Thrift Shop

Macklemore and Ryan Lewis had been independent for years before this hit, and the song is in some ways an argument for that independence — a two-minute performance of refusing to perform affluence correctly. The production is built around a brass sample that honks and blares like a parade crashing through a department store, and Ryan Lewis surrounds it with handclaps and a bass so deep it rattles the frame of whatever you're playing it through. Wanz's hook — delivered in a rich, gospel-adjacent baritone that is completely at odds with the lyric's subject matter — is one of the great absurdist choices in recent pop music. Macklemore raps fast and loose, with the verbal precision of someone who spent years in Seattle hip-hop rooms learning how to fill a bar. The lyric is a catalog of thrift store finds elevated to trophy items, a sustained joke about status and its arbitrary foundations. It arrived as a rebuke to hip-hop materialism at the exact moment that conversation needed a catchy, radio-playable intervention. You hear it differently now than you did in 2012, but the brass still hits the same way.