There are those years when it seems the only way through is to tell yourself: “Hey, one day, this will make for some good writing material.” Mac Miller has had one of those years. This spring, the 26-year-old rapper’s two-year relationship with Ariana Grande ended; weeks later, he was arrested after drunkenly crashing his car into a telegraph pole.
But telling the story to Zane Lowe in a recent Beats 1 interview, Miller sounded unexpectedly zen, as though he had watched the whole thing happen from a bird’s-eye view: “You ever feel invincible?” he asked, only semi-rhetorically. “You gotta understand: I lived a certain life for 10 years and faced almost no real consequences. I had no version of the story that didn’t end up with me being fine.” His arrest, he concluded, was the best thing that could have happened to him.
It is not hard to imagine why Miller was in dire need of a reality check. Before he had turned 20, his first album, Blue Slide Park (2011), became the first independently distributed debut to top the Billboard charts since 1995. Clearly, popularity wasn’t a problem for the Pittsburgh native, but acclaim was a different story. Miller’s narratives didn’t venture far beyond the realm of dorm parties, and his fairly pejorative “frat rap” designation spoke not only to the demographics of his fanbase, but also to a much broader shift in hip-hop’s audience.
His marked creative improvement since then may have demonstrated an ability to learn from criticism, or maybe he just grew up; regardless, over the past five years, Miller’s music has become exponentially better, not to mention weirder. His rhymes got tighter and the beats trippier, often under his production alias, Larry Fisherman. He sang as much as he rapped on The Divine Feminine (2016), an intoxicating exploration of the ways we are transformed by love. He had never sounded more at ease with his place in the world – but, as he rapped a couple of years earlier, “the good times can be a trap”.
Swimming seems informed by a similar sentiment. Where The Divine Feminine probed the spaces between people, Swimming focuses on Miller. His fifth official album is an ambling 13-song journey towards self-acceptance, one that does not end in triumph. Instead, it embraces the possibility that he’ll never have it all figured out. And, mostly, Miller seems fine with that.
On the lead single, Self Care, co-written by Dev Hynes of Blood Orange, Miller’s loping sing-song sounds weary and unconvinced as he croaks, “Hell yeah, we gonna be all right” over watercolour synth washes. But halfway through, the beat switches to woozy space-funk, and light peeks through the clouds: “I got all the time in the world,” he proclaims. “Plus I know it’s a beautiful feeling, in oblivion.” He pulls at the word “oblivion” like chewing gum.
Swimming, as a whole, drifts by at the same leisurely pace – it is a patient record in sound and concept. Gentle orchestral arrangements occasionally forgo percussion, as on the swelling opener, Come Back to Earth, on which Miller elaborates on the album title: “I was drowning, now I’m swimming.” Those six words gesture towards an entire story, and Miller’s writing is at its best in this simple, suggestive mode. On Wings, a spacious neo-soul slow burner punctuated by the occasional sigh of a violin, Miller’s sung hook – “These are my wings” – feels all the more vast in its understatement.
Hints of The Divine Feminine’s warm mid-tempo funk surface throughout: What’s the Use glides along at a balmy stepper’s groove, and the standout track, Ladders, steadily climaxes into ecstatic horns – it’s the kind of song that could fill a wedding dancefloor. However, even the brightest moments on Swimming feel measured, informed less by outright happiness than by the lightness of being. Optimism coexists with regret and intoxication alternates with clarity: one moment Miller is radiating top-of-the-world confidence, and the next, he is accepting that the wise man knows that he knows nothing.
In other words, it’s an album that feels how getting older feels: relinquishing the ideal of perfection and learning how to live with yourself as you are. “Every day I wake up and breathe / I don’t have it all, but that’s all right with me,” Miller sings on 2009, accompanied by gorgeously sparse keys, delicate finger-snaps and the occasional downbeat clatter of snares.
There is no grand conclusion to be arrived at, no windfall of sudden self-actualisation. Instead, Swimming ends with a serene shrug: on So it Goes, over muted guitars and a spacey synth drone, Miller sings those three words like a mantra before being swallowed by a wall of sound. Somehow, it feels like a happy ending and an acceptance of whatever is to come.
