MOST DOPE
The Extraordinary Life of Mac Miller
By Paul Cantor
Five decades into hip-hop’s existence, it’s now routine for rappers to die sickeningly young, often just as their careers are taking off, like casualties of some cruel motif of Greek drama. The hazards of the trade are many, none perhaps as persistent as gun violence and drugs, which have stamped out some of the genre’s brightest-burning flames. Mac Miller, born Malcolm McCormick, was one, and “Most Dope,” a new biography by Paul Cantor, offers a tender, studious remembrance amid the flurry of “Rapper Dies” headlines.
McCormick’s rise wasn’t uncommon in an industry that grooms its talent young, but it was remarkable nonetheless. His output included six studio albums, all of which debuted among the Billboard top five, plus a dozen or so mixtapes, four of them released before his high school graduation. He became a millionaire before he could buy a drink, founded a record label, starred in his own reality series and commanded an exceptionally loyal following before he was found dead from an overdose in 2018. He was 26.
Cantor, working without the cooperation of his subject’s family, makes hay from wide-ranging interviews with the artist’s friends and associates, in addition to the usual trove of media clips. He finds in the early years of McCormick’s career a sheepish white kid with an infectious grin who often repped his hometown, Pittsburgh, but made no secret of his privilege. There were no shoot-’em-up sagas or trap-house ballads; teenage Malcolm rapped about weed, Kool Aid and frozen pizza, the off-the-shelf Nikes on his feet. Earnestness, that killer of careers, was his appeal, his whole persona. It found a surprisingly large audience — and it grated the hell out of critics and serious fans, the kind who live to knock a hustle and argue (not unconvincingly) that hip-hop peaked in 1997.
“The reason Miller’s mass of fans follow him is not because of his music,” read a takedown of McCormick’s first album on the music site Pitchfork. “It’s because he looks just like them, because they can see themselves up on the stage behind him.” Calling it “crushingly bland,” the reviewer rated the album a 1 out of 10 — the harshest of several pans. “Malcolm was distraught,” Cantor writes. Never mind that the record went to No. 1 on the charts.
In “rejecting not only Malcolm’s music, but the very idea of Malcolm himself,” Cantor argues, the Pitchfork review identified a fundamental dilemma for McCormick. Artists sell because of something special in their work, or because they themselves are something special that audiences want to become. The best manage both, but ultimately, mediocrity is no foil to fantasy.
McCormick chose to get better, and did. His beats turned more complex, his lyrics more unsettling. Even his cadences changed, taking on a lilt and mumble here, a songwriter’s soulfulness there. He was a “serious student of hip-hop” who absorbed classics — Big L (dead at 24) was one lodestar — but his ear for innovation, plus a newfound dark streak, led to what one critic deemed “a quantum leap in artistry.” In fact, Cantor makes a fairly persuasive case that for all of McCormick’s later success, he was actually underrated, or at least underestimated, his whiteness an albatross that constantly made him suspect.
Smoldering beneath his talents was a mean drug habit. Fondness for weed became a taste for lean (prescription cough syrup and soda), then pills; and Cantor, playing up the tragic flaw, is wearyingly fixated on the subject throughout a repetitive book, in which whole chapters can drift by without much new information. Yet we learn almost nothing about the circumstances around his death (bedroom, fentanyl), or its larger context.
McCormick died in an extraordinary year for hip-hop. Rolling Stone called 2018 a “changing of the guard,” in which virtually every notable rapper released a major project, but rising stars often eclipsed veterans. All the more devastating, then, that McCormick’s passing came weeks after he released what Cantor rightly calls his best album, “Swimming,” and that the tragedy was diffused by others before and after: XXXTentacion (dead at 20), Nipsey Hussle (33), Juice Wrld (21), Pop Smoke (20).
“I’d put some money on forever,” McCormick sings on “Swimming.” “But I don’t like to gamble on the weather.” The sense that one’s number could be up anytime is one of rap’s most common themes. This makes for intoxicating music: With few exceptions, hip-hop is best left to the young and dangerous. But it’s no reproach to want all artists, when the lights have dimmed, to pass happily into obscurity and mortgage payments, creaky, irrelevant and alive.
"Short" - Google News
January 17, 2022 at 05:00PM
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The Too-Short Evolution of Mac Miller - The New York Times
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