![]() ![]() “We just storm in your house / Open doors through a cloud,” he rapped over an oft-sampled late-’60s saxophone lick in “Party on Fifth Ave.,” and if the blitheness of his approach failed to endear him to the genre’s intellectual elite, it quickly made him an avatar of the so-called frat-rap scene that also gave us Asher Roth and Sammy Adams.Ī profile like that can be hard to dismantle in a digital environment where nothing disappears. When he first appeared, Miller had the look and feel of a carefree party rapper “Blue Slide Park,” named after a Pittsburgh playground, presented a sweet and fun-loving bro whose enjoyment of life was exceeded only by his enjoyment of the white privilege that enabled him to bypass many of the traditional steps to hip-hop success. His album “Swimming,” which came out just weeks before his death, showcased an artist still finding himself. Yet Miller, who died Friday at age 26 of an apparent drug overdose, also managed during his too-short career to do what the internet makes difficult: He evolved. And later, after he started rapping himself, he used YouTube and social media to build a following with little institutional support - a following robust enough that his debut album, 2011’s “Blue Slide Park,” became the first independently released project to top the Billboard 200 in more than 15 years. Mac Miller was undeniably a child of the internet.Īs a teenager in the early 2000s, he went online to study the hip-hop stars working hundreds or thousands of miles from his home in Pittsburgh. ![]()
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