Balloonerism: Mac Miller

Balloonerism, the seventh studio and second posthumous album from Mac Miller, is a cohesive and heart-wrenching project that explores the duality of childhood naivety and its inevitable loss of innocence.

The album was originally recorded in 2014. At this time, Mac was transitioning from more playful themes to the crooning, down-trodden rap and R&B tracks he came to be known for toward the end of his life. 

He began the project with the intention of completing it but ultimately scrapped it in favor of Faces, his only studio project from that year.

While his first posthumous album, Circles, was highly edited and polished by producers, Balloonerism was left practically untouched from its original form, leading many fans to speculate that the album might take on the scraped-together structure that many posthumous releases have in recent years.

Apart from “DJ’s Chord Organ”, the second track on the project that is primarily dominated by SZA vocals, the project feels surprisingly complete; the intention and energy that Mac put into the album before abandoning it are obvious. Even with its unpolished aspects, the album still manages to communicate profound sentiments of addiction, existential loss, and delusion.

Furthermore, almost all of the songs take on a new life insofar as they are descriptive of the artistic transformation Mac was undergoing at the time. While “Shangri-La” and “Transformations” signify a settling into what was presumably his comfort zone at the time, the project as a whole takes a definite step away from the joyous raps that had previously defined his career.

“Do You Have a Destination?”, the third track on the album, sets the tone right from the beginning; while it carries over much of the subject matter from his previous projects, its riding cymbals and upbeat synth pads symbolize a sort of innovation in Mac’s instrumentals, one that would later culminate in projects like Swimming and Circles.

“5 Dollar Pony Rides”, however, is the most pivotal track on the project insofar as it establishes the album’s primary themes. On the song, Mac explores, through a thin layer of irony, a projection of unfulfilled childhood desires as they manifest themselves in adulthood.  Through this, he asks us to consider what the true benefit is of abandoning our childhood fantasies. In a world so dark and cruel as the one Miller encountered, are these not healthy delusions?

This exploration culminates on “Mrs. Deborah Downer” as Mac earnestly asks us, “What’s the difference between truth and things that we pretend?”. This is a question that resounds hauntingly throughout the rest of the album; if childhood, and its innocence, are defined by the fantasies we create, reality becomes more desperate in its fading.

A brilliant addition to Miller’s artistic body of work, Balloonerism, in the manner it confronts these vital questions, offers a beautiful microcosm of the emotional and artistic transformations that Miller underwent throughout his heart-breakingly short life.