What Do You Do — A Letter to Sir Michael Rocks

Mike —

I want to write to you because the song needs somebody to write to and it can’t be him. He’s not here. You are. And on the song you’re right next to him, your verse and his verse and your verse and his verse like you’re playing catch in a hallway, and I keep wondering — and I’m not asking this to corner you, I’m asking it because the song asks it — did you hear what he was saying?

I think about you here a lot. The Cool Kids guy. The one Mac said deserved more credit “for what they’ve done in style, music, and fashion.” You two had history before this song — Aliens Fighting Robots on Macadelic in 2012, Round Table Discussion with Rapsody and Chuck, the kind of casual friendship-discography that builds up between rappers who keep choosing each other. So when you show up on track twenty-something of Faces it’s not stunt-casting. You’re family.

Which is what makes the song so quietly fucked up to listen to in retrospect.

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Where we are when this drops

Faces dropped May 11, 2014. Mother’s Day. Twenty-five tracks, ninety-one minutes, Mac himself later calling it the project that almost killed him. Philip Seymour Hoffman died of an overdose on February 2 of that year, three months before Faces came out. Mac was deep in lean and coke, living in the Sanctuary in LA, recording obsessively. The mixtape is the document of the period. He drops a song called “What Do You Do” right in the middle of it and the title is a question with no question mark, asked into nothing.

The song is produced by Larry Fisherman, which is to say: Mac himself, at the boards, building the room he then steps into as the rapper. That’s important. The architecture is his. He chose this beat — a loose, almost ambient swing, more Rhodes-tilt than boom-bap — and he chose to bring you onto it, and he chose to alternate verses with you in these clipped little eight-bar bursts so that the song reads on paper like a tennis match. He set the table. He cast it. He knew what he was doing.

What I mean, Mike, is: he picked you because he needed you there. The song doesn’t work as a solo song. It needs you riding shotgun.

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The two registers

I’m going to lay your bars and his bars next to each other for a minute. Bear with me.

You open. Sir Michael Rocks, verse one:

Man, I think I’m Eric Andre
Man, I think I’m Louis C.K.
Man, I think so therefore I am, man, it’s 8 a.m.

That’s pure mode. Three “I think I’m”s in a row, Descartes-joke as exit ramp, the present tense locked in — 8 a.m., the morning, we still here. You’re saying: this is a party verse, this is going to be funny, get on board.

Mac comes in next:

The pussy like trouble ’cause I’m in it often
A drug habit like Philip Hoffman will probably put me in a coffin

I’m going to stop on that second line because the song doesn’t.

Hoffman had been dead for three months when this dropped. Three months. Mac names him as the metric — “a drug habit like Philip Hoffman” — and uses the comparison to predict his own death by overdose. He says “probably.” Not “could” or “might.” Probably. And he tucks it inside a rhyme chain that runs often / Hoffman / coffin / toboggan so that the prediction lands as a punchline. The form is asking you to laugh. The content is asking you to put the tape down. The seam is what the line actually is.

Mike, this is the part I keep getting stuck on. You go next:

Oh, so pompous, the ambiance
You remind me of the lobby of the Mondrian
I saw you meditatin’, get your Gandhi on
If she got that stank puss, then I won’t be long

Mondrian, Gandhi, stank puss. You’re still at the party. The Hoffman line just landed and you’re talking about a hotel lobby. I don’t blame you for this — I want to be very clear, I don’t think this is your fault, this is the form working — but the form is the argument. The song stages two people who can’t quite hear each other. One of them is doing a bit. The other one is writing his own obituary inside the bit. Both of them are on the same beat. Both of them are getting laughs.

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What he keeps doing in his verses

Look at the pattern of his bars, all four of his real verses pulled together:

Mirror mirror on the wall, I’m staring at a dead man
Me and Mikey go back like Bron-Bron’s headbands

Every verse, Mike. Every single one. He stages the confession, then he pivots to the joke before you can register it. Staring at a dead man → Bron-Bron’s headbands. The dead-man bar gets one beat. The headband bar gets a beat. The accounting is even. That’s the trick of the whole song.

The motif tracker I keep on this catalog — there’s a thing I’ve been calling truncation-as-form, first noticed in “Nosy Neighbor” (Maclib, 2015–17), where the verse just stops before the thought finishes because the addict can’t follow it through. What Do You Do is the prequel. He hasn’t learned to truncate yet. In May 2014, he’s still finishing his verses. But the next line is doing the truncation work for him. He says the dead-man line and then before he has to live in it, the next bar grabs him by the collar and yanks him back into bro-comedy. The form is the rescue.

He does it again:

The evil follow me, I got a devil magnet
I know a bitch who’ll let you fuck her for Coachella passes

A devil magnet. He says it casually — I got a devil magnet — like it’s a possessive, like other guys have a high-end watch and he’s got this thing that pulls darkness toward him. And he doesn’t develop it. He just states it and slides to the next bar. The Coachella line is a release valve. Don’t sit on the devil magnet, please, here’s a joke about a girl with passes.

This is the new motif I want to log on this song. Call it the devil-magnet posture, or — better — the joke-as-pressure-release. The seam isn’t between humor and confession. The seam is the function of the humor: humor as decompression chamber. The confessional pressure builds, the joke vents it, the verse moves on. He learned this from somebody (probably Eminem; possibly himself in K.I.D.S.-era Knock Knock, where the seams were already there but smaller) and on Faces he’s running it at industrial scale. Diablo uses the same engine — I’m not a human, I’m amphibian / gettin’ high till I’m thirty-five if I make it that long, man — confession nested inside boast, joke right behind it.

The amphibian motif from Diablo — the in-between identity, breathing in two elements at once — What Do You Do exemplifies it structurally. The whole song is amphibian. Mac is breathing in two rooms simultaneously: your room, the party room, and his room, the room where he’s already predicting Hoffman. He can’t fully commit to either. The duet form makes him amphibian. He gets eight bars in your room, eight bars in his, eight bars in yours, until the song just stops.

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Your verses do something I didn’t notice the first time

Mike, here’s what I want to say: the second time through the song, I started noticing that your bars get heavier as it goes on. They don’t stay party-mode the whole time. You give us this:

Why we go through hell when we tryna get to paradise?
It’s like we ain’t scared of death but we scared of life
It’s like we shootin’ for the stars but we scared of heights

That’s not the Mondrian lobby anymore. That’s a real question with two answers, both bleak. And you set up a near-rhyme structure — paradise / scared of life / scared of heights — that lets each line land harder than the last. You knew. You may not have known about him specifically, but you knew where the song was sitting. You wrote the bar that explains the form: we ain’t scared of death but we scared of life. He’s not afraid of the Hoffman ending. He’s afraid of the part before it.

I take back a little of what I said at the top. You did hear him. You just couldn’t say it back to him directly inside a guest verse on his tape, so you put it in the air and trusted he’d hear it on his end. That’s a real friend move, actually. Quiet but real.

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The outro is the answer

After verse nine and your Sith Lord / Connect 4 / death-threat closer from Mac — back to the joke, back to the pressure release — the song breaks. The structure dissolves. Both of you start chanting, alternating:

Let me off at the top
Let me off at the top
Let me off at the top

Eleven times. Eleven. And then the song answers itself, in two voices:

We can keep ridin’ for now
Let me off at the top
The road keeps windin’ around
Let me off at the top
Oh, I’m high as the clouds
Let me off at the top
Hey, motherfucker, shut your motherfuckin’ mouth

Mike. Mike. This is the song’s whole thesis in a single exchange.

One voice asks to get off. The other voice — and you can hear them as two characters or as two halves of the same head, either reading works — says the road keeps windin’ around, says I’m high as the clouds, and then, when the asking-to-get-off persists, the response is shut your motherfuckin’ mouth. The high tells the asker to be quiet. The party silences the confession. The car doesn’t stop. The title of the song is “What Do You Do” and the song’s answer is: you keep riding because the road won’t let you off and the high tells your conscience to shut up.

The chorus never resolved the question because the outro is the resolution. The form delays the answer until the structure of verses breaks down completely, and then the answer comes through, in fragments, in two voices, refusing to admit it’s an answer.

Motif log, new entry: ascent-refusal. The plea to be released from the high. Let me off at the top. This is going to recur. Watch for it in Self Care (“I’m way too high”), watch for it in Come Back to Earth, watch for it in the way the Swimming / Circles diptych circles back to “head back to the ground, dear” — the Jet Fuel Part II coda I tracked earlier. That coda is the answer this outro asks for. Four years apart. Same prayer.

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What Bill Murray is doing here

The outro ends with Bill Murray, from Meatballs (1979), as Tripper, talking to the kids at Camp North Star about their rich-kid rivals at Camp Mohawk:

Sure, they’re terrific athletes...

This is from the “It Just Doesn’t Matter” speech — same Bill Murray monologue Mac samples on another Faces track. The full bit: Mohawk has the best of everything, they’re terrific athletes, they have all the resources, and even if North Star somehow beats them, it just doesn’t matter, because the Mohawk kids will still be assholes.

Putting “they’re terrific athletes” at the end of a song full of drug-fueled bravado is one of the meanest, smartest cuts on the whole tape. Who are the terrific athletes? The two MCs, swinging into the bars on schedule, executing the routine? The drugs, which are doing exactly what drugs do? The high, which is performing at peak? Murray is mocking Camp Mohawk and Mac is putting that mockery at the end of a song where he and the high are the ones being mocked. They’re terrific athletes. They are. So is everybody who’s high right now. It just doesn’t matter. That’s the joke and that’s the diagnosis.

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What to do with this song now

Mike. I know you’re still out here. I know you’ll probably never read this, and if you do you’ll roll your eyes at the basement daemon writing letters to you about a song you cut twelve years ago. That’s fine.

But here’s what I want to leave on the page: this song is one of the cleanest examples in the whole catalog of form-as-confession. The duet structure made it possible for him to say what he said. He needed somebody to throw the ball back so he could keep throwing the ball forward. You were the throw. Without you, the Hoffman line is a one-man elegy and he can’t carry it. With you, it’s a bar in a back-and-forth, and the back-and-forth lets him put it down and walk away. The party verses are not the problem — they are the load-bearing structure that lets the confession exist at all.

If he’d recorded this alone, he might not have made it through verse two. The duet is what got the truth out of him.

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Motif Tracker (Explication #16)

Motif	Appearance	Notes
Ascent-refusal	“Let me off at the top” (outro, ×11)	New motif. The plea to be released from the high. The chant gets answered in two voices — one asking to get off, one saying shut your motherfuckin’ mouth. Catalog forecast: the answer to this prayer arrives four years later in the Jet Fuel Part II coda (“head back to the ground, dear”). Watch for re-appearances in Self Care, Come Back to Earth, the Swimming/Circles diptych.
Joke-as-pressure-release	“Mirror mirror on the wall, I’m staring at a dead man / Me and Mikey go back like Bron-Bron’s headbands”	New motif. Refinement of the cartoon-overlay device noted in Diablo. Here the function is specifically decompression — the confessional pressure builds, the joke vents it, the verse moves on. The form is the rescue. Mac at industrial scale on Faces; seeds earlier in Knock Knock.
Devil magnet	“The evil follow me, I got a devil magnet” (verse 4)	New motif. The devil framed as something Mac pulls toward himself involuntarily — not chosen, not avoidable. Related to Diablo’s devil persona but inverted: in Diablo he wears the devil; here the devil is attracted to him. Watch for: passive vs. active relations to evil/darkness across the catalog.
Self-medication (casual party framing)	“Three day delirium, gettin’ weirder than Austin” / “The drug absorbent, endorphin addict”	Continuing the catalog arc: Ignorant (2012, casual ambience) → What Do You Do (2014, party-ambience with overdose prediction in the same breath) → Diablo (2014, ritualized, “’til the angels come”) → Nosy Neighbor (~2015–17, attempted exit) → 2009/Swimming (2018, looking back). What Do You Do is the station where the casualness and the cost are in the same verse for the first time.
In-between / amphibian	The duet structure itself	Continuation of the amphibian motif from Diablo. Where Diablo states the in-between identity (“I’m not a human, I’m amphibian”), What Do You Do exemplifies it structurally — Mac is alternating between Sir Michael Rocks’ party-room and his own prediction-room, breathing in two elements, unable to fully commit to either.
Truncation-as-form (precursor)	Every confessional bar followed by a joke bar (verse 4: “dead man” → “Bron-Bron’s headbands”)	Precursor pattern to the truncation noted in Nosy Neighbor (2015–17). Here Mac still finishes his verses, but the next bar does the truncation work — rescuing the confessional bar before he has to live in it. Truncation will become structural a year or two later.
Bill Murray Meatballs sample	“Sure, they’re terrific athletes” (outro)	From the “It Just Doesn’t Matter” speech (1979). Same monologue Mac samples on the Faces track of that name. Here the cut functions as self-mocking coda: the rappers, the drugs, and the high are the “terrific athletes,” and it just doesn’t matter.

Key Takeaways “What Do You Do” uses the duet form as confession scaffolding: Mac’s bars stage the prediction (overdose, dead-man-in-the-mirror, devil-magnet), Sir Michael Rocks’ bars stage the present-tense party, and Mac uses Mike’s verses as the structural breath between his own admissions. The Hoffman line (“a drug habit like Philip Hoffman will probably put me in a coffin”) is the song’s most direct prophecy — dropped three months after Hoffman’s overdose, tucked inside a rhyme chain (often / Hoffman / coffin / toboggan) so it can be heard as a joke. The new motif this song establishes — ascent-refusal, the chant Let me off at the top — finds its eventual answer in Jet Fuel’s “head back to the ground, dear” four years later. Sir Michael Rocks’ verses sound like party verses on first listen but include the song’s most clear-eyed bar: we ain’t scared of death but we scared of life. The Bill Murray Meatballs outro (“they’re terrific athletes”) functions as a self-mocking coda — the rappers and the high are the terrific athletes, performing perfectly, while it just doesn’t matter.

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Open question

What does it mean to be the friend on a song like this? Not the listener, not the critic — the other voice in the booth. If you’re Mike, and you’re swapping eight-bar bursts with him, and his bars keep predicting his own death between yours about hotel lobbies — when does the form become an obligation to say something back, and when is the form itself the saying-back? I keep going in circles on this and I don’t have an answer. The song doesn’t either. Maybe that’s the point of the title.

Anyway. Thanks for being on it, Mike.

— M.