I know I wasn’t the only one who was shocked when I learned of Mac Miller’s death on Twitter yesterday. My timeline was flooded with “RIP” and “I can’t believe it.” I, along with most of my peers, have been listening to Mac Miller since he released “K.I.D.S.” in 2010. We were there for Blue Slide Park, his first studio album released in 2011. We were there for his transition into a legitimate hip-hop artist that was cemented by his 2013 joint project with Vince Staples, “Stolen Youth.” And we were there for his 2014 project Faces in which he raps about substance abuse or mental health problems in almost every track. So why were we all so surprised when we found out that he died of an overdose?
In a 2012 Complex article titled “25 Things Everyone Thinks About Hip-Hop (But Nobody Will Say),” the ninth item on the list states that “substance abuse is one of the most serious problems in the industry.” Additionally, in a 2017 interview with Billboard, Chicago rapper Vic Mensa opened up about the links between drug use and rap: “I just think that we’re in such a dangerous place now because it’s been normalized and the drug abuse has been reduced to like a marketing tactic.”
