When a person dies young, everything becomes recontextualized. Last words take on new meanings. Dreams become prophetic. First and second acts become third acts, throwing entire narratives into flux.
Mac Miller, who died Friday at the age of 26, the result of an apparent drug overdose, was supposed to be on a steady path upwards. His fifth studio album, Swimming, was released this past August to warm reviews and a No. 3 debut on the Billboard 200. He was making ripples rather than waves, and that seemed to suit him. “Follow me / We on the up and up,” goes a line on the ethereal Swimming cut “Wings.”
Just one day before his death, Vulture published a profile of Miller in which music critic Craig Jenkins concluded that he seemed to be on route to longevity. “His teenage dream of being top dog has settled into a steady drive to stick around the rap business as long as it’ll have him,” he wrote. “The patient evolution of his art will keep him in the conversation as long as he’s careful. ‘Now I’m in the clouds, come down when I run out of jet fuel,’ he raps on Swimming’s ‘Jet Fuel,’ ‘but I never run out of jet fuel.’”
See what I mean about recontextualization? In less than 24 hours all the qualifiers subsumed the predicates and the redemption story became a tragedy.
But I should back up. There’s no redemption without a prior fall. And it’s worth rehashing what Miller was overcoming. In Jenkins’s profile, it’s a rocky May. That month alone, Ariana Grande ended a long-term relationship with Miller and he was later arrested for driving under the influence.
And yet, there’s a bigger underlying tension that’s present in just about every profile of the Pittsburgh rapper through the years—and there are a bunch of good ones. They all basically fall into the same mold as Jenkins’s. Miller advances as an artist while persevering over a new hiccup with drugs or depression or his personal life, all the while an existential quandary looms: Who is Mac Miller?
It’s a weighty question for a young man, one that most rappers aren’t burdened with facing in such a direct, public way. But then, most rappers don’t burst into the public consciousness quite like Mac Miller did. In 2010, at just 18, Miller released two mixtapes—K.I.D.S. and Best Day Ever—that rode the wave of what came to be deemed “frat-rap": lightweight hip-hop about house parties, hook-ups and getting high. They made Miller an overnight sensation. He became the most popular rapper—hell, artist—amongst young, suburban white dudes.
Count me and my childhood friends in that group. Miller, along with rappers like Asher Roth, Kid Cudi, Chiddy Bang, Childish Gambino and Wiz Khalifa, soundtracked our senior year of high school. Their music wasn’t a reflection of our lives so much as it was a model. The Airheads font on Miller’s mixtapes, the colorful energy of his songs, the references to parties and weed, and his skate style all seemed cool in a way that was both uncomplicated and attainable. “Yeah, I live a life pretty similar to yours / Used to go to school, hang with friends and play sports,” he rapped on “Kool Aid and Frozen Pizza.”
Of course, eight years later, it’s very uncool to have been a fan of frat-rap. The music of Miller and his peers was shallow; it was essentially hip-hop filtered through Pineapple Express or Project X. There was little self-awareness or regard for hip-hop’s history, of the precariousness of being white in that space. Miller and his cohort built their following through rap blogs (speaking of uncool, my friends and I had one called... ThatCrackMusic), but they barely crossed into the mainstream before the rest of the Internet tore them down.
Miller’s debut studio album, 2011’s Blue Slide Park, was probably the biggest inflection point for both the subgenre of music and also Miller himself. It’s a forgettable record on which Miller didn’t quite make strides and didn’t quite capture the spirit of his prior mixtapes. And yet, it was a ginormous hit, debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. That confluence of poor quality and massive success, in hindsight, was a recipe for disaster. Critics widely panned the album; Pitchfork famously gave it 1.0 stars.
The critiques of the subgenre were fair, but Miller bore the outsized brunt of them—especially considering he never went to college and was significantly younger than his peers. It’s hard to comprehend the effect such a short, turbulent period would have on a teenager’s psyche. (This was the early days of social media, mind you.) In a 2013 interview with Complex, Miller alluded to the harsh Blue Slide Park reviews as a reason he developed substance abuse problems. "A lot of the reviews were more on me as a person," he said. "To be honest, that was even worse. You’re 19, you’re so excited to put out your first album, you put it out—and no one has any respect for you or for what you did."
It’s a testament to Miller’s ability and his work ethic that he was ultimately able to transcend his beginnings. A lot of his peers didn’t. He matured as an artist on each subsequent record, getting darker, weirder and more introspective before, on Swimming, going funky and more melodic. By 26, he was an adroit hip-hop veteran. Still, the process of being taken seriously within hip-hop was gradual. Different critics will pinpoint a different moment when Miller moved past that initial phase. For Rolling Stone, it wasn’t until Swimming. “Mac Miller has finally abandoned his frat-rap reputation for good,” Mosi Reeves wrote in his review of the album.
But this, I think, is where we need to recontextualize. Because today it feels like Reeves is wrong both in fact and in sentiment—both that Miller abandoned his frat-rap reputation for good, and that that’s a good thing. Miller’s early music, after all, is what I immediately returned to when I heard the news that he had died. And though those early mixtapes sounded a bit corny to my 26-year-old year, they produced visceral reactions—the smell of cheap beer, the feeling of the wind hitting my face as I sat in the passenger seat of a friend’s Jeep, the preponderance of backwards snapbacks, the butterflies brought on by experimentation—that are meaningful even if somewhat hollow. For me, and I think for a lot of my peers, those songs harken back to a more innocent youth, a stage in our pasts that we distanced ourselves from but that, if only as a way to figure out what we weren’t, we never fully abandoned. Like Mac Miller, we evolved; like Mac Miller, we’ll never really leave behind early Mac Miller.
