In which Larry Fisherman, a slow-learning artist, completes his musical circle
Mac’s debut, Blue Slide Park, was a bright, beaming show of teen positivity, made by someone with total dedication to the glass half full ethos. Except there was one problem with it. Its unabashed sentiment was not regarded as cool back then. And for the mere fact that Mac had made such an album, filled with uncool feelings, meant the critics came searching for him, for the commitment of crimes against inhumanity. By way of an aggressive takedown from Pitchfork.
Watching his 2012 MTV reality show, Mac Miller & the Most Dope Family, it was clear that the critical takedowns somehow got to him. On one particular episode, which I recall, where Mac, stood in his marble-covered luxury kitchen, shooting the shit with a friend, spewed out some confusing emotions about all the critic hate. I cannot quite reminder his exact words, but they reflected the whole Wait! Yes-I-made-frat-rap-but-I-can-do-more! frustration.
And as a partial reaction to the critical dismissals, he’d proceed to turn his back on music tilted towards the side of carefree positivity. His next record, the mixtape Macadelic took in a broader palette of sounds and found him ditching the boom-bap, backpacker aesthetic for cloudier, slowly drawn out songs that began exploring his growing discontent towards fame. Mac had climbed up the treacherous mountainous slopes of Everest, reached the summit, peaked down, and mouthed to himself: this is nice but, Is This It?
The goal of Macadelic, it seemed, was to have the cool hip-hop crowd be all like, we like Mac, he’s one of us. And to fulfill that goal, Macadelic took on the evergreen trends of the day. With Lucky Ass Bitch sitting atop a Lex Luger beat, Fight the Feeling sporting a Kendrick Lamar feature, and Clams Casino being called in on Angels to add that stoic stamp of underground rap approval.
Macadelic was followed by his sophomore record, Watching Movies With The Sound Off. A record that is essentially his significant contribution to the field of experimental, Avant-Garde hip-hop. WMWTSO, like Macadelic, again reeked of jagged, sloppy attempts at critic appeasement. However, that need-to-be-seen, rough around the edge desperation was always part of the appeal of his music. He evoked the commendable human propensity to want to be liked, put your all into it, be showy, wordy, and extravagant in some hope that doing so would bring forth some tangible meaning.
He battled with that desire and dug deeper into himself to make music of greater artistic might. Later on, in this piece, we will stumble onto the heart-warming fact that at the end of his circle, he’d achieve his goal to be respected. But back then, amidst all of that struggle to get there, he would occasionally luck out and land on genuinely non-try hard music. Take Objects in the Mirror on WMWTSO, which with its accompanying live music video began etching out Miller’s love for open, lensed ballads that strung high and mighty like the songs of Elton John and co. It was his first real stab at heart-felt artistry.
He would spend the rest of 2013, the year of WMWTSO, producing many side projects under many aliases, teaming up with then, mostly unknown Vince Staples, to make their Stolen Youth LP. A mixtape all produced by Mac with his beats sounding as if he’d run them through one too many compression filters, and like, they were made from the mind of someone whose brain was rotting day by day, stricken by paranoia, desperately trying to win the ongoing battle in their head.
We also got a sleazy, apprentice effort at a jazz record called You under the alias of Larry Lovestein. As well as what is my favorite project under his many pseudonyms, the Delusional Thomas mixtape.
All this collaboration and weird musical exertions would land Mac into making his magnum opus a year later called Faces. Faces was the first time he began to sound comfortable, but unfortunately, it was also the first time the oh-gee-fame-is-hard aesthetic he explored on Macadelic and WMWTSO started to come off as viscerally real.
Listening to Faces made it clear that this was someone whose drug habit had spilled over into crisis mode. Though hard to hear, the paradoxical anthesis of Faces, and as it so often is, was that Mac’s rotting state of mind, most likely driven by the addiction, produced a thrilling mosaic of scattered, stream of consciousness raps. Of boisterous confidence but also acute self-hate. Of celebratory scowls of wealth but insular declarations of loneliness.
Faces, very much aligned with post-modernist literary trends, with the whole loose self-referential, laissez-faire approach to art, say the first thing that spews out from your chest approach. It was a record very much lived in, with Mac holing up in a studio lit entirely by bright red lights and decked out with modal Ableton setups. About three different configurations of MPC’s and Yahama keyboards, with half-smoked blunts, delicately dangling on the side of a loose table.
GO:OD AM his third LP swiftly came after Faces. And where Faces represented the full embrace of what it means to hit rock bottom, GO:OD AM was the awakening, the sobering morning after effect. In terms of musical tropes, GO:OD AM was the back-to-basics record. The post-experimental phase. On it was a partial return to the bright positivity that earmarked Blue Slide Park because fuck the critics.
But this time around, rather than the naïve, head-first positivity of Blue Slide Park, it was intertwined with lingering fears, conflicts, and remorse. In essence, it represented the mishmash of what it means to be an adult with the black dog’s de-facto existence, but with credulous attempts at trying to shrug the dog off.
Writing about GO:OD AM in 2015, I spun together a narrative that essentially said it was his first album since Blue Slide Park, where wallowing and self-hate did not take centre stage.
And with that, Mac would continue his renewed sense of positivity with 2016’s The Divine Feminine. What can be said to be a happy album with its celebrations of feminine power, naive infatuation, and crude details on like, sex, and all that intimate ying-yang of touch and desire!
And if GO:OD AM and The Devine Feminine represented the formation of the circle, as close to meeting the requirement of artistry, Swimming, released in 2018, was, to me, its completion. Because at the age of 26, Mac had, at last, stumbled onto his artistic niche. One composed of bright, warm neo-soul, with each song driven by a simple, understated beat that keeps rollicking over and over again, like the thumping rhythmic sounds of footsteps, trotting onwards towards someplace, of at last, tranquillity.
The closer, So it Goes, is the best example of this where silence takes up more space than noise. As if to free up enough space for each verse. Because indeed, all that a cluttered mind truly wants is a tender moment of silence. So it Goes, like in Vonnegut’s seminal Slaughterhouse-Five, is a simple admittance of, like, the reality of things with no associations or connections attempted to explain the why.
Having found his niche at last, and in typical slow learner fashion, Mac proceeded to hone it down, eventually becoming his sixth album, Circles. And if Swimming and Circles, the inanimate objects they are, could conversate in some weird sort of surrealist manner. They would go back and forth but eventually agree that Swimming chronicled the aspiration to be better, and Circles captured that struggle of said aspiration.
Swimming — The act of staying afloat, and by doing so, prevents the occurrence of the do-nothing counterfactual that is drowning.
Circles — A circular motion, that is the prediction of déjà vu, of a constant return to the root cause. And in effect, that is what defines any attempts of wanting to be better. The feeling of perpetual, forever moving motion with no end, of constant repetition, permanently moving towards some end that has occurred before.
Post Script
This is really an attempt at developing some kind of unique literary voice. By going for the leisurely sound of an over keel 9-year-old but also the authoritative dominance of a humble knows it all. It’s not quite there yet, but nothing ever is.
It was fun to write, but I guess that’s why anyone does this sort of thing.
Written in the throes, in those tiny margins of time, found on packed to the brim train carriages, with onlookers scanning your screen, with that screwface of confusion and at times delightful curiosity.
