When the ‘D’ rings out from the organ on the dream-like second track of Mac Miller’s Balloonerism, it feels like the beginning of an ascent into open heavens. It’s ironic but fitting that the artist’s latest posthumous release is one so outwardly concerned with his own mortality. Mac first speaks over five minutes into the LP, grappling with the inevitability of his own death. He treats his rise to fame as the opening of a Pandora’s Box that solidified his fate as a doomed star, musing: Â
“I gave my life to this shit, already killed myself.”
Miller spoke openly about his drug use during his life, and Balloonerism is no different from the rest of his catalogue in tackling the subject of addiction. Speaking on his Faces mixtape – recorded around the same time as Balloonerism in 2014 – Mac remarked: “every song is about coke and drugs”. Whilst Faces feels like the work of an artist in a downward spiral, Balloonerism sounds as if it were recorded in a state of purgatory. On the track ‘Excelsior’, Miller reminisces about his early life amidst the sounds of playing children: “Me I used to want to be a wizard, when did life get so serious? Whatever happened to apple juice and cartwheels.” This makes for haunting listening knowing the eventual outcome of Mac’s life – an outcome that Miller himself seemed already aware of – but also acts as commentary on his musical progression from the care-free to the introspective.
Sonically and stylistically, Balloonerism fills a gap in the Miller canon between the playful frat-rap of his early mixtapes and the sincerity of his later work. This is the work of a maturing musician, and an early instance of Mac using his craft as an outlet for his anxieties about mortality. No track exemplifies this better than ‘Funny Papers’, in which Mac jokes about seeing reports of a suicide in the ‘funny papers’ – a Second World War term for the cartoon section of a newspaper. There’s an effortlessness in the way he juxtaposes the joyful with the somber. Even in the wake of a first verse tackling a subject as heavy as suicide, it’s hard not to smile hearing Mac’s playful tone on the refrain: “The moon’s wide awake with a smile on his face as he smuggles constellations in a suitcase.”
Just as his lyrics tackle existential questions with almost childlike metaphor, Mac’s delivery glides between languid and upbeat throughout the album. The more upbeat ‘Stoned’ sees Mac rapping over a hallucinatory beat that fuses psychedelic chirps with a head-bopping guitar riff, but despite its hooks it is still clear this is not a grab for commercial success, but another fragment of an album that Mac is making for himself and his most devoted fans. This undeniable honestly persists in the final two tracks, with the hopeful refrain of “the best is yet to come” on album-highlight ‘Rick’s Piano’ bearing truth regarding the exceptional quality of Miller’s later work. It is after all impossible to listen to Balloonerism without lamenting not only the loss of the man, but of the music he was yet to produce.
The twelve-minute closer feels like the end of the ascent that began at the start of the album, with Mac’s words inevitably lingering on the mind:
“Living and dying are one and the same.”
