Mac Miller dead: Rapper of prodigious talent and tragic demons

The hip-hop star was both critically and commercially lauded - but behind music, was a troubled personal life

On perhaps the standout tracks of his last album, Swimming – released just last month – the platinum-selling US rapper Mac Miller appeared to consider his own mortality.

“I can feel my fingers slippin' / In a motherf****** instant I'll be gone,” he raps on "Small Worlds". “They know that I so need my space / Don’t want to grow old so I smoke just in case.”

It is a track which may come to be seen as tragically prescient. The 26-year-old - real name Malcolm James McCormick - was found dead at his home in Los Angeles on Friday.

Reports suggest Miller – who was always open about his drug use – died from an overdose. It came just four months after he split up with the singer Ariana Grande and a month after he was charged in connection with a non-fatal hit-and-run accident in California.

The Pittsburgh-born son of a photographer and architect was still a teenager when he dropped the album that would make him, by his own definition, one of the most googled things on the internet - "it was like diets, carrots, Mac Miller,” he told Vulture magazine in one of his last interviews.

Blue Slide Park, released in 2011, topped the US charts, while his follow-up records – 2013’s Watching Movies with the Sound Off and 2015’s GO:OD AM – both became critical and commercial smashes, dealing with his ever-increasing addiction issues, loneliness and disillusionment with fame and fortune.

In his own words, it was “really dark s*** – because that’s what I was experiencing at the time," he said. "That’s fine, that’s good, that’s life. It should be all the emotions.”

His fourth album The Divine Feminine, released in 2016, is widely thought to have been a celebration of then partner Ms Grande and love in general, while Swimming may come to be seen as a documentation of the couple’s breakdown.

She herself has previously gone on record to suggest Miller’s substance abuse was a determining factor in the end of what she said had become a “toxic relationship”.

As happens in hip hop, rivals sought to take Miller down with lyrical barbs. “You was Easy Mac with the cheesy raps/ Who the f*** is Mac Miller?” asked Loaded Lux on Mac Miller's own song "Red Dot Music".

The answer it seems today is an artist, rapper and beat-maker of both prodigious talent and tragic demons.