Credit: Spotify

Imagine a seven-year-old Malcolm McCormick, watching the stereo in his childhood home in Pittsburgh, with eyes riveted on the soundbox as a voice from Harlem slices through the static.

The voice is Big L’s. The song is fierce, funny and poetic at the same time. Big L passed only a few months prior, but in 1999, his sound was still very much alive in the room. For Mac Miller, then a young boy, that was an epiphany. Big L’s rap rhythm and wit struck him in a way no others ever had. He did not yet know what a sixteen-bar verse was, but he knew that he wanted to live inside that sound.

Even before he discovered rap, Mac was a child who was fascinated by instruments. His parents had given him a small keyboard at age five, and he was playing continuously, experimenting with chords, teaching himself drums and guitar. But listening to Big L was a different story. Lifestylez ov da Poor & Dangerous was an album that sounded like freedom and confidence packaged in wordplay. They were walking down the street years later when Mac stated that Big L was the one who inspired him to pick up a pen. “The first rapper that really had me wanting to be an emcee is a dude called Big L…that was the dude that made me want to write”. It was not a career choice; more a religious one.

Big L was appealing in a simple but magnetic way. He was a street-smart0 comedian from Harlem who had a wit as cutting as his speech. With technical finesse, he could punch through a beat, flipping punchlines that left the listener grinning and grimacing at the same time. To Mac, his verses were a masterpiece of wit and confidence. Every line felt alive. Though Big L would later be hailed as one of hip-hop’s great poets, he was something more to that little boy in Pittsburgh. He was proof that words could make you invincible.

Part of Big L’s strength was in his flow. Nas once admits that listening to him rhyme “scared me to death”, an honest compliment that says a lot about the man’s ability with words. L could be surgical in her ability to deconstruct a beat, setting rhythm and rhyme to street stories. For an impressionable kid like Mac Miller, who would later say that he spent hours studying lyrics, Big L was an example to follow.

One of the songs by Big L, ‘Street Struck’ was especially penetrating. It was both a cautionary and a hopeful read, and Mac related so much that he had the title tattooed on his arm. The ink was a permanent reminder of the rapper who showed him how to feel through rhyme in life. The legend of L became richer, and for Mac, his death burned the unspoken promise to pick up the torch. He started filling up notebooks with bars, determined to find his own rhythm that would make people feel the same way.

By his adolescence, the flame of early passion had grown to a fire. Mac’s early rhymes were in the punchline format of his hero. “In my early stages of rapping days, I used to try to rap like Big L”, he once said. “Trying to be a super raw MC”. While most kids his age were following the trends, Mac was studying flows from an underrated Harlem rapper who passed before his time. That commitment created his confidence. By 18, he’d been morphed into the artist who would gift the world Blue Slide Park, an album that topped the same charts that Big L once dreamed of dominating.

As Mac’s sound moved from the mischievous mixtapes to the more introspective sound of Swimming, vestiges of Big L’s presence could still be detected. Listen to how he wrote punchlines, listen to how he was unwilling to fake emotion, listen to how he was in love with the written word. The connection between them was not form but soul – a conviction that rap could be personal, joyful, and intelligent at the same time.

Ultimately, Mac Miller and Big L’s story is one of connection across time. The Harlem poet inspired a Pittsburgh boy to pick up the mic, and that boy grew into an artist who would inspire millions himself. Big L once said that Mac “made me want to be clever and witty”, but what he actually gave him was purpose. And trapped somewhere in the rhyme was that initial spark of Harlem that still burned every time Mac performed.