【搬运】【译】叉婊Pitchfork评Mac Miller 2020年专辑《Circles》
搬运自：微信公众号【评论搬一堆】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）
翻译：Jayleen Zhao
校对：Whitney.L
推送：Lynn Liu
The first posthumous album from Mac Miller plays like a companion piece to Swimming. It’s an optimistic epilogue to the life of an aspirational artist.
Mac Miller的首张遗作专辑就像是《Swimming》的姊妹篇。《Circles》是这位有抱负的艺术家人生的一个乐观尾声。
Mac Miller’s death from an accidental drug overdose sent ripples across the rap community he helped cultivate. He was a kind-hearted collaborator and invested heavily in others’ growth, but his musical arc was left unfinished. In August of 2018, he put out Swimming, an album that was like a quantum leap in self-discovery. Then, a month later, at 26, he was gone, unable to realize that potential. Now there’s Circles, a posthumously released Swimming companion piece that gives his years of work a bit of closure. It’s the culmination of a career spent improving, a fitting epilogue to an aspirational life.
Mac Miller因服药过量意外身亡，此事在得益于他培养帮助的说唱界引起了轩然大波。他是一个热心友好的合作者，在他人音乐道路的成长中倾注了大量心血，但自己的音乐轨迹却没有完成。2018年8月，他推出了《Swimming》这张专辑，这是他在自我发现过程中的一次巨大飞跃。然而一个月后，26岁的他还没来得及意识到自己的潜力就离开了。现在有了新专《Circles》，这是他去世后发布的《Swimming》姊妹专辑，有点像在为他多年音乐工作画上句号。这是他在职业生涯中不断进步的结果，也是他理想生活的尾声。
Miller had worked closely on early versions of these songs with composer-producer Jon Brion, who was committed to finishing the album after Miller’s death. It’s unclear how deep Miller was into the process at the time of his passing, but this sounds like a completed work, or as complete as it can be. “This is a complicated process that has no right answer. No clear path,” his family wrote in a letter on his Instagram. “We simply know that it was important to Malcolm for the world to hear it.”
Miller曾与作曲家兼制作人Jon Biron密切合作，共同创作这些歌曲的早期版本，Brion在Miller去世后致力于完成这张专辑。目前尚不清楚Miller去世前参与了多少专辑创作，但是里面的歌曲听起来像是一部完成了的作品，或者说是尽可能完成的作品。“这是一个复杂的过程，没有正确的答案。没有明确的路径。”他的家人在他的Instagram上写信道：“我们只知道，对Malcolm来说，让全世界都听到他的歌十分重要。”
If Swimming wasn’t Miller’s best album, it was certainly the one where he came into his own as an artist. There are moments on 2015’s GO:OD AM where his rapping is sharpest, 2014’s Faces accommodated his most ambitious ideas, and 2016’s The Divine Feminine is his most diverse and complete project, a testament to the community of musicians he’d established around him. But Swimming hinted at an artist who’d finally cleared his mind and found his footing. Circles provides some resolution and helps finish Miller’s final thoughts.
如果说《Swimming》不是Miller最好的专辑，那它无疑是使他成为艺术家的最佳专辑。2015年的专辑《GO:OD AM》创作于他说唱风格最鲜明的时刻，2014年的《Faces》包含了他最雄心勃勃的想法，而2016年的《The Divine Feminine》则是他最多样化、最完整的作品，是他在自己周围建立的音乐人群体的见证。但《Swimming》则暗示了这位艺术家终于理清了思路，找到了自己的立足点。《Circles》提供了一些解决方案，帮助完成Miller最后的想法。
Miller seemed to envision Circles as the completion of a loop. “My god, it go on and on/Just like a circle, I go back to where I’m from,” he rapped on Swimming closer “So It Goes.” That record was about being fine on the surface while struggling with anxiety; this one is about knowing there’s something to be done about it. Both records are about working through depression, how the bad days are long and the good days feel fleeting, but the tone is more optimistic here. The imagery of a cluttered mind is a near-constant in Miller’s final songs. On the plucked single “Good News,” he likens the recovery process to spring cleaning, which feels fitting for someone looking to hit the refresh button. “Sometimes I get lonely/Not when I’m alone/But it’s more when I’m standin’ in crowds that I’m feelin’ the most on my own,” he raps on “Surf,” a poignant realization for someone who spent his last years surrounded by throngs of fans. But it comes with an epiphany, a sort of thesis for the album: “And I know that somebody knows me/I know somewhere, there’s home/I’m startin’ to see that all I have to do is get up and go.”
Miller似乎把《Circles》想象成一个循环的完成。“我的天，他不停持续/就像一个圈，我回到了我原来的地方。”他在《Swimming》中的最后一首歌“So it goes”中唱到。歌词表面上岁月静好，但实际上却是在与焦虑作斗争;他知道要做些什么。这两张唱片都是关于如何克服抑郁的，糟糕的日子多么漫长，而美好的日子却转瞬即逝，但这里的语调听起来更乐观。在Miller的最后几首歌曲中，混乱的头脑几乎是一个永恒不变的意象。在这首拨弦演奏的单曲“Good News”中，他把恢复过程比作春季大扫除，对那些总想点刷新键的人来说很合适。“有时我感到孤独/并不是只身一人的时候/而是当我矗立在人群央时，我越是感到孤不可耐，”他在“Surf”中唱到，对于一个在粉丝的簇拥中度过最后几年的人来说，这是一种深刻的体会。但它伴随着一种顿悟，也是专辑的主题:“我知道有人会懂我/我知道有个地方叫做家/我逐渐明了我所需要做的便是打包走人。”
Circles never really opens up into a full-fledged rap album, content to push back and forth between lo-fi beat music and singer-songwriter indie folk, working almost entirely with live arrangements. After doing his most-ever singing on Swimming, he crosses a threshold into doing almost no rapping on Circles. That was the entire idea: two albums bringing balance to each other. The few songs that do have raps in them display his love of the form and improvement as a writer. On “Hand Me Downs,” he raps about moving carelessly and stumbling through the same patterns. “Hands,” the only full rap song, works through negativity while displaying the subtly knotty lyricism he fell in love with as a teenager.
《Circles》并不是一张成熟的说唱专辑，内容主要是在低保真节奏音乐和创作型歌手的独立民谣之间来回切换，歌曲基本完全是现场直出，未加修饰。在完成了他在《Swimming》中最精彩的说唱后，他跨过了一个门槛，在《Circles》中几乎没有说唱部分。这就体现出了完整的理念:两张专辑互相平衡。为数不多的几首包含说唱的歌曲显示了他对说唱形式的热爱和创作方面的的进步。在“Hand Me Downs”中，他讲述了自己在相同境况下漫不经心地游荡，跌跌撞撞地生活的经历。“Hands”是唯一一首完整的饶舌歌曲，从消极中表现出他在青少年时期爱上的那种微妙复杂的抒情风格。
Miller was always trying to balance being the guy who started Facebook’s first Big L fan page with his love for the nakedness of 1970’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. He didn’t live long enough to get to really reconcile those sides of himself, but as halves of a complete work, Swimming and Circles come the closest. Together, they establish the rapper-producer as comfortable in his skin, no longer out to prove to naysayers he could bar out. These are mellow, relaxed songs in search of that exact state of being. “‘Fore I start to think about the future/First can I please get through a day/Without any complications,” he sings on “Complicated.” It’s more Plastic Ono Band than Lifestylez ov da Poor & dangerous—lots of guitars, some keys, light bass, the occasional synth line—but not beholden to any one sound.
Miller一直在努力平衡自己，他创建了Facebook上第一个Big L的粉丝页面，同时又爱着上世纪70年代《John Lennon /Plastic Ono Band》的悲伤。他离开的太早以至于无法真正调和自己的这两个方面，但作为一个完整作品的两部分，《Swimming》和《Circles》是最接近的。这两张专辑说明了说唱制作人Miller足够了解自己，他不用再向那些唱反调的人证明他可以走出来。这些柔和、轻松的歌曲是为了寻找那种确切的存在状态。他在“Complicated”中唱道:“在我开始考虑未来之前/首先，问能否好好的过完一天？/在没有任何烦恼纠缠的情况下”这首歌比起Big L的《Lifestylez ov da Poor & dangers》更有Plastic Ono Band的风格—大量的吉他配乐，几个音阶，轻低音，偶尔使用合成器—但并不受制于任何一种声音。
The chill-out aesthetic won’t come as a surprise to those familiar with Mac Miller’s Space Migration Tour, which transformed the songs in his catalog with warm Internet-laced grooves from their days futzing with electronica and experimental jazz. He was a huge rap nerd but he also loved the prospect of playing with a live band. These songs feel like an attempt to smooth down his interests into something comprehensive, and Brion seems like the perfect person to usher them to completion. He serves as a co-producer on most songs, an additional producer on all the others, and his work makes the songs shapelier without compromising Miller’s vision for them.
对于那些熟悉Mac Miller太空之旅巡演的人来说，这种令人松弛的审美不会让他们感到意外。Miller的太空之旅巡演让他的歌曲与温暖的网络音乐融合在了一起，不再是过去那种电子乐和实验性爵士乐的混音。他是一个说唱高手，但他也喜欢与现场乐队合作。这些歌曲给人的感觉像是试图把他的兴趣平铺成某种综合的东西，而Brion又是完成它们的完美人选。他参与了专辑中大多数歌曲的制作，并且也为专辑中其他歌曲出谋划策，使其在不改变Miller原本版本的情况下使歌曲更富神韵。
When a young rapper dies too soon, fans start listening to their music much more closely, combing over their lyrics to find the writing on the wall. With Miller, you don’t have to dive too deeply. “God Speed” is rife with thoughts about going down a destructive path and on “Brand Name,” he wrote a disclaimer that proved tragically prescient: “To everyone who sell me drugs/Don’t mix it with that bullshit, I’m hopin’ not to join the 27 Club.” But Circles dispels any sense of fatalism in his music. He was still idealistic; in these songs, he is searching for a way to break the cycle, a way forward. It’s only appropriate that Mac Miller’s final musical act be one of self-reformation.
在一位年轻的说唱歌手英年早逝后，歌迷们开始更仔细地听他们的音乐，梳理他们的歌词，寻找他们消亡厄运的征兆。与Miller相伴，你不必潜得太深。专辑《GO:OD AM》中的”God Speed “充斥着关于走上毁灭之路的想法，歌曲“Brand Name”中他唱到“卖货给哥的家伙们/别掺些杂物进去，哥才不想英年早逝加入27俱乐部”，Miller与整个世界作对，事实证明他有着悲剧性的先见之明。但《Circles》驱散了他音乐中宿命论的感觉。Miller仍然是理想主义者;在这些歌曲中，他在寻找一种打破这种循环的方式，一种前进的方式。将Mac Miller最后的音乐表演视为自我改造，实在是再合适不过的了。
