We finally cover Seattle’s… somethingest… rapper

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Anthony Easton: Hip-hop for the Tumblr set, clever and well written, but belaboring the central metaphor so much one is worried that it isn’t actually a metaphor. 
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Alfred Soto: The sampled cry and horn chart keeps us awake until the only other element worth hearing twice (and we do): the “FUCKING AWESOMMEEE” part.
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Iain Mew: I can get with the sax and some of the technique, but the song sneaks out of committing to really being anything in particular. It pulls back from its do-you-see and non-sequitur comedy leanings, which is a relief after the R. Kelly bit, but it neither really revels in actual approval for thrift shopping or sends it up. “This is fucking awesome” just sounds like some more words.
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Brad Shoup: Starts with some Jazzy jocking, then treads on the territory of “Wut.” It sums to Chiddy Bang, though. Dressing Goodwill well isn’t a thematic dead end; Spoon did something similar on “The Fitted Shirt” (and made an explicit generational connection, too). But I can’t give a red tag to a chorus that parodies Nate Dogg (not this way, at least, or by these people) or a self-satisfaction with thrift that’s years out of date. 
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Jonathan Bradley: I have a soft spot for Macklemore’s earnest Seattle ode “The Town” — it’s a slightly drippy counterpart to Jake One’s essential “Home” — but everything else he’s done seems designed as supporting evidence to theories that Pacific Northwestern rap should begin and end with Mix. “Thrift Shop” is the closest Macklemore’s come to a genuine jam, and includes a squeaky horn loop that is all the better for its similarities to J-Lo’s “Get Right.” But I can’t handle the self-conscious white boy schtick (“Damn that’s a cold-ass honky”) and the embrace of cut-price fashion is too freighted with liberal smugness to be enjoyable. Macklemore doesn’t just want to save a buck; he wants to condescend to people with different priorities. “Fifty dollars for a t-shirt, that’s just some ignorant bitch shit,” he sneers, and he’s surely aware that he’s delivering that message in a genre that treats conspicuous consumption as a stylistic convention. So “Thrift Shop” reads as a corrective: a white boy proving his superiority to his black counterparts by denigrating their apparently crass obsession with signifiers of a wealth they don’t possess or a social status their country is reluctant to award them. He apparently doesn’t wonder why someone who grew up in, for instance, New Orleans’s 17th Ward wouldn’t consider spending a lot on his wardrobe as “getting swindled and pimped.” But he also doesn’t wonder why other rap odes to thrifty wardrobes (think Dem Franchize Boyz’s “White Tee”) prefer to emphasize an outfit’s cultural connotations rather than its friendliness to the frugal shopper. Whether you’re broke or rich, you gotta get this: having money’s not everything, not having it is.
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Edward Okulicz: As a dumb white guy who routinely brags about how little my clothes cost, this song was totally made for me, but it turns out if you give an obnoxious douche a moderately awesome beat, you still have an obnoxious douche who floods his good lines with bad ones — as if it’s just granddad clothes at thrift shops, and as if going on about wearing granddad’s clothes is funny beyond the first time! And of course, it has a gratuitous “fucking awesome” in its chorus so it’s now a hit (and yes, you bet there’s some causality there) — but I guess it would be unfair to dock the song points because of the market. But it is only a moderately awesome beat.
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Will Adams: There’s a Salvation Army store near my campus. Students usually flock to it before an ’80s themed party or Halloween, sifting through racks to find the perfect loud print T-shirt or bedazzled jeans. I’ve always felt some discomfort with this reduction of what is for many people a vital source of clothing to little more than a costume chest. This guilt isn’t shared by my classmates, nor is it by Macklemore. In “Thrift Shop,” it’s equal parts economics and douchiness driving these deals. I suspect it is the same at my school. The other thing about my campus is that I cannot go a day without hearing this song, whether it’s my hallmate’s speakers bleeding through the walls, a horn player noodling with that riff, a passerby dropping her voice an octave to intone, “This is fucking awesome,” and, of course, at every single damn party I go to. “Thrift Shop” is lame — turns out R. Kelly pee jokes do get old — sometimes unimaginative — apparently, only grandpas donate to thrift shops — and completely obnoxious — okay, go ahead and believe that you’re rocking those footie pajamas. But it would be foolish not to submit to that saxophone loop, that busy rhythm track, and that indelible hook. “Thrift Shop” isn’t a stuffy examination of consumerism in hip hop; it’s an off-the-wall dance track that asks its audience to live their costumes, to give in to the transformative process of a party. Who knows? Maybe tomorrow I’ll wake up and this’ll be a [2]. For now, this is fucking awesome.
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Patrick St. Michel: This song’s opening line — “walk up to the club like ‘what up, I got a big cock’” — together with the subsequent “honky” bit and a thawed-out R. Kelly joke paints “Thrift Shop” as joke-rap trash, but it’s a bit better than that. Macklemore definitely isn’t taking any of this too seriously, but he eventually raises some good points ($50 for a t-shirt!? That is dumb!) and sneaks in a few clever touches (that snippet of Clay Davis, for one). Still, this is a song about thrifting, and there is only so much you can say about finding cheap clothes before it gets boring.
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