RaindropHustla

Sometime in 2004 or so, my man Lace Cadence was playing beats (beats from Sekken Thaughtz, producer for the Swedish rap group Fourth World—Fjärde Världen if ya nasty) to Cancer Rising. We didn’t hear anything we really wanted to use, until the very last track, which was exactly what we were looking for; “oh...you guys can’t have this one”, Lace said. Dammit. At the time, shit, we just thought he was trying to bump the price up.

In 2005, Seattle hiphop had a great year, as Charles observed at the time—and Ben “Macklemore” Haggerty‘s The Language Of My World was, to me, a big part of the reason. Track seven—the god track if you will, often where my favorite songs on any given album are located—used that instrumental I’d jumped at, for a song called “Ego”, which became hands down, one of my favorite Seattle rap songs ever. It was exactly the type of song that cats in town didn’t make, and showcased a perspective it seemed that most cats in town didn’t have. The honesty of it was bracing like Lectric Shave—Haggerty copped to wanting to be famous, to being jealous when Grayskul and Boom Bap Project (whose MC Nightclubber Lang AKA Karim Panni, actually wrote something about Mack recently) got signed to Rhymesayers, and detailed, by self-exam, the salty spiral of entitlement that artists in any scene can too easily fall into. ”I took it as a cut to my dreams to makin’ it out of this political scene of Northwest haters”. he said, ”to be next I guess I’m just like them, jealous of who’s taking that step.”

Now he’s the one taking that next step, actually on his way to getting famous—humbled by his moment that, after years of grind, finally seems to be here. I happen to know that Haggerty’s in possession of one of the scene’s sharpest minds and to boot has a heart big as all outdoors; god knows that that very same ego is still all-too rampant in the 6 to this day, but I’m not too worried about him. Ben always remembers the words. 

Macklemore plays the first of his three sold-out shows tonight, like right now in fact, at the Showbox (original recipe), with Grieves and Budo, The Physics, and Sol.