The third single from Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s debut album The Heist, “Same Love” is a powerful song about marriage equality for same-sex couples, and has played a big part in making the issue more understandable to mainstream audiences.

The song was written in April 2012 to support Referendum 74 in Washington state and represents a notable shift in hip-hop culture. Although this wasn’t the first rap song to defend homosexuality (See “Animal Style” by Murs), this was the first to see mainstream success. The song hit number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became the first song that explicitly promotes same-sex marriage to hit the Top 40 in the US.

As hip hop scholar and educator Amil Cook writes:

Although it can’t be attributed to just this song, Washington state became one of the first states to legalize same-sex marriage through a popular vote on November 6th, 2012. In 2015, twelve years after the US Supreme Court invalidated laws prohibiting gay sex, and two years after the Court extended Federal recognition of same-sex marriages, gay marriage finally became legalized in its entirety in all 50 states.