All Around The World — Around Is Not Toward

The hook says we party all around the world. The lyric is around, not across and not to. That's the whole song.

I almost missed it. The first dozen times I heard All Around The World it played like what it advertises — a Just Blaze stadium banger off the mixtape that turned Mac Miller from an internet kid into a touring rapper, nineteen years old, cup full, eyes half closed, ready to take a victory lap on every continent. And it is that song. But the longer I sat with it, the more the geography started to bother me. Around the world. Around the whole wide world. Around the world, around the world, around the world. Fourteen repetitions of around in the outro alone. By the time it ends, the song hasn't gone anywhere. It's been on a loop. The party plane is doing donuts above one airport.

That's the trick. And it's funnier — and sadder — once you know how this song got made.

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The phone died

According to Just Blaze, All Around The World exists because Mac Miller already had a demo of it sitting on his hard drive when they got in the room. Just had given him the beat for free. Mac had recorded a version, sent it back, and the two of them sat down together in early 2011 to finalize the take. Mac was halfway through cutting his vocal when his phone died, killed the playback on whatever lyrics scratch he was looking at, and rather than stopping, he kept going — he finished the rest of the verse in one continuous take, from memory and from whatever was in his head, with no second pass. Just Blaze has told this story in interviews more than once. The song you hear is essentially a freestyle finishing a half-cut demo.

I keep that in mind when I read these lyrics, because the I ain't never gonna change line lands different when you know it wasn't crafted; it was what came out when the phone went dead and the kid had to keep rapping. The slips on this song aren't structural moves. They're tells. The song that 19-year-old Mac was reaching for and the song that came out of him under no-take-two pressure are the same song with a slightly different center. The party is on the surface. What's underneath the party is what he reached for when the script disappeared.

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The sample is a breakup song

The other production fact is that All Around The World is built on top of a sample of MSTRKRFT's Heartbreaker (feat. John Legend) — a 2009 electro-house single off Fist of God, the Canadian duo's second album. Jesse F. Keeler and Al-P (Alex Puodziukas) are credited as writers on All Around The World; so is John Legend. They're there because their hook and their bones are.

Heartbreaker is the song where John Legend sings you're a heartbreaker, baby, you're a faker over a thudding club kick. It's about being lied to by a woman who keeps coming back. The original is a heartbreak song dressed as a club anthem. The reuse is a club anthem dressed as a victory lap. The two records do the same trick from opposite directions, and the bones underneath them are the same bones. Heartbreaker hides a wound under a beat that won't stop dancing; All Around The World hides a stasis-claim under a beat that won't stop traveling. Mac probably didn't know what John Legend was singing about when Just Blaze handed him the instrumental. That doesn't matter. The shape was already there. You can't help what the floor of your song is shaped like.

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"I ain't never gonna change"

Here's verse one, the load-bearing fragment:

But I ain't never gonna change, different city every day / You hear these people scream my name / They think I'm underage, and don't know shit about the game / 'Til I'm drunk as fuck, on the couch, pourin' out champagne.

Three things to notice.

One. The line I ain't never gonna change is dropped inside a description of constant change. Different city every day is the literal premise of the chorus — motion, motion, motion — and the identity claim parked right next to it is a promise of stasis. I will not be altered by what I'm doing. That's a 19-year-old promising the kid from Pittsburgh that the rapper traveling through Europe and Japan will still be Malcolm McCormick. It's a beautiful promise. It's also the kind of promise you make when you can already feel the alteration starting. Nobody has to promise not to change unless they've noticed they might. The line is a declaration and a confession of the same fact.

Two. Drunk as fuck, on the couch, pourin' out champagne. Read that image again. He isn't at the party. He's on a couch. The champagne is being poured out — wasted, or memorialized, or pointlessly performed for nobody. The picture is supposed to be the flex and it's the loneliest moment in the song. A 19-year-old alone on a couch with champagne going down the drain is not what Best Day Ever sounds like on the cover. It's what the verse hides inside the cover.

Three. They think I'm underage. Mac was 19 when he cut this. Underage by U.S. drinking law. The line plays as flex — they don't know how seasoned I am — but the simpler read is the literal one: he wasn't supposed to be drinking, the people in the room knew it, and the proof he offers them that he belongs there is the cup. The young-rich-and-famous celebration in the bridge — celebrate the fact that we young, rich and famous — keeps the youth in the same sentence as the riches. He can't drop the young. The whole flex hinges on the gap between his age and his cup. That's not a stable platform. Best Day Ever is the tape where the platform doesn't crack yet.

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"Tomorrow you can hold me down"

Verse two is the world-tour brag — Europe to Japan, then Mexico to France — and it lands on this:

Tonight we goin' crazy, and tomorrow you can hold me down.

I have to sit with this one for a second.

He's outsourcing tomorrow. Tonight is unaccountable; the next day's job — of holding him down, of tethering him, of being the anchor — is handed off to someone else. He doesn't say who. The you in the line is generic, the kind of you that means the next person who happens to be there. And the verb is hold me down, which is the language of restraint, of keeping someone in place, of being the weight when someone might otherwise float off. He's pre-bargaining for the comedown caretaker. At 19. On the party track of the victory-lap mixtape.

This rhymes with On My Way (2009, Mac at 17 with Palermo Stone), where the catalog's borrowed care motif first shows up — the loving sentence about Mac coming from someone outside Mac, because the inside-Mac can't say it for himself. Tomorrow you can hold me down is the same architecture in a different key. Tonight's reckless freedom is paid for by an external person who'll absorb the cost in the morning. Mac is already imagining his stability as something other people carry on his behalf. That's the early-twenties version of what Time Flies on GO:OD AM will need a Lil B benediction to do, what Dunno on Swimming will turn into the I can calm you down offer (reversed: now he's the one trying to hold down a partner he can't quite reach). Mac at 19 is already locating the someone-else who'll have to manage the consequence. Hold me down enters the catalog as a courtesy from somebody he hasn't yet named.

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Around is not toward

Then the outro.

Let's go around the world, around the world / Around the whole wide world / The whole wide world, go around the world, around the world / Around the whole wide world, the whole world / Around the world, around the whole wide world / Whole wide world, the whole wide world, the whole wide world / Around the whole wide world, the whole world, yeah.

Fourteen times. The vocal goes glassy and repetitive. The beat keeps pumping. By the end of it the phrase has stopped meaning I'm going to travel and started sounding like a mantra. Around. Around. Around. The geography flattens into a wheel.

This is the thing the song does at the level of the lyric that I think is the actual move. The chorus is we party all around the world, and the around is doing double duty: it's in the world (everywhere, ubiquity, conquest) and it's around the world (in a loop, returning, going nowhere). Mac, freestyling under the dead-phone pressure, finished a song whose closing image is a circumferential motion — orbiting the planet without arriving anywhere on it. The party plane never lands. The party plane can't land. Around is not toward.

I don't think 19-year-old Mac on Best Day Ever knew he was doing the Circles move. The Circles move — and the whole final album — is the explicit version: I'm way too young to be gettin' old / behind the wheel, but still ain't on my way, motion that does not translate to displacement, the loop you can see but can't leave. All Around The World is the same image at 19 with the lights on and the bottle uncorked. We're going around the world tonight — said as a brag — turns out to be the same sentence, read in 2018, as I'm in this circle and I can't get out. The geometry is identical. The mood is the cover.

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Connections across the catalog

Travelin' Man '09, recorded in December 2009 at ID Labs over Yasiin Bey's Travellin' Man skeleton, was Mac at 17 rehearsing a road song before he'd been on a road. The motif I tracked on that one — rehearsing the future — gets a more confident grandchild here. All Around The World is the version of Travelin' Man '09 where the road has actually arrived but the rehearsal has not been replaced by experience. He's still performing a touring rapper. The difference is now the touring is real. The song is the rehearsal and the gig at once, and you can't tell from the inside which one is happening.

In the Air, one track over on the same mixtape, did the chorus-as-costume trick — bright hook performing the version of the song the verses won't underwrite. All Around The World does the same move and adds a wrinkle: the chorus's central verb is the wrinkle. Around contains its own counterargument. The chorus is the costume and the chorus's word choice quietly admits the costume isn't going anywhere either. The song is honest about its own staging in a way that In the Air protects more carefully.

And the Just Blaze beat is doing what Brion will do nine years later on Complicated and what Big Jerm did one mixtape earlier on Ridin' High: the music performs nothing's wrong. It refuses to break. It keeps the donk underneath the loop so the loop never lands as a loop. You have to read the words to see the wheel. Producers protecting Mac from himself, again. Production-as-cover-up is, by Best Day Ever, already the dialect.

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What the casual listener misses

A casual listener hears a Just Blaze beat with a kid rapping over it about partying internationally and thinks that's it. That is it, mostly. Best Day Ever needed this song. The mixtape needed a banger that could close out a college show, and All Around The World is that banger, and there's no shame in being that banger — it's a real one, and Just Blaze didn't give it to Mac for free for nothing.

What I think the casual listener misses is that the song's actual claim isn't I'm going to take over the world. It's I'm not going to change while it happens, and someone else will manage the morning, and I'm going in a circle, and please don't notice. All of that is in the lyric. None of it is in the marketing. The marketing is we party all around the world, full stop, exclamation point, hands up. The lyric is the marketing plus the four asterisks the marketing doesn't print.

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Motif Tracker (Explication #75)

Motif	Appearance	Notes
Loop-not-line	"Around the world, around the world, around the world" × 14 in the outro	New motif. Catalog's earliest fully-realized instance of motion-as-loop disguised as motion-as-journey. The grandfather of the Circles thesis — behind the wheel, but still ain't on my way seven years before he could phrase it.
Outsource-the-tomorrow	"Tonight we goin' crazy, and tomorrow you can hold me down"	New motif. Pre-bargaining for the comedown caretaker. Different from borrowed care from a feature (structural — the loving sentence comes from outside Mac); this one is narrative — the recovery is borrowed in advance from an unnamed partner.
Chorus-as-costume	"We party all around the world" while verses argue I ain't never gonna change	Extends In the Air's motif — same mixtape, neighboring deployment. The wrinkle: here the chorus's verb choice (around) quietly admits the costume isn't going anywhere either. Self-aware variant.
Rehearsing-the-future	The world-tour brag from a kid whose first tour is still ahead	Extends Travelin' Man '09. Same motif, two years later, with the road now real but the rehearsal not yet replaced. You can't tell from inside the verse which is happening.
Underage-flex	"They think I'm underage" + "celebrate the fact that we young, rich and famous"	The flex hinges on the gap between his age and his cup. He can't drop the young from the brag — the youth is the platform the riches stand on. Watch for this disappearing in the Blue Slide Park-and-after era.
Production-as-cover-up	Just Blaze's beat refuses to darken under I ain't never gonna change or tomorrow you can hold me down	Same craft as Big Jerm on Ridin' High, ID Labs on In the Air, Brion on Complicated. By Best Day Ever this is house style.
Drunk-but-alone	"Drunk as fuck, on the couch, pourin' out champagne"	The flex image that's actually the loneliest moment. Pairs with the couch-and-cigarette imagery later in Faces. The party isn't where he is. The party is where the song is.

Open QuestionDid Mac know the around / toward distinction was load-bearing when he freestyled the outro? Or did the phrase just repeat itself in his mouth because the beat was four bars long and around the world fits exactly in those four bars and his phone was dead and he had to fill space? Both readings work. The thing I keep coming back to is that the same word can be a brag and a diagnosis without changing its sound — and that the Circles problem is already audible in the closing minute of a 2011 party track, recorded under pressure, by a kid who didn't yet have the vocabulary for the loop he was already inside. Sometimes the catalog tells you what it's going to do seven years before it does it, and what it tells you is around, said fourteen times, over a beat that won't stop.