Mac Miller has released a previously vaulted track with the late, great Sean Price, and you should be as hype about it as I am.
No lie, this isn’t derived from some internet relevancy, google-alerts-driven-feels, but whenever someone asks me who my favourite rapper is, I think Sean Price. I say Earl Sweatshirt, but I’m thinking Sean Price. I’d never name Sean because I don’t actually know shit about him, and don’t want to be outed in a knowledge battle about his canon. I never got into his work on Helta Skelta, or even much of Jesus Price, in fact, I found him via listening to this guy called Copy Write. His hook on ‘Trooper’ that started as: “I been fucked over, left for dead, dissed and forgotten / luck ran out, hoped that I’d be gone stiff and rotten” was harder than Nas’s. And then his whole next “hit the bong and the piff, Dolce Gabbana the wrist” verse had my 18-year-old, Wolf Mother-worshipping self losing my shit. Price had everything you wanted from a traditional rapper, that floating, wheezy flow, a stupidly low voice, and the type of humour that had him boasting on his Eponymous album’s cut – ‘6 Dollar Man’, that he was the “brokest rapper” with a career “barely alive”.
You might think it’s odd that such an OG would jump on a track with a kid who, until a couple of years ago, was going into overdraft on street-cred, but the truth is Sean Price was a big Mac Miller fan. In 2012, Price guest edited HipHopDX.com and when he was asked who should feature, he vouched for Mac Miller, and even requested to do the interview himself. In the piece, he recognises how odd it is for him to vibe off Miller, saying: “Every time I hit [Mac Miller] up on Twitter, my friends are like, “Are you fucking crazy? You like him?”. And he wasn’t just doing it to be bipartisan, the two genuinely get along in the interview, and even talk about a couple of beats Mac sent Price to rap on.
Seems to be that one of them was ‘Pet Sounds’, a Nottz-produced piece that has Miller rapping infinitely better than that shitty ‘100 Grandkids’ single he just released, and Price rapping “so dope you could put the lighter on the spoon”. Listen to it above.
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Interview: Sean Price
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