This album-and much of his subsequent music-is spent pining after home and peace of mind, 2009 or '11, or what have you.
#Up all night blue slide park mac#
Somehow, I’m certain, Mac knew all of this, knew our future needs rushed to meet them. The album takes us back when the past feels otherwise inconceivable. We would just as soon scamper back to “2011,” to those Pennsylvania nights spent plotting on his career and plans to take his homies to the castle at the top. His final album, Swimming, ends with a call back to the easier and albeit better days. Along the way, he would make some of the most tortured music amongst his peers.
The album is an ode to how fleeting joy and childhood can be, and a cautionary tale all the same.īefore long, Mac Miller would be sliding into an ultimately terminal drug addiction. To the park, perhaps, but more so to a place where we feel less shame over enjoying the simple and unacclaimed things in life. Yet, Blue Slide Park still manages to whisk us away somewhere. Unfinished ideas, weak writing, and overwhelming bouts of kiddishness that goes beyond delight are but a few. There is a lot to critique with this record. In the spaces between “ My fam's still the only people that really know me for who I am” and “ Still sippin' on my 40 when the cops drove by” there is the realization that no one is too good to be happy, and we are all guilty of taking happiness for granted. These swerves to outsized parties and flashy rapper flexes now sound like necessities more than proof Mac Miller had nothing to say. With the game already rotting him at the roots, Miller had to make the conscious choice to be cheerful and frivolous across his debut.
#Up all night blue slide park for mac#
The worst was yet to come for Mac Miller, and he could feel it.īlue Slide Park is happy-go-lucky as a point of order. Mac leans into the tropes of youth and dives into his big band tastes as a diversion tactic.
It also broke records as the first indie rap album release to top the Billboard 200 chart this century. Even the hard facts of the album make it out to be an in-flux thing. At every evocative turn, there’s an immediate cease and repositioning. At 18 and 19, Miller was only gaining the vocabulary and complementary life experiences to break down who he is and what troubles him. So, Blue Slide Park is emotive the hot spots are simply fleeting. Not even a minute into his album-into his commercial career-and Mac Miller already wants to turn back time. With a stringy voice, forcing out a rasp to sound mature and weather-worn, Miller tells us as much on Blue Slide Park’s opening track, “English Lane”: “ Sometimes I just wanna go / Back to Blue Slide Park, the only place I call home / I hope it's never all gone, don't think it's ever all gone.” A sweet and wistful wish, the foreshadowing here is ominous. Musicians at his caliber, though, just so happen to be famous. But what if it was, just for a moment, 2011 again? What if we let ourselves revel in the brightness of hard-done and misguided youth? Seven years later, that is the ultimate takeaway from Blue Slide Park.įrom day one to the aftermath of his passing, the general consensus was that Mac Miller did not want to be famous, per se. Come the release of the hazy and playfully forlorn Macadelic the following year, Miller fans quickly realized that it ain’t 2011 no more.
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