The rock legend Mac Miller had tattooed on his body
Mac Miller was, among other things, a fan of 1960s music, and there was one iconic figure of the decade that he especially idolised. He even got tattoos in dedication to this person.
During a conversation with Complex back in 2013, Mac ran through 25 of his favourite albums of all time. A couple of them originated from the 1960s: Bob Dylan’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, released in ’63 and ’67 respectively. But it was specifically his love of the Beatles, and one of the band’s members in particular, that drove him to get some ink.
“I got a John Lennon tattoo dude,” he admitted, laughing. He actually had two: one of Lennon’s face, and another of the word “imagine,” after Lennon’s song and album of the same name.
Like so many popular music fans, Mac loved the trajectory that the Beatles took throughout their short career as a band. “I love what they represent,” he said. “I love all the shit when they started getting really weird.”
This path was something he could see in himself. Not that he thought he was as big as The Beatles—he wasn’t deluded—but he understood their pivot into experimentation as a tendency he could see within himself. “I kind of identify with them,” he said, “not with, like, in massiveness, but like in their journey.”
Mac had adored The Beatles since his childhood days, pretty much as far back as he could remember. As he put it during the interview, being asked how a person gets into The Beatles is like asking how they got “into Jesus.”
“I’m just saying, it just exists,” he laughed. “How did you get into sandwiches? I found [out about them myself], I was very independent. I taught myself how to tie my shoe and how to write. I was reading by four. [Laughs.] I was a prodigy.”
This was far from the only time Mac publicly discussed his love of The Beatles, and Lennon in particular. During a 2016 chat with Pitchfork, he said of the band, “No one has ever had—or will ever have—an effect on the world like they did. When the Beatles did The Ed Sullivan Show, crime in the world went down—I’m not playing. That’s how much of an influence they had.”
He highlighted his favoured member, too, speaking in jokingly blasphemous terms that Lennon himself became known for, when, in 1966, he announced that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus now.”
“I got a Lennon tattoo, bro,” Mac said. “He’s Jesus.”