Eight years after losing Malcolm McCormick on September 7, 2018, his absence is a distinctive heavy chest ache of the rap community. Yet, somehow, he is still reaching out from another hemisphere to shake the world and industry. We are witnessing something entirely unprecedented: Mac Miller is tearing up the global charts posthumously.
His veering, eight-minute masterpiece “Cinderella” – a romantic orchestration track of 2016’s The Divine Feminine – has unexpectedly gone insanely viral. A younger generation of listeners is discovering his soul in real time, catapulting this decade-old song to a historic peak at number 21 on the UK Official Singles Chart and driving it all the way up to number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100. As the biggest Mac Miller fan since 2017, I am filled with envy of the people that get to discover Mac for the first time today and watching this resurgence isn’t just a statistical triumph; it is an incredibly emotional milestone for a community that still fiercely adores and protects his memory.
This sudden global moment highlights a massive void in the current musical landscape. Over the last few years, we’ve watched the rapid rise of incredibly talented artists like Role Model, Jack Harlow, and Malcolm Todd. It’s impossible to listen to their work and not catch the distinct echoes of Mac’s creative DNA; the conversational, laid-back flows, the effortless blending of indie-pop and hip-hop, and that raw, conversational vulnerability. They constantly remind people of Mac, but it’s just not the same because they lack the exact painfully beautiful alchemical makeup that made Malcolm who he was. They don’t have the grit under their fingernails, the bleeding-heart honesty, or the sheer, relentless dedication to the craft that defined his life.
Mac was a true alchemist who locked himself in the studio for days, treating music not as a product, but as oxygen. We watched him grow in real-time. Embarking on a staggering artistic evolution that took him from the sunny, carefree, backyard indie-rap days of Blue Slide Park to the dark, introspective depths of Faces, and finally into a jazz-infused mastermind who could arrange an emotional odyssey like “Cinderella.” While brands still chase that effortless, sun-drenched euphoria, like Major League Baseball recently utilizing a nostalgic needle drop of “The Spins” just to capture a passing essence of summer joy, no one else can replicate the sheer gravity of his storytelling. Mac didn’t just write hooks; he built sonic sanctuaries out of his production. From a playground in Pittsburgh to the top of the Billboard charts, his living legacy stands completely alone, a beautiful reminder of a boy who gave us everything he had before he left.