“Wait, bud light made a seltzer,” said Post Malone, standing in a convenience store in South Los Angeles. He frowned. “Wait, Bud Light made a seltzer,” he said again, quieter. “Wait, Bud Light made a seltzer?” Louder, now: “Wait, Bud Light made a seltzer!”
It was five o'clock somewhere, but not in L.A., not that Post would have cared. Anyway, the store was fake: Post was on set, running lines for a commercial being filmed—amid military secrecy—for the Super Bowl. Post Malone has been hawking Bud Light since 2017, and drinking it for a good deal longer than that, and so Anheuser-Busch InBev had chosen him to help announce its newest product, Bud Light Seltzer: a watery beverage for people who find Bud Light too beery. Designers had converted an auto-body shop into a fake convenience store, which looked just like the real thing, except that all the brand names on the shelves were fictitious, besides Bud Light.
When Post was finally dismissed for a lunch break, he ambled out into the parking lot, which was surrounded by a fence that had been comprehensively tarped, for privacy. Post Malone is taller and more imposing than many people might expect, and he gained a few extra inches from the rich brown cowboy boots he was wearing. In conversation (as in song) he exudes a warm, stoney charisma. He found a seat on a cooler and dug into a pack of Camel cigarettes, paying little attention to the spread of cheesesteaks and fried-chicken sandwiches that had been brought in. The shoot was going well. “It's easy, because I don't have a lot of lines to memorize,” he said, smiling. He doesn't love delivering dialogue, especially in front of a group. “I'm shy,” he said.
Post Malone knows that he is not generally perceived as shy, and not just because he is one of the most popular musicians in the world. In the past few years, pretty much no one has been more consistent in making blockbuster hits: “Rockstar” and “Sunflower” and “Circles” and fistfuls more. Spotify named him the most streamed artist of 2019, and according to Nielsen, his 2019 album, Hollywood's Bleeding, was the most-listened-to album of the year, though it only arrived in September. Even as his music dominates the planet, Post Malone cultivates a gregarious image. He is only 24, and he has reacted to success with amusement and amazement while taking care to reassure fans that he hasn't lost his taste for cheap thrills, now that he can afford expensive ones. Along with Bud Light, his sponsors have included Crocs, which has created limited-edition Post-branded clogs, and Doritos, which used Post Malone to help publicize its Flamin' Hot Limón chips. (He renamed himself Post Limón for the occasion.) He is now a global celebrity, but Post Malone still acts like an interloper in this exclusive club, wandering through A-list parties with heavy eyelids and a sheepish smile.
In the abstract, Post Malone's music might seem obnoxious. He takes hip-hop bravado and turns it into suburban pop, a white guy with a face full of tattoos singing lyrics about treacherous exes and small-minded critics: They was never friendly, yeah / Now I'm jumping out the Bentley. But even skeptics have discovered, over the past few years, that he is surprisingly hard to hate. His albums have received increasingly respectful reviews: Rolling Stone called Beerbongs & Bentleys, his 2018 album, “an ouroboros of new-money narcissism” (rating: two stars out of five); but last year, the magazine wrote that Hollywood's Bleeding showed “his gift for turning dreamy darkness into Top 40 gold” (rating: four stars out of five). Indeed, just about every song in his catalog has a melancholy streak, which is part of what makes it so easy to root for him. And he is resolutely unpretentious, with a tendency to refer to his music as “shitty.” When pressed on this self-assessment, he concedes, eventually, that it is inaccurate. “I don't think my songs are shitty,” he says. “I worked real hard on them. But I think that's a way for me to say, ‘Not everybody's going to like your shit, and there's a lot of people who don't like your shit, and it's okay.’ ” He laughs. “A little self-deprecation goes a long way,” he says.
In the Bud Light commercial, Post was allowed—in fact, obliged—to be himself: He played Post Malone, a thirsty superstar trying to decide what to drink. The shoot stretched on into the night, and Post, who was operating on about two hours of sleep, tried to stay focused during the short camera segments, and during the long breaks in between.
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Post Malone's first album was called Stoney, which was what some of his friends used to call him, but he says he quit smoking marijuana after a pot-induced anxiety attack that never completely subsided. The first line of the first song on Stoney goes: I done drank codeine from a broken whiskey glass. He says that his diet has changed since then—he now likes to consume nothing stronger than alcohol. And, it sometimes seems, nothing weaker. By the time Post Malone arrived at that auto-body shop, in December, he was near the beginning of a two-month break from touring, and enjoying what he described, fondly, as a “rough” fortnight in L.A. “There was not a second of not-inebriation,” he said. “And I couldn't sleep, so I'd get hammered and stay up till fuckin' 3 p.m.” He managed to be charming on-camera, despite the schedule. And by the time the shoot wrapped, sometime around midnight, Post's day was just beginning—he disappeared into the Los Angeles night, ready to find something to celebrate.
Post Malone was still celebrating a few weeks later, when he arrived in New York. He was one of the marquee attractions on New Year's Rockin' Eve, the Times Square celebration that is now hosted, on ABC, by Ryan Seacrest. Near his hotel, he was set upon by a TMZ cameraman, who broke the news that Post had added to his face-tattoo collection: a ball-and-chain flail, covering much of his right cheek. (“Since I was a kid, I've always been obsessed with knights and medieval times and ancient Egypt and ancient Rome and shit like that,” he says.) As the New Year approached, he took the stage, singing a pair of his biggest hits, “Circles” and then “Congratulations,” which was punctuated by an explosion of silver confetti. Viewers at home didn't see the moment when Post fell into the gap between the stage and the crowd and had to be rescued by security; he smiled the whole time. Post wasn't tired yet, nor was he tired by the time the city's bars closed, so he met up with his friends from Beach Fossils, an indie band he loves. A friend of theirs had a bar that was willing to host a private party, which turned into an impromptu karaoke session as the sun rose. (Post did a credible version of “Walk,” the legendarily aggro Pantera track, as well as some 2000s country chestnuts.) “Just a couple boys, fuckin' throwin' back drinks, listening to some records,” he said. “No debauchery.”
Post's touring break took him to Las Vegas (“I lost so much money”) and then, on a whim, to Japan, with the songwriter Brian Lee. As one of the music industry's most reliable hitmakers, Post is surrounded by a number of industry professionals, not all of whom knew in advance about his trip abroad, which functioned as both a restorative vacation and a wildcat strike. “I love everybody that I'm around,” he said. “But leave me the fuck alone sometimes, you know? That's the difficult part of being in this situation: You don't have a moment to yourself.” Not long after he arrived in Japan, he posted a disconcerting picture of himself staring into a camera lens, eyes watery, with a tear just above his mustache. The caption was either a canny bit of brand placement or a minor act of corporate sabotage or somehow both: “bud light baptism,” it said.
When Post Malone finally stopped to catch his breath, after his intercontinental trip, he was in Utah, in a grand and angular mountainside house that has been his hideaway for the past two years—a few hours by airplane from L.A., though it feels much farther. On a gray afternoon, he rolled out of bed around dinnertime, wearing white long johns and a Dallas Cowboys jersey (No. 55, Leighton Vander Esch). In theory Utah is where Post goes when he needs some time to himself, although in practice he is rarely alone; on this day there was a small group of people working quietly on various household tasks, including Post's father, Rich Post, a garrulous guy with impressive muttonchops, who seems to have transmitted both his obsession with music and his easy self-confidence to his son.
Post's real name is Austin Richard Post, and he was raised around Syracuse, New York, where his parents lived, separately. Post says that he was a musical omnivore from a young age, happily listening to Guns N' Roses, George Strait, and Jay-Z on his dad's iPod. The first two albums Post loved were a motorcycle-themed compilation (songs like “Magic Carpet Ride,” by Steppenwolf) and True Story, the album by Fat Joe and the Terror Squad, which contained “Lean Back,” the hip-hop hit. As a boy, Post was sometimes summoned to the living room to amuse his father's friends with the “Lean Back” dance. On his own, Post mastered Guitar Hero and eventually got his mother to buy him a real guitar. When Rich Post got a job as a concessions executive with the Dallas Cowboys, he moved to the Dallas area with his son, who eventually fell in with the local metalcore scene, led by bands like Crown the Empire. Post played guitar in a shouty band while using hacked software to produce beats and rap over them. By the time he graduated from high school, in 2013, he was starting to think that he might be able to scrape together a music career, so he soon moved to L.A. with a friend who was having some success streaming video games online.
One of the people Post met in L.A. was Dre London, an emerging music executive from the U.K., who was impressed by Post's balling-on-a-budget swagger (he once spent an entire $900 paycheck on a pair of Versace slippers) and his versatility: Hanging around his shared house in Encino, Post might start the evening rapping and end it strumming an acoustic guitar, singing love songs. Dre signed on as a manager and has been guiding Post's career ever since. “I always told people in the beginning,” Dre says, “that Post is hip-hop but he's not a rapper.”
In the early years, not everyone was inclined to make that subtle distinction. Post Malone broke through in 2015 with “White Iverson.” He uploaded it to SoundCloud one night and then went to bed, thinking it might accumulate a few dozen views overnight. “I woke up, it had—I don't remember if it was 7,000 or 30,000,” he recalls. “I sat at that computer all fuckin' day, smoking weed, drinking, watching that shit going up. And I was like, ‘This is so fuckin’ awesome, dude!' That was, like, one of the best days of my life.” In the video, which arrived a few months later, Post squatted in front of a borrowed Rolls-Royce, trying to speak prosperity into existence. The beat was hypnotic, and there was also something hypnotic about the soft and mournful way he murmured the words, as if he had accidentally been handed the lyric sheet to a different and much rowdier song: When I started ballin', I was young / You gon' think about me when I'm gone / I need that money like the ring I never won. (By then Allen Iverson had been out of the NBA for five years; some younger listeners probably had no idea what an “Iverson” was.) At the time, SoundCloud and other outlets were clogged with mysterious upstarts specializing in hazy vocals; Post Malone might have seemed like just another sing-rapper, alongside Lil Yachty and Spooky Black and iLoveMakonnen and Yung Lean.
Even now, it is not hard to imagine a different history: one in which Post Malone tried and failed to recapture the success of his first hit, and went down in history as a one-hit wonder—that “White Iverson” guy. (In fact, one of the songs he released in the wake of “White Iverson” was “Monta,” in which he compared himself to a different basketball player, Monta Ellis.) By the time Stoney arrived, at the end of 2016, it seemed as if the music world might have moved on. No song did more to save Post from his fate as the guy with the basketball song than “Congratulations,” featuring Quavo, from Migos. The song started to find an audience early in 2017, and kept growing, becoming one of that year's biggest hits. It established Post Malone as the pop-music equivalent of a universal donor. He was well versed in hip-hop but not, as Dre London realized, a rapper. He was a convivial white guy who didn't come across as a frat bro, a moody codeine sipper who didn't scare away mainstream listeners, and a teen favorite who was no one's idea of a pretty boy, least of all his own. “I'm a ugly-ass motherfucker,” he says—and he suggests that his face tattoos might be a defensive strategy. “It does maybe come from a place of insecurity, to where I don't like how I look, so I'm going to put something cool on there so I can look at myself and say, ‘You look cool, kid,’ and have a modicum of self-confidence, when it comes to my appearance.”
A casual Post Malone fan might show up to one of his concerts expecting a party. A devoted Post Malone fan would probably know better. During a recent appearance at Madison Square Garden, he arrived onstage alone: no band, no DJ, no hype man. “I need to play y'all some shitty music and get fucked-up,” he said. He is a surprisingly delicate presence onstage, dragging his toes like a dancer, and taking care to emphasize the introspection in his music. The night's most memorable special effect was an acoustic guitar (“Can I play some fuckin' guitar at MSG tonight, ladies and gentlemen?”), delivered to the stage in time for Post to accompany himself during “Stay,” a ballad that rose to No. 17 on the chart, despite never having been released as a single. “I don't want to be out there with a whole lot of dancers,” he said later. “It's personal shit.”
Like many breakthrough singles, “White Iverson” seemed like a fluke, but Post's career since then has been proof that it wasn't. Many of those hits were created with the producer and songwriter Louis Bell, who was with Post from the start and has since become a key member of his musical team. Bell has also become a sought-after producer in his own right: His recent client list includes Taylor Swift, Camila Cabello, and Lana Del Rey. But he says that Post has a singular ability to hear a beat and find a melody for it nearly instantly. “He doesn't second-guess himself,” Bell says. “I just put the track on loop for 15 minutes and have him do one long take, because he knows what he wants to do. That doesn't really work with other artists.” Post has learned not to worry about technical flaws. “You don't have to sing good,” he said. “You just gotta be fuckin' real about it. It's like David Byrne said: The better you sound, the less people will believe you.”
By calling that first hit “White Iverson,” Post was acknowledging the complicated racial dynamics that would help shape his career. He was a white guy who was enthralled with hip-hop, which means he was also enthralled with African American culture. In the video, he wore cornrows and gold teeth, not as a goof but as a form of wishcasting. Dress for the job you want, they say—and Post wanted to be a hip-hop star. This kind of transracial identification has lately fallen out of style; if Post had emerged just a few years later, the cornrows alone might have overshadowed his music. Soon after “White Iverson” exploded, Post had to contend with the emergence of a grainy video, apparently from his high school years, in which he mutters the N-word, not as an epithet but as a casual term of address, as if he were black.
Obviously, Post has apologized for having said the N-word. And just as obviously, he has declined to apologize for loving hip-hop culture enough to want to become part of it. Indeed, it seems perverse to expect young musicians, including white ones, not to be influenced by hip-hop, and not to reflect that influence in their own music, and maybe even on their own teeth. Before he was a great singer, Post was a not-so-great rapper, emulating his idols. “I so badly wanted to be like Mac [Miller] and Travis [Scott] and [A$AP] Rocky,” he says. (It is easy to forget that Post is, again, only 24; when he graduated from high school, Mac Miller and A$AP Rocky were already popular, and Travis Scott had already released “Quintana,” his breakthrough single.) “Finding my own identity in the whole thing was—I don't want to say difficult, but it was a process for me.”
Sometimes, for Post, that process meant tacking away from traditional hip-hop. He was particularly drawn to Mac Miller, a white rapper who became an early supporter and a friend before his death, by drug overdose, in 2018. Post noticed that Mac Miller made musical connections with the non-hip-hop world—one of his first hits was based on a sample of Sufjan Stevens, the indie-rock singer. “I thought that was the coolest fuckin' thing,” Post says. A popular YouTube clip from 2013 shows Post in an American-flag shirt, strumming and singing a credible version of “Don't Think Twice, It's All Right,” the Bob Dylan classic. (One of the top comments: “This must be what he does when he's home Malone.”) He still sounds like himself, especially when his voice starts to warble. Post's grainy vocal quaver, sometimes mistaken for an Auto-Tune effect, has become one of his most valuable musical tools, especially when he wants to evoke melancholy. He jokes that it makes him sound like a goat, but it also makes him sound like another of his musical idols: Conor Oberst, from the beloved emo band Bright Eyes. “Listening to him as a kid definitely inspired me,” Post says. “I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning is probably one of the saddest [albums]—I sit there, and I'm drinking and crying my fuckin' eyes out to that shit.”
Oddly enough, it was this kind of sentiment that earned Post the harshest criticism of his career. In a 2017 interview with a Polish outlet, he suggested that contemporary hip-hop lacked emotional range. “If you're looking to cry, if you're looking to think about life, you know, don't listen to hip-hop,” he said. “There's great hip-hop songs where they talk about life and they really spit that real shit, but right now, you know, there's not a lot of people talking about shit. So whenever I want to cry—whenever I want to sit down and have a nice cry—I'll listen to some, like, Bob Dylan.” The next year, in the Washington Post, the critic Jeff Weiss wrote a vituperative review of a Post Malone homecoming concert in Texas, calling him “a fake pale king sitting on a tinfoil throne,” and suggesting that Post's relationship with hip-hop was exploitative. Weiss wrote, “He can afford to feign the swagger and cool of hip-hop when it's convenient and opt out when it's time to see who's riding for the cause.” For many of Post's detractors, this is the true fear: not that he tries too hard to be hip-hop but that he is too eager to leave the genre behind, moving on to styles that he (and much of the rest of the world) perceives as more sophisticated, and more meaningful.
Post tries to be more careful now when he talks about hip-hop; he is quick to acknowledge hip-hop heroes like Young Thug, who helped expand the idea of what it means to be a rapper. But the real reason for the skepticism that Post sometimes faces has less to do with his music and more to do with the perception that white hip-hop acts have an easier time earning mainstream success than their African American counterparts. Certainly Post now outshines—and outearns—most of the figures who inspired him; in America it's often more lucrative to be White Iverson than black Iverson. In his rise to the top, Post didn't do anything more objectionable than make a bunch of notably unshitty songs, inspired by his favorite music in the world. But like any successful person in America, he now has cause to consider the history and the system that enabled his success. He admits this, although he also admits he is only now starting to think about what that might mean. “I'm 24,” he says. “It's time for me to give back and show appreciation and do whatever I can to show that I'm grateful to be able to do what I do.”
It is easy to forget just how successful Post Malone has been, especially when you are hanging out with him. One afternoon in Utah, he noticed that he was running low on Doritos and considered making a trip to restock. “I gotta go to Costco,” he said. He wandered over to his indoor garage, which contained four gleaming white cars, none of which seemed designed for a low-profile trip to a discount warehouse: a Rolls-Royce Phantom, a Lamborghini Aventador SV, a McLaren 720S Spider, and a Bugatti Chiron, which he bought last summer, for around $3 million.
He never made it to Costco, but Post loves to shop. Like most pop stars, he has an enormous closet where his footwear collection is carefully arranged: sneakers, Crocs, cowboy boots. Unlike some pop stars, he also collects firearms. Half a dozen were laid out on a bar counter, including a few rifles and a SilencerCo Maxim 9, a handgun with built-in noise suppression. He describes these weapons as toys—“grown-up Legos,” he calls them—but he is also fascinated by mayhem, and mindful of his own security. (In 2018 three men broke into a California house where Post had recently lived, shouting his name; according to TMZ, they robbed and pistol-whipped the occupant.) Post is an easygoing presence, but his music suggests a paranoid streak: He has been singing about the pitfalls of fame and riches since long before he was famous or rich. “You always see this super fuckin' hackneyed shit in the movies where the guy gets all this money and at the end of the day he's in the house all alone,” he says. “And that always struck a chord with me.”
It was getting dark in Utah, and Post, still jet-lagged from his Japan trip, was starting to wake up, assisted by plenty of Bud Light and one can of Bud Light Seltzer Mango, which he was trying for the first time. (“Wow,” he said earnestly. “This is good.”) Post talks and sings about misery so much that it sometimes sounds like shtick. At Madison Square Garden, he introduced “Goodbyes,” his ultra-emo collaboration with Young Thug, by saying, “This song is about sad times, and crying and shit, and heartbreak and shit.” But he insists that for most of his life, he has reckoned with a sadness that seemed unconnected to anything in particular. “Middle school, I would cry myself to sleep every fuckin' day,” he said. “High school, the same thing. I tried to drink some beers to get rid of that shit, but it just never goes away. And I don't think that's anybody's fault; it has to do with something predisposed in you.”
Post has decided to talk more explicitly about the importance of mental health, even as his own remains a work in progress. “I'm fuckin' crazy,” he said. “And it has exacerbated over the past years, since Stoney.” Like many musicians, he worries that if he found an effective treatment, his music might suffer. But he knows, too, the risks of self-medication. A number of his musical peers have recently died from overdoses: not just Mac Miller but also Lil Peep, in 2017, and Juice WRLD, this past December. “That could have been me,” Post said. One of his earliest singles was “Too Young,” about wanting to survive, and he has tattoos of a number of musicians who didn't, including Kurt Cobain, the rapper Bankroll Fresh, and Lil Peep himself. But when asked whether he was getting help for his own mental health problems, Post was vague. “I am, now—I'm trying,” he said. “It's difficult. Through my songs, I can talk about whatever I want. But sitting here, face-to-face, it's difficult.”
Five years ago, when Post announced his intention to become a hip-hop star, lots of people didn't take him seriously. And perhaps people don't always take him seriously now, when he talks about his chaotic life and his fitful efforts to find peace. “I wake up and I'm so sore and sluggish,” he said. “But that's the beautiful thing about music—for me at least. Something strikes a synapse and then you want to go and sit down at the fuckin' computer and make a beat, and then you make ‘White Iverson,’ or you make fuckin' anything. And that's all it takes.” He paused. “I don't know. I'm not, by far, the most inspirational dude. But if I can do it, you can do it fuckin' too.” He paused again. He wanted to acknowledge that this motivational line was not original: He was actually paraphrasing “Get Money,” by the rapper Chief Keef. But still, he sounded like he meant it.
Kelefa Sanneh is a staff writer at ‘The New Yorker.’
A version of this story appears in the Spring/Summer 2020 issue of GQ Style with the title “Post Apocalyptic.”
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Jason Nocito
Styled by Mobolaji Dawodu
Hair by Lauren Palmer-Smith using Oribe
Grooming by Sandy Ganzer for Forward Artists
Manicure by Mel Shengaris for Chanel Le Vernis
Tailoring by Yelena Travkina
Set and prop design by Julien Borno for Owl and the Elephant
Produced by Connect the Dots
Special thanks to LKQ Pick Your Part
