Macklemore has released a scathing protest track supporting pro-Palestinian protesters at college campuses across the country, calling for an end to Israel’s war in Gaza, and even sneaking in a Drake diss as well.
The Seattle rapper released “Hind’s Hall” on social media last night, May 6, saying once it’s up on streaming services, he’ll donate all proceeds to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees. The song’s title is a reference to the new name protesters at Columbia University gave to Hamilton Hall when they occupied it last month, re-naming it after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old likely killed by the Israeli military in February.
“The people, they won’t leave,” Macklemore raps at the start of the song. “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.”
Elsewhere in the song, Macklemore calls out everything from the ostensible effort to ban TikTok in order to clamp down on images and videos coming out of Gaza (which Mitt Romney more or less copped to in a recent interview), efforts to label anti-Zionism as anti-semitic, especially when so many Jewish people have taken part in the pro-Palestine protests; and even Joe 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.”
Macklemore closes “Hind’s Hall” with a rebuke of many of his peers in music: “Never be defeated when freedom’s on the horizon/Yet the music industry’s quiet, complicit in their platform of silence/What happened to the artist? 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 ceasefire, fuck a response from Drake.”
Macklemore has spoken out against the war in Gaza before, releasing a statement last October and then speaking at a demonstration in Washington, D.C., the following month. “They told me to be quiet,” he said at the time. “They told me to do my research, to go back, that it’s too complex to say something, right? To be silent in this moment. In the last three weeks I’ve gone back and I’ve done some research … I’m teachable. I don’t know enough. But I know enough that this is a genocide.”
