It’s like I never felt alive before
Mhmm, I’d rather have me peace of mind than war
See me and you, we ain’t that different
I struck the fuck out and then I came back swingin’
Take my time to finish, mind my business
A life ain’t a life ’til you live it

It’s no secret that I’m a big Mac Miller fan and last week would have been his 29th birthday after passing away in 2018, which is crazy he wouldn’t have even been 30 yet. I think Mac was an artist that I related to because I was in college when he first started popping online and he was rapping about a lot of the same stuff I was doing. He was probably the most successful out of the white kid frat rap genre (Asher Roth, Sammy Adams, Chris Webby etc.) that was like a comet back in the late 2000s, but he was also the only one to really grow up and his music reflected that.

K.I.D.S. and Best Day Ever still immediately takes me back to drinking around campus and Blue Slide Park came out when I was living by myself in New York working my first real life job. (It was also the first time I owned a car with an actual CD player) Watching Movies With the Sound Off though is where Mac really started experimenting and you could see he was trying to break out of the party rapper mold, which eventually led to much more well rounded albums like GO:OD AM. He started branching out into other genres like funk and somehow successfully bending that to fit his own style like he did with The Divine Feminine before releasing arguably his best all around album Swimming, released just over a month before his death in 2018. His family and inner circle posthumously released his Circles album in 2020 as well.

But I think one of the most enduring examples of his work oddly enough was his NPR Tiny Desk Concert. I was feeling nostalgic the other day so I threw that up on YouTube and it just shows the growth Mac Miller had from his early days as he croons with a live band including one of my favorite songs of his, the melancholy ballad “2009.” There are much worse ways to spend 15 minutes of your day so I highly recommend checking it out.