by Dan O

Influence naturally splinters when the primary source isn’t around. Since Mac Miller died on September 7th 2018  we were left with two primary groups:

The confused and unimpressed-So much happens in music and in our lives that sometimes a rapper just passes away. Your timeline lights up with stories about how lives have changed because of this person and you realize…I heard like one song and didn’t like it. I avoided learning more because that rapper seemed annoying to me. If you lean into your feelings you end up walking around angrily saying stuff like “What was the big deal about Mac Miller?!” So mad at your timeline for beating you down with the importance of this person you never cared about that you forget to take a breath and admit…I know nothing about Mac Miller!  Not everyone in this classification is malicious and some work their way to back to generally indifferent which is all the rest of us should expect.

Superfans-If you succeed as a rapper ,a lot of times, that just means survival. Mac survived the vicious hate from critics in his early days and lived long enough to have a generation with deep emotional ties to his music. When he passed on it didn’t just rip him from their lives it magnified the importance of the music he left. This created a subset of people united in focus on how great Mac Miller is. Elevating him to levels of historical importance Mac wouldn’t have understood. The praise becomes poisonous because anyone who heard and loved Mac Miller knew how great he was yet wholly understood he wasn’t ever top 5 dead or alive and he knew it. He loved Odd Future, Schoolboy Q and countless others.  Lying all the time out of love is still lying.

Not fitting into either of these groups has been freaking me out lately.  Mac now has three albums I consider posthumous: the recently released Balloonerism, Circles, and Swimming. End of life Mac is really connecting with people. The hopelessness, the depression in fame, it fits next to Nick Drake and Elliott Smith in the all time canon. I can’t listen to it. I don’t find it poignant that Mac slowly lost his will to live in a cocktail of drug abuse and the spoils of fame. I’m not willing to live in the moment where just as the world was embracing how much he meant he slipped away and every song of that time gives a pencil stroke outline of it. Mac Millers young brash annoying years are not a part of mine. I was already old. I studied Mac and the reaction to Mac with passion and intensity, growing as a writer throughout the experience. It pisses me off to hear Mac Miller slip away and I don’t understand how it doesn’t piss you off if you cared about him.

I haven’t been able to listen to anything but 2010’s K.I.D.S. mixtape, smiling as I remember Lord Finesse suing him for Kool Aid & Frozen Pizza. The content is a teenage cocktail of video games, girls and smoking but the force of his personality is a supernova. An infection of energy that galvanized a generation. Every song bangs from  Outside, The Spins, Senior Skip Day and Traffic In The Sky.

I’m fighting back the part of me that wants to tell you how some Mac Miller fans miss him as pure dramatic tragedy as if Nipsey Hussle wasn’t bleeding to death outside of his store on the verge of changing the whole coast. I don’t want to be a jerk and declare that some Mac Miller fans only miss him and him alone and never sweat in their sleep about Prodigy in his hospital bed choking on his food. I don’t even know what happened to Ka or DOOM. It hurts that Mac is gone but I’m not going to read books about it or listen to him fade away. I’ve lost too many. I’m listening to K.I.D.S.