Mac Miller and My Dream of Dying Young

Mac Miller died yesterday of an apparent drug overdose. He was only twenty-six years old. I’m not going to lie to you and tell you how big of a fan of his I was, because I really wasn’t. I got into his music over the last few years and respected him as an artist, lyricist, and as a criminally underrated producer. His album ‘Swimming’ released only a month ago is one of the best albums I’ve heard in a long time. It is an album that gives me hope for the evolution of hip-hop from its current state. In a time where we like to shit on mumble-rap and all the Lil-face-tats out there, Mac Miller invited us to look into an alternate timeline of where young artists could take this genre while keeping it genuine, and for that we should be grateful.
I always thought I would die young. My father died young, though not in the traditional or romantic way we normally associate with “dying young”. Still, at the age of thirty-six he was dead of a heart-attack, gone long before the majority of his peers. At the time he felt very old to me, but as I make the slow creep towards that age myself life still feels quite young to me. I always thought it would be heroic in a way - leaving this world on my own terms before time and age took me and beat me down. There was something noble about the idea of taking that process into my own hands and making that decision before my body made it for me. There is nothing sexy or mysterious about living until you are in your eighties and then dying after fighting cancer for a few years. Using your walker to get to chemo appointments and getting moved into a home doesn’t have the same allure of leaving this world when there is still so much promise left.
I know now that there is nothing romantic, nothing glorious, and nothing heroic about death. It is the opposite of all of those things - a vast emptiness that consumes you, those you leave behind, and inevitably all memories of you. I can say with relative certainty that Mac Miller knew all of this, too. He wrote countless bars and entire songs about struggling with depression, addiction, suicidal feelings and the search for happiness. He wrote honestly about not wanting to die young, about not wanting to put his mom through that pain, about the struggle of finding fame and still not finding fulfillment. Maybe that is why his death brings up so many feelings. He knew it was wrong, knew what could happen, what was at stake, and still risked it all. I’m not mad at him. It was his life to risk, and you can only play with fire so many times before you get burned.
I’ve certainly tried enough times to fulfill my destiny of dying young. I’ve mixed enough pills with liquor to know what it feels like to live on the precipice of death. I’ve driven drunk enough times, and had enough nights that I can’t remember, to always be grateful when I wake up the next day and don’t know how I got there. I’ve snorted enough cocaine for a lifetime, chasing that feeling when you think your heart might explode, but it doesn’t. It was close though, and some nights I wondered what it would feel like if it did. I’ve chased death enough times to grow out of that desire and find happiness in the fact that I am here. I am here. I am happy, and I am grateful that I don’t need drugs or the prospect of death to feel alive.
There were a lot of people I’ve know that weren’t as lucky. I came of age during the golden era of the opioid epidemic. I can remember when all you had to do was ask and almost any doctor in the country would prescribe you whatever you wanted. Oxys, Soma, Codeine, Tramadol, and my personal favorite to abuse, Vicodin. All of the the good drugs were free flowing and for a self-destructive young adult, it was a great time to be alive. Growing up in Metro Detroit, if you couldn’t get a prescription yourself pretty much any of your friends moms would sell you a pill or two, and it was cheap. I also can’t count the number of people that I have known, personally and on the periphery of my life, that have died from overdosing. It is the preferred death of my generation, a quietly romantic way to go out, especially if you are from the Midwest, the Rust Belt, or Appalachia.
I don’t know why I always wanted to die young, but I know that I am not the only one. Even amongst my close friends there were more than a few of us. We thought we’d be dead by eighteen, and when that didn’t happen we knew for sure we wouldn’t live past twenty-one. Eventually you get to be like twenty-eight or so and one day you wake up and realize you’re going to be here forever, so you might as well try to do something with your life. Maybe dying young is easier than failing to live up to your own expectations. It’s at least easier than paying your rent. Dying young saves you from all of the most monotonous parts of adulthood and you leave the world still full of promise, of potential value, or places that you can go. You’re still shiny. When you die young you are saved from the crippling reality that it is all downhill from here.
Mac Millers death is especially sad when you put his art into perspective. At only twenty-six he had already fallen, gotten back up, and kept going. He had gone through serious stages of evolution as an artist that rappers twenty years his senior still haven’t gone through. He will be rightfully canonized, as all artists who die young are, and his legacy in hip-hop will be put onto a pedestal. He will never have the chance to put out a decades worth of terrible music, to make bad country crossovers, or to try acting. Larry Fisherman will be remembered forever as being wrapped in his technicolor dreamcoat. As sad as that is, it is exactly the way it was supposed to be.
