Downtown (feat. Melle Mel, Grandmaster Caz, Kool Moe Dee & Eric Nally)

Over Ryan Lewis' funky old school beat, Macklemore pays homage to the great hip-hop pioneers. The track features hip-hop legends Grandmaster Caz, Kool Moe Dee, Melle Mel, while singer Eric Nally croons the hook. Macklmemore told 97.1 Amp Radio morning show host Carson Daly: "It is a record that kind of pays homage to the late 70's, early 80's and what was going on in hip-hop, and what was going simultaneously in rock music, and melding the two worlds together in one record."

After Macklemore & Ryan Lewis embarked on their first world tour in 2012, they each bought mopeds, which allowed them to leave the confines of the venues and see the sights on their travels. This kept the tour experience from becoming the routine of hotel-backstage-show without ever venturing into the local landscape. In this way, the moped became far more than a cheap means of transportation: it was a vessel for freedom. When Lewis came up with the track, he called it "Moping Around," a work title that Macklemore heard as "Moped Around." That gave him the idea to write a song about mopeds. It started off as jocose song where he was just having fun, but it grew into something much more when they introduced the old-school element and involved the guest vocalists.

Macklemore told MTV News the story of the song. "I was listening to Backspin on XM Radio and hearing these older rappers' cadences and vocal tones and I was like, 'This is so dope, nobody's doing this anymore,'" he said "Ryan was like, 'Yo, you gotta flip something like that for the new album. People aren't doing these old school type cadences.' And so I messed around with that a little bit." "We were also listening to a lot of Queen and a lot of music from the '70s and it was, 'How could we kind of merge these two worlds, these two very different worlds, in a way that seamlessly worked, that were obviously different, but could live on the same record?'" Macklemore added. "Like, 'Is that even possible?'"