Jonah Bromwich will house you.
There’s no doubt that Mac Miller changed his public image last year, but that fact alone shouldn’t be enough to condemn him. You’ll remember that Mac originally emerged from the woodwork praising rap’s golden age and rapping over the likes of Pete Rock and Primo. It was nice, sweet, cringeworthy, badly uncool. So his shift to the latter-day camp of Odd Future and Brainfeeder represents less perception-manufacturing and more a much-needed corrective. A leap from the rap heroes of yesteryear to the camp that’s pushing boundaries today doesn’t seem fake; it’s exactly the same transition that so many of us have made (in our preferences) as rap has evolved. Mac as Larry Fisherman is a Mac that’s interested in a weird, twisted future, not one tying himself in knots adhering to an earnest past.
That he means to keep up the new act is clear from the self-produced single “Erica’s House,” a strange, slow procession of free association, embossed with his signature one-liners. (listen to a bar like “I love like a folk singer but fuck like a crack addict” and tell me that Mac’s not one of the funnier kids rapping today.) He confesses here to hating white rappers, to still having sex with blind people, and all manner of weird sins, “all kind of evil.” And despite the fact that this is the same type of crawling beat that eventually killed the tempo on last year’s Watching Movies with the Sound Off, this is the kind of rapping that will put him on heads’ maps. Nothing earnest. Instead its awkward, doubletake humor, lacerated through with the kind of honesty that’s difficult to express unless it seems like you’re joking.
