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Mac Miller Would Have Loved This
The world of Balloonerism is a good excuse to obsess over his work again.
Crisp recordings of wily, gorgeous tunes like the SZA showcase “DJ’s Chord Organ” offer a fuller picture of the inclinations and cast of musicians in Mac Miller’s orbit in the Studio City years fondly remembered for freewheeling team ups with Earl Sweatshirt, Vince Staples, and ScHoolboy Q. My tiny personal balm for the emotional Band-Aid rip of discourse about this album (and the attendant discomfort of people scanning music of the deceased for insight into death but not life) is knowing that after he wrote all those breathtakingly dark songs, he managed to have a pretty upbeat 2015. Balloonerism asks the listener to accept death and loss as facts of life, but the message that I choose to receive from it is that it only took a few turns for the rapper yelling “Fuck the future” in “Rick’s Piano” to dream of living to meet “100 Grandkids” the next year.
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