In 1994, the country singer Alan Jackson released a hit country song about country songs by non-country singers. Instead of criticizing these new arrivals, he just chuckled. “The whole world’s gone country,” Jackson sang, and in the video he flashed a sly smile, as if he were wondering what took ’em so long. Country music always seems to be swinging in and out of fashion, and thirty years later Jackson’s claim is truer than ever. Taylor Swift, who was a country singer before she was a pop leviathan, remains perhaps the most beloved performer in the world. Beyoncé topped the album chart with “Cowboy Carter,” which was both a tribute to country music and a critique of it; she “redefined a genre and reclaimed country music’s Black roots,” according to one fan, who also happens to be the Vice-President of the United States. Shaboozey, a Nigerian American singer who appeared on “Cowboy Carter,” has been ubiquitous this summer with “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” a twangy update of a twenty-year-old hip-hop hit. Lana Del Rey, one of the most beguiling voices in popular music, is promising to release her first country-inspired album, “Lasso,” next month. “The music business,” she said, earlier this year, is “going country.”
But this year no one has gone country more wholeheartedly, or more successfully, than Post Malone, a face-tattooed former hip-hop star who seems to make fans and friends everywhere. He appeared on both “Cowboy Carter” and the recent Taylor Swift album, “The Tortured Poets Department”—and, if you’re feeling brave, you could argue that on each album the Post Malone collaboration (respectively, “LEVII’S JEANS” and “Fortnight,” which topped the pop chart) is the highlight. Post Malone has built himself a place near the top of the pop hierarchy: his 2018 single “Sunflower” is the fifth most popular song in the history of Spotify. But his last album, “Austin,” met with a slightly more subdued reception: it was the first Post Malone album without a Top Ten hit. He arrived in country music not as a critic or a reformer but as an eager fan and student. This spring, he played covers of his favorite country songs at Stagecoach, the California country festival. And earlier this month he celebrated the release of his new album, “F-1 Trillion,” with a performance at the Grand Ole Opry, the long-running country showcase, where one of the hosts, Kelly Sutton, described him as the best kind of guest. “He’s making everybody feel so at home, because he feels so at home,” Sutton said. The album hadn’t yet been released, but Post’s Nashville makeover already looked like a success: the lead single, a playful song called “I Had Some Help,” featuring Morgan Wallen, this era’s definitive country singer, had already made it to the top of both the pop chart and the country-radio chart—an important sign that country fans were not just willing to accept Post Malone but happy to listen to him, too.
Post Malone first emerged in 2015 with a single called “White Iverson,” a boastful hip-hop track (he was comparing himself to Allen Iverson, the legendarily self-assured basketball player) with a twist: when Post declared, in the opening verse, “I got me some braids, and I got me some hos,” he didn’t rap the lyrics so much as he moaned them. That moaning voice, often enhanced with a quaver that can sound like a digital effect, helped him realize his hip-hop fantasies, but success only increased his sheepishness, and vice versa. He carried himself like a walking question mark, shoulders hunched and eyebrows raised, as if he were apologizing for his own songs, or for the questionable decisions that often seem to inspire them. Even before “F-1 Trillion,” Post was drifting away from the sounds and attitudes of hip-hop; “Austin,” his most melancholy album, included a song titled “Green Thumb,” which evoked the sort of psychedelic folk music that briefly flourished about a quarter of a century before he was born, in 1995. When he introduced himself on the Opry stage, he used his given name, Austin Richard Post, and he dressed up a bit, in a snug blazer and a cream cowboy hat, although he sounded genuinely surprised when someone in the crowd told him he looked great. “Oh! Thank you very much,” he said. “I was kind of going for, like, a Kmart George Strait.”
“F-1 Trillion” is long and shaggy, with eighteen songs, and nine more on the deluxe “Long Bed” edition; it is not a great album, but it is good fun, and sometimes more than that. The title comes from a rowdy, bluesy collaboration with Hank Williams, Jr., in which both men brag about being low-rent high rollers, driving the most extravagant Ford F-series imaginable: “My Lambo and my ammo’s all camo-green / Yeah, I got an F-1 Trillion limousine.” Fifteen of the original eighteen songs feature guest singers, and Post is a solicitous host, happy to be upstaged. “I Had Some Help,” the album’s hit single, is brisk and slick, carried along by Wallen’s distinctive rhythmic phrasing. That song, like the rest of the album, was partly written and produced by Louis Bell, Post’s main musical partner, and by Ryan Vojtesak, also known as Charlie Handsome, a hip-hop producer who worked with Post early on, and is now one of Wallen’s key collaborators; while the whole world has been going country, country has been going hip-hop, at least a little bit. When people complain that country music isn’t country music anymore, this is partly what they mean.
Post doesn’t seem inclined to choose between the various definitions of “country”: the album includes a jokey collaboration with the virtuoso bluegrass guitarist Billy Strings, a not-quite-love song with Dolly Parton, and an earnest power ballad featuring Jelly Roll, who has proved in the past few years that a face-tattooed white guy from the world of hip-hop can become a major presence on country radio. (Perhaps Post was paying attention.) In “Nosedive,” Lainey Wilson helps him turn the titular word into a musical analogy, hurtling down the scale and then pulling back up, away from trouble. It all works best when Post isn’t laying it on too thick. He is less convincing when he tries to resurrect the sound of Western swing, and more convincing when he teams up with HARDY to wrap a love song around a halfway romantic question: “Would you hide my gun?” The biggest difference is the clarity: Post was formerly known for blurry songs that evoked blurry feelings, but country listeners typically expect intelligible lyrics, coherent narratives—and, often, deliciously corny concepts. In “Guy for That,” Post and Luke Combs commiserate about how they can find someone to do just about anything (“I got a guy to sight in my rifle / My mama’s new boyfriend re-binds Bibles”), except make things right with a woman who has left.
No genre can be endlessly inclusive. When the hosts at the Opry welcomed Post by noting that he grew up partly in Texas, and was “a true Southern gentleman,” they were acknowledging that a different singer, from a different place, with a different attitude, might not have been received so warmly. Country music is a style—or, rather, a whole constellation of styles—but it is also an attitude, a community, a way of working, and a business model. Some country-inspired performers find effective ways to kick against its conventions, but Post knows a good party when he sees one, and what he mainly wants to do is join in. One of the bonus tracks, “Ain’t How It Ends,” is written from the perspective of a lovelorn guy who knows that his life has become a country cliché: “Hank and Johnny, Strait and Ronniе Dunn made all the rules / Thе girl gets gone, guy ties one on like he’s supposed to do.” It’s a sad song, but Post sounds happy enough to waste another night going with the flow. ♦
