Who do you call to make it to the top? And who do you call to make the shooting stop? And who do you call to give the coupe a wash? After everything I did, I think I'm still myself. | | | | Mac Miller during a quiet moment while filming a Music Choice "Take Back Your Music" campaign ad in July 2013.
(Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images) | | | | | | “Who do you call to make it to the top? And who do you call to make the shooting stop? And who do you call to give the coupe a wash? After everything I did, I think I'm still myself.”
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| | rantnrave:// I'm heartbroken at the news of MAC MILLER's death. If you're not entirely aware of who Miller was, it's well worth understanding how his professional career and artistic traits defined his unique, memorable legacy. It's in a manner most beloved, that by 1988, rap music's "old school" (led by the likes of KURTIS BLOW, UTFO and RUN-DMC) had wildly evolved into its "new school" era (ERIC B. & RAKIM, BIG DADDY KANE, EPMD). Similarly, 1998 saw rap's "new school" surge into the era of JAY-Z and DMX, where the music—and hip-hop culture—became a multimedia juggernaut, an insurgent bellwether of mainstream cool dripping with b-boy and b-girl swag. By 2008—when I began to regularly write about rap music and hip-hop culture and Mac Miller's rap career was a year old—the eras had shifted again. What had been old, new and multimedia-driven was now proving disruptive in the advancing digital, streaming and social media spaces. Though artists such as DRAKE, KENDRICK LAMAR, NICKI MINAJ and WIZ KHALIFA—Mac Miller's one-time labelmate, friend and fellow Pittsburgh native—have emerged as instantaneously recognizable superstars from this generation, it's Miller who may have proven over time to be its most sustainable outlier. The darkest of the mainstream horses in what is statistically hip-hop's brightest of commercially and culturally relevant ages, his career demands to be celebrated as a lesson in achieving artistic sustainability while remaining a respectable person. Jay-Z once tweeted, while listing his favorite emcees, that "black people really magic. Mac Miller nice too though." Think of "nice" as an allusion to the notion that Jay—like many artists who have feted Miller in the past few days—knew he was underrated. In a period where the music industry was figuring out how to stave off commercial decline, Miller released five mainstream albums, had somewhere in the range of 200 credited productions for himself and other artists, and headlined seven tours. What always struck me as most important about Miller was that instead of pulling the "industry is unfair/politics are holding me back" card, as so many rappers do when pop stardom proves elusive, he redoubled his efforts to learn and master the craft of music. The milquetoast blandness that I felt defined his 2011 debut album BLUE SLIDE PARK was largely gone by the time of the 2013 followup, WATCHING MUSIC WITH THE SOUND OFF. (PITCHFORK rated the former at 1.0, and the latter at 7.0.) After 2016's THE DIVINE FEMININE and 2018's SWIMMING, I noted to a friend that I found his career "collegiate." I meant that he had emerged from a sophomoric artist to a wise, senior voice of rap's latest school, just as the genre was being overrun by a click-ready SOUNDCLOUD and SNAPCHAT-birthed freshman class. Instead of being remembered as a superstar par excellence of this seemingly just-passed epoch, I like how FIONA APPLE remembered him as being as exemplary a musician as he was a person. That may be a greater memoriam than recalling a slew of hit albums. "I really really liked him and I wanted to stay friends with him, but I never got his number," Apple said. "I wish I could have made music with him. He was a really good soul... I'm going to go listen to that and um, keep him alive that way." MusicSET: "Mac Miller Never Stopped Swimming Toward the Deep End." | | | - Marcus K. Dowling, guest curator |
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| | | i hope you're proud of me |
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| He was a fearless explorer of rap's musical and psychological depths and a beloved champion of the hip-hop underground. He reinvented himself repeatedly on his seven-year journey from the party rap of "Blue Slide Park" to the dark introspection of "Swimming," but he couldn't outrun his demons. | | |
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| AI is fundamentally changing not just how we listen to music, but how music is made and even how the music industry operates. And as all tech does, AI is evolving at such a radical pace that, frankly, we can only speculate about its long-term impacts. | | |
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| She took her own life while visiting the rapper, who memorialized her death in a track before he was killed in a shooting. | | |
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| New memoir ‘Anything for a Hit’ details Dorothy Carvello’s experience of toxic work culture during her career as a record executive. | | |
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| Kate Bush, N.W.A., Brian Eno, Madonna, Prince, and the other icons who defined a decade. | | |
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| Skinny, sober, and happily married, Trap’s reigning kingmaker has never felt freer-and now he's ready to see the world. | | |
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| Each company announced new programming series at the IAB. | | |
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| Releasing music on Friday devalues new albums. | | |
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| In the midst of a serious accusation, the beat scene gives a mixed welcome to the Los Angeles artist. | | |
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| In an exclusive extract from his new essay collection They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, Hanif Abdurraqib talks about grief, memory, and Atlanta rapper Future. | | |
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| | | ingenuity influenced by your eulogy |
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| Writers and editors share 40 years’ worth of memories about helping invent a language to talk about music, and the artists they critiqued -- some grateful, some not. | | |
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| A look back at the stripped-down subgenre that defined the German capital from 1998-2008. | | |
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| "BoJack Horseman" and "Rick and Morty’s" impact on an entire aesthetic. | | |
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| Ever wonder how a record gets made? We visited United Record Pressing down in Nashville, TN to learn how the magic happens. Lacquers, stampers, and masters, oh my! | | |
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| Abe Beame creates a mix reminiscent of a time where the only music on the radio was bad adult contemporary tunes. | | |
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| The singer has foregrounded his story as a young gay man in his music, to unprecedented commercial success. But can he break through to pop's top tier? | | |
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| A deep dive into the successes of Flying Lotus’s label. | | |
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| Popular rock bands are now far older than their pop and hip-hop peers, which completely changes how we relate to them as listeners. | | |
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| The late singer-songwriter has been gone for 15 years, but his life and career still aren’t any easier to make sense of: He was as gifted, haunted, and destructive as any musician from his generation. | | |
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| The above appeared in the June 1975 issue of Stereo Review (formerly Hi-Fi Stereo Review), now archived here. The letters are in reference to a Bangs twin review, from March ’75 (one I’ve never seen before) of Harrison’s "Dark Horse" and Ringo’s "Goodnight Vienna" (a “metal-flake glow-in-the-dark music box”). | | |
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| | | | | | | Stream of consciousness raps over a Diplo-produced beat with a Balkan Beat Box sample. It's exactly as out of left field as it sounds. |
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| © Copyright 2018, The REDEF Group |
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