Part I: A Wuddery-Eyed, Sober Mea Culpa

I’ll keep it a buck, prior to his passing a week ago, I didn’t listen to Mac Miller much.

Don’t get me wrong, I would never go as far as to say I actively disliked him either.

Well, perhaps just a little bit, once upon a time, around 2009, when he first broke.

The first decade of the 2000’s was an odd time for rap fans of a certain lineage.

We discussed it a bit last summer, while discussing Tyler the Creator’s Flower Boy.

To fans coming up in the late 80’s Golden Age, navigating adolescence during rap’s unprecedented rise to cultural and eventual commercial dominance in the nineties, the 2000’s were an oddly transitional time, with results that despite preliminary hype, often turned out to be less than satisfying.

Movements once championed (Rawkus, The Soulquarians, Wu-Tang’s W as a brand-you-could trust, Los Angeles as one of the genre’s meccas, Gritty Pre-9/11 New York City, OutKast & Goodie Mobb) faded, devolved, or became compromised, while stale outbreaks (G-Unit, Snap Music, Trap Music, Crunk) metastasized.

One of the worst developments was a late-2000’s fad soon to be known as “Frat Rap”.

This seemingly industry-planted trend is best surmised by Asher Roth’s Weezer-jack smash, “I Love College”: