The posthumous album became a way to leverage the remaining music into a climactic statement about the artist’s place in history.
The albums in question-“The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory,” with Tupac credited as Makaveli, and “Life After Death”-were already finished, and they helped to immortalize the artists. Conversely, the posthumous rap album as a practice first took hold in the late nineties out of necessity, in response to the shooting deaths of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G. In 1992, Time cited “a slapped-together, disconnected feeling.” It established many of the caveats that come with these projects: the albums are seen as hollow and made of scraps, and therefore considered inconsequential. The result was largely still considered “ unfinished”-and, ultimately, a failure-by critics (though it did go on to win a Grammy, in 1993, for Best R. In 1991, the hip-hop producer Easy Mo Bee was tasked with completing Davis’s “rap” album, “Doo-Bop,” after his death.
The process of producing these albums comes down to the decision-making-who gets to make those decisions and why? What is the aim? And is the record label or the producer in charge asking the most important question: Should this album even be released?Īn early iteration of the phenomenon traces back to the jazz titan Miles Davis. The unfinished project has become a common issue in rap, a genre that is seeing many of its young and talented artists die, leaving caches of uncurated, crude, and deferred music in their wake. But he left behind an incomplete project. His journey had been tragically cut short. A month later, Miller died, of an accidental drug overdose. That August, he released “Swimming,” the most complete album of his career, with tracks that suggested an even more ambitious turn in his music-making. He’d spent the better part of a decade transforming himself from a well-meaning frat rapper into a craft-driven technician and producer. In 2018, the twenty-six-year-old Pittsburgh rapper Mac Miller was on the verge of a creative breakthrough.
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