The documentary film Post Malone Is a Rockstar that accompanies the release of his second album strikes a defiant note. In among the glowing testimonies to his talent and humility from colleagues, old schoolfriends and – an unexpected move, this – a man who doesn’t seem to know who Post Malone is, there is much talk of his resilience to criticism, his bird-flipping attitude to those who “talk shit” about him.
You can see why a thick skin might be an essential character trait for Austin Richard Post. The reviews of his debut, 2016’s Stoney, weren’t so much vicious as dismissive: it was held to be the work of a one-hit wonder who never should have been allowed to make an album in the first place. It went on to sell 2m copies in the US alone, and spawn a succession of hit singles. He has weathered accusations of cultural appropriation and the opprobrium of other rappers, who possibly remember the last time a long-haired white guy with a liking for both rap and down-home American rock got big – Kid Rock – and how well that turned out for everybody.
The press, meanwhile, can’t seem to work out whether they think that, with his belief in chemtrails, obsession with firearms and I’ve-suffered-racism-too response to Black Lives Matter, he’s just an idiot – a conclusion you might jump to, based on the haircut he sported last year, a mid-forehead fringe that left him looking like Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber – or something more cynical and calculating. Suspicious eyebrows were raised regarding the veracity of the recent viral story about him giving a postal worker a copy of his forthcoming album in lieu of a tip. His 2017 hit Rockstar was helped to the US No 1 spot by a YouTube video that featured not the song, but just its chorus repeated five times, which, depending on your perspective, is either cheating your way into the charts, a brilliant marketing ploy aimed at the Musical.ly generation who consume not songs but sections of songs, or the kind of incisive editing by which a lot of chart singles could be vastly improved.
Throughout it all, Post Malone has got bigger and bigger: he’s as impregnable as barbed wire, which, in another curious fashion decision, he has tattooed across his forehead. Which brings us to his second album, pretty much a guaranteed smash. If you cleave to the just-an-idiot theory regarding Post Malone you might note that, well, it’s called Beerbongs & Bentleys, that its lyrical rendering of the current vogue for moaning about the emptiness and misery of wealth and success tends to the thumpingly prosaic – it contains a song called Rich and Sad – and that he writes about sex in such a dummkopf way, it makes you feel like taking up a lifelong vow of chastity: “I ain’t even seen the face but she got beautiful boobies – wow!”
If you think he’s more calculating, you could point to its bet-spreading sound, which melds a host of current big pop memes, from warm, post-tropical house synthesisers to icily Auto-Tuned R&B, from earnest acoustic balladry to mumble-rap. “Barf on me,” he pleads repeatedly at one point, which feels a bit alarming until you realise he’s actually saying “ball for me”. There are references to classic rock – Same Bitches swipes a lyric from the Zombies’ Time of the Season, Over Now concludes with a thrilling, distorted explosion of John Bonham-esque drumming – and a great deal of that weird latter-day lyrical trope whereby you spend half your time boasting about how many drugs you take and how much you drink in party-hearty style, and the other half trying to elicit sympathy from the listener because of how many drugs you take and how much you drink.
It would be churlish indeed to deny that a lot of the songs on Beerbongs & Bentleys are exceptionally well-turned, stuffed with hooks and powerful choruses: Rockstar’s global success had less to do with shenanigans involving YouTube than the fact that it’s a maddeningly catchy song, and there’s plenty more where that came from. Furthermore, while no great shakes as a rapper, Post Malone’s singing voice is impressive and the production is regularly tricked out with beautiful touches: the lovely Mellotron intro to Rich and Sad; the eerie, feedback-and-echo-heavy guitar that runs through Takin’ Shots. However, over a protracted period of time – and Beerbongs & Bentleys goes on and on like a charity telethon – there’s a paucity of original ideas, the sense that he has virtually nothing to say for himself, and that whatever he has, has already been said umpteen times before with considerably more skill, wit and impact. Meanwhile, the guest appearances are a mixed blessing. An impressive array of supporting talent has been assembled, seemingly with the express intention of showing Post Malone up: the gulf between what he does and the sparky power of Nicki Minaj’s guest verse on Ball for Me – “could have been a seamstress, still wouldn’t cut him slack” – feels immense.
Of course, Beerbongs & Bentleys’ defects might be less evident in smaller doses, if you consider it less as an album than a collection of songs made for picking and choosing, for filleting on to playlists, then the aforementioned hooks, choruses and production touches might well outweigh the repetitiousness and predictability. Listening to it, you understand both the charges against him and the reasons for Post Malone’s success, and you wonder how long his apparent impenetrability will last. Whether he can move with the times when the trends collated here change remains to be seen.