After Macklemore and Ryan Lewis won Best New Artist and three trophies in the rap category at last month’s Grammy Awards, the duo’s mouthpiece tried to prove that he thought another nominee should have walked off with some golden hardware: “You got robbed,” Macklemore texted Kendrick Lamar. “I wanted you to win.”
The private message — which Macklemore made very public by posting it on Instagram — didn’t strike everyone as generous. And in the new issue of Rolling Stone (on stands Friday), Drake makes it very clear he thought the message was unnecessary. To put it bluntly, he thought “that shit was wack as fuck.”
“I was like, ‘You won. Why are you posting your text message? Just chill. Take your W, and if you feel you didn’t deserve it, go get better — make better music,'” he tells Rolling Stone contributing editor Jonah Weiner. “It felt cheap. It didn’t feel genuine. Why do that? Why feel guilt? You think those guys would pay homage to you if they won?”
Drake notes that Grammy wins don’t always go to the artist who made the best album. “This is how the world works: He made a brand of music that appealed to more people than me, Hov, Kanye and Kendrick. Whether people wanna say it’s racial, or whether it’s just the fact that he tapped into something we can’t tap into. That’s just how the cards fall. Own your shit.”
And in the end, if Macklemore was going to start doling out apologies, he should have reached out to more nominees, Drake says. “To name just Kendrick? That shit made me feel funny. No, in that case, you robbed everybody. We all need text messages!”
