But it’s hard to blame Mac for wanting to get the most out of a contented headspace, considering the depression and drug addiction he’s been through since first rising to fame.
If this album has one serious flaw, it’s that it gets too plush, overly saturated in its own aesthetic, resulting in an overlong run time. Gone are the thin, synthy beats Mac rapped over on his K.I.D.S. With gleaming instrumentation, the album feels like a living, breathing thing. He has his beatmaking talents to show off in addition to his rapping, and with help from producers like Tyler, the Creator, ID Labs, Thundercat, and DJ Dahi, the beats here are things of beauty. Mac isn’t compelled to be the center of attention at all times. Sure, it’s 70 minutes long and features well-executed but splattered guest appearances by everyone: TDE rapper Ab-Soul is a wordplay fiend on “Two Matches” (the sequel to Watching Movies with the Sound Off‘s “Matches”) Chief Keef spouts inventive patterns reminiscent of peak-era Gucci Mane on “Cut the Check” Lil B offers spoken word wisdom on “Time Flies” and Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano is to “The Festival” as Charli XCX was to Danny Brown’s album-closing “Float On”. If GO:OD AM looks unwieldy on paper, rest assured that everything comes together smoother than it seems like it should. Now, after 2013’s Watching Movies with the Sound Off and 2014’s even better Faces mixtape, he returns with GO:OD AM, configuring his sound into idiosyncratic but approachable shapes and keeping a sense of composure throughout. He works with left-of-center artists like Tyler, the Creator, Earl Sweatshirt, and Flying Lotus, and he’s starting to get the critical love that they do. Mac changed in a hurry, though, and his music is funnier, weirder, and altogether doper, especially when it sounds totally removed from commercial expectations (see Mac’s Quasimoto-like Delusional Thomas project). 1 on the Billboard 200 since 1995, but it didn’t fare well with critics to say it got “bad reviews” doesn’t do it justice. His Blue Slide Park became the first independently distributed debut album to reach No. It’s been a journey for him to get to this point. Mac sounds like a rap star on his third album and major label debut, GO:OD AM, but one with a nonchalance more comparable to ASAP Rocky on At. or Rick Ross on Black Dollar than any cheap radio grabs that might be expected of him as a new Warner Bros. While it’s true he “killed the game like Jeffrey Dahmer did the ‘80s” (as he puts it on his new album’s Juicy J-featuring “Break the Law”), it didn’t exactly garner him lasting respect from the rap world at large.
“You was Easy Mac with the cheesy raps,” jabbed battle rapper Loaded Lux during an interlude on Mac’s sophomore album, Watching Movies with the Sound Off. But his music, while invigoratingly youthful at its best, was glaringly juvenile at worst. He seemed genuinely interested in hip-hop, a teenager who liked A Tribe Called Quest and Big L.
The Pittsburgh rapper was too young when he first got rich and famous. Mac Miller has won a lot of people over, roughly as many as he had in the first place.
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