![]() As a rapper, Mac Miller was working within a Black genre. The mutual relatability between artist and audience can’t be untangled from Mac Miller’s and my classmates’ suburban whiteness (“If you don’t know, I’m from the burbs” Mac announces in “Kool Aid & Frozen Pizza”), and my resentment couldn’t be untangled from my being Asian. I resented the idea that they found license from his words to be carefree and cool, while I felt pinned to my lanky body, trapped in what felt like a perpetual state of non-adulthood. In truth, what bothered me wasn’t the content of his albums, but how easily the white kids around me could see themselves in it. Now thinking about it more deeply, I can’t in good conscience say that that was really why I didn’t like his music. With vocabulary freshly gleaned from mainstream feminism, I broadly rejected his lyrics on the basis that they were “misogynist” and “objectifying.” Sexism offered me a convenient argument onto which I could map my objection. ![]() (“I just wanna ride, ride through the city in a Cutlass” he raps in his 2011 song regretfully titled “Donald Trump.” “Find a big butt bitch, somewhere get my nuts kissed.”) I was a gawky Asian kid who bemoaned the death of romance. He was a white boy who rapped about smoking weed, partying, and getting head. No matter how unfair and untrue, Mac Miller was, to me, an agent of some unnamed force set out to perpetuate and widen a gap I imagined was between me and the male attention I craved. From there, who knew what could happen? Normally, I would have pushed back, called them old fashioned. They had been warned that if they weren’t careful, it could snatch up their babies, strip us of our mother tongue. Back then, my Vietnamese parents possessed a general suspicion of American pop culture and the unknowable extent of its power over the young. I wasn’t cool enough and my parents were unlikely to be convinced that a concert the size of a third of my hometown was a good idea. I say from a distance, because I hadn’t gone. ![]() They would sing along to upbeat lyrics about haters and hoes, and afterwards, in the warm haze of post-concert exhaustion, they would performatively recall their exploits, the fun they’d had. From a distance, I imagined how the festival would go down: my classmates smuggling booze in flattened Poland Springs water bottles, loosening their limbs against the summer heat. It was the summer going into my sophomore year of high school. In August 2011, 19-year-old Mac Miller headlined Boston Urban Music Festival, a free show at City Hall Plaza outside Boston’s Government Center.
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