Tonight you can’t hear a lot of what Mac Miller says.
This is the elephant in the room, and it’s a shame, because Mac Miller is an artist who has made what is widely agreed to be an incredible transformation from the terrible, deservedly-panned ‘frat-rap’ of Blue Slide Park to the nuanced, experimental, boom-bap nature of his most recent albums, where Miller confronts his drug addiction, depression, and what it is to be a white rapper, but you can’t have nuance if you can’t hear a thing you say.
The beats are great, and it’s easy to get swept away by the production, but you’re here for a man, and what you get is nothing of the man, you get a man muffled, an outline of the character in the recordings.
It’s a stretch to think that this is the man who came up with self-aware, conflicted lines like “but me, I’m still trapped inside my head / it kinda feel like it’s a purgatory / so polite and white, but I got family who would murder for me”.
This lack of reduces a hip-hop gig to a caricature of what hip-hop is, which is not good, because hip-hop is a language for (mostly black, though that’s a different conversation) struggle, and if you can’t hear its nuances you just hear the clichés, and it makes a mockery of whatever struggle that may be.
Even when Miller’s friends in Odd Future use extreme, violent, abusive lyrics, it can be part of a struggle simply by violently resisting clean, edges-off pop, no matter how problematic the language or message might be.
But tonight Mac Miller can’t have the depth to be able to convey any of that sort of message, because what the show is just a victory lap for those who know the music, and a fuzzy, distant version of songs on the record.
Words: Tony Boardman
Photos: Aimee Boyle
