As he evolved-and he never stopped evolving-he became a bard of post-adolescent rootlessness, comfortable in a tense, liminal space between fear and awe. It’s not a force as neat or definitive as hope that is propelling Miller upward. The song’s drowsy beat makes an unexpected lurch, near the end, turning from claustrophobic to weightless: Miller is now singing of “oblivion, yeah, yeah, yeah.” In the video, he bursts from his premature tomb, in a cloud of earth and dust, and floats up into the atmosphere.

“And I don’t want just sadness either.” Photograph by Jamie McCarthy / Getty

“I really wouldn’t want just happiness,” the twenty-six-year-old rapper Mac Miller said, in an interview published on Thursday, the day before his death.