“Thrift Shop” rapper Macklemore is back with a fiery new song in which he slams both President Joe Biden and Columbia University’s police response against pro-Palestine student protestors.
The Seattle rapper—who’s never been shy about expressing his political opinions and who has previously been accused of antisemitism—titled the song “Hind’s Hall,” after the Columbia building that student protestors recently occupied and renamed in honor of Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed in Gaza during Israel’s war against Hamas.
Protests have recently erupted at universities all over the country as students demand that their schools divest from businesses that profit from Israel. And while many of those demonstrations have been interrupted by police crackdowns, Macklemore aims most of his ire at Columbia specifically with the song’s title and accompanying visuals.
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In the song, he 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?” He goes on to back the students’ call for divestment: “What is threatening about divesting and wanting peace? / The problem isn’t the protests, it’s what they’re protesting / It goes against what our country is funding / Block the barricade until Palestine is free.”
The rapper also takes aim at Biden, rapping, “The blood is on your hands, Biden, we can see it all / And fuck no, I’m not voting for you in the fall / Undecided.”
His disappointment extends to the music industry, which he raps is “complicit in their platform of silence,” as well as his peers in hip-hop, who have seemingly been more focused on the ongoing beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar. “What happened to the artists, what do 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 cease-fire, fuck a response from Drake.”
One of his strongest points, though, comes with this bar, where he references the Nakba, the Arabic term for the events of 1948, when Palestinians were displaced to make room for Israel’s new state: “History been repeating for the last 75 / The Nakba never ended, the colonizer lied.”
“Hind’s Hall” is not yet available on digital streaming platforms. Once the song is released, Macklemore said on X that he plans to donate all of its streaming proceeds to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees.
