Mac Miller

Malcolm James McCormick was born on January 19, 1992. Growing up in Pittsburgh, his mother worked as a photographer and his father was an architect. Miller, his older brother drew and designed. The household was very creative without being wealthy. Malcolm was raised Jewish and went to a Catholic grade school because the education there was better.

For Hanukkah at five years old, Malcolm got a keyboard. After plugging it in, he did not stop playing. By six years old, Malcolm could play the piano, guitar, bass, and the drums — all self-taught. He performed at piano recitals and already made up his own music instead of only playing off the pages. Next to music, Malcolm started taking an interest in basketball, football, soccer, and lacrosse.

But what took most of his interest? Hip-hop. At first Malcolm wanted to be a singer. At 14, Malcolm was rapping in a session with some friends and it stuck. From 15 onward he stopped treating it as a hobby. Parties, teams, and all the other ordinary teenage activities fell away. Everything became about the music.

The scene while coming up was very local. Attics and all-age cypher rooms. He was known as the little white kid who could rap. He released But My Mackin’ Ain’t Easy in 2007 under the name Easy Mac. After that came The Jukebox, The High Life, and K.I.D.S. in 2010, and Best Day Ever in 2011.

Rostrum Records, an independent Pittsburgh label that had already signed people like Wiz Khalifa, signed Easy Mac. He still wanted to graduate, though. He still wanted the prom, the gown, the walk with friends. And so he did. After graduating, the city got larger than just local cyphers.

In 2011, Blue Slide Park became the first independently distributed debut album to enter the Billboard 200 at number one since 1995. Malcolm was just 19 years old. The record was named after the park he grew up against. Frick Park Market turned a sandwich shop into a local landmark. The song “Party on Fifth Ave” became a teenage anthem in Pittsburgh before it became a national one. Most of the touring crew were childhood friends. To people back home, he still sounded like Malcolm. No pretense.

Success arrived faster than anything. Reviews were not only about the music, though. “Too white.” “Too cheerful.” “Too suburban.” “Too party.”

A nineteen-year-old puts out his first album and discovers that the conversation is more about whether he is allowed to exist in this genre than about whether the music is good or not. Mac later talked about how this felt worse than people simply disliking the songs.

“You’re 19, you’re so excited to put out your first album, you put it out and nobody has any respect for you or what you did.”

Mac was not happy. Very distraught, he started sipping on lean very heavy. Friends said they couldn’t look at him the same. He was, by his own admission, just lost.

This is where mental health stopped being a side note and became the center of Mac’s story.

Mac had said before that he had a very addictive personality. Not just for substances. Music, clothing, anything — always something. Depression and anxiety had already entered his mind; the success just made it visible and worse. People started judging and asking what he could possibly be depressed about. He had money. He had fame.

Mac said that fame blurs the line between what other people say you are and what you know yourself to be. In a conversation with Larry King in 2015, Mac said that the drug problem was a state of mind. He was pretty depressed. It all started with success, and the strange isolation came after it.

Mac talked about mental health and drug problems earlier than a lot of rappers were “supposed” to talk about it. Around the album Watching Movies with the Sound Off in 2013, Mac was publicly saying that the bad days were common, and that running away from them didn’t work anymore.

“Write to feel better!”

“Don’t treat sadness as if it is the end of the world!”

All the advice Mac got from the people close to him was honest, yet incomplete. Writing becomes a trap too. You just keep trying to decorate the dark room you’re living in.

In 2014, Faces became the album that let everybody into that dark room.

Not a very conventional album. The album feels like a long night that refuses to end. The paranoia, depression, cocaine, hysteria, the feeling of having it all yet feeling nothing for it. Listeners later called it the soundtrack to the worst periods of their lives — and to getting through that period. Faces does not romanticize the edge; it lives on the edge. It shows someone watching himself get stuck and doing it anyway, because stopping makes it feel like he would lose the only language he has. In interviews, the drugs always got the back end of the conversation. State of mind first, drugs second. Depression first, drugs as a way to mute it. And that worked. For a while. After a while, the drugs only made the feelings heavier.

After Faces it was time to get some air. GO:OD AM came in 2015. It was a deliberate change of sound and mind. Mac said Faces had been super depressing and he didn’t feel it as extremely as before anymore. Not healed — less under. The record doesn’t avoid the topic and still talks about the wreckage, but it also talks about how to stand up inside the wreckage.

The Divine Feminine came in 2016. Love, women, softness, and the possibility that another person could be a place to rest and a spot to fill the void. Mac’s relationship with Ariana Grande was all of this, both in public and in private. For a moment there seemed to be space.

Space for collaboration, tenderness, and a different kind of attention. Yet the pressure did not seem to leave Mac. He said he always had a feeling of being on. Being called Mac Miller so much that you are no longer who you really are.

By 2018, the balance Mac was looking for was still out of reach. He crashed a car into a pole while under the influence. He called it something he needed. A hard stop, literally. The relationship with Ariana was over. Mac was just trying to get clearer — numb, at least. But the noise inside refused to stay quiet. Mac talked about wanting to have good and bad days. Not just wanting only happiness — just wanting the permanent sadness to end. He talked about low self-esteem and anxiety. He talked about being tired of creating from the same drugged-out and depressing space. It became repetitive, even to him.

Swimming was released in August of 2018. There was a lot of tension in the album. Songs like “Self Care,” “Ladders,” “2009,” and “So It Goes.” These are songs of somebody who is trying to stay afloat — a cry for help.

“Somebody save me from myself.”

This does not sound like a bar or a slogan. It sounds like a sentence Mac had been rewriting for years, finally putting it out. The album is not an AA-meeting recovery note, nor is it a suicide note. It’s the sound of a person who has seen and knows the pattern. Yet he wants out of the pattern. Mac had been nominated, praised, doubted, loved, memed. He had been just a white kid, the party kid, and the sad kid. Swimming was him trying to be a complete person in the public eye, which was harder than either of the masks.

On September 7, 2018, Mac Miller passed away at his house in Los Angeles due to an overdose. Mac was 26 years old.

Circles, meant as a musical companion to Swimming — “Swimming in Circles” — was finished after Mac passed away by Jon Brion and was released in 2020. The idea was two records that would complete each other. The album feels like exhaling after taking a deep breath. Like Mac was still here and giving us songs like “Good News,” “Blue World,” and “That’s On Me” that keep the softness in sound that he had been reaching for. Friends and collaborators carried pieces of him forward in their own work. Thundercat, among others, talked about Mac’s death as a rupture that forced reckoning. Pittsburgh kept Mac alive on wall murals, in parks, and in the market that he had previously turned into a local landmark.

For some people, everything that remains of Mac is his catalog: Blue Slide Park, Watching Movies with the Sound Off, Faces, GO:OD AM, The Divine Feminine, Swimming, Circles. But for me, and a lot of others, what remains of Mac is also how he openly spoke about his vulnerability being treated as a weakness, and about not being or feeling okay. He said he was depressed while people kept saying that was impossible because of the money and fame. He gave us Faces instead of burying it.

Mac’s friends who still called him Malcolm, his family that both sparked and encouraged the early creativity, his grandmother who came to his shows. People who knew him as a child said fame did not make him put on a new face when he came home.

Plenty of people can make beats that resemble Mac’s beats. No one can be that kid who got a keyboard at 5, dropped everything at 15, and topped the charts at 19. Mac spent years trying to stay afloat but kept swimming while the floor moved below him. Mac never wanted to be a symbol of just joy or just pain. Mac wanted to be an ordinary human — good days and bad days — and the chance and inspiration behind surviving both.

Mac lives on. In me, in you, in everybody who is willing to give his music a chance. Listen to the songs. Live the songs. Mac has music for your worst days and for your best days.

Mac’s story teaches us that even if people are in the center of attention, you don’t know what another person is going through. There is no need to judge or bully someone out of a genre or anywhere else because they don’t fit a certain stereotype. We could all use a bit of love.