Mac Miller's "Balloonerism" Reviewed

The Pittsburgh troubadour turns his consternation catchy

“I’m hopin’ not to join the 27 Club,” raps Mac Miller on GO:OD AM. The Pittsburgh native would indeed narrowly avoid such a fate — but only by overdosing one year before he could claim membership. Balloonerism marks his second posthumous release since then, recorded way back in 2014 around the time of his Faces mixtape. The album departs from the breathless frat rap of Miller’s early work, but the desire to label this LP a definitive ‘stepping stone’ between the front and back tranches of his catalogue should be avoided. Yes, the simian chest-beating of Blue Slide Park does not appear, but Miller had already experimented with late-night vibes in Watching Movies with the Sound Off, and this album’s tracks too sit low in their chair. Where GO:OD AM was breezy and muscular, Balloonerism is anxious and louche.

What’s therefore surprising is how Miller can make these negative emotions sound so… good. In ‘Do You Have A Destination?’, the rapper, now “rich as f*** and miserable,” repeatedly questions his life’s direction, but the bouncy backbeat keeps the song outwardly bright. Meanwhile, the dusty riff in ‘Stoned’ will have you rocking along to the tale of a girl who cries all alone. This conflict can exist because of Miller’s tight sense of control: the gloom of the lyrics is never allowed to bleed into the beat. It’s only much later in the album, come ‘Excelsior’ through ‘Manakins’, that a sense of dread finally infects the melody. This makes these songs comparatively more challenging, a move that will be equally lauded (for its artistry) and criticised (for its artistry, which entails songs that are not easy hits).

But as you delve further into Balloonerism, it’s the unease that creeps into ever-sharper focus, even when it bangs up against deliciously pinballing grooves (like on ‘5 Dollar Pony Rides’). You move through a mire of dour images (“they found my body somewhere in the sewer,” and, “all roads lead to the same confusion,” in ‘Mrs. Deborah Downer’). It now seems painfully obvious, as is so often the case in retrospect, that Miller was hurting badly. But even more tragic are the slim glimmers of hope: “cleaned myself up, now would you be my friend?” Miller’s lyricism is often free-range, but his unifying production gives a sense of cohesion that such scattergun lyrics shouldn’t enjoy. The rapper knows exactly when to stick and when to twist, and thus effects musical changes judiciously.

Nothing of this morose imagery should suggest that Miller isn’t enjoying himself; we see his playfulness in the tambourine-led opening track and again in a knock-knock joke told over the intro to ‘Rick’s Piano’. There’s even a teaspoon-dragging-on-crockery soundbite in ‘5 Dollar Pony Rides’ that I didn’t know I needed. It doesn’t all land, however: the slowed drum beats at the end of ‘Stoned’ and the vocal distortions sound like the additives of someone toying with a new effects pad. More generally, the LP’s instrumentation swerves from euphoric (the feast of harmonies in ‘DJ’s Chord Organ’) to cloudy (the muffled pulsing in ‘Stoned’), holding up a clever mirror to Miller’s drug-taking itself.

There is obvious poignancy in that this release marks (for now, at least) the last output from a dead artist: you’ll wince at the line, “What does death feel like?”, and yet, there is no desire to cash in on any sentimentality. This is made clear by where the album ends: not with the refrain of “the best is yet to come” from ‘Rick’s Piano’, as would have been so cloyingly easy, but rather by veering wildly into ten minutes of unsettling ambient music, almost mocking anyone who might’ve been starting to well up. 

Balloonerism thus shouldn’t be viewed any differently for its posthumous nature — it’s rather one more brilliant, gloomy piece in the Mac Miller puzzle. 

Illustration by Janya Malkani