{"id":33598,"date":"2019-02-04T06:00:30","date_gmt":"2019-02-04T12:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs2.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/?p=33598"},"modified":"2019-01-17T15:44:49","modified_gmt":"2019-01-17T21:44:49","slug":"applause-for-the-late-mac-millers-heart-felt-swimming","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/applause-for-the-late-mac-millers-heart-felt-swimming\/","title":{"rendered":"Applause for the Late Mac Miller’s Heart-Felt Swimming"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sonically and lyrically, “Come Back To Earth,” perfectly establishes the feel of Swimming<\/strong><\/em><\/a> and encapsulates all the thematic elements of the album: breakups, vulnerability, addiction,\u00a0 despair, hope, and painful self-awareness. People connect with Mac Miller because he wasn’t afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve. He perfectly sums up what depression feels like when he wrote:\u00a0 “And don’t you know that sunshine don’t feel right \/ When you inside all day \/ I wish it was nice out, but it looked like rain \/Grey skies and I’m drifting, not living forever \/They told me it only gets better.” <\/span><\/p>\n

Now, the lyrics “I’ll do anything for a way out of my head” are just haunting.<\/span><\/p>\n

It wasn’t until after Mac Miller died\u00a0 from a powerful combination of cocaine, fentanyl, and alcohol that I heard his most recent album, Swimming<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, and immediately started listening to his other work,\u00a0Best Day Ever, and The Divine Feminine, <\/em>among others.\u00a0 Like the inimitable artists who preceded him in death – Prince and Tom Petty, most recently – Miller’s reputation as a real-deal artist is not diminished due to his struggle with addiction. In a short lifespan, he managed to eat, breath, and sleep his craft, so much so that he was always writing, creating, performing, and improving. Just 26 years old after dropping his self-produced August 2018 album,\u00a0Miller made an inspired appearance on NPR’s Tiny Desk<\/a> Concert Series, mere months before his body was found.\u00a0 His NPR performance immediately struck me as genuine as he bantered with his band and addressed the audience in between songs.\u00a0 Plus,\u00a0 Thundercat’s<\/a> willingness to back you up is evidence of your awesomeness . But moreso: Mac Miller makes me feel\u00a0<\/em> something, and simple though that criteria may appear, it’s an indicator for great artistry. Even though he suffered, he nobly shared his vulnerability, sadness, and hope through his music.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
The late Mac Miller<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Initially, the song “2009” was one of my fast favorites on the album, probably because of the self-reflective quality that the\u00a0song conveys, both lyrically and instrumentally. The narrator appears to have looked back on his life having realized some hard-won truths but is ready to embrace a hopeful future. My favorite lyric is when he refers a conversation\u00a0the narrator\u00a0had with a woman and he cleverly characterizes her as an angel: “She tell me that I get her high ’cause a angel’s s’posed to fly”. The track has a dreamy wisdom about it that comes through the stripped-down instrumentation. Much of Miller’s music simply\u00a0<\/em>makes me\u00a0feel good.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Track number three, “What’s the Use” is a funky, laid back,\u00a0feel-good groove featuring Snoop and that signature Thundercat bassline and\u00a0 that hits in all the right places and might be my favorite tune on the album because, hello, FIVE STRING BASS in the house<\/p>\n

Then you have the trumpet-heavy funk and disco dance tune, “Ladders”, that seems to encapsulate the hope and despair Mac embodied in his music. Such a big, bright song evokes a wild night living large in the city but against the backdrop of a sad truth looming in the near future: that the sun would rise and the fun would be over.\u00a0 “Somehow we gotta find a way \/ No matter how many miles it takes \/ I know it feels so good right now \/ But it all comes fallin’ down \/ When the night meet the light \/Turn to day.\u00a0 Where was it Mac wanted to go? Check out his live performance of ladders<\/a>\u00a0and the all-star 11-piece band on the The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.<\/p>\n

Melodically and rhythmically, “Self-Care”(co-written by Dev Hynes of Blood Orange)\u00a0 is easily one of my favorite tunes on the album (but I’m hard-pressed to find a bad song on the album). Eerily, the music video portrays Miller lying in a coffin and nearly buried alive as he sings: “Somebody save me from myself, yeah \/Tell them they can take that bullshit elsewhere \/ Self care, we gonna be good \/Hell yeah, they lettin’ me go”. Given the trendiness of the concept of “self care” in a society marked by millenial backlash against the backdrop of growing social isolation in spite of vast widespread advancements in technology, Miller wanted to take better care of himself: he was envisioning a better life, but the question would be:\u00a0 how am I gonna get there?<\/p>\n

A review in Pitchfork states so eloquently that the\u00a0feeling\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>of a work of art\u00a0is indeed as valuable\u00a0<\/em>as the other more technical components of song crafting:\u00a0 “As always, Miller remains a step behind the prestige artists he emulates\u2014Chance the Rapper<\/a>,\u00a0Anderson.Paak<\/a>, and, increasingly,Frank Ocean<\/a>, whose nonchalant songcraft looms large here.\u00a0Swimming<\/em>\u00a0is less virtuosic than those artists\u2019 recent works, but no less heartfelt, and the album\u2019s wistful soul and warm funk fits Miller like his oldest, coziest hoodie. He may be unable to escape his own head, as he laments on the opener \u201cCome Back to Earth,\u201d but he\u2019s decided to make himself as comfortable as possible while he\u2019s trapped there.”<\/p>\n

Co-written by Pharell Williams (does he collaborate with everyone?) , “Hurt Feelings” (awesomely described in this article<\/a> as “weirdly cocksure”)\u00a0 is another super-catchy tune on the album with a beat that’s perfect for head bobbing, and oddly enough, one of the tunes I crank in the morning to psych myself up for work or life.<\/p>\n

Check out “Swimming”\u00a0 for honest, heart-felt poetry from a young soul who lived the life he rapped about only to die far too young, long before he had a chance to love himself back to life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sonically and lyrically, “Come Back To Earth,” perfectly establishes the feel of Swimming and encapsulates all the thematic elements of the album: breakups, vulnerability, addiction,\u00a0 despair, hope, and painful self-awareness. People connect with Mac Miller because he wasn’t afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve. He perfectly sums up[Read more]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11],"tags":[4832,3041,4830,3253,4197,4835,4834,4837,4831,4836,4833],"class_list":["post-33598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","tag-4832","tag-hip-hop","tag-mac-miller","tag-music","tag-rap","tag-rest-in-peace","tag-self-care","tag-snoop","tag-swimming","tag-thundercat","tag-whats-the-use"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pd0CXx-8JU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33598"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34175,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33598\/revisions\/34175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.davenportlibrary.com\/reference\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}