Post Malone\u2019s been on quite the journey since he debuted a decade ago rapping over trap beats with a voice soaked in laconic charisma and Auto-Tune (a lot of Auto-Tune). He\u2019s duetted with Ozzy Osbourne, he livestreamed Nirvana covers for charity during lockdown. Now, on latest album F-1 Trillion, he\u2019s gone country, explaining the preponderance among the audience of Stetsons and cowboy boots, doubtless getting their first airing since Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s Country Carter shows here in June.<\/p>\n
Tonight, Malone ricochets with chaotic panache between rock, trap and twang, never making a big deal out of it. To create this patchwork of supposedly divergent elements in a moment when the culture war is using such divisions to break America apart, feels almost political. His hand-picked opening act \u2013 fellow chart-topping rap-to-country convert Jelly Roll \u2013 references those divisions explicitly, offering his music as \u201cmedicine\u201d and promising, on breakthrough hit I Am Not Okay, \u201cit\u2019s gonna be alright\u201d.<\/p>\n
Malone, however, isn\u2019t one for preaching. He\u2019s an entertainer, a genial, gently wasted presence who\u2019ll drag a guy from the audience to sit cross-legged beside him on a campfire reading of Stay, who\u2019ll lead the crowd in chants of \u201cOzzy! Ozzy!\u201d and do press-ups on the gangway as barrages of pyro explode around him. With his just-woke-up hair, scruffy beard, vintage Ozzy T-shirt, cigarette and polystyrene beaker always in hand, Malone\u2019s styled himself like an outlaw country shit-kicker from the 70s (albeit one with facial tattoos and platinum grills), though his music is slick and owes more to Jon Bon Jovi than Johnny Cash. If he leans too often towards power-balladry, it\u2019s because he\u2019s a genre-blind shark, hunting hooks and anthemic moments wherever he finds them.<\/p>\n
He finishes the set in a glass box above the audience, telling them they can do whatever they want if they try \u2013 that enduring American dream, one that\u2019s getting ever harder to believe in. But when it\u2019s sold by a man with a whiskey-stewed rocker\u2019s rasp that keeps slipping into the sweet, singsong melodiousness of a dancehall lothario, simply dripping dangerous, oblivious charm as he swaggers, \u201cI\u2019ve got \u2018Fuck you\u2019 money!\u201d, it\u2019s not hard to see how it seduces.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Post Malone\u2019s been on quite the journey since he debuted a decade ago rapping over trap beats with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":159920,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":["post-159919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159919"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159919\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}