CMC London - Iggy Azalea is still not speaking to Macklemore following their feud over his lyrics. Iggy took exception to a line in the Canadian hip-hop star’s song with collaborator Kevin Lewis, White Privilege II, which name checked her while criticising the appropriation of black culture by white musicians.
Macklemore, real name Ben Haggerty, admits that the female rapper hasn’t spoken to him since the row. ‘I haven’t talked to her,’ he told Billboard.com. The pair had been friends for over a year.
On the track, MACklemore rapped, ‘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,’ adding, ‘You’re Miley (Cyrus), you’re Elvis (Presley), you’re Iggy Azalea/Fake and so plastic, you’ve heisted the magic.’
After the record’s release in January, the Fancy singer responded angrily on Twitter, writing, ‘He shouldnt (sic) have spent the last 3 yrs (years) having friendly convos (conversations) and taking pictures together at events etc if those were his feelings.’
Although MACklemore has insisted his lines focused on his status as a white rapper and weren’t an attack on his former friend, he wishes he’d reached out to her before he made the song public. ‘Iggy and I came up together,’ he says. ‘We were on the XXL (hip-hop magazine) Freshmen cover together. There’s enough of a relationship that I should have let her know beforehand. And I didn’t do that.’
Despite the controversy over its lyrics, White Privilege II did win MACklemore new admirers among African-American civil rights activists. ‘It’s powerful,’ DeRay MCKesson, a leader in the Black Lives Matter movement, tells the U.S. music publication. ‘It gives voice to a set of issues and nuance around the issue of white privilege.’