But even if it took his untimely death to finally receive his flowers from many who long dismissed him, he knew his own merit better than anyone. Not until his death in 2018 did the popular conception of Mac Miller fully shift from that of a curiosity hanging at the edges of real rap music to a visionary in his own right. Malcolm McCormick had been under-appreciated his whole career, accumulating a decade under the public eye without ever fully lifting the curse of his first impressions. If the tragedies in rap of the last few years - from Pop Smoke to King Von to Nipsey Hussle, and the list goes on and on - have spoken to anything broken in our culture, beyond the complete callousness with which we treat the lives of young hip-hop musicians, it’s that we fail to adequately celebrate our artists until they are no longer able to join in themselves. Too common is the scenario where an artist’s talent is belittled just as their star rises, like when popularity invited cynicism to Lil Peep and Juice WLRD until their premature demises rendered their geniuses unimpeachable. If an artist is “lucky,” they will live long enough to have their contributions simply forgotten, as with innovators undersung in their middle age like the late DMX and Shock G. ![]() People will take you for granted until you’re gone, a truth hip-hop is intimately familiar with.
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