If there’s anything a college campus loves, it’s a white male rapper. We can’t seem to stop Hoodie Allen from showing up on some WUStock or WILD survey every year, and who can forget the Macklemore WUStock fiasco two years ago after Congress of the South 40 had to relocate the concert to The Pageant due to heavy snow? Mike Posner assured us all we were cooler than him at my freshman WILD in fall 2011. And now we’re getting the latest white rap king: Mac Miller.

Eddy Rissling | Flickr Creative Commons

Continuing the spring WILD hip-hop tradition, Mac Miller isn’t necessarily the worst choice Social Programming Board could have sprung for from the survey, and he’s probably going to have the widest appeal on a college campus that differs widely in musical tastes. That doesn’t mean he’s a particularly exciting choice either.

Miller has been releasing music since 2010 and has risen to a reasonable amount of recognition since then, although he has never really hit the big-time radio exposure. Although he was initially compared to Eminem during his initial rise (because who else can we reference for white rappers?), Miller has begun making a name for himself more uniquely, distancing himself from counterparts like Macklemore and Asher Roth by not simply going for the radio-ready single but rather striking out new frontiers in hip-hop.

His latest full-length release, 2013’s “Watching Movies with the Sound Off,” was definitely Miller’s best release to date, but that shouldn’t necessarily be attributed to Miller’s rapping skills. Instead, slick production and featuring turns from up-and-coming rap stars like Earl Sweatshirt and Tyler, The Creator combined to make a listenable album with a couple of standout tracks that proved that Mac Miller still had something new and different to say in the hip-hop world (see “Watching Movies,” and “Suplexes Inside of Complexes and Duplexes”).

By combining his humorous lyrics with a progressive, “psychedelic-rap” sound, Miller surprised critics. Hopefully he packs his WILD set with songs from “Watching Movies with the Sound Off,” but just as the album was more experimental than his previous offerings, it also won’t have the same mass appeal as some of his earlier work. After all, “Watching Movies” has echoes of Chance the Rapper, and his brand of trippy/hallucinatory beats and fuzzy rap, while musically progressive, didn’t go over particularly well at WILD two years ago with a crowd of kids who just wanted to cut loose and dance.

We’ll see which direction Miller choses to go in when he takes to the Brookings stage: his more appealing songs or the more critically praised ones that won’t be able to get us moving as much? Hopefully, unlike Chance, he’ll show up with enough time to do a full set and hit us with the wide range of his discography.

If anything, he has some decently popular songs that should get all the drunken college kids going: I personally can’t wait to watch everyone try and rap along to “Donald Trump” as soon they realize they recognize it. All in all, Mac Miller’s certainly not the worst choice for my last WILD (he’s no MKTO, after all) but it definitely could have been better. Janelle Monae was on the list after all.

Seems like it’s time for SPB to make like CS40 and start ignoring the results of its surveys. Miller surely got more votes than Monae, but since when has this campus known what was best for ourselves?