‘Balloonerism’ Is a Fitting Final Piece of the Mac Miller Puzzle
The late Pittsburgh rapper’s second posthumous album, recorded a decade ago, sheds new light on his artistic evolution.
In the seven years since Mac Miller’s death, I’ve often turned to his 2014 appearance on the Mass Appeal video series Rhythm Roulette, in which guests are challenged to make a beat with three albums or less. In it, the rapper and producer giddily assembled an instrumental in his garage recording studio, known as The Sanctuary, through a combination of sampling and live instrumentation. After plucking some snippets and laying down a drum track and some synths, he fetched a bass and improvised a riff while cartoonishly nodding his head. In the middle of all this, his father, who had been cutting the grass outside, walked by, and Miller cut the music off before summoning him in. “Say something to the people one time, dad!” he shouted, as the camera zoomed in on his parent’s face, friendly but befuddled: “Hi, how you doin’? Are you guys taking care of my son?”
Revisiting the video, I’m always gripped by a swell of emotion. Miller’s death from an accidental overdose at 26 naturally looms large in my mind, but the video was also shot around the time of a creative blossoming. The heady boom-bap of his 2013 album Watching Movies With the Sound Off had been a bold pivot from the lackadaisical vibes of his 2011 debut Blue Slide Park. Every project from 2014’s Faces—arguably his masterwork—onward played up the happiness and sadness constantly at odds in his writing, while leaning toward lusher and more genre-agnostic territory. Watching Miller’s goofball tendencies clash with his developing musicality on Rhythm Roulette, taped after the release of Faces, felt like the closest thing to a connector between those early eras. But Balloonerism, his seventh studio album, offers an even clearer view of that transition.
