Mac Miller’s Circles & Posthumous Albums, Charlotte Stanbridge

‘Other things’; Mac Miller’s Circles and Posthumous Albums

BY CHARLOTTE STANBRIDGE

At the time of Mac Miller’s untimely death, he was already deep into the recording of Circles; the now posthu- mously released album that acts as the follow-up to 2018’s Swimming. The two albums were intended to create a loosely drawn concept - Swimming in Circles - that reflects the deeply intro- spective nature of Miller’s lyrical con- tent. The most mature and fully realised of Miller’s work, Swimming is a tour de force of a young artist at the height of their powers. We feel him trying to move forward on ‘Perfecto’, beginning to accept the discordant nature of life, but being held back and restrained by ingrained habit on ‘Jet Fuel’, and facing the dissociative effects of alienation on ‘Conversation Part 1’. ‘Self-Care’ is a hip-hop masterpiece, with a switch-up half way through the track that brings the second half to reflect upon the first; of- fering hope for the future as an antidote to present confusion. Chaos lurks under- neath the surface of the album, whose sonic diversity showed Miller moving towards funk, soul and even orches- tral sounds to act as the foundation for his introspective musings. The lyrics are self-aware without being self-conscious, giving the album a free and spacious quality whose trajectory is upward mov- ing and hopeful. Thus when the news of Miller’s death broke in September 2018, only a month after the release of this album which seemed to scream re- covery and forward movement, it shook many of his fans who had taken Swim- ming as a sign of good things to come. 62

Circles producer Jon Brion said that Miller presented him with the material that would make up the posthumous al- bum as ‘some other things I’m not sure what to do with’, alongside the tracks that would become Swimming. The Zane Lowe interview makes clear that Brion tried as much as possible to ful- fil Miller’s sonic vision for the album, drawing from conversations with the rapper and demos left behind following his death. The result is an album stylis- tically divergent from Swimming, ex- perimenting with indie rock, folk and pop influences, as well as Disclosure’s distinctive production on ‘Blue World’. There is little on the album that could be considered ‘hip-hop’ at all, and only a couple of the tracks feature Miller rapping rather than singing. Circles sees him move into this new sonic territory with ease, his meandering vocals find- ing a home on any beat, and coming into their own on stand-out tracks ‘I Can See’, ‘Woods’ and ‘Hands’; argu- ably the most accomplished of the set. It’s difficult not to superimpose mel- ancholy onto the album in light of the knowledge of MIller’s death, and find a haunting, disquieting quality to his croonings that speak now from be- yond the grave. But the introspection on Circles is darker, more disturbed and perturbed than Swimming, despite the morbid retrospective shadow of his passing. The lyrics seem to sit in a more resigned position and speak to the pres- sures of trying to keep up the forward movement and self-acceptance laid out in the former album. “This is what it looks like right before you fall”, drawls Miller on the opening track; ‘Heaven’s too far when you live in the basement’ he muses on ‘I Can See’; “I wish that I could just get out my goddamn way” he spits on ‘Good News’. If Swimming is about recovery and resurrection - finding the window opening onto a blue sky in the lid of your own coffin, as on the album’s cover, or rising from the dirt of your own burial as Miller does in the ‘Self-Care’ video - then Circles is about the flawed reality of life on the other side, and the self-sabotaging pull back into the deep. This is one of the many mouse-traps of the posthumous album; what Jon Brion calls the ‘loss goggles’; every lyric reads as a prophetic message of Miller’s im- pending death, and the tone of each vocal seems to act as a sign of his pain. It’s the same effect that makes Amy Winehouse’s ‘Rehab’ so difficult to listen to now; what seemed to be playful irony upon the song’s release transitions into a painfully crude cry for help when the reality of her death is known: “My daddy thinks I’m fine....” Another difficulty is the challenge of mangling together the artist’s ‘final word’ from the fragments and first drafts of music left behind. The posthumous al- bum necessarily lacks the deceased art- ist’s creative vision - unless their death follows the completion of the material, as with Tupac’s The Don Kilimuniati, Joy Division’s Closer or Nirvana’s haunting MTV Unplugged in New York session - as well as their full development and re- vision of the material. Of course produc- ers always play a huge role in the creation of an album, but the posthumous album gives the producer, rather than the art- ist, the final say; making the finished product the result of a torch passed on rather than a mutual exchange of ideas. And so unanswerable questions naturally arise; what would Circles have sounded like if Miller had survived? Would these

‘other things’ have even made it onto the final album, or were they just ex- periments that wouldn’t have made the final cut? What would the album after Circles have sounded like? All this and more is wrapped up in the bittersweet pill of the posthumous album; a gesture of everlast- ing posterity through music that provides a valuable insight into the life of the artist at the time of their death, yet whose partiality inevitably cuts as deep as it heals. Posthumous albums are difficult to get right no matter what the cir- cumstances, and producers and fami- lies have approached the problem in different ways. In the case of Jeff Buck- ley, the incompleteness of his posthu- mous release was made clear by the affixing of Sketches For onto Buckley’s working title (My Drunken Sweetheart); affirming the unfinished nature of the album. Yet Buckley was famously un- happy with the first recordings of what became his final work, and who knows how it would have sounded, or wheth- er it would have even been released, if he had lived. The same questions arise in Amy Winehouse’s case; an artist no- toriously self-critical of her own work and meticulous in the revision of it be- fore it was released. Therefore to put forward any collection of her work posthumously feels almost like a viola- tion, and I’ve always struggled to listen to Lioness, particularly after discovering the extent of her family’s manipulation and exploitation of her talent. The Asif Kapidia documentary ‘Amy’ revealed that Winehouse had been working on new styles, including more hip-hop in- fluenced work, in a prolific streak of creativity shortly before her death which was inspiring her more than any of her work so far. Yet none of this finds its way onto Lioness, which is largely a collection of covers and special record- ings of some of her more famous tracks. It’s always a pleasure to hear Winehouses’ timeless and peerless vocals, but to do so in the absence of her spe- cific creative control is a somewhat hollow experience. Despite the many pitfalls and potential minefields of the posthumous album, Brion and Miller’s family have produced a moving tribute to his life and music that does bring with it some sense of clo- sure to his work. Brion worked closely with Miller, and oversaw the creation of many of these tracks in the moment, giv- ing him the personal insight and where- withal to complete the rapper’s vision in his absence. Fans and critics alike have revered it and those who had fol- lowed his life and work can find some comfort in it. Perhaps this is the true purpose of the posthumous album; not a cash-cow or a hollow attempt at the resurrection of the deceased, but a hum- ble tribute to a flame now extinguished.