Macklemore Says He Should Have Warned Iggy Azalea About "White Privilege II"

Iggy had tweeted that he "shouldn't have spent the last 3 yrs having friendly convos and taking pictures together at events etc if those were his feelings."

By Corinne Heller Mar 03, 2016 6:30 PMTags
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Macklemore says he should have warned fellow rapper Iggy Azalea that he was going to name-drop her in his and Ryan Lewis' new track "White Privilege II," given their shared history.

The racially and politically charged song is featured on the rapper and DJ and producer's second studio album, This Unruly Mess I've Made, which was released last week.

"Iggy and I came up together. We were on the XXL "Freshman" cover together. There's enough of a relationship that I should have let her know beforehand. And I didn't do that," Macklemore told Billboard in a cover story interview published Thursday.

"White Privilege II," the follow-up to a 2005 track, contains the verse, "You've exploited and stolen the music, the moment / The magic, the passion, the fashion, you toy with / The culture was never yours to make better / You're Miley, you're Elvis, you're Iggy Azalea."

In January, she tweeted her opinion about the verse, saying he "shouldn't have spent the last 3 yrs having friendly convos and taking pictures together at events etc if those were his feelings."

Macklemore told Billboard that he has not talked to Iggy to make things right. 

Isaac Brekken/Getty Images for Clear Channel

He also said he was actually "implicating" himself on that verse.

"I don't think people understood that I'm in my own head [saying], 'You're Miley, you're Elvis, you're Iggy Azalea'—I'm talking about myself," he said.

"For me, that second verse is unpacking," he had told Rolling Stone in January. "It's an unpacking moment of internalized criticism and self-doubt, and 'What have I done,' and letting the criticism infiltrate who I am. 'Why am I insecure at a protest?' And I think that people get put into boxes, and the conversation around cultural appropriation—I was at the forefront of that, rightfully so. And that conversation also included Miley Cyrus and Iggy Azalea, and that's why their names are on the record."

Macklemore also talked to Billboard about racism. In 2014, he joined thousands of people who marched to protest a grand jury's decision not to indict white former Ferguson, Mo. police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown, a black unarmed 18-year-old man.

Macklemore said he and Lewis attended a six-month informal seminar on race, taught by the latter's former University of Washington thesis adviser, Georgia Roberts.

"The night of the non-indictment was the biggest one in terms of realizing I had been silent [about racism] out of fear," Macklemore told Billboard. "I had been silent out of not wanting to mess up, out of a fear of saying the wrong thing. If I said the wrong thing, that would be a bigger story than me supporting it."