Chance the Rapper tweeted that he met Earl Sweatshirt and Vince Staples through Miller, and many others shared similar stories. He was a noted friend of the indie rap set, treating the home studio in his L.A. Though his songs reached many, Miller’s legacy may reveal itself more in those he reached personally. Miller was a bigger star than many of his more lauded rap friends but there was always something about him that remained industrious and blue collar, perhaps something in his Steel City roots. “I just need a way out of my head/I’ll do anything for a way out of my head,” he sang on “Come Back to Earth.” His music got more and more personal throughout his career, leading him to face addiction and mortality in a way that felt accessible, hackable even. Listening to Miller’s final album, last month’s Swimming, feels like following a restless rapper as he chases stillness. When Rolling Stone’s Brian Hiatt asked what he learned through this process, Miller’s answer seemed to echo his new approach to songwriting: “Just being still, and how important it is to be able to quiet your mind and be honest with yourself.” He credited Rubin with helping him detox and encouraging him to “ get his life together” in 2015. He said he “was not on planet Earth” when he made the druggy Faces and sought serious help from producer Rick Rubin. “Mac Miller nice too though.”ĭespite a largely unwavering fan base, a creative resurgence, and the admiration of his peers, Miller struggled with addiction throughout his career. “Black people really magic,” he tweeted in 2017. The most savvy summation of his trajectory from kid rapper taken lightly to indie success story to respected artist can be found on “Here We Go,” from his brutally honest 2014 mixtape Faces: “Cocaine ether creates a strange creature/They wasn’t hearing me ‘til I fucked with a Brainfeeder/I’m still playing it out the same speakers/I did it all without a Drake feature!” He “ did it all without a Jay feature,” too, though Hov eventually gave his approval. “People just started getting how real it was to me,” he said in Fader’s mini-doc, Stopped Making Excuses. But the further down the rabbit hole Miller went, it became clear that he was there to offer something to the music he loved. He started drifting through the oddball beats of Flying Lotus and Clams Casino, striking up friendships with ScHoolboy Q, Earl Sweatshirt, Vince Staples, and Da$h.Īt first this seemed like a shrewd strategy for him: become cool by association. Mac was always having fun in his raps but now he was fun to listen to. He became much better at rapping, too, abandoning the rudimentary mechanics of his early stuff for the easygoing technicality of his indie peers. From that point on, Miller became harder to define and impossible to pin down. The 2012 stopgap release Macadelic ushered stranger sounds. By then, he’d already set out to snatch his respect through sheer force of will. “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,” he told Complex in his 2013 cover story. Scathing criticism, in part, turned a teenaged Mac toward drug use, specifically lean. The conflicting critical and commercial responses signaled a crossroads for Mac Miller, in more ways than one.
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