THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 13FIVE DECADES INTOhip-hop’s existence,
it’s now routine for rappers to die sicken-
ingly young, often just as their careers are
taking off, like casualties of some cruel mo-
tif of Greek drama. The hazards of the
trade are many, none perhaps as persist-
ent as gun violence and drugs, which have
stamped out some of the genre’s brightest-
burning flames. Mac Miller, born Malcolm
McCormick, was one, and “Most Dope,” a
new biography by Paul Cantor, offers a
tender, studious remembrance amid the
flurry of “Rapper Dies” headlines.
McCormick’s rise wasn’t uncommon in
an industry that grooms its talent young,
but it was remarkable nonetheless. His
output included six studio albums, all of
which debuted among the Billboard top
five, plus a dozen or so mixtapes, four of
them released before his high school grad-
uation. He became a millionaire before he
could buy a drink, founded a record label,
starred in his own reality series and com-
manded an exceptionally loyal following
before he was found dead from an over-
dose in 2018. He was 26.
Cantor, working without the cooperation
of his subject’s family, makes hay from
wide-ranging interviews with the artist’s
friends and associates, in addition to the
usual trove of media clips. He finds in the
early years of McCormick’s career a
sheepish white kid with an infectious grin
who often repped his hometown, Pitts-
burgh, but made no secret of his privilege.
There were no shoot-’em-up sagas or trap-
house ballads; teenage Malcolm rapped
about weed, Kool Aid and frozen pizza, the
off-the-shelf Nikes on his feet. Earnest-
ness, that killer of careers, was his appeal,
his whole persona. It found a surprisingly
large audience — and it grated the hell out
of critics and serious fans, the kind who
live to knock a hustle and argue (not un-
convincingly) that hip-hop peaked in 1997.
“The reason Miller’s mass of fans follow
him is not because of his music,” read a
takedown of McCormick’s first album on
the music site Pitchfork. “It’s because he
looks just like them, because they can see
themselves up on the stage behind him.”
Calling it “crushingly bland,” the reviewer
rated the album a 1 out of 10 — the harshest
of several pans. “Malcolm was distraught,”
Cantor writes. Never mind that the record
went to No. 1 on the charts.
In “rejecting not only Malcolm’s music,
but the very idea of Malcolm himself,” Can-
tor argues, the Pitchfork review identified
a fundamental dilemma for McCormick.
Artists sell because of something special in
their work, or because they themselves are
something special that audiences want to
become. The best manage both, but ulti-
mately, mediocrity is no foil to fantasy.
McCormick chose to get better, and did.
His beats turned more complex, his lyrics
more unsettling. Even his cadences
changed, taking on a lilt and mumble here,
a songwriter’s soulfulness there. He was a
“serious student of hip-hop” who absorbed
classics — Big L (dead at 24) was one lode-
star — but his ear for innovation, plus a
newfound dark streak, led to what one
critic deemed “a quantum leap in artistry.”
In fact, Cantor makes a fairly persuasive
case that for all of McCormick’s later suc-
cess, he was actually underrated, or at
least underestimated, his whiteness an al-
batross that constantly made him suspect.
Smoldering beneath his talents was a
mean drug habit. Fondness for weed be-came a taste for lean (prescription cough
syrup and soda), then pills; and Cantor,
playing up the tragic flaw, is wearyingly
fixated on the subject throughout a repeti-
tive book, in which whole chapters can
drift by without much new information.
Yet we learn almost nothing about the cir-
cumstances around his death (bedroom,
fentanyl), or its larger context.
McCormick died in an extraordinary
year for hip-hop. Rolling Stone called 2018
a “changing of the guard,” in which virtual-
ly every notable rapper released a major
project, but rising stars often eclipsed vet-
erans. All the more devastating, then, that
McCormick’s passing came weeks after he
released what Cantor rightly calls his best
album, “Swimming,” and that the tragedy
was diffused by others before and after:
XXXTentacion (dead at 20), Nipsey Hussle
(33), Juice Wrld (21), Pop Smoke (20).
“I’d put some money on forever,” McCor-
mick sings on “Swimming.” “But I don’t like
to gamble on the weather.” The sense that
one’s number could be up anytime is one of
rap’s most common themes. This makes for
intoxicating music: With few exceptions,
hip-hop is best left to the young and danger-
ous. But it’s no reproach to want all artists,
when the lights have dimmed, to pass hap-
pily into obscurity and mortgage payments,
creaky, irrelevant and alive. 0Brief and Wondrous
A remembrance of the rapper Mac Miller.
By DAVE KIM
MOST DOPE
The Extraordinary Life of Mac Miller
By Paul Cantor
292 pp. Abrams Press. $26.
DAVE KIMis an editor at the Book Review.
Mac Miller in 2013.PHOTOGRAPHS, FROM LEFT: OWEN SWEENEY/INVISION, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS; JOSEPH OSBORNETHE CONCEPT OF Latinidad, or “Lat-
inness,” is an unstable one. Meant to en-
compass a multitude of cultures, lan-
guages and experiences, it inevitably falls
short, as words often do. Although con-
tested, the term at least attempts to put a
name to a hazy collection of norms and re-alities, the pretty and the ugly that togeth-
er constitute a certain idea of self. It’s
largely the ugly that “High-Risk Homosex-
ual” is concerned with, and though often
heavy, Edgar Gomez’s debut is also a
breath of fresh air.
The memoir recounts Gomez’s life grow-
ing up queer in the literal arena of compul-
sory masculinity: The opening chapter
takes place in his uncle’s cockfighting ring
in Nicaragua. Scenes of the birds sparring,
their beaks and talons affixed with blades,
are interspersed with those of a 13-year-
old Gomez in an Orlando nightclub. In this
other, no less lethal kind of arena, his uncle
pushes him toward sex with a girl, the
man’s former housekeeper. It’s a compel-
ling portrait of machismo: a surveilled, vi-
olent dance.
Gomez is something of an alien to these
rites, an unwilling participant in the man-
datory spectacle of being a man. As a writ-
er, he invites us into the chasm between
what he is expected to do and what he is
capable of, giving himself plenty of room
for emotion, self-deprecation and acerbic
observation on the “machistas,” or sexists,
who proliferate in Latin culture.
This is as true in the early chapters,
which see a young Gomez under the thumb
of various authority figures like his uncle
and his mother, as it is in the second half of
the book, after he’s out of the closet. The
banner chapter, in which his doctor labels
him a “high-risk homosexual” and puts
him on PrEP, finds Gomez caught in a simi-
lar bramble. “I didn’t particularly feel high-
risk, but given the history of H.I.V. among
queers and the disproportionate rates that
it affected Latinx people, I couldn’t exactly
say I wasn’t,” Gomez writes. “I was stuck.”
This time, he turns to the authority of
wise elder queers he’s encountered in art
and the media, who lived through the peak
of the AIDS crisis in the United States. “Be
careful, they said. Sex can kill you. Look
what it did to us.” Ultimately these elders
assume a mirror role to his uncle’s: people
who have Gomez’s best interests at heart,
but whose expectations he can’t meet.
And like his uncle, this older generationposes the question that runs through the
heart of the book: What happens after
you’ve tried and failed to be the right kind
of man? Or in this case, the right kind of
gay man? Can you ever be an authority fig-
ure in your own right?
Gomez writes with a humor and clarity
that generally keep the melodrama at bay,
an absolute must in a memoir that might
otherwise have been a laundry list of
painful experiences. In a relatable scene
that will likely make queer readers squirm,
the author recalls a consultation with his
doctor in which she asks, “‘Do you preferto give or receive?’... as if the question
weren’t about anal but my philosophy on
Christmas.”
Ever committed to parsing its central
themes of masculinity and queer identity,
“High-Risk Homosexual” does circle back
on itself a bit, the chapters teetering on uni-
formity. Gomez’s voice is equal parts
warmth and acid wit, like a good friend
you’re slightly afraid of, but there are times
in the middle of a passage where you’ll feel
you know what he’s going to say before he
says it.
These minor complaints do little to dull
the shine of an exciting debut from an au-
thor with a rare point of view. “High-Risk
Homosexual” deals with some titanic
questions. What is Latinidad? What is ma-
chismo? What does it mean to be a man,
never mind a queer man? By its own ad-
mission, the book doesn’t have all the an-
swers, but it makes a compelling case that
they will come from the razor-sharp
queers living in the margins. 0Toxic MachismoA queer memoir of resisting compulsory masculinity.By JOHN PAUL BRAMMERHIGH-RISK HOMOSEXUAL
A Memoir
By Edgar Gomez
287 pp. Soft Skull. Paper, $16.95.JOHN PAUL BRAMMERis the author of “Hola
Papi.”Edgar GomezWhat happens after you’ve
tried and failed to be the right
kind of man?