Post Malone Is Paying His Country Dues, but He Leaves Behind Other Debts
On F-1 Trillion, the rapper-singer heads full speed for Nashville, but he still hasn’t found an identity of his own.
Post Malone at CMA Fest 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee. Photo by Brett Carlsen/Getty Images for Spotify
In the 1997 romp Spice World, a producer commends the Spice Girls on their run-through of a song by saying, “That was absolutely perfect—without being actually any good.” There, it was an ironic dig about how little the girl-power-peddling Brit quintet cared about the no-fun opinions of supposed experts. But when the line popped into my mind this weekend while I was listening to Post Malone’s long-anticipated country crossover album F-1 Trillion, it was less as punchline than as straight description.
I say that even though I genuinely like almost half the songs here. Which is a lot, considering the album had 18 tracks when it was released at midnight Friday and then picked up nine more when an extended F-1 Trillion: Long Bed version dropped later that morning. As an exercise in country crossover from a shapeshifting rapper-singer usually described in the past as hip-hop–adjacent, F-1 Trillion is kind of a master class. The album is loaded with Nashville A-listers of multiple generations as guests, from Dolly Parton through Tim McGraw to Jelly Roll. The songs were cooked up in Music Row writing rooms by clusters of veteran country hitmakers alongside Malone and his longtime production hands Louis Bell and Charlie Handsome. The fingers on these fiddles and pedal steels belong to some of the most venerable session players in the genre.
But I draw something of a blank when I ask what it’s all for; what mark of distinction this collection has to add to country music or human existence in general.
Not that the album needs approval from critics like me, not anywhere near the way it’s thirsty for Nashville’s. F-1 Trillion was a certified crossover success even before it came out, given that its lead single “I Had Some Help,” featuring Morgan Wallen, since it came out in May has become not only the year’s most successful country song, but the biggest song of the summer, and possibly of all of 2024. (It’s his sixth No. 1 single since his 2015 debut.) Of course, if your song of the summer is by Chappell Roan or Sabrina Carpenter or, especially in this context, Shaboozey, don’t sweat the stats. But by the numbers, Posty is first past the post. The two subsequent singles, “Pour Me a Drink” with Blake Shelton and “Guy for That” with Luke Combs, weren’t smashes on the same level, but they each made the Top 20. (I’d vote no on the Shelton track and yes on Combs, but I knew that before I heard either one.)
I don’t think Posty’s a phony opportunist. He’s not jumping aboard this hayride just because, as I documented for Slate this spring, country’s cool again. The boy born Austin Post grew up near Dallas, listening to country as much as other genres, like other children of the downloading and streaming age but perhaps even more so given that his dad was a part-time DJ. His stylistic sponginess is his calling card, as he’s moseyed from trap beats to downtempo grooves to rock guitars, and country’s seldom left the mix. As far back as 2015, he tweeted, “WHEN I TURN 30 IM BECOMING A COUNTRY/FOLK SINGER.” Since then he’s reinforced the point many times over, and demonstrated he knows and can truly sing the music. (Check him out performing Brad Paisley and Sturgill Simpson songs in 2021.) F-1 Trillion may be arriving in the middle of the country moment, but for Post it’s a year ahead of schedule: Last month he turned 29.
If anything, the naturalness with which he takes to country throws more shade on his hip-hop past. The ease with which he’s walking away from that genre in a period of what feels like somewhat turbulent generational and stylistic transition is simply not available to everybody. Many Black singers and songwriters who’ve devoted their entire careers to trying to get a foothold in Nashville don’t get anything like the welcome that Malone does. That’s also a reminder that earlier in his career, he often seemed at best dimly aware and at worst belligerently defensive about his position as a white artist in an art form originated and defined by Black artists.
Granted, he’s clearly grown up a lot from the ignorant, video game–numbed kid spending his new fortunes loading up on guns in his 2017 Rolling Stone profile. Practically everyone in music now gushes about what a massively likeable, polite guy he is—it’s not just his musical flexibility but his status as a primo hang that seems to prompt artists from Beyoncé to Taylor Swift (on “Fortnight,” another of the biggest hits of the year) to Noah Kahan to feature him on their songs, and no doubt that’s also part of why so many country stars lend their talents here.
He’s also become a father, the inspiration for possibly the least appealing song on F-1 Trillion, “Yours.” Addressed to his daughter’s imaginary future husband almost as if the guy were a romantic rival, it serves a degree of daddy-daughter possessive ick rarely seen since Bob Carlisle’s 1997 embarrassment “Butterfly Kisses.” Before this one was set loose, someone should have looked at the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend satire of this subgenre, “I Love My Daughter (but Not in a Creepy Way).” Congrats to Posty, I suppose, on going so authentically country that he even mirrors some of its worst tendencies.
Along with that newfound maturity, no doubt his memories of being called a “culture vulture” in the past led to the careful way Malone has ingratiated himself with Nashville, which has led in turn to him being touted by eminences like Vince Gill at the Grand Ole Opry and other country institutions. But I still don’t see him expending any of that cultural capital on anybody but Post Malone. Many of his early successes hinged on co-signs from Black artists, and part of his transition into country this year was his appearance on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter album (which also featured Shaboozey). But every one of the 14 guest stars on F-1 Trillion is white.
On message boards and other forums, I see Nashville insiders talking warmly about how “humbly” Malone has come to the music, particularly compared to Beyoncé. They seem to forget that part of the reason Beyoncé made a country album in the first place (aside from honoring her own Texan origins) was that she’d been humiliated by racist reactions to her appearance performing “Daddy Lessons” with the Chicks at the 2016 Country Music Association Awards. Sometimes it’s Nashville that needs a dose of humility, not the other way round.
Not always, of course. Both hip-hop and country have reasons to be wary about the borders of their communities, after decades of being maligned for reasons of class, race, region, and social niceties—often by the same people, the kinds who declare their open-mindedness by saying they like “everything but rap and country.” (The punk-rock equivalent of the Onion, the Hard Times, once nailed the subtext by rephrasing it as “I like everything but rap, country, and poor people.”) Particularly since the rise of Southern rap, the two genres have had more and more aspects and listeners in common, and crosspollinations have become more frequent. There are probably few country artists under 40 who didn’t also grow up listening to hip-hop. (I’m convinced that’s the main reason Wallen, like a teenage Malone many years back, was caught on video using the N-word with a soft “a” with friends—they were each ignorantly posturing in imitation of what sounded cool in songs and other media.)
Add the way technology is making genres more porous in general, and everyone is going to have to adjust their standards for what counts as “culture vulture” appropriation or fakery. Hybridization has always been a prime engine of American (and global) culture, but now more than ever, the question needs to become less about what you take than about what you give back in return—both financially and creatively.
F-1 Trillion—its title itself joking about the aspirational material fantasies that hip-hop and country share, by conjuring up an ultraluxe pickup truck—finds Post Malone frantically paying his country dues while ignoring his outstanding debts elsewhere. Guest list aside, this is to the album’s musical detriment in other ways. On almost every track, the producers strive so diligently for genuine country styles that there’s little room for any recognizably Postian sonics. By overloading the album with duets in order to prove Posty’s bona fides, they suck away any space for him to establish a country voice of his own.
Instead, over and over, beginning with McGraw on opening track “Wrong Ones,” Malone sounds fine for the first while but then is shown up completely when the more steeped and practiced country singer comes in. Regardless of the quality of the songs, I’m often left thinking we’d have been better off if the guest had just handled the whole thing. That’s particularly true with the older singers, such as McGraw, Hank Williams Jr. (now 75 but still sounding more robust than Malone here), Paisley, and Shelton. And unfortunately, they’re all frontloaded to the top of the album.
The exception is Parton on “Have the Heart,” a flirty duet that wants to smooth away the five-decade age difference between the singers, but instead ends up exaggerating it by inexplicably applying Malone’s signature Auto-Tuned warble (generally used sparingly here) to Parton’s voice, producing less a vibrato than a tremor verging on collapse. The result is Harold and Maude cosplay unflattering to all sides. Come to think of it, Beyoncé’s encounter with Parton on Cowboy Carter is one of that album’s weakest points too—maybe Dolly in 2024 is just too overcharged an element to mess around with.
Malone does better with performers closer to his age, Wallen first among them, of course—“I Had Some Help” may be nothing profound, but its relatable recap of blame games amid romantic rubble is so propulsive and expertly crafted that you want to ride the ride again and again. Combs and Malone also mesh well, though we probably didn’t need to hear from him twice—the trick of “Guy for That” is that while Combs sounds like the kind of guy who “has a guy” for everything and Malone doesn’t, Malone has become “the guy” other artists call on for his ineffable special sauce, so there’s a kind of meta symmetry. But on the heartache ballad “Missin’ You Like This,” it again becomes unclear what Malone is doing that Combs couldn’t do better on his own. It suffers especially by following a similarly themed slow one, “Never Love You Again,” which is one of the best songs on the album, sung in harmony with Sierra Ferrell (though Ferrell deserved to get at least a verse to herself).
Malone should be at his best with the handful of edgier artists here who got country warmed up for the likes of him, especially his fellow face-tattooed former rapper, Jelly Roll. Unfortunately, their combo on “Losers” is too much of an obvious thing; it’s the kind of outsider anthem Jelly Roll’s done umpteen times before, and better. The album doesn’t really get dirtbag country right until its third try, “Hide My Gun” with Hardy (or fourth, if you also count the well-performed but abysmally written Southern-rock workout “California Sober,” with Chris Stapleton).
Dealing with these variable dynamics through a full 15 duets is so draining that the official album’s mere three solo numbers don’t stand a chance, especially when one is that intolerable closer, “Yours.” By then it’s been so long since I’ve heard the other two that I’ve forgotten them. Instead I’m left wondering why “chameleonic” is a compliment when applied to some artists and dismissive when used for others. When it’s David Bowie, André 3000, Beyoncé, or, closer to Post Malone’s situation (including sometimes accusations of culture vulturism), Billie Eilish, there’s a force of personality that might be tinted but never occluded by whatever styles they move through. With someone like Post Malone, or Ed Sheeran (whom I’ve called the tofu of pop), the generalized affability risks becoming unlimited assimilability, leaving the listener little sense of a person behind the curtain. It’s almost as if they’d been sent to prepare the way for the coming age of A.I. music.
In this sense, the “perfect but no good” joke might just rebound on me. Because, like a fool, I’ve been talking as if F-1 Trillion were actually an album, when Post Malone has always been a post-Drake, post-Future master of the playlist era. Treat this record not as an overlong unified statement but as a closetful of separates from which to mix and match outfits, and it makes a lot more sense. In fact, its best punchline might be that the “bonus disc,” the Long Bed version—which I greeted with initial dread, reminded of Taylor Swift’s superfluous “double album” drop after Tortured Poets Department came out—is the more coherent, possibly better, and certainly more traditional “album” here.
It’s all solo, giving Malone time at last to develop his own country persona, which turns out to be almost like some lost mid-1990s country-radio crooner. At least six of the nine tracks are keepers. Some are even surprising, like the Western-swing number “Who Needs You” with the great Larry Franklin on fiddle. Or the moment on the honky-tonk “Go to Hell” when he sings “she’s a full mason jar of white lightnin’ ” and gives his voice a little hiccup in honor of George Jones. But it’s not all trad tributes. “Ain’t How It Ends” is like what country might have become if it had followed Taylor Swift’s stylistic lead instead of lapsing into the tropes of bro country in the 2010s. Its hook even has a very Taylor-esque, fourth-wall-breaking wink, as the song runs through the possibilities of its couple reconciling, but then sighs that “There’s no comin’ back/ ’Cuz baby, that ain’t how it ends—in a country song.”
Still, the way those bonus tracks are packaged, Long Bed reads as just an afterthought an hour deep into the album. So how does Post Malone’s country song end? With a long life in Nashville (or Texas, as the final track hints), a quick bow and backtrack into the pop mainstream, or a series of further sidelines into emo-folk, doom-metal, or Tin Pan Alley standards (seriously, the jazz harmonics on “Who Needs You” make it plausible)? For a person with a face tattoo, Austin Post has quite an abundance of career options. But I don’t see them lasting long if he doesn’t start imbuing them with some actual stakes. One might even say, more spice.
