The album was a commercial smash but a critical failure - a backlash that Mac, as a diligent student of hip-hop, turned into a learning opportunity. Released 10 years ago today, Blue Slide Park became the first independently distributed debut to hit #1 since 1995. He began as a high school student, a regional star putting on his Pittsburgh area code, then acquired national notoriety as a frat-rap icon in the build up to his first LP.
YOUTUBE LIL PEEP FUNERAL MAC
What Mac Miller achieved in a decade is testament to the restlessness of his creativity that propelled him through the many artistic lifetimes he lived in his far too short life. Most useful as a succinct thesis for understanding Mac is the song’s chest-thumping declaration that he is “the hardest working person in the universe,” a big title that he did more than anyone to claim. In a short pair of verses, he lays out his ambitions (“Tryna be a legend by tomorrow/ They say I can’t, I’m determined to prove ’em wrong though”), relevant cultural commentary about his own reception (“They wasn’t hearin’ me ’til I fucked with a Brainfeeder… I did it all without a Drake feature”), and offers the type of double-edged self-awareness that proved his mettle to millions who had any number of reasons to doubt his credentials (“If I ain’t in your top 10, then you a racist”).
YOUTUBE LIL PEEP FUNERAL DOWNLOAD
“Here We Go,” the second song from Mac Miller’s landmark mixtape Faces - distributed as a free download in 2014 and finally released to streaming services last month - is as clear and insightful an origin story as anything written about him by others since. But even if it took his untimely death to finally receive his flowers from many who long dismissed him, he knew his own merit better than anyone.
Not until his death in 2018 did the popular conception of Mac Miller fully shift from that of a curiosity hanging at the edges of real rap music to a visionary in his own right. Malcolm McCormick had been under-appreciated his whole career, accumulating a decade under the public eye without ever fully lifting the curse of his first impressions.
If the tragedies in rap of the last few years - from Pop Smoke to King Von to Nipsey Hussle, and the list goes on and on - have spoken to anything broken in our culture, beyond the complete callousness with which we treat the lives of young hip-hop musicians, it’s that we fail to adequately celebrate our artists until they are no longer able to join in themselves. Too common is the scenario where an artist’s talent is belittled just as their star rises, like when popularity invited cynicism to Lil Peep and Juice WLRD until their premature demises rendered their geniuses unimpeachable. If an artist is “lucky,” they will live long enough to have their contributions simply forgotten, as with innovators undersung in their middle age like the late DMX and Shock G. People will take you for granted until you’re gone, a truth hip-hop is intimately familiar with.
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