Macklemore & Ryan Lewis - Thrift Shop/Transcript

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The following is a transcript of "Macklemore & Ryan Lewis - Thrift Shop", the thirteenth episode of Musical Autopsy, a supplement to the comedy web series A Dose of Buckley.
==Transcript==
Introduction
This is Musical Autopsy, the feature where Doc Buckley heads down to the musical morgue, pulls a stiff from the drawers, and starts hacking away.
Sound of a chainsaw plays.
Today on the table, it's Macklemore and Ryan Lewis featuring...[attempting to pronounce Wanz] Wahns, Wans? Fuck it, it's Thrift Shop.
===The Autopsy===
Song begins; lyrics appear.
"What x ∞"
Song continues.
Oh, here we go. We're literally a second in, and I'm already annoyed. At least they don't do the typical rapper name drop here. Here, actually I'll just do it for them.
Song continues.
Macklemore...Ryan Lewis...Wohns, or Wans, or whatever...Let's just skip ahead.
Song fast-forwards to hook.
"I'm gonna pop some tags,
only got twenty dollars in my pocket
I'm, I'm, I'm hunting, looking for a come up,
this is fucking awesome"
Oookay, uh, not sure when the last time was I heard a rap song about a guy with only twenty bucks, so...let's see where this is going.
"Now walk into the club like
'What up?! I got a big cock!'"
"Uh, hi, excuse me, ladies, I'm here, uh, so's my penis, hi, it's very large, excuse me, I'm sorry sir, yes, that's just my dick. Hi miss, massive penis here." Interesting way to introduce yourself.
"Nah, I'm so pumped,
I bought some shit from the thrift shop"
Oh, he's just fucking with us. You see, he's acting like he's a bigshot, but really, he's wearing twenty dollars or less worth of shit he bought at the fucking Goodwill. Do they have Goodwills in the States? Is this a relevant reference? Whatever. Point is, he knows he's not a bigshot, but he's gonna act like one anyway.
"Ice on the fringe is so damn frosty
The people like
'Damn, that's a cold ass honky'"
Now, call me racist if you want, and I'm sure those of you that have no idea what that word means will, because you're drooling morons, but I don't watch music videos very often, so when I first heard this, I thought Macklemore was black. No big deal, just thought he was. I wasn't paying attention enough to this song the first few times I heard this song to catch this line; then I saw the music video a week later and was like, "Wait, he's Macklemore? Well then, now I know how people who first saw Elvis felt." For you kids who think you know a lot about music, but really you don't know shit, since TV wasn't as widespread as it is now, a lot of people who had only heard Elvis on the radio thought he was black. Then he got on TV wriggling his hips around, and white, conservative, 1950s America had a whole new reason not to like him.
What? Oh, right, Thrift Shop.
"Dressed in all pink,
'cept my gator shoes, those are green
Draped in a leopard mink,
girl standing next to me
Probably shoulda washed this,
smells like R. Kelly's sheets
(Pissssssss)"
I've been to clubs where I think the faint smell of piss wouldn't even make the top three on a list of terrible smells, next to the girl who just vomited up her last nine tequilas, the asshole who farted on the dance floor, and the lovely potpourri of about a hundred different perfumes and body sprays mixed with sweat and B.O. Decent R. Kelly, burn, though...if this was 2002.
"But shit,
it was 99 cents!"
Oh, well, in that case, why not buy a coat that smells like it was used as a homeless man's bathroom for a while? What the fuck, it's only a buck. By the way, I wanted to name a chain of dollar stores that, but sadly it wasn't meant to be. We'll keep it moving here. 
"I'ma take your grandpa's style,
I'ma take your grandpa's style
No for real, ask your grandpa,
Can I have his hand-me-downs?
Velour jumpsuit
and some house slippers
Dookie Brown leather jacket
that I found digging"
I have a feeling this isn't something that's gonna catch on, 18- to 25-year-olds dressing like they're 65. Which'll make hipsters happy, 'cause they don't want anyone else going to their vintage clothing store you probably never heard of. But apparently Macklemore doesn't care; he's gonna dress like he's ready for yooker, followed by dinner at 4 PM and then a nap. 
"They had a broken keyboard,
I bought a broken keyboard"
Yeah, you did. Sounds like Ryan Lewis made this fucking beat with it.
"I bought a skeet blanket,
then I bought a kneeboard"
I thought the line was that he bought a ski blanket, which I assumed would be used to keep warm while skiing or after skiing or whatever, though someone that buys thrift shop clothes probably can't afford to go skiing too often. Apparently, though, Macklemore confirmed it's a skeet blanket, which, if Lil Jon has taught us anything, it means he bought a blanket for jizzing on. Now, whether it was already an established skeet blanket, pre-stained, or it was a regular blanket he's going to use for that purpose...I don't know, and quite frankly, I don't want to know. And who fucking wacks off into a blanket?
"I could take some Pro Wings,
make them cool, sell those
The sneaker heads would be like
'Ah, he got the Velcros'"
Yeah, I don't know if you've ever met people who consider themselves sneaker heads, but they're not gonna fall for you trying to sell some shitty shoes you found at the thrift store, painted up, and are attempting to pass off as anything of value. These are people who have devoted their lives to knowing everything about fucking running shoes. They collect running shoes; they collect old shoes as a hobby. There's a lot you might get past them, but this isn't one of them.
...Let's just skip the hook and get right into verse two.
"What you know about rocking a wolf on your noggin?
What you knowing about wearing a fur fox skin?"
Thankfully, next to nothing, Macklemore. Next to nothing.
"I'm digging, I'm digging,
I'm searching right through that luggage
One man's trash,
that's another man's come up"
The semi-gangsta version of "one man's trash is another man's treasure", I guess. He goes on to rambling about wearing some jammies and onesies before he finally gets to the point of this whole song, which we'll just get to right now.
"They be like
'Oh that Gucci, that's hella tight'
I'm like
'Yo, that's fifty dollars for a t-shirt'
Limited edition,
let's do some simple additon
Fifty dollars for a t-shirt,
that's just some ignorant bitch shiiiiit
I call that getting swindled and pimped,
I call that getting tricked by business
That shirt's hella dope
And having the same one as six other people in this club is a hella don't
Peep game, come take a look through a telescope
Trying to get girls from a brand?
Man you hella won't
Man you hella won't"
Ah, now, here's the part that's gonna be hilariously ironic. As of writing this, this song has peaked at #1 on Billboard, and it's still staying there. It's probably playing at every club on the fucking continent; a bunch of people wearing clothes that would cost an Ethiopian everything they'd earn in six lifetimes all singing along and grinding up on each other to this, a song essentially making fun of them for spending all that money on clothes that in the end impresses nobody, and that a bunch of other people in the club are also wearing, making these people so generic, they might as well be the mannequins in the windows of the stores they bought their clothes from.
Now, I've been often criticized in the past for ripping apart music for the stupid lyrics with no message to them, with morons saying, "Fuck you, Buckley, it's a club song; it's got a sick beat. The lyrics don't matter." But here's a song with essentially a pretty decent message about not pissing away your money and not trying to impress people with how much money you have, something pretty rare in mainstream rap and hip-hop, hidden beneath what I think is kind of an annoying beat (but I'm sure a lot of people would claim it's very catchy) that people can and will dance to - that DJs are playing. So, a song can have a decent message and be danced to, just like Saul Williams's "List of Demands", though I'm certainly not comparing the two here. No, Macklemore seems to be like a modern one-man Bloodhound Gang - not quite a parody act; he's not The Lonely Island. He's humorous, but he's still serious about his work. Part of me wants to hate this for sounding like the type of shitty pop-rap that would chart on Billboard, and part of me wants to like it for making an attempt to spread a decent message, like the song is some sort of undercover agent trying to smarten the idiots up. But that's not gonna happen. They're gonna listen to it and laugh, and then go to American Eagle or H&M and waste a bunch of money on clothes that makes them look just like everyone else and turns them into walking billboards. That's not exactly Macklemore's fault (people are too stupid to understand his work), now is it?
This has been Musical Autopsy - I almost hate to say it this time - but, bag it and tag it.
Sound of zipper plays; video ends.
Category:Transcripts