Post Malone’s Country Album Has Too Much Baggage
Post Malone’s ascent to hip-hop stardom was a fast and jittery ride. In short order, he progressed from making songs in his bedroom to whiffing conversations about cultural appropriation to churning out hits whose soaring hooks beat back accusations of inauthenticity and veiled intent to use rap as a step stool to further acclaim. The beer-pong and Magic: The Gathering enthusiast’s relatable explorations of heartbreak provided the juice for wide-ranging exploits, like playing a Hootie & the Blowfish song in a Pokémon Company promotional campaign, and guesting on Beyoncé and Taylor Swift albums. But F-1 Trillion, Post Malone’s sixth album, realizes a dream he has been cradling all along. “WHEN I TURN 30 I’M BECOMING A COUNTRY/FOLK SINGER,” he tweeted in 2015. Trillion comes after a long soak in the scenery, evidenced in the now-29-year-old star’s leisurely passage of wearing Tyler Childers T-shirts to working with legends of the form. The album is a hearty slab of slick pop-country that speaks to how Post works and to the freedom of movement enjoyed in the white-male pop milieu he represents.
Post’s foray into country benefits from a string of favorable confluences: a strong year for the genre on the “Hot 100,” a mass influx of folk and Americana projects from artists not previously known for the stuff, and the restructuring of the formerly trap-happy bro-country into party rock. Trillion barrels into a genre rich with stories of dramatic changes of heart. “I wrote songs about sinning, evil women, pills, and cars,” Post reflects on “Right About You.” “I wrote songs about drinking ’til you walkеd in and raised the bar / But who am I to write rock bottom from the highs you took me to?” Workshopped with Post’s go-to producer and co-writer, Louis Bell, and Morgan Wallen collaborator Charlie Handsome (who worked on 2016’s Stoney), the new songs feature a murderers’ row of country songwriters who’ve crafted tracks for Jason Aldean, Kane Brown, and Luke Bryan, and a torrent of guest verses and co-writes from the likes of Luke Combs and Brad Paisley. Nashville house style trumps the quirks in a catalogue that has stretched from emo rap to folk- and synth-pop. Country is a vehicle for expressing a joy in the comfort of companionship; a wonderful excuse to coax a weed anthem out of Chris Stapleton and a sex jam from Dolly Parton; an outlet for a camo-cap-wearing Utah dad to wax domestic instead of counting money and problems. But Post’s reverent take on pop country ends up inheriting the subgenre’s baggage.
Like Wallen’s albums, Trillion runs longer than the versatility on hand warrants. The lyrics and melodic sensibilities feel so observant of their prospective radio format that you lose a sense of Post’s character. It’s illuminating watching him adapt to the guidelines of another genre and make a beeline for the most mathematically marketable sound. “I Had Some Help” is your quintessential up-tempo Hot Country Songs meteor, a rocker touting just enough fiddle and pedal steel to shush anxious program directors and awards juries. If you quietly slid “Pour Me a Drink” co-star Blake Shelton into the driver’s seat for this album, you wouldn’t immediately notice the pen of a guy who had great chemistry with Migos. You’d think, Blake sure loves God, Gwen, and guzzling brews. The grit implied in Post Malone’s rearview clashes with neat, sunny sounds and resolutions such that you wonder why writers like Jason Isbell, who sings from experience about logging the distance between past and present selves, or Sturgill Simpson, whose career is a miraculous rebound from a military trajectory that didn’t pan out, weren’t brought to the roomy table of assisting personnel. Post Malone knows his shit, so you have to suspect he made this album to kill two ducks with one 12-gauge, redesigning his day job to center the newfound stability in his personal life and taking a plunge he has always wanted to in the manner destined to make the most money.
F-1 Trillion: Long Bed, the quick-hit deluxe edition, tacks on nine more tracks to make an unwieldy 27 but improves the batting average by scaling down. Ditching big-name guests and reassuring outcomes for a spell, Malone offers a glimpse of the wilier, weirder album he’s capable of delivering. As with The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, lifting the veil of borderline overproduction reveals a songwriter who doesn’t need slick, suffocating structure to resonate but also highlights the deliberateness of the choice to work with the gloss elsewhere. The best genre exercises are buried the deepest. “Killed a Man” is Post’s “Turn the Page”; the warbling, lascivious “Go to Hell” braids threads of love and faith more astutely than the main album’s aggressively chipper “Devil I’ve Been.” Stick with this thing for 80 minutes, and it finally starts to feel like distinctly Texan country music, as “Who Needs You” pitches a western swing tune none of the pop artists sniffing around country would bother with. But the starting lineup of Tim McGraw, Hank Williams Jr., Morgan Wallen, and Blake Shelton collabs — steely rock stompers that set a pace only broken by ballads that manage to feel just as busy as the louder songs — sticks the album with a sluggish momentum and sameness of sound that it struggles to break. It does a disservice to gems like the gorgeous “Two Hearts,” the album’s 25th track and the rare moment Trillion eschews a lumbering arrangement. Just as frustrating is the choice to pack the album out with well-known commodities.
As intentionally as Trillion focuses on CMT Hot 20 Countdown–core, it’s also notable that most personnel involved are white and already country-famous. Why weren’t his other friends at the party? Where were Swae Lee and 21 Savage? In the world where Country Billy made a couple milli, and Solange, Beyoncé, and Lil Nas X have sparked cowboy-couture movements, it’s fascinating that Post Malone — who has spent the last five years making an increasingly pointed show of an ability to work in beat-based and acoustic situations, dropping songs with Youngboy Never Broke Again and Noah Kahan last year alone — has hatched such a regimented play. But he wouldn’t be the only person cutting a slightly more demure public image in the name of red-state infiltration this year. (Though he will likely be the only erstwhile hip-hop-chart mainstay dropping back-to-back songs with Morgan Wallen and Hank Williams Jr., who have both offended the Black communities, whose stars helped elevate Post to the notoriety required to secure these collaborations.) Some people break chains, others are better at building links. Trillion proves Post Malone’s mettle as a country-music superstar but suggests that he thinks he needs to mute certain aspects of his art to get a leg up in that field. This is both a reasonable reaction for someone who learned to compartmentalize after his early love of Future and Bob Dylan songs sussed people but also a fulfillment of detractors’ early prophecies that he’d ditch rap the moment the wind shifted. Cumbersome recent works from guests like Wallen, ERNEST, and HARDY are this album’s obvious forebears. But it’s hard not to think of Cowboy Carter, the fearlessly imperfect pivot Post appeared on this year, where an R&B-pop shape-shifter splashed through several varied and colorful permutations of country music in roughly the same amount of time Trillion spends painting everything Solo-cup red. Malone burrowed so deep into the mainstream-country songwriting machine that he came out with a sound that feels prefab and indistinct, and that’s surprising for someone whose best and worst work has always felt like a genuine extension of often diverging interests.
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