Mac Miller: grizzled determination made troubled star a rap icon

The son of a middle-class Jewish photographer and architect, Miller took a dogged approach to pushing his soundIt was grizzled determination more than natural talent (though there was plenty of that too) that made a rap icon of Mac Miller. When the Pittsburgh MC first exploded into hip-hop in 2011 with his first album, Blue Slide Park – a wide-eyed glide of airy boom-bap beats and youthful rhymes that his growing grassroots fanbase turned into the first independently distributed debut to t