Faces was made for Mac to journey back to Malcolm. His woes are plentiful and bone-deep a bar like “Everyone I know ain’t nothing to God” captures the desolation he feels inside The Sanctuary, trying to create his way back into the realm of the living. The track is its own personal undoing, with non sequiturs funneling into honest depictions of drug use overtaking Mac’s life, and how as much as this saddens him, he just can’t stop (“Buggin’ out, had it all, I’m nothing now … I bust your speakers with some bullshit rap / I’m on drugs, all my new shit wack”). There is so much intensity, it’s impossible to be bored why not set up camp on the edge of mortality, just to see what fun can be had? (Mac said as much about his drug use in his 2016 Fader documentary.)Īs anxiety permeates the tape, “It Just Doesn’t Matter” stands as one of its most human moments. For him, the precipice is a sexy place, everything extreme and laden with meaning. Mac flourishes in confounding spaces about to die, he sprouts and blooms. Paging through lines admitting to suicidal tendencies is skin-crawling, but there’s an authenticity to each word that keeps us coming back. “And kill me now if I did it all for hip-hop (K-ch, blaow) / I might die before I detox” -“Malibu”įaces is not meant to be agreeable it’s meant to be honest. The tape is an exposé on the lies we tell ourselves in our fight to get better, as well as an expulsion of those lies from Mac Miller’s fragile system. “Malibu” is packed with lines that communicate the ethos of the mixtape -from Mac shouting “You piece of shit” at himself, to flirting with death in the service of his art, to the animalistic declarations of “Well I’ll be damned if this ain’t some shit” and “I’m the only suicidal motherfucker with a smile on.” The fallacy of a smile is the core essence of Faces. (“I ain’t a star, I’m way farther with the constellations / Contemplatin’ suicide like it’s a DVD”). On “Diablo,” we hear the humor and hysteria of a depressive episode (“I been poppin’ like a kernel, readin’ Justin Bieber’s journal / Treat you like a urinal”) and the nervous jitter of unraveling (“Look at what you did to me, look at what you did to me”). We hear ourselves in it fighting our battles as best as we can, putting on our personas so no one worries. Miller often referred to music as a religion consider Faces the inside of a church, with the heat of the devil filling the air. As listeners, there’s a natural concern for Malcolm, but there’s also a natural attraction to such brink-of-life music. In the storm of this mixtape, he never lets us forget that, at the time, he is just a 22-year-old guy trying to get his mind right. Mac vacillates between emotional peaks but his rapping is at its best. He’s getting higher than we’ve previously heard about, celebrating his success with a variety of drugs while documenting the difficult descents from riding so high. In a swirl of jazz, Mac begins by proclaiming that he should have died already, establishing Faces as a confession. Across the 24 tracks, Mac covers damn near everything within the scope of the human condition, resulting in his most expansive, challenging, esoteric, flawed, and affecting offering to his career at this point.
#MAC MILLER YOUTUBE GOOD AM HOW TO#
The mixtape is a paranoid stumbling through the cocaine ether, the perceived fragility of mortality, and the anxiety of only knowing how to create, not necessarily how to live.
It may well have taught me that the purpose of great writing is to elevate the person receiving it. My favorite Mac project, it was the soundtrack to my self-harm, the darkest period of my life, and the consequential soundtrack to my recovery. This is a lesson I learned from Mac Miller time and again, but most crucially from his 2014 opus, Faces.
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