Sometimes I hear a song and I know it’s a song I’ll listen to the rest of my life. It’ll get stashed in the memory banks as a forever banger and once in the stash, it is never leaving. In the early/mid 2010’s, I was listening to every Mac Miller piece of work I could find. I first started really listening to Mac when his album, Making Movies with the Sound Off dropped and I was hooked. That album was an absolute classic from the artwork, to the sounds, to the lyrics, to the singing… ok yeah… you get it. I think the album is dope. But loosies like this that are floating around are what I’m here for.
In the early 10’s, to find out more about artists I would go to SoundCloud and hit YouTube so I could find those deep cuts that for whatever reason never got officially released. Those are the tracks that typically resonate with me so much because they usually display an artist trying to stretch the bounds of creativity and just do something different. Songs like “Nebraska” are likely ones you don’t know about and probably wouldn’t even like in the first place. But me??? These end up becoming my favorite songs from artists. At the time, this minimalistic slow beat wouldn’t have been a good fit for the times. But man… If this dropped today??? It would be a smash. I knew a lot about Mac and Earl Sweatshirt but I didn’t know much of anything about Vince Staples. And after I hear his slow drawl on this beat I knew this was something….
As I started listening to more of Vince Staples’ music I came across “Lindo” which found his slow flow melting over the instrumentation in a way I hadn’t heard before. This was a guest feature that made me really took notice to a young Vince Staples.
As I listened to that track over and over, I came across an LP from Vince and somebody named Larry Fisherman called Stolen Youth. I thought the name was dope and the album cover was super gully. I needed to know more about this project so I did my typical deep dive. I first needed to find out who Larry Fisherman was….
dopest Mac pic out?
Wait… what??? Ahhhh, okay… Larry Fisherman was actually Mac Miller under a different alias. Straight up some MF Doom shit which instantly made me give Mac more respect. I hadn’t even pressed play on this project and I was already catching vibes. Here is the whole project if you want to give it a spin.
There was that one song that stood out to me though. It was a song called “Thought About You” that Vince once again melted over the beat but he matched that style up with superb storytelling which had a listener like myself in awe. Vince delivered his verses in such a matter of fact way that I felt I was watching a documentary on the History channel. Yet Vince was walking us through his livelihood and it was Mac Miller aka Larry Fisherman’s beat that brought the feelings up out of Vince. Those hard drums coming in and out with Vince just staying in his lane is absolute perfection. Vince and Mac on this track were a gangster version of Madvillain to me. It was a g’d up version of Deltron with Mac playing the Dan the Automator role and Vince killing it as Del out of the Norf Norf. This was just some good music…. Yet it never was critically acclaimed nor is it available on the DSP’s. So it simply lives in an era with fans who were in-tune during that moment of time when Vince and Mac created a dope project with each other. Give this track a spin… See if it hits you like it did with me.