Mac Miller’s Previously Unreleased “Benji The Dog” Surfaces
Last year, the rapper and producer Mac Miller, just 26 at the time, died of an apparent accidental overdose. Before his death, Mac Miller reportedly recorded tons of music, much of which was never released and maybe never intended for release (including a rumored collaborative EP with Madlib). Since his death, very little of Mac Miller’s unreleased music has come out, either legitimately or otherwise. But recently, a full unreleased track called “Benji The Dog” hit the internet, as Hiphop-N-More points out.
“Benji The Dog” samples David Schwimmer saying, “He’s always gonna be the Juice” on the TV show The People V. OJ Simpson: American Crime Story, which aired in 2016. But people online are claiming that Mac Miller recorded the song in 2015, so maybe that bit got added later. In any case, the song, like so many other Mac Miller tracks, sounds sadder and more haunted in the wake of his death. On the track, Mac talks about his struggles with addiction. He talks about the idea of arriving at a new place in his life and admits that he can’t really offer advice to anyone else who’s struggling. As with so many Mac Miller tracks, it sounds light and playful, but it deals with much heavier ideas and situations: “They told me, “Don’t make a promise you can’t keep” / All the drugs in your system, you can’t sleep / How many times you had to buy a Plan B / For a girl you never bring back home to meet your family.”
The song samples Valerie Simpson’s 1972 soul song “Benjie,” which the producer Streetrunner already sampled for the 2010 Lil Wayne/Drake collab “With You.” Check out “Benji The Dog” below.
Mac Miller used so many samples in his work that a posthumous collection of his work would probably be a tough thing to put together. But he deserves one.