“The Spins” will catch you off guard. One of Mac Miller’s early remixes, the song is a high school party in musical form: rollicking, breathless fun. The infectious rhythms of a synthesizer jolt through at breakneck pace, and you can’t help but enthusiastically nod along. “Uh, follow your dreams…?” Miller jokes at the outset, his sarcasm palpable. As he quips about the ecstasy of adolescent debauchery, you can practically hear the smirk painted across his face.
At 18 years old, Mac Miller had captured the giddy energy of his generation’s reckless, naïve antics. And we, the naïve and reckless, couldn’t get enough of it. It was a unifying anthem for youth-in-revolt and our carefree misadventures. It was the soundtrack to our perceived invincibility.
Eight years later, in one of his last performances, Miller exudes the same electric vitality of his early career. Performing his newly-released single “Ladders” on The Late Show, Miller unleashes fast-talking rhymes over a barrage of horns. When he begins to croon, a warm, soulful funk emanates, an aura equally matched by his burnt-orange sweater. Grooving on stage with effortless cool, Miller runs a tattooed hand over his red beard, a smile playing across his features. “Keepin’ my head on top of my shoulders,” he riffs, “It feels so good right now/ But it all comes fallin’ down.” He speaks to a feeling of resigned contentment in the wake of turmoil, of the weightlessness that comes when you accept the way things are.
From his earliest mixtapes to his latest and most acclaimed album yet, this is what set Miller apart as an artist: his ability to deftly convey a mood or emotion through his music with refreshing transparency and an ever-evolving ingenuity. He was constantly improving his craft by trying out different styles and penning more thoughtful prose, cementing himself as an influential figure in the rap scene.
Last week, Miller was found dead in his Los Angeles home. He was just 26 years old. The victim of a suspected drug overdose, his premature death is a profound loss.
Our generation grew up with Mac Miller. In high school, we blasted his insouciant raps from our cars as we sped away from campus, reveling with him in our newfound freedom. In college, his music thumped from blown-out speakers as we crowded together in muggy basements and claustrophobic garages. As time went on, his verses echoed our first swooning sensations of love, then the overwhelming grief of our first heartbreaks, and the crushing loneliness that followed. When we felt suffocated by depression or dejection, we wrapped ourselves in his musings and felt understood. When Miller fumbled and took missteps, we were able to lose and find ourselves right beside him.
His music saved many of us on our most difficult days. In losing him, it feels like we’ve lost a friend.
Miller was able to connect with fans on such an intimate level because he transformed alongside us. Early on, critics knocked Mac Miller – whose real name is Malcolm McCormick – as an unremarkable kid from Pittsburgh with little artistic potential. Though his first album Blue Slide Park debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 – becoming the first independently distributed album to top the chart since 1995—he was often dismissed for peddling ‘frat-rap,’ which Doreen St. Felix describes in The New Yorker as a semi-pejorative label for “performers deemed to be not quite stealing hip-hop from its black creators but using its essence to reflect their blithe realities.”
In a way, much of his early music did fit this description: here was a swaggering college-aged, middle-class white guy, whose appeal stemmed from his commerciality. His reductive lyrics and superficial themes – which touted drugs, sex, and partying— reflected this. “I was still trying to figure out who I was at this point,” Miller explained to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about his initial work. “I didn’t know what I wanted to talk about. I just wanted to tell people I could rap.”
But Miller would soon cast aside the corny-white-rapper persona and adopt a more artistic sensibility. Lyrics like, “Find a big butt bitch/ Somewhere get my nuts kissed” on his popular 2010 single “Donald Trump” were replaced with poignant ruminations like, “Weight of the world I gotta carry on my own/ With these songs I can carry you home/ I’m right here when you’re scared and alone” on his 2018 track “2009.” From the psychedelic hum of Watching Movies with the Sound Off (2013), to the laid-back beats of GO:OD AM (2015), the R&B-infused serenades of The Divine Feminine (2016), and the layered meditations on Swimming (2018), he was constantly reinventing his sound in unpredictable ways.
Yet even as he evolved, Miller’s personal demons lingered. Throughout his career, his introspections on substance abuse, depression, isolation, and mortality were strikingly honest. “I used to rap really openly about really dark shit,” he told Vulture in an interview earlier this month, “because that’s what I was experiencing at the time. That’s fine, that’s good, that’s life. It should be all the emotions.” He worked through these experiences in public with a keen self-awareness: His video for the single “Self-Care,” released just weeks before his death, shows him lying in his own coffin with a cigarette between his lips, carving “Memento Mori” into the wood. It was as if he was choreographing his own death.
In searching for someone to blame for his death, many have attacked Miller’s ex-girlfriend, Ariana Grande. She has previously been open about the toxicity of their relationship; to guilt her for not being able to single-handedly ‘save’ him from substance abuse is both misogynistic and cruel. Miller’s death is symptomatic, perhaps, of systemic failures. As a society, we tend to treat addiction as a choice rather than a disease and refuse to take mental health concerns seriously. Miller, through his frankness about his own struggles, was helping to disassemble the shame associated with openly discussing these issues.
Miller was a maverick. He was as celebrated for his humor and perpetual fuck-you attitude as he was for his kindness and extraordinary sensitivity. For that, many who weren’t fans of Miller’s music still deeply respected him as a person.
His death has sent far-reaching ripples of disbelief and sadness throughout the music industry and beyond. The public outpouring of grief—from the likes of Elton John, Drake, John Mayer, Solange Knowles, and Chance the Rapper— offers a window into how his discography touched lives. In her most recent tribute, Ariana Grande articulated this sorrow: “I’m so sorry I couldn’t fix or take your pain away. I really wanted to. The kindest, sweetest soul with demons he never deserved. I hope you’re okay now. Rest.”
Miller struggled with the complexities of life and fame, but he never pretended to be something he wasn’t. On “The Spins,” he laughs as the music fades: “I’m just doing me, you feel me?” It hurts that we’ll no longer be able to grow alongside Mac, or see which direction his boundless talent took him next. But his music will endure long past his death because of his ability to speak fluently to our generation and in turn, give us a voice.