Post Malone's winding country road

Only a few months after Post Malone unveiled his debut single, “ White Iverson ,” in 2015, the Texas-raised rap upstart was already mapping out his honky-tonk future. Though he’d presented himself in his breakthrough moment as a swaggin’, saucin’, ballin’ adopter of the spoils-obsessed melodic hip-hop surfacing on SoundCloud, an all-caps tweet from that spring found him setting a course for different territory: “WHEN I TURN 30 IM BECOMING A COUNTRY/FOLK SINGER.”

There was already a marked disconnect between what Post presented to the world and how he saw himself. The music he was making prior to his breakthrough was a dead giveaway, leaning into the rootsy aspirations of a singer-songwriter and guitarist obsessed with Bob Dylan and Hank Williams, the revelation of which fueled accusations that he was a hip-hop opportunist. As packaging, “white rapper” has frequently been a fast track to commercial viability, but even then there were signs that the artist was wielding that expediency in service of a very specific course to stardom, one that might not have been available to him as a run-of-the-mill folksinging Texan. “The old country singers, they were badass, they were the American badass people,” he told The Fader that year when asked about his role in the rap ecosystem, the sideways response indicating that he’d set his goalposts on a different field. This week, the 29-year-old crosses into the endzone a year earlier than he predicted, completing his country transformation with the new album F-1 Trillion .

On the face of things, there’s a sizeable gulf between the Post Malone of “White Iverson” and the one who recently shut down Broadway in Nashville shooting the video for “ Guy for That ,” lipsynching alongside Luke Combs in the bed of a moving 18-wheeler: He’s undone the cornrows, stripped off the chains and unlaced the Jays, opting instead for a mesh trucker hat, cowboy boots and a wooly beard, and exchanging the Bentley for something more blue-collar. In the same way, his decade-long graduation from SoundCloud rapper to diamond plaque collector to All-American mainstay arm-in-arm with some of country music’s most prominent stars can read from afar as chaotic harmony, a series of drastic and unlikely reinventions that somehow resolved into steady upward progress. But zoom in a bit, and it becomes clear that he’s mapped this trajectory with care, and that his seeming big swings are better understood as myriad baby steps, gingerly evading the strictures of authenticity. That’s not to say there haven’t been plenty of lucky breaks on the path to his rhinestone makeover. But if a young Austin Post saw rap as his ticket to the Top 40 all those years ago, it was becoming a pop star that truly made his country dream a reality.

Though country seemed to be calling out to Post from the start, the path didn’t reveal itself right away. A rap career presented itself first in Los Angeles, after an adolescence spent in high-school hardcore bands. He first learned to make beats from his friend Jason Stokes, the YouTuber MinecraftUniverse, and they started a rap duo together in Grapevine, Texas, which Post initially hid from his parents. “I don't want to say I was mad, but I was mad,” his father told the Dallas Observer in a 2016 profile, saying he worried right away how the inevitable “culture vulture” pushback to his son’s rap turn might affect his state of mind: “All the things you think of with a kid like Austin, with his demographic, those things go through a dad's head with the challenges he's going to face.” Stokes invited Post to live in a gated San Fernando mansion dubbed The White House, and Post abandoned his first semester at college to start recording there. Being around other aspiring artists led him to the Atlanta producer FKi 1st, whom he convinced to move to LA full time and live at The White House. They recorded “White Iverson” on a whim; it had a million plays in six days. But the internet giveth and taketh away, and he quickly found his feet to the fire for a digital footprint that made him seem like a hobbyist at best and a raider at worst. Addressing his controversial image — which included resurfaced video of him using the N-word — he claimed to be drawing from a single wellspring: “Hip-hop and country aren't too far different,” he said. “They got shiny suits and the boots and the guitars with their names on it. I was infatuated with that type of stuff."

Despite benefiting from the optics of a white kid pantomiming Blackness, Post was reluctant to commit to rap in name. “I'm not a rapper,” he told the Observer . “It’s music instead of a genre.” His refusal to stop and consider the way his early music was coded often came off as ignorance, even if many artists — rappers especially — are wary of strict genre labels. In truth, there was something to what he was saying: He had a knack for hooks that suggested a studied pop songcraft, and even his debut mixtape, August 26 , hinted at a genreless ambition, interpolating Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” into the intro for the nightmare trap of “ Comedown .” In the 2017 hit “ Congratulations ,” from his debut album, Stoney , you can hear an increasing refinement to his droned, blotting vocals and the way he deploys them, and hints of a core style shifting away from his early posturing.

Questions about genre identity and its relationship to appropriation and authenticity have followed Post throughout his career. In 2016, XXL editor-in-chief Vanessa Satten said that while considering Post for their annual Freshman cover feature, she was “told by his camp that he wasn't paying attention to hip-hop so much. He was going into more of a rock / pop / country direction.” Post denied the claim, but his immediate trajectory told a different story. By 2017’s Beerbongs & Bentleys , he had already begun to make his move away from trap. FKi 1st, whose fingerprints were all over Stoney , did not appear on it at all. Even the binary of the title suggested a new aesthetic juxtaposition. It has never felt like a coincidence that the album’s lead single was “ Rockstar ,” or that the riffy, crooned “ Better Now ” nudged him closer to pop’s center (country gal turned pop supernova Taylor Swift once admitted she was jealous of the hook).

He had already taken a sideways stance on hip-hop’s utility in an interview that year , drawing ire for comments about what he perceived as a lack of depth in rap music: “If you’re looking for lyrics, if you’re looking to cry, if you're looking to think about life, don't listen to hip-hop,” he said. “Whenever I want to sit down and have a nice cry, I'll listen to some Bob Dylan,” indirectly drawing a line back to the Dylan covers he uploaded to YouTube as Austin Richard before he was famous. He’d later walk the comments back, but not before doubling down: “What I was trying to say is that a lot of people, except for a handful of artists, are saying the same s***, they’re not saying anything super meaningful.” Post has spent the rest of his albums — the most recent of which was simply titled Austin , a time-honored gesture at realism and legitimacy — inching away from “rapper” and toward a more ambiguous stardom. The songs of his Diamond Collection compilation, which gathers all eight of his singles to achieve the coveted RIAA certification, display an artist finding his way back to neutral ground: from the trap imitations of “White Iverson” and “Congratulations” through the mainstreamer moves of “ Psycho ” and “ Sunflower ” to the soft rock of “ Circles ” and “ Chemical .”

As for his country swing, there have been signposts throughout the Post run signaling its eventual arrival. In a ViceCanada video from 2017, he explained why he loved the music, again comparing the swag to rap’s and planting the seed: “Later down the line, I might make a country album.” In 2018, Post took over Nashville’s Exit/In club as part of Bud Light’s “Dive Bar Tour.” That same year, he joined Dwight Yoakam on his newly debuted SiriusXM radio channel to perform a duet of the latter’s “A Thousand Miles from Nowhere.” At a tribute for Elvis Presley in 2019, he performed alongside Blake Shelton and Keith Urban. For the “We’re Texas” benefit concert held by Matthew and Camila McConaughey in 2021, he was joined by Yoakam‘s band for renditions of his country favorites, like Brad Paisley’s “I’m Gonna Miss Her” and Sturgill Simpson’s “You Can Have the Crown.”

Throughout the 2020s, Post has seemed to ingratiate himself with the heavy hitters in that corner of the industry, in a way that came to feel like a political candidate gladhanding important donors on the campaign trail. He took Kane Brown out for a night on the town in Nashville, and introduced Carrie Underwood to his mom. Sturgill Simpson expressed a desire to produce a Post Malone album of live instrumentation, in the caption of a video in which he’d covered Post’s Spider-Verse hit “Sunflower.” In 2022, Post dueted with Billy Strings, played beer pong with Randy Travis and connected with Luke Bryan and Wynonna Judd at his Nashville show. “Music has no boundaries,” Judd tweeted. “Post Malone and the Country Music Hall of Fame in one day.” She didn’t know how right she was. Last year, Post seemed be in soft-launch mode, guesting on Noah Kahan’s “Dial Drunk” and performing a Joe Diffie medley with Morgan Wallen and Hardy at the CMAs . By November he made it official: “Country record is coming,” he announced on Twitch. “We made such sick music down in Nashville.”

That Paisley and Wallen and Combs and Dolly and Strings and Shelton and Hardy all appear on F-1 Trillion feels like culmination of long-term aspirations and careful wrangling efforts. Drinking too much and being in dysfunctional relationships have been calling cards in his music since Stoney , and there has been an outlaw sensibility lingering beneath the rap flexer all along, but on songs like “ I Had Some Help ” and “ Pour Me a Drink ” he is emboldened by partnership, invoking a different kind of street cred. That establishment backing was perhaps the only way, after years rolling around in Bentleys, to make the switch to singing about working 40 hours and “breaking my back just keepin’ up with the Joneses” without sounding eye-rollingly out of touch — a trick he might have learned from having his intentions questioned in hip-hop so often.

Beyond Post’s individual efforts, the stars have aligned for F-1 Trillion : If there ever were a time to make the move, it’d be now. Rap and country have been shuffling closer together ever since Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus took those horses to the old town road, but 2024 has been defined by the country crossover. Morgan Wallen’s rap-inflected pop continued its domination thanks to One Thing at a Time . Beyoncé staked her claim to the music and its history, with “Texas Hold ‘Em” topping the Hot 100 and the Hot Country chart earlier this year, before Cowboy Carter flipped tradition inside out (with an assist from Post for good measure on “Levii’s Jeans”). And the alt-country riser Shaboozey has taken over the airwaves with “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” interpolating a lost rap hit from 2004 . If Post were truly genreless, this would be an ideal moment to push his chosen styles even closer together, mashing them up in a way that strips both of their usual conceits, but the album’s pre-release singles have charted a course for straight-ahead Nashville reverence. For all the talk of bold reinvention that has accompanied this move, there is an inherent safety in its execution.

It’s worth noting that Post, like Wallen, has benefited from crossing a boundary that has generally been more porous on one side than the other, in large part because of how genres are often policed along racial lines. Combs’ “Fast Car” breakthrough brought country music’s black-and-white gatekeeping back into view, while Post was embraced at the CMAs in a way that Beyoncé, in the moment that became Cowboy Carter ’s origin story, was not. Some of that is a result of timing, but it’s also clear that Post’s outsider status has mostly not been weaponized against him, and in fact has helped him build momentum. Part of his success in this moment feels linked to an underlying idea that he is coming home where he belongs: There is a sense of redemption in transitioning from goofball white rapper to down-home country musician that those in the latter camp might find easy to root for.

Even before “eras” became a buzzword, pop music has always been about reinvention, a near-constant act of roleplaying that has often required genre performance of one kind or another. A generous reading of the Post Malone arc might offer that fluidity in artistic practice allows for both greater creativity and more costumes for the entertainer — and in this context, you could look at his embrace of country as merely another performance. There is another reading, supported by his early comments, that suggests this is the artist that he wanted to be all along: the American badass, Hank Williams’ long-lost kin. Post himself seems to want listeners to believe it’s both — that, just like Beyoncé, country speaks to his character as a Texan, yet it’s also something he is tapping into as a free-flowing artist following his whims. That duality is the ultimate payoff for a rare talent maybe he alone in pop possesses: actualizing a self-concept that uses the signals of authenticity to transcend actually being anything in particular.

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