On Thursday, Vulture published a hybrid profile and interview by the music journalist Craig Jenkins.
Just this past week, Miller had seemed tenderly alive. He was supposed to start a tour in October. The album seemed to invite an eventual follow-up, a chronicling of the adrift artist reaching some shore. “Swimming,” released in August, was a dispatch from a young man embracing his own mysteries. As he evolved-and he never stopped evolving-he became a bard of post-adolescent rootlessness, comfortable in a tense, liminal space between fear and awe. It’s not a force as neat or definitive as hope that is propelling Miller upward. The song’s drowsy beat makes an unexpected lurch, near the end, turning from claustrophobic to weightless: Miller is now singing of “oblivion, yeah, yeah, yeah.” In the video, he bursts from his premature tomb, in a cloud of earth and dust, and floats up into the atmosphere. (A statement by Miller’s family did not name the cause of death.) In the last video that Miller shot, for “Self Care,” an existential spiral of a song from his latest album, “Swimming,” Miller is lying in his own coffin, puffing on a cigarette, carving “ Memento Mori” into its wooden ceiling, seeming nonplussed by it all. TMZ, which has in the past decade perfected a crude art of celebrity death-chasing, broke the news fans speculated that the artist, who spoke publicly about his struggles with addiction, had died of an accidental overdose.
On Friday afternoon, the rapper and producer Mac Miller was found dead in his San Fernando Valley home. “And I don’t want just sadness either.” Photograph by Jamie McCarthy / Getty “I really wouldn’t want just happiness,” the twenty-six-year-old rapper Mac Miller said, in an interview published on Thursday, the day before his death.
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