“You’re a faggot. ” “Ew, that’s so gay. ” Take a minute and think about how many times you hear these phrases on a daily basis. Slanderous terms like these are some among many other homophobic sayings that are used daily by people all over the world. Why is this? How have the terms ‘faggot’ and ‘gay’ become part of our daily vocabulary? How have these terms become synonymous with the terms ‘lame’ or ‘stupid? With the youth of our world bred into constant hateful thoughts, the possibility for a positive outlook for our future generations is slim.
Macklemore’s song and music video, Same Love, aims to point the youth in our society in a new and forward thinking direction. Macklemore, who is one of the most popular artists in today’s hip-hop industry, recognizes the issues within our society and uses his influence on people to help make a difference in the world. The goal of the song lyrics is to show Macklemore’s belief in supporting equality in the LGBT community and to also emphasize how important it is that people are respectful of and do not discriminate against them.
Macklemore tries to accomplish this goal by using several elements of rhetoric in his lyrics to help get his point across. Same Love opens with Macklemore singing, “When I was in the third grade, I thought that I was gay, ’cause I could draw, my uncle was, and I kept my room straight. ” This is basically a story from Macklemore’s childhood. In this story, he is a little kid and fears that he was gay because he could draw. He tries to tell his mom that he thinks he’s gay and his mom tries to convince him otherwise. The opening of this story does many things: It relates to a stereotypical idea of gays.
The song specifically states the phrase “bunch of stereotypes all in my head” and then goes on to state some of the stereotypes seen in sexuality like artistic and athletic ability. The literary devices used in this chunk of the lyrics are an ANECDOTE, and a pun. The pun found in these lyrics is the use of the word straight. Macklemore talks about keeping his room straight. This phrase can have two meanings. One of them being keeping his room straight like clean and tidy, and the other could mean straight as in the opposite of gay.
This could further add to the fact that Macklemore thought he was gay but he was trying to hide it in any way he could because he was afraid of people knowing. The lyrics can be considered an anecdote because it is telling us a story about Macklemore’s childhood and what he experienced when he tried to tell his mother that he thought he was gay. This leads to the next portion of the lyrics: “I told my mom, tears rushing down my face, she’s like “Ben, you’ve loved girls since before Pre-K. ” Trippin. I guess she had a point didn’t she? ” These lyrics directly illustrate society’s corruption of an innocent child’s mind.
In this case, the mother is trying to convince the son that he isn’t gay by trying to get him to believe that he has liked girls since he was practically an infant. Careful not to disappoint his mother, the son puts his feelings to the side and agrees with the mother to make her happy. Looking deeper into these lyrics, you can start to see how much of an effect parents have on the way their children think and behave. With controversial topics like equality for LGBT, many parents are against it solely because that’s how they were raised to be.
This might not be their fault because if you go back in time, things like, racism, slavery, genocide, and being different were big issues within society. Back in the day, Anything different than “the American way” (being white, having a husband or wife, two kids, a dog, and live in a white house with a white picket fence) was frowned upon in society. Most of the time, if parents were raised a certain way, they are more likely to raise their children to believe the same way that they do.
This can lead to bigger problems because with society slowly ecoming more open to the ideas of gay marriage and being transgender because some parents have such strong opinions that they could end up scaring their children into thinking that being anything other than the gender or sex you were born as or having feelings for the opposite sex is wrong. This can be emotionally traumatic for a child who is confused about their gender or sexuality. By writing this song, Macklemore is trying to make the youth questioning their gender or sexuality feel like they are not alone and that there is someone out there experiencing the same thing they are.
The chorus of this song does a really fantastic job of illustrating how it feels to not have someone approve of the person you love. Repetition of key the chorus help the listener really focus on the overall message that is being conveyed by the chorus of the song. “And I can’t change, even if I tried, even if I wanted to. My love, my love, my love, she keeps me warm. She keeps me warm, she keeps me warm. ” The words being repeated a large amount of times are love and warm.
With these words being repeated so many times within the chorus, the person listening to the song starts to pick up on how much the main character in this story really needs and loves their significant other. These words are repeated to express how love giving them everything they need in life like being warm and that if they didn’t have the warmth and love brought into their life they wouldn’t be able to continue living. This part of the song also hits on the most flawed notion about homosexuality; the idea that being homosexual is a choice and can be ‘fixed.
Homosexuality is not a disease and cannot be cured. Macklemore’s disagreement with the idea that one can “pray the gay away” is shown when he sings the lyrics “Playing God, aw nah here we go. America the brave, still fears what we don’t know. And God loves all his children is somehow forgotten, but we paraphrase a book written thirty-five hundred years ago, I don’t know. ” Macklemore is addressing the fact that many people use the bible as an excuse to help justify their hate and disapproval even though the aspects the bible covers are so outdated and not even applicable in today’s society.