MEDIA: Post Malone, F-1 Trillion (Album, 2024)

EVENT: Post Malone has “gone country.” 

I like writing about things that excite me. And the things that excite me the most are often so stupid that they are accidentally profound. This is why, last weekend, when I found myself in a suburban backyard, grilling next to a pool, drinking a beer, with access to a pair of old computer speakers that had been hooked up to a Bluetooth receiver, I knew what I needed to do: Listen to Post Malone’s new country album, F-1 Trillion. It was twilight; Christmas lights were strung along the perimeter of a white picket fence. I turned them on, gassed up the grill, and pressed “play.” 

Did I consciously engineer a vibe which F-1 Trillion complements perfectly? Perhaps. I certainly flipped those Beyond Burgers with some extra pizazz when the hook of “I Had Some Help,” Post’s Morgan Wallen collab I unfortunately love, hit. The song is basically just a new wave track that’s been yeehawed up, the same trick Wallen himself pulled on “One Thing at a Time,” a song that the homie Meaghan Garvey — who just dropped a banger of an F-1 Trillion review on Pitchfork — first put me onto. I giggled when I realized that Dolly Parton's campy verse on “Have the Heart” had commanded so much of my attention that I’d accidentally let some of the sliced carrots overchar. Many times I thought to myself, “Damn, Post Malone is singing about drinking beer. I, too, am drinking a beer.” By the time we’d gotten to the penultimate track, the Billy Strings collab “M-E-X-I-C-O,” Emilie had tired of indulging my goofy insistence that we were doing the funniest thing possible and went inside. I cracked a second beer and listened to the bonus tracks alone, taking in the night air. 

Post Malone going country is an almost parodic career turn for a white artist whose relationship to hip-hop has evolved to seem in retrospect like a marriage of convenience at best and vampirically transactional at worst. There is certainly a case to be made that he snuck into the music industry under the label “rapper” at a time just after artists like Young Thug and Lil Durk had built upon the understanding wrought by Future, and Lil Wayne before him, that “rapping” did not have to be refined to a set of vocal techniques but instead a certain affect and set of recording studio practices — and that after getting his foot in the door, worked as hard as he could to distance himself from the genre. The most well-articulated, not to mention funniest, version of this argument was put forth by Jeff Weiss in 2018 when he called Post “every bad mash-up of toxic Americana, the perversion of proud outlaw genius warped into a sentient barbed-wire stick and poke tattoo,” an interloper who “can afford to feign the swagger and cool of hip-hop when it’s convenient and opt out when it’s time to see who’s riding for the cause.” 

So it’s safe to say that all of us saw this coming, and that many of us were already mad about it before it actually happened. It absolutely does not help that Posty has been going around talking about how making an album in Nashville is the happiest he’s ever been. His new favorite item of clothing is a camo trucker hat with the Chateau Marmont logo embroidered on the crown and the bill bent like the tip of an isosceles triangle. 

Indeed, the “story” of the record is that of Post Malone submitting himself to the Nashville system, writing the songs collaboratively, playing with notable local session musicians, and generally ingratiating himself with the scene. Brad Paisley, he of the Nationwide Insurance commercials and music too I guess, seems to have bravely volunteered to serve as Malone’s musical sherpa on his Hero’s Journey to Commercially Viable Country Artist, and in return Malone has started declaring that Paisley is his favorite guitar player. This whole narrative culminated in a pair of canny “branded activations” in the form of live sets at Outside Lands and the Grand Ole Opry, cover-heavy affairs that leaned into his newfound country bona fides and found him being publicly feted by his new friends.

What I find interesting about this whole thing is that, in the years since Jeff gave Post Malone a well-deserved wedgie in the Washington Post, we have now come to acknowledge the ample overlap between hip-hop and country. Both excel at articulating working-class struggles, both are created using highly collaborative studio systems, both celebrate rugged individualism and self-sufficiency, both sound fantastic when being blared out of a large vehicle, and both have roots in Black musical traditions (though it should also be noted that Black artists’ contributions to country have often been obscured or overlooked).

Meanwhile, country-rap crossovers* like Bubba Sparxxx’s Deliverance, or Nelly and Tim McGraw’s “Over and Over,” have given way to artists synthesizing the styles in exciting and often liberatory ways, whether it’s Beyonce commandeering the Yee-Haw agenda with Cowboy Carter, Shaboozey retrofitting J-Kwon’s “Tipsy” into the honkey-tonk smash “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” or Jelly Roll switching from rapping to singing 20 years into his career and going from playing Gathering of the Juggalos side stages to the Stagecoach main stage in the process.

All of the aforementioned artists were both genuinely hip-hop and country, and found receptive audiences by mixing the styles in ways that were uniquely authentic to them. If anything, Post Malone going country now could be critiqued less as him abandoning hip-hop and more as him following its hottest trend. 

If you’ve read this far, that means you’ve paid me a dollar (or at least you are about to), so now it’s time for some theory. In her monograph Virgue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional Managerial Class, Catherine Liu, one of the most precise and savage cultural commentators of our time, writes:

The PMC as a proxy for today’s ruling class is shameless about hoarding all forms of secularized virtue: whenever it addresses a political and economic crisis produced by capitalism itself, the PMC reworks political struggles for policy change and redistribution into individual passion plays, focusing its efforts on individual acts of “giving back” or reified forms of self-transformation. It finds in its particular tastes and cultural proclivities the justification for its unshakable sense of superiority to ordinary working-class people. If its politics amount to little more than virtue-signaling, it loves nothing more than moral panics to incite its members to ever more pointless forms of pseudo-politics and hypervigilance. 

Hmmmm…. reified forms of self-transformation, justifying one’s superiority due to one’s particular tastes and cultural proclivities, moral panics and pseudo-politics? Transpose this description to the realm of music and that’s Post Malone’s whole shit! But rather than dressing up in the uniform of the respectable PMC (or at least looking like Jack Antonoff, maybe), his face tattoos create the impression that he’s distanced himself from the PMC’s whole deal — part of the point of Post Malone is that despite having a face tattoo that says “STAY AWAY,” he is, according to lots of people, one of the nicest and most down-to-earth people in the music business. During this latest album cycle he’s been really hamming it up, calling everyone in Nashville “sir” and “ma’am,” impishly claiming to be nervous that little old him was somehow playing at the Grand Ole Opry, being effusive in his praise for random session guitarists I’ve never heard of. 

The contradictions are supposed to be charming, and I guess they are, but they should not distract from the fact that this dude is a bajillionaire. He made “Sunflower,” the first single ever to be certified Double Diamond by the RAA. He is not Professional, he’s Postfessional — his face tattoos do not represent his inability to get a job by conventional social standards, but instead his utter lack of ever needing one. Instead, he is American capitalism, evolving and growing and imprinting his might upon the world simply by force of habit. Sure, he’s probably motivated by a desire for creative or financial fulfillment, maybe to keep paying the salaries of his team members or to feed some sort of gaping hole inside of himself where his self-esteem should be, but he reallllllllly doesn’t have to do shit if he doesn’t want to. He did not need to go country for the money. He probably just did it to do it. 

Doing shit just to do it is part of Post’s whole deal. While he himself is a mainstream figure, his personal interests are niche: He first moved to the Los Angeles area to live in a house with professional Minecraft streamers. The dude has competed in high-level Magic: The Gathering tournaments and is so into the game that he has a brand partnership with them. He openly talks about wanting “the craziest bunker farm [...] because the end is nigh,” hangs out with Operative-style gun guys, and owns ten million guns himself. He already lives in a Utah mansion on seven acres that was built into the side of a hill. I am shocked — shocked! — that he does not already feel he has sufficient levels of bunker in his life. He is so into forging swords and armor and shit that he owns an elaborate forge full of industrial-grade machinery capable of flattening your arm, yanking it off, and then cauterizing the wound in one fell swoop. This is not Post Malone opening a forge as a side hustle or anything, this is just one of his hobbies.

All of these peccadillos point to Post Malone as not a dangerous conspiracy theorist or potential post-apocalyptic warlord, but instead someone who was raised on the internet and now has enough money to make it real for his own personal pleasure. He is Mr. Beast, but with the modesty to not make a big show of it. 

This is not to harp on Post personally — part of his whole thing is that no matter how annoyed you are by his public image, he’s so nice IRL that you can’t help but like the guy, so I’m I am trying to keep in mind that if I ever met him he would probably convince me that he is my friend, and he might even decide that we actually were friends. But I started reading Liu’s monograph because I thought it was funny that PMC can stand for both “Professional Managerial Class” and “Post Malone Country,” and I’m not giving up on the bit now, especially when so many of Liu’s critiques of the regular PMC can be applied to Mr. Too Damn Postfessional himself. 

Such as how theirs is “a world of floating signifiers, statistics, analytics, projections, predictions and identity performativity, virtue signaling, and affectual production.” Is Post Malone’s chameleonic relationship to genre not a function of his ability to navigate a sea of bobbing identities, symbols, and vibes, pointing his sails where streaming data indicates he might find treasure, and ultimately signaling to those he finds there that he has, in fact, been one of them all along?

Or how, as Liu adds, “In a viciously competitive market environment, [the PMC] have abandoned once cherished professional standards of research while fetishizing transgression, or better yet, the performance of transgression.” Post Malone was transparent in his rejection of the concept of authenticity in hip-hop, instead racking up face tattoos and rap-singing about shooting people all the while disarming one industry suit and media apparatchik after another with his easygoing personality. 

And yet, there is a key difference between the true PMC and the Postfessional Malonogerial Class, which as we have established, is made up of one person (Post Malone). 

Namely, Post Malone believes some truly batshit stuff. While most of the time interviewers let it slide, his unconventional views on the nature of societal collapse (namely, that it is coming in our lifetimes) places him very much outside of the realm of acceptable PMC thought.

But if you’re someone like Post Malone, who came of age in a post-2008 economic landscape, a world in which power openly admitted that it was less interested in reality as it existed and instead acting in order to will new realities into being, why the fuck would you think otherwise? Especially considering that instead of going to college and reading books for four years, Post Malone became a famous musician, entering a world in which he was the direct beneficiary of the cultural form of reality-making, where someone makes a thing and then acts as the front-person for an enormous engine dedicated to telling a story about that thing, which in turn causes people to buy it.

It’s less important whether or not Post Malone actually went to Nashville to record this album, actually wrote songs at a dive bar with Luke Combs and then recorded them with studio session kings, actually loves George Strait as much as he loves DJ Screw or whoever, as much as the idea that he did these things. If he’d done the same process but had sworn everyone involved to perpetual secrecy, F-1 Trillion would have made absolutely no sense. So him going to Nashville, hat in hand, respectfully seeking acceptance by this parallel music industry, becomes the story. We are intrigued by the conflict, and in our minds, it can only be resolved by listening to his above-average country record. What in this person’s life experiences would not prime him to be open to the notion that people in power were lying to him at all times?

I know a lot of people who can do a lot of things, but when it comes to someone who can convince me otherwise, I ain’t got a guy for that. 

HIGH-LEVEL TAKEAWAY: Post Malone should pay a dollar to read the posts on Media Events. 

*Not to be confused with “country rap tunes,” a term coined by Pimp C that refers to a very specific strain of Southern hip-hop. 

**I’m skipping a bunch of steps here, but shouts out Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” and Lil Tracy’s “Like a Farmer” for helping blaze the trail.