Last Friday, I ran the rule over what started as 18 and then became 27 tracks collected on Post Malone’s F-1 Trillion project. I summarise it as a mutual hug between Postie, the city of Nashville and its country music industry.
The Guardian dispatched pop savant Michael Cragg, author of the complete history of boy and girl band pop between 1996 and 2004, to write a review. Under the unfair title ‘catchy country cosplay’, Cragg concludes that: ‘As with most 18-track epics, there’s a more successful album hidden away inside.’ With the ears of a man who has heard it all, chart-wise, he writes that F-1 Trillion ‘feels tailor-made for chart domination’ even if Post is ‘shooting a little too straight’.
I like his description of Wallen as a ‘country jackass’, but if he thinks 18 tracks are epic, wait until he hears the behemoth of One Thing at a Time, whose total running time is 112 minutes. Robin Murray of Clash magazine also seemed to think an 18-track album was ‘colossal’ and commented that Post was ‘building his own tapestry’ (you don’t build a tapestry, you sew it) thanks to ‘a love letter to the genre’.
Neil McCormick’s Telegraph review hooks readers with the headline: ‘From “bad boy” rapper to good ol’ boy – with help from Dolly Parton’. As a country star Malone is ‘most at home’ in Parton’s ‘warm embrace’, although it seems a bit prudish and poor to mention the age gap between the two. It’s art, Neil!
He compares the album negatively to the ‘progressive fusion’ that was all over Cowboy Carter, although to his credit Post is ‘genuinely good at this stuff, with a sharp lyrical wit and sweet singing voice that rises to heights of soulful passion’. The piece’s subheading asks if it’s ‘a pose’; McCormick notes the absence of ‘rapping, no trap rhythms, no bone rattling sub bass, just a set of slickly crafted songs about cars…bars and broken hearts’.
In the Independent Helen Brown and her (probably non-existent) sub-editors call the aforementioned jackass ‘Morgan Wallace’, which makes it hard to take the review seriously and which may have been edited by the time this piece goes up. Brown also calls Blake Shelton a ‘bro-country star’, which is slightly unfair given that he had been having hits for a decade before getting down with the Boys Round Here. But now I’m reviewing the review, which I never like doing.
Amid the ‘rhinestone constellation of collabs’, Brown praises Post’s ‘solid, stompin geetar jams’ and ‘undeniable song-crafting chops’, although I would like to introduce her to Ernest, the man behind the Postie. She also tosses in mention of Beyoncé and her ‘cool experiments’, as well as Keep Up by RaeLynn, a lovely surprise based on her daughter’s Spotify playlist. That song, with its line-dance video, was about three too early for the Austin trend.
As well as criticism from British broadsheets and sites, I followed the promotion of F-1 Trillion in Post’s home market to see how game he is to push his product and use Republic Records’ budget. Given his slew of past Tonight Show appearances, I predict a slew of late-night talk show clips this week.
The big promotional gambit was in the hipster part of Music City. ‘Come see the truck in person this weekend!’ shouted an ad on Post’s social media, sending people to Grimey’s record store to ‘win tickets to a show!’ His tour begins next month with two dates in an amphitheatre in Salt Lake City, Utah, before passing through Indiana, Maine and East Coast sports stadia like Fenway Park, Boston.
The Texas boy has two dates each in Houston and Austin in late October, but the big day will come on the 19th of that month at the Nissan Stadium, returning Post to the venue where he previewed Pour Me A Drink as part of CMA Fest. If there aren’t half a dozen cameos from local stars, followed by a slot at the CMA Awards the following month, someone on Team Post hasn’t been making the right calls.
I cannot sum up the pre-release media coverage better than Marissa Moss does in her newsletter Don’t Rock The Inbox: ‘The red carpet rollout has been borderline insane.’ As well as the Opry debut, the Lower Broadway video shoot and an exclusive show in Nashville where he debuted the track Yours, I imagine she would include in that insanity the piece in the New York Times.
They got in early on August 8 with their (paywalled) profile wryly headlined ‘How Post Malone Went Country (Carefully, With a Beer in His Hand)’. Writer Joe Coscarelli, who has written a book on rap in Atlanta, sees Post as following Kid Rock and Jelly Roll from one genre to the other. The profile must have made Republic Records delighted, and lowers my enthusiasm for pieces which might as well be bylined PR than top-notch journalism that asks the tough questions.
It bursts with praise and positivity, as Coscarelli summarises Postie’s schtick as ‘using his electric charisma and pliable, Auto-Tuned vibrato to make friends in high places; remaining nimble and mutable enough to blend right in; and pulling off some of the defining, boundary-blurring smashes of the streaming age’. Twelve of them have been streamed over 1bn times, and one of them (Sunflower) has sold the equivalent of 20m units, the first double diamond song in history.
So the guy can afford to go country, although he has pedigree. Post’s grandparents are from Tennessee and he recalls writing country songs when he was learning his craft, so this isn’t a costume or, as per Michael Cragg, cosplay. I thought his pandemic cover of I’m Gonna Miss Her by Brad Paisley was quirky, but little did I know how besotted with country he was.
Paul Franklin and Derek Wells are Nashville cats who contribute to the album’s sound; the latter notes that Post sought to ‘ask permission’ to be a country star. The link was Ryan Vojtesak, one of the backroom figures who co-wrote Last Night under his Charlie Handsome moniker and co-produces F-1 Trillion with Post’s reliable lieutenant Louis Bell.
Vojtesak, who shared beers with Post in Nashville, had already dubbed his career ‘a reverse Taylor Swift…he knows every country song’. Ernest recalls a session with Tim McGraw where they all sang old Merle Haggard songs and praises continues to pile on the hype and says Post ‘baptised himself’ in the city.
It’s all very puffy from Coscarelli too, who describes Post as ‘good company — winning and solicitous, a man of superlatives and honorifics, a smiley people-pleaser unleashing a constant stream of sirs, ma’ams and genuine-seeming praise’. Sounds like any number of country stars from the past 60 years. Like Luke Combs, Post is a fan of beer (‘my biggest vice’) although the Bud Light partnership is a bit much and maybe Coscarelli’s questioning was lost in the edit.
The merch prices are a bit much too: Holler posted a piece listing five items including a $40 t-shirt, $40 camouflage hat and $90 hoodie. They followed it up with a precis of the album, which can be summed up by the word ‘joy’; this is a vast volte-face, they note, on the introspective insecurity of Post’s previous work.
Nowadays, argues the piece, country music offers a place for ‘anti-mainstream rebellion’ where Post can channel heartbreak into a new playful sound and thus bring ‘the spark and the joviality’ back to country music in a climate of Zach Bryans and Jelly Rolls. Even better, he is a unifying force for fans of Bryan and Wallen, which is a bit of a reach, as is calling the new genre Post-Modern Country.
As a counterpoint to all this hyperbole, the satirical performer Wheeler Walker Jr, an alter ego of Ben Hoffman, went for the ‘Florida Georgia Line with face tattoos’ angle. Kyle Coroneos of Saving Country Music thinks the new guy is taking attention away from your Zach Tops and Billy Stringses, although the latter was not to know that Strings would appear on F-1 Trillion’s hoedown M-E-X-I-C-O.
‘Perhaps he’s trying too much,’ Coroneos writes, to promote an album whose streams will guarantee that it joins Combs, Wallen and Bryan in the upper reaches of the almost redundant country album chart. ‘Country music is only focused on being country. Let the popularity come and go and let the creatures of pop be the ones to obsess over world domination.’
I wonder if, thanks to the neediness of country music lifestyle magazines and websites, we will soon become as intimately familiar with Post’s fiancée and child (whose name he has kept out of the public eye) as we are with the partners and children of Luke Combs, Thomas Rhett and Jelly Roll. In a genre that sells itself to families, an artist’s family needs to sign up to play the game too.
This is a four-quadrant record targeted at the young, the old, the male and the female (as the terms have it), which means there must be softball TV profiles bought up by Republic Records to puff the album and sell it to different demographics.
Postie duly obliged for a seven-minute profile/publicity piece for CBS the weekend before the album came out. As with Joe Coscarelli’s piece, we open on Lower Broadway on set for the Guy For That video; Post is ‘one of the biggest popstars in the world’ for those not in the know, while everyone knows the name on Post’s Dolly Parton Fan Club hat. (Is anyone not in that particular fan club? That’s like disliking the colour blue.)
The CBS package contrasts Post’s initial viral fame as a so-called ‘one-hit wonder’ rapper with the ‘kind’ welcome he had from the city of Nashville. The viewer is told that his dad was concessions manager for the Dallas Cowboys, and that he couldn’t master the real guitar as well as he had Guitar Hero. He could, though, sing a bit, summarising the art as ‘making a baby with, like, soundwaves’.
Post shows off his Hank Williams Sr. and John Lennon hand tattoos, as well as one on his forehead with the initials of his daughter. Mid-interview he opens a can of beer, which is either the subtlest product placement or part of his personality, and there is a miniature therapy session where he admits to ‘loneliness…having a good cry, drinking’ before he became a father.
‘I needed that, to figure out who I am,’ he says, close to tears; he seems to have put his emotions into the song Killed A Man, which was left off the 18-track album but might well become part of his live set so he can segue into it from a bit of heavy stage patter. ‘I don’t want people to feel how I felt,’ he adds. ‘I want everyone to feel loved.’
‘I think we can debate without getting disrespectful, right?’ was Billy Dukes’ opening comment on a video for Taste of Country which brought together a digest of thoughts from country music figures on Postie. He also notes that both Hank Williams Jr and Dolly Parton are guests on F-1 Trillion, testament to how he crosses the political divide.
Jelly Roll is with the programme (‘he’s one of the best dudes on earth, the sweetest soul’) and refers to a Sturgill Simpson cover Post did a while ago. Dasha, who had a charming meeting with Austin who proved himself fully aware of her big hit called Austin, likes how he is ‘so himself’. I Had Some Help is stuck in Carly Pearce’s head ‘most hours, most days’.
Gretchen Wilson feels Postie is an example of country’s infinite variety, while Jason Aldean (who is not on the project for obvious reasons) doesn’t see him as an example of using country to rescue his career: ‘He’s just a country fan that loves the people and the genre…a lot like they did with Kid Rock, [people] will welcome him with open arms.’
Dukes also constructed one of those pathetic bait-worthy pieces that ranked the tracks for Taste of Country, a site that relies on clicks to sell advertising direct to the person who clicks on such pieces. For perhaps the first time in years, I did actually click on a ‘Ranked!’ piece. Amid complaints that too many of the songs are similar to one another, they start with Goes Without Saying as the least best and work up to a top three of Never Love You Again, I Had Some Help and, at number one, Guy for That.
Dukes has spotted a formula in this ‘very long’ album; unlike the British writers above, he knows Wallen’s last album had double the quota of tracks, so why labour the point? Post, he writes ‘opens and gets through a chorus. His guest follows with a fresh take, and they finish with (or without) a bridge and final chorus.’
Twice in his write-up of each track he uses the word ‘vibe’: ‘a 90s vibe to the beat’ of Finer Things, ‘Willie and Waylon vibes’ of California Sober. Dukes loses points for calling Post ‘the peanut butter to Jelly’s roll’. I imagine Grady Smith’s review, on his Youtube channel will be the one to look out for most in the next few weeks; if it’s anything like his Megan Moroney critique, it will be the definitive article.
In the meantime, you can read my own take on the album immediately below this piece, or here if you came via a link to its dedicated page on the site.
A Country Way of Life 