With the release of Mac Miller's sophomore album Watching Movies With The Sound Off, we've seen a more mature side of Mac which journalists and music critics have praised. However, Mac was prepared for the worst, expecting "everyone to talk shit" he said in a new interview with the Huffington Post.
The rapper speaks on his evolution to WMWTSO during the interview and making a decidedly different kind of music. "It [WMWTSO] was gold to me [but] I think [the public] has trouble taking me seriously, which I mean... it's my fault," Miller said. "But it's cool because I really just kind of appreciated how everyone was able to listen with an open mind. They were able to just listen to the records and not be like, 'Oh, I can't... this sentence... fuck your sentence.'"
Mac said of his older stuff, "My ideology was, if I just make very happy music, very happy music, then people will forget about whatever their problems are. I will forget about my problems." But for his recent album, he took a different approach, "I think that I realized that maybe it's time to confront my own issues and write about them -- write about my own shit and put it out there -- which was difficult, but it was important."
His issues, however, don't really make for content that is radio-friendly-- and Mac isn't bothered, because he says he wasn't looking for that. "I was thinking anti-single. I was just like, 'I don't want to make a single,' because I'm not gonna get radio play anyway. I don't have the money to do that shit, you know what I'm sayin? We're independent. I mean, yeah, if I had the right record, I could do whatever, but I'm cool. I don't need that right now," the Rostrum Records rapper explained.
The focus then turned to another subject matter which Mac has grown more familiar with since Blue Slide Park: drugs. Although Mac says he's cleaned up, he still admits he loves drugs, and goes on to discuss molly and the controversy surrounding Rick Ross' line in "U.O.E.N.O."
"I love drugs," Mac said. "To this day, I still fuck with drugs. I did get clean, but I love drugs. I'm just saying, be smart about it. I think when I was in to the lean heavy, I think what it was is that it created this numbness which I liked. I was 19 years old and I was the CEO of a multi-million dollar corporation. I've like, got people with families depending on me. Like, fuck dude. The numbness thing was like I was going through a lot of relationship issues, going through a bunch of different shit so I just kind of wanted to just like, shut it all out."
"I don't know if you've ever taken molly but you're not getting raped on molly," Mac said of the trending drug. "It's not a roofie. If you have sex on molly, it's consensual. Like, they were calling molly this date-rape drug and shit -- it's not a date-rape drug. I don't even like to have sex when I roll. If I'm rolling and I'm with a girl, I'm much more likely to have a good conversation. For real."
What do you guys think about Mac's evolution? Are you with it?
Check out the full interview here.