Still Swimming: Notes from a Brief Foray into the Music of Mac Miller

Mac Miller and I don’t go back very far. I became aware of him when most other hip-hop fans did, in the early 2010s on the eve of rap’s explosion in cultural prominence. He never really did it for me. I considered him a part of what I thought was a fleeting sub-genre of “frat-rap”, pre-Soundcloud rappers popular among the college set. I was Mac Miller agnostic.

The beauty of technology like Spotify is that I can pinpoint almost the exact moment Mac’s music first registered with me. On February 6th, 2015 I added “Watching Movies” to one of my playlists, a hyper-curated selection of my favorite trap and trap-adjacent rap music. The song was two years old at the time. I was late to the party, but it’s still a gem, an energetic yet refined example from the early days of commercial trap. That’s the end of chapter one. I found the song, enjoyed it, then discovered Migos, Young Thug and the other artists of Atlanta’s 2nd wave and put Mac aside.

The story really begins in 2016. Trap was showing signs of age. The apexes of Future, Young Thug, and 21 Savage had arguably passed while 2 Chainz and Migos were firmly at their peak. In what is now a noteworthy coincidence, Mac released The Divine Feminine on my birthday, September 16th, 2016. I initially gave it a listen based on the strength of Anderson .Paak’s feature on the single “Dang!”, which ended up my third favorite song on the album, the first two being “Skin” and “God Is Fair, Sexy Nasty”. “God is Fair” cemented Mac Miller’s status as one of the few artists who could thrive on a song with Kendrick Lamar, a feat he first managed on another amazing track called “Fight the Feeling” four years prior. Despite my well-established love for Kendrick, it was “Skin” that caught my attention in the most meaningful way.

“Skin” is an intoxicating and beautiful song. The lazy percussion, meandering guitar riffs, uplifting vocals, and the signature, soft slur of Mac’s voice combine to form a powerful window into Mac’s relationship with Ariana Grande. The song touches on a poignant theme that really resonated with me as a recent college graduate in the throes of my first real break-up and first grinding desk job. It’s the idea that life, at least for a 24 year-old (both mine and Mac’s age at the time), is predominately composed of boredom and slog, if not outright malevolence, pocked by instances of extremely invigorating eventfulness. “Skin” is a song about sex, but the broader point is the juxtaposition between the pleasure of intimacy against the backdrop of relentless work, in Mac’s case recording, promoting, and touring. Mine and Mac’s trajectories were converging. I couldn’t relate to the the self-assured, fratty confidence of the earlier “Easy Mac,” but I could definitely relate to the uncertainty and seemingly constant anxiety of young-adult Mac. Our paths would continue to merge from there.

Many artists wax poetic on the trials of life, but there’s something in the tone of The Divine Feminine that conveys a sort of level-headed acceptance of the undulating current of life, a mindset I’ve spent the past few years trying to cultivate with varying degrees of success. Without saying it outright, Mac was exploring the concept of mindfullness… recognizing and embracing one’s emotions without feeling bogged down or hopeless, a point he really drove home in his most recent album Swimming, released just a month before his death on August 3rd, 2018.

I enjoy listening to albums cover to cover at least a couple times just to find the great b-sides that I wouldn’t hear out in the wild. For most albums I’ll find those songs, scrap the throwaways and just listen to my favorite 2–4 songs for a while, but the best albums exist as their own singular piece of art. Swimming falls firmly in this category. The spirit is obvious from the first notes of the opening guitar riff on “Come Back to Earth,” a contemplative melancholy common to the quarter-life crisis victim that permeates the entire album. Miller’s imperfect yet soothing singing voice makes him a compelling narrator as he explores the success and strife of his own mid-20s; namely his public breakup with a mega pop-star and his struggle with addiction. There’s a line in that opening track that perfectly encapsulates the sentiment of the album and captures so beautifully the mental state of young adults in the Age of Anxiety… “…don’t you know that sunshine don’t feel right / When you inside all day / I wish it was nice out, but it looked like rain.” It doesn’t matter what the weather is at a given moment… maybe sad, maybe happy, maybe anxious, stressed, excited or angry… what matters is the way we interact with these ever-present human emotions. The underlying lesson here is that instead of constantly wishing for sunny days, for happiness and lack of stress, we should instead learn to see the beauty in the full spectrum of emotions we are guaranteed to experience by virtue of being human in an imperfect world. To be caught up in one’s emotions is to feel drenched by the storm, but that’s not the experience compelled by the song. Mac recognized the beauty of a gloomy day, that sometimes sunshine feels inappropriate from perspective of a literal or metaphorical cubicle. Mac strove to appreciate the unconventional nice day, lacking in the idyll of stereotypical sunshine and rainbows.

Swimming is so powerful because Mac confronted his struggles without surrendering to them, giving the listener the impression that while he may not have fully overcome, he was more or less at peace with his problems and was content to embrace life with all of its ups and downs, a powerful message for anyone trying to figure out what it means to be happy (or at least fulfilled) in 2019. He seemed content with himself and confident in his craft, but maybe not.

I was particularly struck by Mac’s death, as my closest friends can attest, but not out of nostalgia or general love for the artist like most others. Mac Miller’s affect on me was entirely of this moment and his most recent music addresses issues that weigh heavily on my generation on a daily basis. Swimming is a beacon of hope that melancholy is not something to be feared, but something to be embraced as one of life’s many distinct emotions; the quiet dark that makes you most appreciate the light. The unfathomable tragedy of Mac Miller’s death is that despite teaching such an efficacious lesson… it wasn’t entirely his truth. There is nothing to suggest his overdose was intentional, but from his music it seemed like Mac was approaching his place on the mountain, looking down at the passing clouds below.

So what exactly do we do with that paradox? It took a while to make any sense of it but I’ve come to the conclusion that the power to overcome derives heavily from one’s sense of self. Humans have infinite coping mechanisms… friends, romances, music, exercise, drugs, pets, work, traveling, partying… you name it, but these coping mechanisms, while useful when constructive, are only a small part of the overall puzzle of human life. The takeaway from Mac’s story is that we should all continue where he left off, because developing an attuned sense of self and a framework for handling life’s hardships offers us the best opportunity for growth and yes… happiness.

RIP Mac. Here’s hoping your journey can serve as example to the rest of us still learning to swim.