My Conversations with Mac Miller

 

Rest in peace Mac Miller. You will always be respected never tarnished.

Malcom McCormick’s passing is not something that will disguise his legacy. Malcom stood for something greater than drug culture. He stood for our freedom to create, our ability to express empathy, and our ability to be an individual. I will not stand for any disrespect to this man’s legacy.

More than an introduction

I was first exposed to Mac Miller’s music in highschool. This seems to be the point in life when everyone else had discovered his mixtape K.I.D.S.. Right off the bat, I began to notice an immediate change in my highschool environment. Young adults were embracing their youth in a way that I had never seen before. I compare this to the same change that Rock and Roll had on young adults during the late 1960’s and 70’s. I can not remember a single party that I went to in highschool where the person in charge of music didn’t play a single Mac Miller song. Much like any other music that gets overplayed, people started to get tired of it.

Why I stopped listening to Mac

After graduating from highschool I had deleted a bunch of his music from my library. The only songs that I couldn’t find the courage to delete were “Kool Aid & Frozen Pizza, Nikes On My Feet, and Senior Skip Day,” because lets be honest… how could any hip-hop lover possibly get tired of those song. At this time, the White vs Black rapper debate was in full motion, and some hip-hop critics began to notice similarity between Modern Hip-Hop and signs of cultural appropriation. For myself, Kendrick Lamar had taken up the entire spotlight and any other artist had taken a backseat (freestyle) to his albums. Little did I know how much Mac Miller had matured over time.

The drugs got harder

As Mac Miller’s taste in music had significantly changed; so did his choice in drugs. He began to experiment with a variety of mind altering drugs that helped him unleash his creative potential. Then, he started to speak about problems he had noticed about himself. He mentioned problems such as drug dependence, sex addiction, social anxiety and much more. Despite all of these problems that he had recently uncovered, Mac Miller was able to manifest a life of positivity and perseverance. Nothing was going to get in the way of Malcom and his music. His message was clear and simple.

“People change and things go wrong, but just remember, life goes on.” – Mac Miller

“Life goes on, days get brighter.” – Mac Miller

What he told me before he waved goodbye

Thank you Malcom for everything that you have taught me. Your music has instilled hope into the mind of the hopeless. No matter what you went through, no matter what people said about you, and no matter what hardships you encountered. You were always capable of putting on a smile and then showing the world what it meant to take pride in your individuality. Much like your legacy, your music will live on forever.

Yours Sincerely,

Cole Lamkins

Urban Poets

by Cole Lamkins

There are poets living among our pop culture and we call them rappers. Poetry lives within authentic hip-hop and yet I truly feel that most fans of the culture still don’t comprehend the subjective value behind it’s lyrics. I was inspired to write about how poetry and hip-hop go hand-in-hand due to a Spotify playlist I recently encountered titled “Urban Poets.” An Urban Poet is a MC (rapper) that has a unique ability to tell a story in a poetic fashion through their creative use of lyrical ability and rhyme.

The Argument

If hip-hop is poetry then all music is poetry right? I can agree to a certain extent, but fundamental hip-hop is different because at its core hip-hop is a collection of creative expressions in the form of verses that come together to form a whole. True hip-hop artists look at their songs as having a bigger concept and will purposefully produce music that will influence their audiences in a specific way.

Tupac

If you don’t believe me then check out the book “The Rose That Grew from Concrete” by Tupac Shakur. Many hip-hop heads (including myself) believe that Tupac  is the greatest artist to ever have laid their hands on a hip-hop track. Tupac once said during a police interrogation that he initially started writing poetry in high school, and that this happened before he started to rap.

Tupac then said later in the interrogation that “it is of my opinion… that I was rapping while I was writing poetry, and so I was into rap I guess you could say from junior high whenever I wrote my first poem.”

All in all, I think that I am going to have to agree with Tupac on this one and say that hip-hop is very much so a form of poetry. Urban Poets exist and hip-hop artists around the world are taking poetry to a larger audience that has not quite been reached by the traditional poet in the past.