While Drake and Kendrick Lamar are busy trading petty diss tracks, Macklemore—of all people?—has released a pro-Palestine, anti-war anthem that calls out Joe Biden’s support of the Israeli government.
If you’re like me, you’ve probably spent less than 10 minutes thinking about Macklemore in as many years, laboring under the vague assumption that he’s not taken very seriously. But if his latest track is any indication, maybe we’ve been wrong. Macklemore dropped the single, titled “Hind’s Hall,” on social media on May 6, the same day that the Israeli military seized a border crossing in Rafah, the southern Gaza city where over one million Palestinians have been displaced—despite the U.N.’s warning that doing so effectively prevents aid from entering the region.
The title “Hind’s Hall” has a dual meaning, referring to the Columbia University student protesters’ occupation of Hamilton Hall, which they’ve renamed Hind’s Hall in honor of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli military in Gaza. The video for “Hind’s Hall” features footage from Israel’s attack on Gaza alongside images from protests at college campuses across the country, where students are demanding their educational institutions divest from corporations that support the government of Israel. Referencing the double standard we’re watching play out as universities enlist police to combat the largely peaceful protests, Macklemore raps, “If students in tents posted on the lawn / Occupying the quad is really against the law / And a reason to call in the police and their squad / Where does genocide land in your definition, huh?” The verse continues with Macklemore calling out President Joe Biden for his support of the Israeli government:
Destroyin’ every college in Gaza and every mosque
Pushin’ everyone into Rafah and droppin’ bombs
The blood is on your hands, Biden, we can see it all
And fuck no, I’m not votin’ for you in the fall (Woo)
Undecided
You can’t twist the truth, the people out here united
Never be defeated when freedom’s on the horizon
Yet the music industry’s quiet, complicit in their platform of silence
Macklemore also pokes at the beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, an example of artists who aren’t using their platforms to advocate for anything other than themselves:
What happened to the artist? What d’you got to say?
If I was on a label, you could drop me today
I’d be fine with it ’cause the heart fed my page
I want a ceasefire, fuck a response from Drake (Woo)
What you willin’ to risk? What you willin’ to give?
What if you were in Gaza? What if those were your kids?
If the West was pretendin’ that you didn’t exist
You’d want the world to stand up and the students finally did, let’s get it
Macklemore’s track was also released the same day as the Met Gala, the exclusive annual fashion event hosted by Vogue and attended by high-profile celebrities wearing wildly expensive garments. The Met Gala is often compared to the Capitol in The Hunger Games, but the cognitive dissonance of such an event has only grown more pronounced in recent years, and 2024 feels exceptionally bleak—as celebrities brag about the hundreds of hours of labor involved in making their couture gowns, hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza are starving, with many of their family members either missing or dead.
“Hind’s Hall” effectively cuts through all of that noise, which is only serving to distract us from what’s happening in the world right now. In the caption for the video, Macklemore announced that once “Hind’s Hall” is made available to stream, all proceeds will go to UNRWA, the U.N. relief agency providing aid to people in Palestine.
(featured image: Gina Wetzler, Getty Images)
