“Malibu” is packed with lines that communicate the ethos of the mixtape -from Mac shouting “You piece of shit” at himself, to flirting with death in the service of his art, to the animalistic declarations of “Well I’ll be damned if this ain’t some shit” and “I’m the only suicidal motherfucker with a smile on.” The fallacy of a smile is the core essence of Faces. (“I ain’t a star, I’m way farther with the constellations / Contemplatin’ suicide like it’s a DVD”). On “Diablo,” we hear the humor and hysteria of a depressive episode (“I been poppin’ like a kernel, readin’ Justin Bieber’s journal / Treat you like a urinal”) and the nervous jitter of unraveling (“Look at what you did to me, look at what you did to me”). We hear ourselves in it fighting our battles as best as we can, putting on our personas so no one worries. Miller often referred to music as a religion consider Faces the inside of a church, with the heat of the devil filling the air. As listeners, there’s a natural concern for Malcolm, but there’s also a natural attraction to such brink-of-life music.
In the storm of this mixtape, he never lets us forget that, at the time, he is just a 22-year-old guy trying to get his mind right. Mac vacillates between emotional peaks but his rapping is at its best. He’s getting higher than we’ve previously heard about, celebrating his success with a variety of drugs while documenting the difficult descents from riding so high. In a swirl of jazz, Mac begins by proclaiming that he should have died already, establishing Faces as a confession. Across the 24 tracks, Mac covers damn near everything within the scope of the human condition, resulting in his most expansive, challenging, esoteric, flawed, and affecting offering to his career at this point. The mixtape is a paranoid stumbling through the cocaine ether, the perceived fragility of mortality, and the anxiety of only knowing how to create, not necessarily how to live. It may well have taught me that the purpose of great writing is to elevate the person receiving it. My favorite Mac project, it was the soundtrack to my self-harm, the darkest period of my life, and the consequential soundtrack to my recovery. This is a lesson I learned from Mac Miller time and again, but most crucially from his 2014 opus, Faces.
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