By: Neil McAlister, Peak Associate
Since September 7, one line from “Jet Fuel” — a track on Swimming, Mac Miller’s final album — always makes the breath catch in my throat: “Well Imma be here for a while, longer than I did expect to.”
For an artist who often saw his own death as an impending inevitability, this was a remarkably hopeful sentiment. Mac Miller had, over his career, ascended from radio-friendly frat-rap beginnings into the upper echelons of hip-hop. After releasing a string of beloved, acclaimed albums over the past five years, his position in the future of hip-hop seemed firmly entrenched. But on September 7, Mac Miller passed away from an overdose.
Death, and overdosing in particular, was a recurring motif in Mac’s music, yet it was always balanced with a kind of boastful optimism. 2013’s Watching Movies with the Sound Off was the first real introduction to a more experimental, artistic, and deeply tormented Mac Miller. It opens hopefully, with a sentiment similar to that on “Jet Fuel” (“Hallelujah, thank God I have a future”) but, like many of his albums, concludes with an aural representation of dying. His 2014 mixtape Faces is so fraught with demons, addictions, and suicidal tendencies that fans genuinely wondered if Mac would survive the year. In 2015, Mac released GO:OD AM, which, in an ironic twist, stands for “Go O.D. in the AM”. On “Perfect Circle / God Speed,” Mac terrifyingly, prophetically, described the events of his eventual overdose three years before it occurred.
Over the past couple of years, Mac was getting better — 2016’s The Divine Feminine found him at perhaps his happiest, crafting a beautiful album on the concepts of love and divinity. Swimming, released roughly two months ago, was his most concise project to date. It’s a small masterpiece from an artist who was only getting better, centred on the concept of survival: you have to keep swimming if you don’t want to drown. Swimming was never supposed to be Mac’s goodbye letter, but in terms of distilling his message into its purest form, it’ll certainly do.
Mac was one of the most important artists hip-hop has seen, and not just for his remarkable music or the role he played in helping dozens of artists reach fame. Mac Miller symbolized the fact that, no matter how terrifying the voice in your head got, not matter how hopeless life seemed, you were never alone. He put so many of my greatest fears and darkest thoughts into words, but he also gave voice to hope and perseverance that have been so necessary over the past five years. At 26, he is gone far too soon. Like many others, I grew up alongside Mac Miller, and to lose such an important artist so young hurts deep in the soul.
Thank you, Mac Miller, for everything.
