Mac Miller, who died last week at 26, was a rapper and producer who evolved quickly and frequently. Each of his albums — which all debuted in the Top 5 of the Billboard chart — was different from the one before. He began as a teenage hip-hop classicist and grew into an experimentally minded aesthete.

And that was just his own music. He also intersected with several larger movements that have been shaping popular music over the past decade: the way that the internet has smoothed the path to fame on one’s own terms, without the mediation of major labels; how white rappers channel robust allegiance to hip-hop history as a means of securing acceptance; and the trend toward generating musical ideas with a collective, rather than in isolation.