Why I'll Never Get Over Mac Miller
updates on my life, & thoughts on Mac's impact on late millenials.
Friends,
What’s up! It’s been a minute, yeah? As you probably know by now, my life is WILD & I’ve been super busy. But I’ve been thinking about you, & I’ve been thinking about how much I wanna get into music writing this year. This newsletter will be an honest effort at that, but first I’ll start with a couple KB updates.
I, along with 7 other amazing artists across the US, was named a 2022 Broadway Advocacy Coalition Artivism Fellow. If you know me, you know that I’ve been exploring art-based activism, advocacy, and organizing for a while, so I’m feeling so grateful to have financial, educational, and mentorship support as I develop a project that speaks to abolition in my local community (more on this sooner than soon).
To support How To Identify Yourself with a Wound’s release, I’m going on a many-city, multiple-stop tour !!!!! Many of the shows are virtual because COVID, but a number are also IRL (for now). Check out more info & RSVP for my performances, workshops, classes, and more here.
I’ve been in Fort Worth (my hometown) for the past week & a half writing. dreaming. loving. I can’t wait to finish & share these new discoveries with you.
Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about Mac Miller and I wanted to share my thoughts on his 30th birthday. Let me know what you think.
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[Image credits: billboard.com]
I remember cause it was my prime years. The first time I heard Kickin’ Incredibly Dope Shit was in the cramped backseat of a 2-door pickup truck in Fort Worth, Texas. Ju was the only one person in my squad who had a car, and we packed that little blue Ford out every moment we could with our limbs and wet smoke.
I was beginning to see the ills of life through my own eyes. In 11th grade, on my last leg with my family’s homophobia and on my 2nd church that I was eventually shunned out of. Every teacher telling me to pull up my pants, and every safety net I knew was compromised til I started skipping school with a clique of rebels as a means of survival.
They were my boys. Josh, the big blue-black kids who used weed as his therapy after his mom passed; Ju, the puerto rican boy who desperately wanted to fit in at an all-Black school (also the dude with the truck); and Kam, the Black theatre gay who wanted nothing more but free smokes and to be straight-adjacent. When I was with Josh, Ju, and Kam, I could count on listening to stoner shit I never would’ve come across if I wasn’t waiting on Ju to roll.
Motherfucker, I feel like the hardest working kid in America
Playing with the pros, I remember being amateur
At that time, the world was just beginning to realize the terror that was climate change, and realize that millennials were going against the grain of many generations before us. We were smoking weed earlier, asking more questions of our parents, old enough to know 9/11 was some bullshit, and backdropping our melancholy with the likes of Wiz Khalifa, TDE, Odd Future, and Mac Miller.
I’ll always mourn Mac Miller.
The same way I’ll always be immediately transported to the back of that sweaty-ass pickup truck when I hear the guitar chords from Studio Lovin’, but Mac was something different, something that felt like a movement. Once while me and the boys were getting high outta our minds, Josh was mumbling lyrics with his eyes closed.
“Motherfucker, I feel like the hardest working kid in America. sumsumsum… ”
“Wake up!” I yelled all loud and obnoxious. We both laughed as he got his drool together and smacked his lips. “Why you always mumble that shit?”
“Cause bro, it’s like a prayer to me. I FEEL that shit when he say it, yunno what I mean?”
“Yeah. I mean, I guess.” Reader, I didn’t know what he meant then.
“Because it’s like, errybody be sweatin me. My uncle, my girl, whatever. I’m workin hard on my shit.”
And in a way, I absolutely felt him. Josh had lost his mother a year or so before he transferred to our school, and since I hadn’t experienced a loss like that, I just tried not to bring it up. He also was thrust into an environment of kids with no food, no resources from our bullshit-ass district, and high truancy. At the time, his uncle was nagging him about gettin a job. At the time, we were always asked to be hard-working kids.
“All I do is work hard, my nigga. I’m alive, and that’s a lot to ask from me.”
To memorialize Mac Miller is to memorialize all the moments I spent having heart-to-hearts with myself, honeys I wanted to get with, and my boys. It all happened to Nikes on My Feet, Kool-Aid & Frozen Pizza, and Senior Skip Day.
Senior skip day was everyday in our minds.
All the boys at my high school had rap dreams — me included. Since college wasn’t spoken of like it was a viable option, and so many folk ended up dropping out, in prison, or both, every boy or boy-adjacent wanted to live Mac’s life. When my boys and I got high, it was to YouTube instrumentals of the artists we like and “______ Type Beat” productions searched for my passenger-seat Josh.
Lace 'em up, lace 'em up, lace 'em up, lace 'em
Blue suede shoes stay crispy like bacon
I remember one specific time I rhymed something corny like “Nikes on My Feet, my rhyming is elite, if you don’t smell me now you gon smell me in her sheets” and my boys went WILD. It’s like I said something clever, when it was really just me mimicking the silly shit that they said. My freestyles were often 2nd-best to Kam and his never-ending flow, but everything I said off the dome was hyped so much that I tried my hand at recording something the next day.
Without Mac Miller, I would’ve never found my voice.
About a year ago, I had started writing poetry with my other group of friends. I really thought nothing of it, though; you can’t necessarily tell a chick you think is cute that you write poetry and expect a nice response. I did, however, LOVE the idea of being a rapper, so I started writing and rhyming vigorously in journal after journal until they were but smeared ink and pain.
Most of the shit I wrote about was Mac’s specialty then — drugs, partying, and girls. It felt so exciting to find new ways to rhyme, and pass off my written shit as freestyles with my boys.
Around 2013, things changed, though. Me and Ju had a falling-out, and a near-visit to jail made me realize I needed to go straight-edge for a while. At the time that I was evolving, Mac was too. After Blue Side Park, his music became more introspective and experimental.
Watching Movies with The Sound Off felt like the backdrop of millenial life. I was about to go to college, and the biggest thing in the news was Snowden’s leak of documents on government oversight. As late millennials were figuring out if privacy was a lie, Mac was letting us into his mind — one that felt jarringly similar to mine. I remember listening to Objects In The Mirror a million times over — first picturing the song as my relationship to weed, and then as my relationship to women. My desires started to change as Mac, the once-source of my childhood angst, transformed into the backdrop of my hazy, early adulthood.
Becoming an adult during the 2nd Obama presidency, and finally feeling like one as Trump came in, was not for the faint of heart. In real-time, I saw friends turn to numbing themselves of this life through alcohol and stuff much harder than a bowl could offer. In that stretch of 6 years, Mac Miller took a leap from Watching Movies with The Sound Off to GOOD:AM to Divine Feminine and then Swimming — managing to encompass the leaps of time that 18-24 are perfectly. By the end of 2018, I hadn’t seen Josh for 5 years, meet-ups with Ju and Kam felt awfully forced, and letting them go on to live separate lives felt hard since I once knew them like the back of my hand. Like Mac, though, I had matured from a once-know-nothing teen to a person with a better, though still riddled with demons, sense of self. And they all had too — just in a different way than me.
That’s why it's so hard to get over Mac Miller’s death.
Mac Miller was the poster child for angsty millennial kids and still-evolving early adults. He had his flaws (as we all do) and you could see his progression to better choices (and lovers) in his music. If you would’ve told me that Mac would make some beautiful, near-perfect shit like Divine Feminine, I would’ve laughed in your face, called it corny, and told you to pass the blunt. Truly, neither I nor Mac would’ve been able to picture this project then cause we were kids — in the belly of a world falling apart for reasons that weren’t our fault (though everyone was blaming us for it). It felt like he went from smoking in somebody else’s cheap truck to overcoming the bullshit life throws at you with me. He was my white boy stoner-turned-lover. My boy from the hood tryna learn how to be better.
And he still had so much life to live. I’ll miss him forever, and it’s clear that a lot of us will.
Losing Mac Miller felt like losing a childhood friend, and a grim reminder that we’re all here until we aren’t. I hope his legacy — and the memories I have of me, Ju, Josh, and Kam — live forever. That way all the late-millennial stoners-turned-lovers (that are maybe still stoners) have at least one more thing to live for.