At the 2000 VMAs, Eminem’s performance of “The Real Slim Shady” featured him walking across Sixth Avenue in Manhattan and into Radio City Music Hall followed by a few hundred extras that had been styled in his image, bleached hair and all. The performance was an arresting, and very literal, visual representation of the song’s claim of there being “a million of us just like me.” Pittsburgh rapper Mac Miller is having his “‘The Real Slim Shady’ at the VMAs” moment right now, even if he'll never actually perform there. There are hundreds of thousands of listeners trailing him intensely—Blue Slide Park sold just about 145,000 copes in its first week in stores, making it the first independently distributed debut album to go No. 1 in 16 years. And the reason Miller’s mass of fans follow him is not because of his music, at least not completely. It’s because he looks just like them, because they can see themselves up on the stage behind him, if not next to him.
It’s a presumptive conclusion, but it’s hard to find much, if anything, in Miller’s music that suggests otherwise. He is an outsider, but he brings no outsider’s perspective to his music. Forget Eminem, Miller’s point of view is less unique than Asher Roth’s or Childish Gambino’s. He lusts after fame, money, and women, and he smokes weed and parties. Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with that; it is rap music, of course. But it does raise the question of why Miller is so popular, because, despite his claim of being a cross between John Lennon and UGK, he's mostly just a crushingly bland, more intolerable version of Wiz Khalifa without the chops, desire, or pocketbook for enjoyable singles. Unless you buy into Miller’s persona—and why would you?— Blue Slide Park offers you nothing that you can't find done more much artfully by, say, Curren$y.
This is, in a way, rap music’s fault. Mac Miller has been called “frat rap,” and, while there’s a slight truth to that, the term leaves unacknowledged the fact that frat guys used to engage with the rap world writ large. That interaction may have involved an unhealthy appreciation for Jurassic 5, but it also involved rocking Youngbloodz and Ying Yang Twins songs at parties. The pop world has left rap behind, save four or five rappers, and it’s opened a door for someone like Mac Miller to seize the college-aged, white-male fanbase. If that fanbase is interacting less with rap music, then maybe they’ve rallied around Miller because he also barely engages with the wider rap world. Consider the fact that Blue Slide Park has not one feature—not a guest verse or chorus. For a contemporary rap album, let alone a No. 1 rap album, that is basically unheard of. Before you consider that to be a noble pursuit, the album could’ve used somebody, anybody, to break up the monotony of Miller on the mic.
Miller’s world is a hermetic one, and unless it’s one you inhabit, the album holds no appeal. It’s a normal rap album, sure, but as listeners we should strive for more than a no-stakes work by a guy wearing the same streetwear brands and snapbacks as everyone else, who has merely found a niche and exploited it. Miller’s hustle can’t be knocked, and it shouldn’t be, but his art is 144,487 times less remarkable than his first week sales numbers would have you believe. His success is not a mirage, no. But it is a projection.
