![]() ![]() Long past the carefree party rap that laid the foundation for his career, Mac had spent the last few years mining his darkest artistic impulses this was his turn back towards the light. “It’s a dark science when your friends start dying/Like how could he go? He was part lion.”īreezy and open and relaxed, with a focus on live instrumentation and an improvisational atmosphere, The Divine Feminine served as a remarkably confident announcement that Mac Miller had arrived in the third act of his career (a very real tragedy after his untimely passing is that there was no indication that this third act would be his final one). The song sits as the first instance of Miller’s disillusionment with the bright lights of stardom: “And everybody wanna talk to me about some business shit/Never really listening, couldn’t get real interested.” But even more, “REMember” found Miller dealing with a growing awareness of his own mortality, balancing the invincibility of his younger self - “I know I’ve been the shit/All this people full of me” - and the growing shadow cast on the people he thought would be around forever. “REMember” is not only a dedication to his late friend, Ruben Eli Mitrani, who passed away the year before, but kicks off a series of melancholic spins (one of which we’ll get to a bit later) wherein Miller debuts his creaky, wailing singing voice. Miller’s broody sophomore album, 2013’s Watching Movies with the Sound Off, pinpoints the moment the artist’s growing musical maturity dovetailed with his developing sense of pain. Famously, this would begin a long-running feud with the now-President, a battle that Miller would take seriously (though with his characteristic tongue-in-cheek sense of humor at every turn) throughout his career. Over a bouncy, delightful sample of Sufjan Stevens’ “Vesuvius,” Miller forecasts his seemingly inevitable rise to rap stardom as he plotted to “take over the world while the haters gettin’ mad.” The raps here are facile rags to riches fodder, yet it’s the shrill delivery that, especially listening back now, stands as a reminder of Miller’s adroit ability to convey the simple joy of finally being recognized for and profiting from thousands of hours of work. A precocious talent, Best Day Ever was Mac shedding the final vestiges of his high school life settling behind him, a graduation gift for the four years Miller committed to both school and rap. It’s a distillation of the exuberance of a backpack rap generation banking off the mid-00’s internet mixtape boom. Mac Miller’s earliest hit, from his 2011 project, Best Day Ever, is a time capsule. ![]() ![]() ![]() So, for newcomers and longtime fans alike, we’ve assembled a (non-chronological) mix of his best-known and obscure tracks in an attempt to introduce Mac to those who didn’t get a chance to listen to him while he was still here. But, to get an idea of how much he changed over his career, and to get a snapshot of why he was so beloved by a such a diverse audience, it’s important to take a sampling from every era of his varied career. Some of his best work, especially Swimming, are best taken as a whole. In its latter stages, after he began to shed the carefree image and work of his early persona and develop into something of an experimentalist, he became a consummate album artist. From his “EZ Mac with the cheesy rap” (a catchphrase he would come to regret, but endeared him to an early, still passionate audience) days in the late 2000s, to the harrowing and poignant release of Swimming earlier this year, Miller’s discography renders a portrait of a full artist who crafted records bleeding with sincerity. In his final interview, published on Vulture just a day before his death, Mac Miller gave unwitting advice on how best to honor him: “The people that have the best chance of knowing me, that would like to” the late 26-year-old rapper said, “would just be by listening to my music.” And while his later music developed an alchemy of complicated sorrow and clear-headed descriptions of substance abuse, one does need not look too deep into his catalog to hear the sweetness that characterized the Pittsburgh rapper’s career. ![]()
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