Mac Miller Buries His Feelings in a Coffin in Claustrophobic ‘Self Care’ Video: Watch

Courtesy Photo
Mac Miller “Self Care”

New clip pays homage to Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill Volume 2.”

The layers of meaning in Mac Miller’s claustrophobic video for the new track “Self Care” are thicker than the pile of dirt the rapper is buried under in the latest song from his upcoming 13-track Swimming album (Aug. 3). The Christian Weber-directed clip dropped on Thursday (July 12), the same day that Miller announced the release date for his follow-up to 2016’s The Divine Feminine.

In an homage to the scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol. 2 in which The Bride (Uma Thurman) must punch her way out of a wooden coffin, the suffocating visual for the nearly six-minute song opens with Miller, dressed in a white jumpsuit, calmly peering around the inside of his tomb with a flashlight as the track’s murky, narcotic beat kicks in.

So chill he’s comfortable enough to spark up a cigarette in his underground spot, Miller croons out the song’s affirming chorus from six feet under, mumble singing, “Swear the height be too tall so like September I fall/ Down below, now I know that the medicine be on call, yeah/ It’s feeling like you hot enough to melt, yeah/ Can’t trust no one, can’t even trust yourself, yeah/ And I love you, I don’t love nobody else, yeah/ Tell them they can take that bullshit elsewhere/ Self care, I’m treatin’ me right/ Hell yeah, we gonna be alright.”

 

The track chronicles an emotional spiral, with Mac spinning out into “oblivion,” which sounds like exactly the place he wants to be. Miller, literally, carves his feelings into the roof of the coffin, calmly using a pocket knife to write “Memento Mori” (Latin for “remember that you have to die”) in the wood, then punching through the words and emerging in a pile of dirt as the song’s vibe switches to a more sultry R&B groove and he brushes off the grime as explosions fill the air around him.

Before unleashing “Self Care” the Pittsburgh rapper has dropped three new songs earlier this year: “Small Worlds,” (which will be featured on the album) “Programs” and “Buttons.” Swimming, which can be pre-ordered here, is Miller’s first album since his break-up with now-engaged Ariana Grande, who appeared on Feminine, which took the Pittsburgh MC into a more R&B/funk-soul direction for an “exploration of love” featuring more singing than his previous efforts.

Check out the “Self Care” video, and the Swimming track list, below.

 

 

Read more on Billboard HERE.