Another damn white rapper. Did we not learn our lesson from Asher Roth? I refused to click on the HotNewHipHop link when I came across Mac Miller's K.I.D.S mixtape in 2010. Eventually, the murmurs of a Wiz Khalifa co-sign gave me the motivation I needed to go on my cruddy family desktop and download the tape to my iPod classic. And shit. All of a sudden, I couldn't stop running it back. I came across some of his music videos, and this clean shaven, brightly smiling kid only three or four years older than me was really spitting. Soon enough, I watched Mac change, navigate life, and fight to not lose himself, all while feeling those same feelings myself.
Back then, when the sun blazed and the final school bell rang, it was time to hit the Curtis High School handball courts; if the surrounding Staten Island streets were quiet enough, you could hear the honk of the ferry casting off to Manhattan. There was a lot going on: some couples hooked up, other kids smoked under the shade of the playground's sole tree, and a few were drenched in sweat from putting in work on the court. I sat directly outside the white lines of the square, iPhone in hand, mashing the volume button wishing it would play louder. When people strolled over to me they usually chastised my music taste, but not when I was playing Mac Miller. “Kool Aid and Frozen Pizza” was the song. When that track played through the shitty iPhone speakers, kids would rap along, some still with a blunt in hand, wearily keeping a side eye for any type of authority figure. We were 15 years old and all we wanted to do was hang out, talk shit, and play handball until our palms callused. Mac Miller knew this: “Yeah, I live a life pretty similar to yours/Used to go to school, hang with friends, and play sports.”
I sure as hell wasn't brave enough to bring up Mac Miller around my high school basketball team, though. The unspoken rule was if you dared to discuss any rapper that wasn't Fabolous, your ass was getting cooked. In a team study hall, I watched as one of the two white kids on our team finger-stomped on the mouse trying to get Mac's “Nikes on My Feet” video to load. He wanted to show a couple of my teammates what he was messing with. I watched as the group passed around a single headphone, waiting for the roast. But it never came. The next day, “Nikes on My Feet” rang through the locker room from iPhone speakers. It was the first time I witnessed how Mac's music wasn't a white thing, a smoker thing, a misfit thing. He was for everyone in our generation.
Social media was the shift I couldn't adapt to at first. This new extension to my life just made me feel like a sad sack as I watched kids my age turn to successes overnight. And there I was, still in school, making no progress, wishing it all would speed up. Mac dropped Best Day Ever when I was 16, and the sound of the tape was still as light and fluffy as K.I.D.S, but that youthful optimism was starting to fade: “Hopefully I'll be at the top soon/For now I'm at my house watching cartoons.” Like me and so many teenagers, he felt stuck, as if he was just taking part in a series of empty actions.
Online life was changing me, and I drifted away from Mac's music. When Blue Slide Park came and went I swore off of the pop-rap wave that tons of kids were championing on Facebook and dove deeper into the internet. The music that resonated with me became darker. I would log onto YouTube and listen to every low-quality SpaceGhostPurrp track I could get my hands on. From afar, Mac was growing in stride with me. He was falling into the same internet rabbit holes I was, drifting away from his old sound, evolving at the era's hyperspeed pace.
I wouldn't come back to Mac's music again until the weeks leading up to my high school graduation, around the time he dropped his 2013 album Watching Movies with the Sound Off. Mac was experiencing a graduation of his own and he seemed as scared about his next phase—about alienating the fanbase he had attained—as I was going away to a college I picked on a whim. That summer, I worked in the frozen food aisle of a grocery store, packing vegetables, with one headphone in and the other dangling so I could still hear customers' questions. Some days I would just hide in the back freezer, running back Watching Movies with the Sound Off until my fingertips were too numb to scroll on my phone.
During the final days of my freshman year of college, Mac dropped his opus, Faces. The jazzy, lo-fi project was a complete 180 degree turn from his earlier work. It's a project rooted in darkness made during a time in his life where he had spiraled into a drug-fueled gloom. Through the bleakness (“Shoulda died already...”) there are glimpses of optimism. Moments of hope, where he begins to think it can only get better from here. There's a level of awareness to it all here that's not found in some of Mac's earlier music, where his feelings battle with each other. Faces was the first time my growth wasn't in stride with Mac, but it made me aware of the connection I had built with him.
That connection made his passing a completely new experience for me. This is the first time I've suffered through the loss of an artist that I grew up with. Mac matured side-by-side with me and so many teenagers and, like us, he had no idea what he was doing. We were all just figuring it out, and having Mac Miller there as our vessel to the outside world made it all seem a little more livable.
