Mac Miller: Closer Than He Appears

“I’m not saying it’s not misogyny to say, ‘suck my dick before I slap you with it’. It is. But some girls want to hear that.”

Malcolm McCormack aka Mac Miller is backstage at the Sydney leg of Big Day Out. When he realises the interview won’t be filmed he quickly relaxes, rubs the back of his pink head (he dyed his hair before the festival’s New Zealand date) falls into a chair and alternately sips a Corona beer and smokes a cigarette.

“Sometimes you say things because they have a meaning and sometimes you just say things because they feel good to say.”

Less than two hours ago the 22-year-old was barefoot onstage singing his track Youforia at a baby grand piano. Fans seeking the gut-punching hip hop and hype-boy attitude were certainly sated but amid the ‘90s call-and-response pastiche and the avalanche of concert-ready remixes was the Australian debut of a man reinvented.

Growing up in Pittsburg, McCormack – raised Jewish – was born into a creatively open household. His mother, a photographer and his father, an architect, were the silent conduits in their son’s inexhaustible discovery of music. At 15, after teaching himself piano, guitar, drums, and bass, McCormack had picked his genre; that same year (2007) he released But My Mackin’ Ain’t Easy, a braggadocio mixtape under the moniker EZ Mac. At 17 he had dropped out of school, was entering MC competitions and had piqued the interest of independent label and management company Rostrum Records.

His debut LP Blue Slide Park swiftly triggered a cult following; as the first independent album to top the Billboard chart since 1995’s Dogg Food by Tha Dogg Pound, it was as swiftly dismissed as hedonistic ‘frat rap’ by purist critics as it was lauded by middle-class suburban teenagers. By 2012 his art had become more pointed, his voice less appeasing and his message more affirmed. He raked in 6.5 million and came in at #20 on Forbes’ Hip Hop’s Top Earners list. Early that year he confessed to his “lean” addiction – a cocktail of promethazine and codeine – but later said he kicked the habit before the initial filming of his MTV reality show Mac Miller and the Most Dope Family.

The release of Watching Movies With The Sound Off in 2013 saw McCormack at his highest fidelity; music became his first-chosen narcotic, enabling his most progressive tracks to date. His teaming with Odd Future alumni The Internet added a lush, ethereal bedding, liberating his own conventions while tying him to a subculture populated by black overachievers. McCormack’s latest LP is a far cry from Blue Slide Park’s stimulating schoolboy shenanigans, a fact he’s well aware of.

“Malcolm McCormack is the same person, you know I’m the same person,” he says, stretching back in his chair, “the idea of Mac Miller may have shifted. As a younger artist, I represented feel-good happy music with everyone dancing around having a good time, and then Malcolm McCormack went through his things. He grew up and changed; so the idea of who Mac Miller is maybe shifted to a little bit more deep and surreal.”

McCormack toys with the idea of the perceived self, on tracks I’m Not Real (featuring Earl Sweatshirt) and I Am Who I Am he is both subtle and intense, vulgar and philosophical; he’s aware he is a character to most and Watching Movies… is his digestion of that.

“I think in celebrity culture you’re just an idea […] that’s what we are to people and the fake, ‘oh we know each other’ is bullshit.”

Although McCormack does have an extensive philosophy fetish, he’s only flirted with it, musically. The elementary touches in the navel-gazing track Avian, his introspective paean to late friend Reuben Eli Mitrani (REMember), as well as the interstitial stream of consciousness (S.D.S), all display a rudimental symbiosis of lyrical aptitude and humble awe.

“I love fucking Dali and I love fucken…”, he stops himself. “I don’t wanna say a philosopher in case they’re like ‘he doesn’t cover surreal’ […] In the sense that like, I sit around and talk about life for five hours. Because the best part of it is you can try and pick it apart and break it down the whole entire time but you always end up at the same place.”

In the interim between Watching Movies… and his next full-length LP, McCormack has been working with Pharrell Williams on an EP called Pink Slime (“it’s gonna happen but it’s not the next thing that’s coming out”), released the live album Live From Space – recorded during last year’s Space Migration Tour, and adorned with five new studio recordings – and released the instrumental track Tequila under his producer moniker Larry Fisherman. In other words, he’s building calculated expectancy.

“If I want a big record that everyone knows, that reaches a lot of people and helps me progress and push forward, you gotta strategise.

“I have so much fucken’ music, there’s so much music that I make all the time that we just find outlets to get ‘em out without being too oversaturated,” he says. The Internet is such a fast culture; it’s like if you don’t stay in people’s face they forget about you.”

“I just wanna play the piano so I can be John Lennon and shit,” McCormack spat into the microphone earlier in the day, during his Big Day Out set. His performance was neither strategised nor aloof, a sign of an artist aware that the connotations of careerism and tactics are an instant buzzkill for any fan.

“There’s times when I’m performing I’m so lost in what I’m saying that I look like I’m on something,” he says seriously. “I’m completely sober, completely sober but I’m fucken’, I’m in the moment and that’s where you should be.

“If you want to change somebody’s life, if you want to influence somebody, it’s not about what you do, it’s not about like ‘Lil Wayne gets caught with a gun’ that influences people. Fuck that, it’s about how you deal. If you believe what you’re saying when you’re saying it, that’s what fans should take from it.”

Layered across his cigarette-stained fingertips, his beer-soaked tongue and his ink-seared skin, there’s a purity to McCormack that isn’t masked. Pushing the boundaries between MC and multi-instrumentalist, genre-slasher and drug-addled MTV reality star, his unchecked ability to question his own reality, sexualise women in a way that’s not taken out of context and push the record button in his most vulnerable state, is a force currently unmatched by his peers.