Most Dope by Paul Cantor

Author:Paul Cantor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2022-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Malcolm was depressed.

It was December 8, the day before the last show on the Blue Slide Park Tour. He’d played the venue, Stage AE, a year earlier, opening for Wiz Khalifa. Back then, boos and cheers greeted him. The crowd was not yet completely sold on the young rapper.

Now he was back, a different artist, a different man. There was KIDS, then the videos with millions of YouTube views, Best Day Ever, “Donald Trump,” the On and On and Beyond EP, the mixtape I Love Life, Thank You—better still, more than two hundred shows and a number one album, Blue Slide Park, under his belt.

Nobody could fuck with Malcolm. Or so he thought.

In the weeks after Blue Slide Park was released, reviews began trickling out. Some were good. But many were bad. Really bad.

In a review for XXL, Neil Martinez-Belkin wrote: “. . . the jury is still out whether he’ll pursue an artistic vision, or ride out the Jonas Brothers–esque commercial appeal.”

Chuck Eddy at Rolling Stone said: “White rapper from the Rust Belt conquers the world—sound familiar? Pittsburgh’s Mac Miller, the Wiz Khalifa labelmate whose debut LP has already topped the album charts, is no Marshall Mathers.”

And Phillip Mlynar at SPIN derided the record completely, writing: “. . . Mac Miller’s Blue Slide Park suggests what would happen if the cast of Glee tried to make a rap album.”

Each review stung in its own way, but then there was the granddaddy of them all—Pitchfork’s.

“When I started out, it was about really laying into people who really deserved it,” the site’s founder, Ryan Schreiber, told the Washington Post.1 “If it gets sacrificed or tempered at all for the sake of not offending somebody, then what we do sort of loses its value. . . . That’s so the opposite of what criticism is supposed to be.”

By the time Malcolm was ascendant, the site was, according to the New York Times, “the most prominent brand in online music journalism.” So Malcolm sat there, captivated, reading their review of Blue Slide Park.

And Pitchfork absolutely hated it.

“The reason Miller’s mass of fans follow him is not because of his music, at least not completely,” Jordan Sargent wrote in his review. “It’s because he looks just like them, because they can see themselves up on the stage behind him, if not next to him.”

Pitchfork was rejecting not only Malcolm’s music, but the very idea of Malcolm himself.

“He is an outsider, but he brings no outsider’s perspective to his music,” the review continued. “. . . [He’s mostly just a crushingly bland, more intolerable version of Wiz Khalifa without the chops, desire, or pocketbook for enjoyable singles.”

If you were white, Sargent argued—a “frat rapper,” as Malcolm had been dubbed—you could co-opt hip-hop’s attitude and slang, saw off its rough edges, and cash in with a young, ostensibly white, pop-leaning audience who didn’t know any better.

The album’s final score: 1.0.

Malcolm was distraught. To him, Blue Slide Park wasn’t just an album, it was home. And Pitchfork had taken a flamethrower to it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.