The 32-year-old Seattle rapper had the good sense to relegate “Spoons” to bonus-track status on his new album This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, his second collaboration with the producer Ryan Lewis and his first full-length since achieving superstardom in 2012. But the way that song gleefully sacrifices Macklemore’s dignity without regard for the listener’s is typical. Perhaps in response to the backlash his rise caused, he’s released an album that suggests he is living through the great millennial nightmare: laying your soul bare, and finding only banality.

The opener, “Light Tunnels,” uses the most bombastic tools in Ryan Lewis’s arsenal—galloping drums, orchestral swells, a guest vocalist cackling about stormy weather and such—as Macklemore narrates his night at the Grammys. On a song like this, you can understand why he’s popular. By all measures, what he’s doing is corny, and that’s why it works: The goosebumps that the song is designed to provide are more typical of Coldplay-style rock than of most mainstream hip-hop. As for Macklemore’s rapping, he does a solid job of putting you in the moment with him as he looks up tie-tying tutorials on YouTube, gawks at Taylor Swift from a few rows over, and gives his thank-you speech.

But what is the song’s drama really about? He says he did drugs a couple days earlier and sort of regrets it. He forgot his belt at the hotel—“this sucks.” He realizes awards shows are more about ratings and marketing than art. Fascinating. But toward the end of the song, he turns his criticism inward, realizing a contradiction in his desires: He’s “miserable here / But wanna make sure I’m invited next year.” And then:

I know now who I am when the lights go out and it falls down

And the curtain closes, nobody notices

Wanted to throw up the Roc, wanted to be Hova

Wanted to be Wayne with the accent from the ‘Nolia

Thought I’d feel better when the award show was over

Whoosh. The curtain comes down and Macklemore only feels like a wannabe. The real-life context for the song is that the 2014 Grammys ceremony was when Macklemore swept the rap categories over Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Eminem, and Jay Z. When Macklemore publicly apologized to Lamar for winning, he tacitly aligned himself with folks who argued that racism unfairly elevated him over the rest of the field. Two years later, “Light Tunnels” mines that psychological toll of that backlash for sympathy, but it also kind of endorses it. He really isn’t worthy, it sounds like.

This could be a thrilling and extreme premise for an album; perhaps in an alternate dimension, Macklemore’s music sounds like Xiu Xiu, or Nine Inch Nails, or Kendrick Lamar on “u”—which is to say, he looks into his own self-loathing unflinchingly, for horror’s sake. Instead we have something yet more unsettling, the spectacle of someone trying to carry on like a pop star when he’s revealed that he shouldn’t be one.