Mac Miller's Balloonerism: A Posthumous Exploration of Life and Death
Sitting in the back of the screening of director Samuel Jerome Mason’s Balloonerism: A Film Based on the Album by Mac Miller, I thought about how Malcolm would’ve loved this animated companion piece soundtracked by his not-quite-lost 2014 album, and how a new Mac Miller drop used to mean checking in with him. I was spoiled: I first heard 2015’s GO:OD AM in his home on the day I met him in person. I lurked in studio sessions for 2016’s The Divine Feminine in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. I picked the artist’s brain about the overt singer-songwriter aspirations of 2018’s Swimming. When the posthumous 2020 album Circles dropped, I visited a pop-up exhibition full of lovely fan art and came out overwhelmed. Most people don’t get the memory of the idyllic last afternoon they saw someone alive enshrined in paintings and tattoos; the dead don’t all leave plush sound sculptures we can pluck out later to splash around a certain beloved point in their emotional and artistic development. Since Miller’s death in 2018, mid-Januaries feel a touch chillier. Five years after Circles, it is a joy to have the excuse to obsess over his work again, and to be floored by bits of Balloonerism that hadn’t trickled out in leaks. But the light it seems to shine on the pains of the artist can be unnerving. The phantom ache I feel about not prodding more into the moment in time when Faces was to be followed with a darker and stranger full-length than the more manicured major-label refinement of GO:OD AM is tremendous.
The Genesis of Balloonerism: A Creative Outpouring
Balloonerism was born in the outpouring of creativity that yielded 2013’s Watching Movies with the Sound Off and 2014’s Faces. It tracks the unification of ideas Miller sometimes spread out across his Larry Fisherman and Delusional Thomas alter egos, and the gloom and self-medication he struggled with in his Studio City hangout and laboratory, the Sanctuary. The shift that pushed his art from workmanlike consistency to brilliance was letting these moods and sounds smudge. Balloonerism’s lyrics capture his silliest and his most philosophical instincts, his aspirations and the insomniac self-doubt undermining them. The music catalogues the burgeoning bond between Mac and Thundercat, the Brainfeeder bass genius who made a wonderful foil for a budding multi-instrumentalist with tighter chops than he was ever willing to accept the credit for. The crass humor of Delusional Thomas and the fixation on death of Faces make jarring bedfellows in Balloonerism. You see why there was no rush to get it out. It’s as open about thoughts of mortality as the staggeringly downcast but defiantly pretty Circles.
Key Tracks and Their Significance: A Deep Dive into the Album
“Funny Papers” and “Rick’s Piano”: Raw Beauty and Titanic Sympathy
“Funny Papers” foiled a plan not to cry in the Balloonerism screening (“I wonder if He’ll take me to the other side,” Miller raps), and “Rick’s Piano” has given me the same rough time as unabashedly somber Circles tracks. You want the artist not to have felt whatever pain makes a man in his early 20s so unafraid to write about death. But you’re left instead with raw beauty and titanic sympathy. Mentioned casually in Donna-Claire Chesman’s The Book of Mac: Remembering Mac Miller by trusted engineer Josh Berg as the product of a “side-splittingly ridiculous” exchange at Rick Rubin’s house, “Piano” turns out to be Balloonerism’s missing centerpiece. After a knock-knock joke, the rapper thunders through a verse accentuating the warring preacher/player instincts that made him slot a twerk scene in a house of worship in the “Watching Movies” video. Punctuating increasingly spooked thoughts with a hearty “The best is yet to come” — suggesting not grim irony but the chest-beating splendor of Faces’s “Here We Go” — “Piano” crashes into a long and devastating coda: “What does death feel like? / Why does death steal life?”
Exploring Themes of Mortality and Acceptance: A Philosophical Journey
As with Linkin Park’s “Lost,” another unearthed loosie capturing a too-young musician delicately pondering an immense sinking feeling, it’s difficult to hear Mac Miller utter this refrain in a world where he didn’t make it. Madcap ad-libs, tumbling drum fills, and billowing melodies suggest vitality and flowing water, bringing a disorienting air of buoyancy to curiosities about the end of existence. Balloonerism juggles aching inner reflection and zoomed-out, zenlike perspective, exhibiting the love of Beatle-y gravitas that Circles reveled in a few evolutionary steps before most ever thought of Miller as a student of serious songwriters. “Funny Papers” and “Excelsior,” whose ailing group of orphans are the cast of Mason’s anthropomorphic vision quest, aspire to the balance of ripped-from-the-headlines suffering and stoned acceptance of entropy driving Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’s “A Day in the Life.” “Tomorrow Will Never Know,” the long ambient groove that closes Balloonerism, nods to Revolver’s denouement, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” John Lennon’s drone jam about LSD and Timothy Leary writings.
The Artist's Evolution: From Party Jams to Profound Reflections
As lacerating as its lyrical content can get, it’s exciting to see Balloonerism canonized. It’s another look at Mac Miller’s path over the crossroads he faced as a multifaceted artist straining to build a lasting career out of what started as a reputation for easygoing party jams. That it evaded release speaks to the speed of new concepts bursting out of the artist in the early 2010s and to the contrasting intention that went into ushering the public around the many dimensions of this creativity. I prodded him about songs and album ideas I enjoyed because it was apparent that an intriguing one could go the way of the Pharrell collab Pink Slime or the Madlib team-up — projects that didn’t seem to make it out of the planning stages but should have. A fascinating batch of songs was liable to gather dust as three others manifested; for every album, there is a shadow body of work almost as intriguing, an alternate means of self-expression that might have gained momentum in its place. The business of corralling mostly or fully formed collections of songs for posthumous release has been handled gracefully by Miller’s family and estate. The announcement of an accompanying short-film tie-in for an album tends to generate a yawn outside communities whose goal is boosting everything a favorite artist releases. But Mason and his team honored the sense of lost innocence, the aesthetic attention to darkly psychedelic absurdism, and the adulation for a good Michel Gondry film that lit Malcolm’s brain up.
Musical Collaborations and Production: A Tapestry of Talent
Crisp recordings of wily, gorgeous tunes like the SZA showcase “DJ’s Chord Organ” offer a fuller picture of the inclinations and cast of musicians in Mac Miller’s orbit in the Studio City years fondly remembered for freewheeling team-ups with Earl Sweatshirt, Vince Staples, and ScHoolboy Q. 2014’s Z, SZA’s TDE debut, featured two Larry Fisherman beats, and her contribution here completes the musical conversation between the two friends. Flying Lotus and Kamasi Washington regular Taylor Graves is revealed as a valuable piece of Balloonerism’s tight production braintrust. Fluttering piano, bass, and drum jams often crafted by Miller, Graves, and Thundercat set this material apart from the works in its immediate vicinity. Faces and GO:OD AM each feel more deliberately programmed, the former accessing a legacy of claustrophobic boom bap and the latter succeeding in a push for a version of traditional rap stardom.
A Legacy of Resilience: Finding Hope in Darkness
Balloonerism’s bustling sound highlights Miller’s musicianship; dropping the aching “Piano” and “Papers” on top of the morose “Angel Dust” and “Funeral” would’ve put it in people’s heads that the guy was the Grim Reaper, when the truth was far from it. My tiny personal balm for the emotional Band-Aid rip of discourse about this album (and the attendant discomfort of people scanning music of the deceased for insight into death but not life) is knowing that after he wrote all those breathtakingly dark songs, he managed to have a pretty upbeat 2015. Balloonerism asks the listener to accept death and loss as facts of life, but the message that I choose to receive from it is that it only took a few turns for the rapper yelling “Fuck the future” in “Rick’s Piano” to dream of living to meet “100 Grandkids” the next year. There’s no depth we can’t fight our way out of. It hurts that we don’t get to tell him any of this, but it’s a sweet consolation to have others to talk to about it.
