Get It Again — The Sun Rise Like Yeast

So the catalog rolled me a deep one this week. Not a mixtape anchor, not a leak with a mythology — a two-and-a-half-minute drop on a DJ tape called The Grind Season: Go-Getters Vol. 1, hosted by Mr. Peter Parker, March 30, 2010. Mac had just turned eighteen. The High Life was three months behind him, K.I.D.S. was four months ahead of him, and "Kool Aid & Frozen Pizza" was maybe weeks from changing everything. This is a song from the last possible moment that Mac Miller was a local rumor.

And before anything else happens, he tells on himself:

Haha. I'm on my shit right now, boy. That's me playin' the guitar too. Yeah, multi-talented, motherfucker, haha. Ayo, Jerm, I'm 'bout to go in.

Listen to what that intro actually is. It's not swagger — it's disbelief. "That's me playin' the guitar too" is a kid pointing at his own hands. The laugh isn't a villain laugh, it's an I can't believe they're letting me do this laugh. And "Ayo, Jerm" — that's Big Jerm, ID Labs, Pittsburgh, the guy engineering half of this era — it's a shout into the control room. He's performing for an audience of one guy behind glass. Hold onto that. It matters later.

Bus-stop words

The first verse is exactly what you pay for on a tape called Grind Season. Playground insults — "dipstick, doofus, numbnuts, nuisance" — which, let's be honest, are bus-stop words, the vocabulary of somebody whose last real fight was in a school hallway. There's a swine flu punchline ("doctors think the swine flu hit") that carbon-dates the recording harder than any metadata could; H1N1 panic was a spring-2009-to-2010 artifact, and here it is, preserved in amber between two dick jokes. There's a Moon Man line, a belt line, the usual architecture of a teenage flex verse.

But look at the very first line. The song is called "Get It Again." It's a song about getting. And it opens with:

Give it away, give it away, give it away now.

He's quoting the Chili Peppers — a funk-rock anthem about generosity, about giving as a spiritual practice — as the lead-in to a money-and-haters chorus. Is that deliberate? With an eighteen-year-old on a DJ drop, honestly, probably not consciously. He just liked the bounce of it. But the accident is the interesting kind: the song about acquisition starts by giving something away. And what is this tape appearance, really? A free verse, donated to somebody else's compilation, given away to build a name. The form was doing the lyric before the lyric was.

The coin in the couch cushion

Then the chorus, and — wait, stop. Go back.

Laugh now, cry later.

He just slid that in there. In between "hi, hater" and "I be gettin' it in," in the middle of the most disposable kind of song a rapper can make, four words from tattoo flash and Chicano clown-mask iconography — smile now, cry later, the theater masks, the whole duality — dropped in like a coin in a couch cushion. Nobody assigned him that. Nobody's grading a Go-Getters Vol. 1 drop for thematic depth. He put it there because it rhymed and it sounded hard.

Here's the thing, though. I've been reading this catalog front to back for a hundred and seventy-nine of these now, and I can tell you where that coin gets found. The laughing-while-sinking, the smile that keeps getting stapled on over worse and worse news — that's the subject of the back half of his work. "Self Care" is "laugh now, cry later" with eight more years of evidence. And here it is at eighteen, unearned, tossed off, already there. I'm not saying he knew. I'm saying the motif knew him. Some things are in a writer before the writer is in them.

Breakfast as scripture

Verse two opens with the verse's job — "belly of the beast," "pour some liquor on the street," standard-issue menace-and-memorial — and then something genuinely strange happens. He stops rapping about the game and starts rapping about his morning:

Hoppin' out the bed, the sun rise like yeast
Brush my teeth, I at least need to grab a bite to eat
Walk down the stairs, kiss my momma on the cheek
Before I walk up out the door, let my feet create a beat

This is the best writing on the song and it's about breakfast. Look at the yeast. The sun doesn't just rise — it rises like yeast, which means the sky is dough, which means the morning is bread, which means — yeah — the morning is money, but money rendered as something warm and alive and proofing on the counter instead of stacked. That's a whole economic philosophy in one image, smuggled into a simile. Then teeth. Then — and this is the line I keep coming back to — kiss my momma on the cheek. Completely unguarded. No punchline attached, no recovery, no "but." On a tape built for flexing, in the middle of a verse about being a problem, he kisses his mother goodbye on the way out the door and doesn't apologize for it.

I've been tracking the mom references across this catalog. Later on, mom becomes a scoreboard — the first million measured by her reaction, success reported home like grades. Here, before any of that, she's just the house. She's not proof of anything yet. She's who you kiss before you go outside. There's something almost unbearable about reading it in that order — knowing the scoreboard is coming, watching her just be a person in a kitchen.

And then the run keeps going and detonates:

On the street that I'm steppin' on, matter fact glidin'
Climbin' out the atmosphere to travel back from Zion

Back from Zion. Read the direction. He's not climbing toward heaven — he's returning from it. The morning walk down the stairs and out the door is a descent from the holy city into Pittsburgh, which means he lives there, which means the ordinary morning — the yeast sun, the toothbrush, mom's cheek — was Zion all along. That's the whole trick of the verse: eight bars of pure domestic routine, framed as coming back down to earth from somewhere sacred. He did the thing the best writers do, where the mystical reveal is just your own house seen from far enough away.

The grind, finally named

Then, because he's eighteen and this is a grind tape, he cashes the check:

People look at me a different way
Now they listen when I got a little shit to say

There's the grind, finally named — and notice what it actually is. Not money. Not chains. Being witnessed. Being looked at different, being listened to. I traced this exact hunger through "On My Grind" a while back — the grind as a bid for witnesses, hustle as a cure for invisibility — and here it is a year and change earlier, in its larval form. He doesn't want to get it. He wants to get it again — the title's a loop, the chorus is a loop, "you wait a minute, I'ma get it again" — because the first time anybody looked at him felt so good he built a whole doctrine around making it repeatable.

The rest of the verse is the usual surgeon/current/serpents rhyme chains — technically nice, and the "call you Wee Man / nah, fuck that, I'ma call the weed man" flip is the one genuinely great joke, a punchline that corrects itself mid-air into a better punchline, which is basically a sketch of his entire writing process. And "I'm writin' while I'm liftin' up a mountain with my free hand" — there's the hundred-years-under-my-belt kid from earlier in the verse, the youngin' spitting like it's nothin', doing the impossible one-handed. He keeps insisting it's effortless. The song exists because it wasn't.

Where it sits

So where does this one sit? It's a minor song. It knows it's a minor song. But it's a minor song from the exact hinge of a career — the last spring before the fall everything changed — and it's got the whole future folded up inside it like a note passed in class. Laugh now, cry later. Mom in the kitchen. Zion, located at the top of the stairs. And a kid laughing into the control room because somebody finally, finally let him press record.

He got it again. That's the whole career, really. He got it again, and again, and again, until the again ran out.

Key takeaways

• The intro's "that's me playin' the guitar too" is disbelief, not swagger — an artist announcing himself to the one guy in the control room, weeks before the world showed up.
• A song called "Get It Again" opens by quoting a song about giving it away — and a donated DJ-tape verse is literally giving it away. The form did the lyric first.
• "Laugh now, cry later" — the entire duality of the late catalog, present at eighteen, unearned, dropped into a throwaway hook because it rhymed.
• The mom line is pre-scoreboard: she's a person in a kitchen, not proof of success. Reading the catalog forward, this is the before picture.
• "Travel back from Zion" inverts the ascent — the ordinary morning was the holy city all along.