I'm heartbroken at the news of MAC MILLER's death. If you're not entirely aware of who Miller was, it's well worth understanding how his professional career and artistic traits defined his unique, memorable legacy. It's in a manner most beloved, that by 1988, rap music's "old school" (led by the likes of KURTIS BLOW, UTFO and RUN-DMC) had wildly evolved into its "new school" era (ERIC B. & RAKIM, BIG DADDY KANE, EPMD). Similarly, 1998 saw rap's "new school" surge into the era of JAY-Z and DMX, where the music—and hip-hop culture—became a multimedia juggernaut, an insurgent bellwether of mainstream cool dripping with b-boy and b-girl swag. By 2008—when I began to regularly write about rap music and hip-hop culture and Mac Miller's rap career was a year old—the eras had shifted again. What had been old, new and multimedia-driven was now proving disruptive in the advancing digital, streaming and social media spaces. Though artists such as DRAKE, KENDRICK LAMAR, NICKI MINAJ and WIZ KHALIFA—Mac Miller's one-time labelmate, friend and fellow Pittsburgh native—have emerged as instantaneously recognizable superstars from this generation, it's Miller who may have proven over time to be its most sustainable outlier. The darkest of the mainstream horses in what is statistically hip-hop's brightest of commercially and culturally relevant ages, his career demands to be celebrated as a lesson in achieving artistic sustainability while remaining a respectable person. Jay-Z once tweeted, while listing his favorite emcees, that "black people really magic. Mac Miller nice too though." Think of "nice" as an allusion to the notion that Jay—like many artists who have feted Miller in the past few days—knew he was underrated. In a period where the music industry was figuring out how to stave off commercial decline, Miller released five mainstream albums, had somewhere in the range of 200 credited productions for himself and other artists, and headlined seven tours. What always struck me as most important about Miller was that instead of pulling the "industry is unfair/politics are holding me back" card, as so many rappers do when pop stardom proves elusive, he redoubled his efforts to learn and master the craft of music. The milquetoast blandness that I felt defined his 2011 debut album BLUE SLIDE PARK was largely gone by the time of the 2013 followup, WATCHING MUSIC WITH THE SOUND OFF. (PITCHFORK rated the former at 1.0, and the latter at 7.0.) After 2016's THE DIVINE FEMININE and 2018's SWIMMING, I noted to a friend that I found his career "collegiate." I meant that he had emerged from a sophomoric artist to a wise, senior voice of rap's latest school, just as the genre was being overrun by a click-ready SOUNDCLOUD and SNAPCHAT-birthed freshman class. Instead of being remembered as a superstar par excellence of this seemingly just-passed epoch, I like how FIONA APPLE remembered him as being as exemplary a musician as he was a person. That may be a greater memoriam than recalling a slew of hit albums. "I really really liked him and I wanted to stay friends with him, but I never got his number," Apple said. "I wish I could have made music with him. He was a really good soul... I'm going to go listen to that and um, keep him alive that way." MusicSET: "Mac Miller Never Stopped Swimming Toward the Deep End."