Mac Miller isn’t the Divine Feminine. The Pittsburgh keg-stander-turned style-sampling-artisan isn’t making a play at defining femininity. This isn’t an attempt to examine feminism in any way. He isn’t being facetious or woke. In fact, he doesn’t even try to explore what being a woman is like in any sense in any of these texts. The Divine Feminine, a concept record of sorts in distinct contrast to September 2015’s GO:OD AM, is an album about love as it relates to the female form and beyond, as Miller has referred to it, “the feminine energy of the planet.” It broaches smaller, bite-sized topics revolving around romance and connection in an attempt to understand the universe at large, bringing to mind a quote from Carl Sagan’s 1985 sci-fi novel Contact: “For small creatures such as we the vastness [of the universe] is bearable only through love.”
When Miller talks about The Divine Feminine, he considers the universe, the distance between persons, and deciphering love on an ideological level. He’s mentioned playing the record for a couple and slowly observing them cut the distance between each other in a room as it progresses. “I want people to put on the record and it’s a date in itself,” he told i-D. “I want people to love to this record and realize they can love to it.” There’s a very real connective tissue to these ideas of space and intimacy. It’s about contact and togetherness, closing the gap between people; about being in unison and growing apart, and all the stages in between. It peels back and exposes the many layers of love—romantic, schmaltzy, sensual, carnal, wilting. It’s easily his most intoxicating release yet, an odyssey of soulful compositions paring down his expansive and eclectic soundboard from the last few years into something distinctly cozy and pleasant.
Mac Miller has put in hard work establishing himself as a Serious Rapper since the release of his emotionally and sonically flat debut, Blue Slide Park, putting on his fair share of wordplay showcases and aligning himself with the right people since his sprawling breakout Watching Movies With the Sound Off in 2013, but much of that work came off as pandering or, worse still, overly earnest. He’s gotten more comfortable in his own skin with each release, but that threatened to be an issue here, given the title. Yet, The Divine Feminine is by far the most settled he’s ever been. There aren’t any plays to satisfy or ingratiate a specific subgroup of listeners. There aren’t any lyrical exercises or overthought exhibitions of verse structure and execution, no plays to prove himself a rapper’s rapper—frankly there’s almost more singing than rapping. But this is his most nuanced release, a record that forgoes personal narrative and somehow reveals his individuality in the process. He does it all with just a little help from his friends.
The album interlocks a diverse array musicians without losing the main thematic thread. The fingerprints of his sonic soulmate Ariana Grande are all over the record: backup vocals, feature vocals, voiceover work, and her positive influence on him shows. CeeLo Green lends his unmistakable vocals and energy to “We,” which simmer just above the surface of crisp drum kicks. Miller and Kendrick move in tandem on the epic closer “God Is Fair, Sexy Nasty” without any competitive tension. Students from Juilliard played strings on the album, and they accent the arrangements well. He even gets noted lothario Ty Dolla $ign to play a gentleman (or at least as close to that as he gets) on “Cinderella,” which is no easy task.
As a group, led by Miller’s pronounced vision, they forge the lover’s guide to the universe, painting in tiny brush strokes from a warm and familiar tonal palette. The Divine Feminine has very specific set of sonic reference points: the rich and heavy funk of Anderson .Paak’s Malibu, flexed into with help from Dâm-Funk and .Paak himself on tracks like “Dang!”; flecks of the Social Experiment’s juke and jazz (especially on “Stay”); even the electro-fused alt-R&B of a producer like Kaytranada. It’s heavily indebted to the growing fusion jazz rap movement with contributions from pianist Robert Glasper, Brainfeeder bass maestro Thundercat, and trumpeter Keyon Harrold, sometimes appearing in the record’s margins, but usually as full-fledged performers (the first two also played on To Pimp a Butterfly). The Divine Feminine reins in Mac Miller’s wide-ranging taste, bonding aesthetics and fully realizing his artistry.
It’s worth noting that The Divine Feminine has the fewest tracks of any Mac Miller album and that it is the clearest, most concise record of his career; that’s a correlation, not a coincidence. The project started as an EP, but it became a full album as Miller continued to flesh out its ideas. Across its 10 songs, it observes love as a part of the human experience without forcing any beliefs on the listener, dealing mostly in the building blocks of feelings. “Dang!” and “Stay” play back-to-back and examine loss of love close up. The Grande duet, “My Favorite Part,” is basically the downtempo reprise of One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful.” The album’s emotional and sonic center is “Planet God Damn,” about becoming vulnerable, a sentiment echoed by Njomza on the hook: “Tell the truth/Show me you.”
As the closer, “God Is Fair, Sexy Nasty,” trails off into Glasper piano chords, a widow recounts how she fell in love with her husband, punctuating her story with a mantra: “How important it is to love, respect, and care for each other.” That kind of union is something Miller clearly strives for, something he calls “the best love story in the world.” The Divine Feminine doesn’t just chase that, it bottles the very essence.
