Albums of the 2010s - 2016 - Post Malone's 'Stoney'

The arc from the first half of the decade is done. Things got minimal, and then people got sick of things being minimal. So now what? It seems to me we should return to the idea of the spectre of the past haunting the present. It happened with Marxism following the fall of the Soviet Union, it happened with rave culture once the feds started to crack down on illegal clubs and the drugs dried up, and it's still happening with "rock music" now. 

"Rock is dead" is a cliche that's pretty much as old as rock itself - people were calling it over as early as 1959 when Buddy Holly died, Elvis joined the army, and Jerry Lee Lewis nonced his cousin - but if you look at the past few years you'd assume rock has less cultural cache than ever. The only famous rock bands are, like, Coldplay and Maroon 5? Maybe you class Imagine Dragons as rock, maybe you class Radiohead as popular, but that's really stretching things. The glory days of the late 60s, Hendrix, the Beatles, the Stones, etc; Van Halen and their assorted ripoffs soundtracking high school parties everwhere in the 80s; even something like nu metal that briefly stole the limelight at the turn of the millennium; all that kinda shit's in the rear view now. Rock is a niche concern, the way blues and jazz have been for decades.

And yet, it lingers on in the culture. The first, most obvious place to look for this phenomenon is hip-hop, rap, whatever you call it. I don't necessarily mean those kids heavily influenced by various waves of emo from 2014, though we will get to them. Nor do I REALLY mean things like Aerosmith and Run-DMC doing "Walk This Way" together, or the Jay Z/Linkin Park collab Collision Course, though that's a related phenomenon. I mean big, big, rap performers moving TOWARDS rock as their careers progressed. As they've done with pretty much everything, OutKast paved the way for this. After ten years of being the preeminent Southern hip hop act, André 3000 and Big Boi went their own separate ways for a double album and Dré immediately created the biggest single of their career (and probably one of the best pop songs of all time) around an acoustic guitar riff and a Beatles-on-Ed-Sullivan video. Sure, there'd been plenty of guitar on Outkast songs before - "Gasoline Dreams" off Stankonia, for example - and Organized Noize had always produced OutKast tunes like a band, but "Hey Ya" was a step beyond all that, a pure, perfect power pop song of the sort that Sloan, Ash, Jellyfish, could only dream of writing.

That was a successful attempt, but there have been far worse ones. N.E.R.D., Pharrell and Chad Hugo from the Neptunes' rock side project, has a mixed reputation - critics were lukewarm originally in the 2000s, but following the rise of Odd Future Tyler pretty much single-handedly rescued them from the Scrappy heap, and they reformed in 2017 to a more positive response. Also, remember when Lil Wayne picked up a guitar for some reason? This was, much like André 3000, someone considered one of the greatest living rappers, deciding to pretend to be a rockstar instead, only this time it went abysmally. I remember "Drop The World" being popular when I went to Toronto as a kid in 2010, and indeed the single went quadruple platinum and was considered the only highlight of its parent album, Rebirth, but nowadays if anyone remembers this album they remember this video of him attempting to play a guitar solo.

   

As the 2010s carried on this trend would only pick up steam. Speeding Bullet 2 Heaven, anyone? Kid Cudi also did time in a rock side project of his own, WZRD, before making that disaster of an album. Machine Gun Kelly made a similar pivot this year, enlisting Travis Barker (who's involved in like half these projects for whatever reason) to play drums on his (very successful) pop punk album Tickets To My Downfall.

You didn't have to pivot to MAKING rock music to pay your respects, though. All through the previous decade rappers have been dropping smaller hints to prove rock still looms large in their consciousness. "Black Beatles" by Rae Sremmurd. "Rockstar Lifestyle" by Famous Dex (Inspirational Verse: "I play guitar and shit."). Future naming his sixth album Hndrxx. "Rockstar" by daBaby and, of course, "Rockstar" by Post Malone. As my friend Rhys pointed out, here's Lil Yachty declaring his undying (semi-ironic?) love for Coldplay in advance of his debut album. The trajectory is important; these guys are releasing rock music and thinking of themselves as rock artists AFTER they become famous. "Hey Ya" comes AFTER "Player's Ball", "Rosa Parks", "Ms Jackson". Speeding Bullet comes AFTER "Day N Nite". "Rockstar" comes AFTER "White Iverson". 

The reason I find this interesting is it's the inverse of what every black artist before, say, 2000, had to do to make it. One of the reasons I got so obsessed with Prince this past year is the way you can see him making little concessions to try and achieve mainstream success - my personal favourite is his choice of guitar. The ones you're probably thinking of are the one called a Cloud Guitar or the one shaped like Unpronounceable Symbol he played at the Superb Owl, but his main guitar up to and including Purple Rain was a Telecaster copy. Assuming you don't give a shit about guitars like me because you have friends and a social life or whatever nonsense, a Telecaster is (kind of) the first electric guitar design ever. It's the one on Born To Run, it's Keith Richards' main guitar (of course, the Stones took Prince on tour in like '81 and he recieved a less-than-stellar reception), very popular with country and roots musicians, and it signals to me the conscious decision Prince made early on to pursue a rock (i.e., white) audience with his stuff. The Telecaster is a marvel of post-war American mass-manufacturable design simplicity, an instrument produced specifically to be easy to maintain and repair, rather than for any artistic reason, by a radio repair guy called Leo Fender who was so musically illiterate that guitarists still get stuff mixed up because of mistakes he made in the 50s. This probably seems like me making something out of nothing, but I know he thought about it because in the FILM Purple Rain the Kid (Prince) doesn't play the Cloud Guitar until the final performance, where he makes it - it's symbolic of his eventual conquering of the American public, just as the Telecaster is symbolic of the come-up.

There are others. Jimi Hendrix cut his teeth on the chitlin circuit with the Isley Brothers, where he wasn't allowed to really be Jimi Hendrix - playing with his teeth, setting shit on fire, doing drugs, that kinda thing. It wasn't until getting his big break inventing capital-R Rock guitar over here in England that he could really follow his muse beyond "just" rock or "just" soul and start making heavy funk songs like "Crosstown Traffic" and later abandon the Experience entirely and make whatever Band Of Gypsys was supposed to be. Sly And The Family Stone made their names as happy-go-lucky interracial friends who were just delighted to be themselves, and then Sly did a whole bunch of drugs and made a sparse, Black Panther-indebted funk masterpiece, pretty much alone, that was ACTUALLY him being himself instead. When Island Records were working on making Bob Marley palatable to a wider (whiter) audience they had Wayne Perkins spaff guitar solos on top of shit the Wailers had already recorded and put out Catch A Fire. And so on, and so on. All these artists had to tone it down a bit before truly being themselves.

Post Malone sits between all these varied approaches to cracking America, and that's probably what makes him so fascinating to me. It's probably worth quickly covering two more things - I'm sorry, I promise I'll get to the actual album in a few hundred words - that seem relevant to his come up. One is bro-country. Luckily, bro-country band Florida Georgia Line actually defined the genre perfectly on their song "This Is How We Roll" - "This mixtape's got a little Hank [Williams, pretty much the inventor of country music as we know it], a little [Aubrey] Drake [Graham, modern rap-pop star]". This was country music, still coming out of Nashville, still sung with a twang or a drawl, still white, but in conversation with hip-hop, and with pop more widely. Florida Georgia Line would get rap/singer Nelly (himself no stranger to country grammar) to join them on their crossover to the mainstream, "Cruise", and in the first half of the decade we'd get all sorts of stupid, beer-soaked, country-esque pop songs in their image. I'm talkin' "Boys Round Here". I'm talkin' "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk". All the classics. It was essentially the genre predicated on the concept "Hey, rappers and country singers are both mostly Southern, mostly alkies, and mostly obsessed with arses. Let's hook 'em up!"

The other thing was the Soundcloud rap boom of the mid-2010s. It feels incredibly strange to talk about this in the past tense, but it's already done. A group of kids coming out of a lot of random places - but most often Florida - were combining A$AP Rocky's cloud rap with Atlanta's trap, smidgens of emo strewn about the place, and a lot of punk agression. Lil Peep and his GothBoiClique, XXXTentacion, Lil Uzi Vert, Ski Mask The Slump God, Famous Dex, fucking Tekashi 6ix9ine unfortunately, et plus, et plus. Random kids from random ends with multi-coloured dreads and unbelieveably bad attitudes, all uploading shit to Soundcloud for free and hoping it would blow up. It often did.

That's what happened to Austin Post in 2015. "White Iverson" caught fire on Soundcloud in February '15 and had racked up a million plays by March. It sits perfectly in that half-cloudy, half-trap mould, the kind of thing I'd describe as "leaned out" or "xan'ed out" if I'd ever done anything stronger than scrumpy. Unusually, Stoney didn't end up coming out until December 2016, long after "White Iverson" had climbed up, and then back down, the hype charts. The key to a lot of the Soundcloud stuff was its immediacy. Take X for example: "Look At Me!", released in 2016, blows up in early 2017, he gets out of jail that April, puts out a barely-an-album in August, a second next March, dead by June. XXXTentacion had his whole public career in less time than it took for Post to make Stoney. 

i wonder how many el clasicos there was between "look at me!" and jahseh dyin

It's not like the album sounds like it, either. I like Stoney, kind of, but it really smacks of "rushed follow up to SoundCloud hit". "Deja Vu", the first Post Malone song I ever heard, in a free period in upper sixth form, glides along on a beautifully jazzy bit of guitar work drenched in reverb - in short, it sounds like King Krule instrumentally, thus making it impossible for me not to enjoy - but the song itself was so obviously meant for Post and a girl singer that their decision to pair him with Justin Bieber feels almost transgressive. "Tell me if you want it, baby, 'cause I know I could drive you crazy" sings Bieber; "girl, I been thinkin' bout you lately" Post replies. Are they supposed to be singing to different girls? The same girl? Because this is very obviously about Justin and Austin no matter how many 'girl's you add, babes.

That's how the album goes, for the most part. Moments of transcendence like the Am9-D7b9-Gmaj7 guitar line in "Deja Vu" - it's so rare to find violently functional harmony like that in modern pop because most modern songs are based around ambiguous unresolvable patterns, c.f. "Passionfruit" by Aubrey - are followed up by unbelievably stupid shit. The first third of the album is where most of the "bangers" lie. The cinematic opening of "Broken Whiskey Glass"; the DJ Mustard-helmed "Big Lie"; "Deja Vu"; then "No Option", which has enough hooks in its 3 minute runtime to sustain an entire album. This is funny because the rest of the album is mostly devoid of them, devoting most of its runtime to dull-as-dishwater downtempo ruminations on girls who done wronged him, or drugs, or perhaps, if he is feeling particularly expressive and Romantic, both. The atmosphere of "none of us can be arsed" reaches its peak on obligatory 'Mum I made it', 'fuck the haters' song "Congratulations". Inspirational Verse from guest star Quavo: "Huncho and Post | Malone | I gotta play on my phone". Sixth (6th) single and breakup ballad "I Fall Apart" is utterly hilarious - it's essentially a country weeper in structure and outlook, but caked in rap signifiers, so you end up with completely fucking ridiculous lines like "Never caught a feeling this hard, hard as damn liquor I pour" or "Whippin' in the foreign and the tears keep flowin'", all bleated out in that singular whine.

I really should talk about his voice. He doesn't rap particularly much on this album, it's all the same kinda sing-rapping that you're probably intimately familiar with if you lived through any of the previous decade and have ears. What sets Post apart is his wild country howl. I don't want to commit sacrilege and compare it to Roscoe Holcomb's old-timey High Lonesome Sound, but at the same time... he do be soundin' kinda Holcomb-y tho? It's the same Untamed Sense Of Control that Dylan raved about in Holcomb's music, a wobbly vibrato - that's vibrato (pitch), Leo, not tremolo (volume) - that imbues whatever he chooses to sing about with often unearned emotion and gravitas. That he chooses to use this voice on lines like "Hard as damn jewellery I bought, you was my shawty I thought" is, to me, part of the joke.

You see, Post Malone doesn't really like rap. If I had to place a bet on why it took almost two years for this album to come out, I think the label was expecting ten or so "White Iverson"s and Post quite quickly was like, "Nah, that's not me". He doesn't respect the genre, and he isn't particularly shy about it, which has obviously provoked cultural appropriation accusations and the like. I'll come back to that. What's more interesting is how Post used rap as his in to the mainstream, the way Prince had used rock in the 80s, or Bob Marley had in the 70s. If bro-country was country, but in the thrall of hip hop, Stoney is a hip-hop project that really wants to be country.

The album dominated 2017 - like I said, there were six fucking singles, and they were all pretty big - and before the album cycle was even over Post had hit new stratospheric heights with the release of "Rockstar", from Beerbongs & Bentleys. But the true signposts on Stoney are nestled in that interminable back half, with the bonus tracks. "Go Flex" and "Leave" are both the kind of Lumineers-y, Mumfords-y roots music that Spotify calls 'Stomp and Holler', and "Feeling Whitney" is an honestly nice, sweet country song that could easily have fit on My Morning Jacket's first couple of albums. That's the thing about Austin Post. This Austin Post, the facetatted, dreadlocked, white Allen Iverson could have only existed in the past five years. His "way in", so to speak, would have been completely different. Had he come up ten years earlier he would've simply been in the most pop-facing band of that brief Southern rock revival that encompassed Kings Of Leon, Band Of Horses, My Morning Jacket, Drive By Truckers, etc. Ten years before that and he ends up in the post-Uncle Tupelo alt-country boom, or a mid-level Green Day ripoff. I know exactly what would have happened to Post in the 70s because it happened and his name was Gram Parsons. 

In terms of genre melding, smashing racial and cultural boundaries, and sheer force of personality - I'm not arsed if you think he smells, the voice is there - Post Malone is the closest thing to Parsons' Cosmic American Music we'll probably ever get. Who the fuck else would shout out Dwight Yoakam (on "Feeling Whitney"), collab with 2 Chainz and Biebz, and then lead a lockdown-enforced Nirvana cover band (along with Travis Barker because fucking of course)? Who the fuck else could pull all that shit off, too? "Yeah, but Earl Sweatshirt says he's wack!" Earl fucking Sweatshirt got famous for threatening to rape yer nan and shit in her mouth or whatever, and he thought the beat to "EAST" was a good idea, I don't give two shits what he thinks about music.  

As to why this worked so well for Post, we have to go material for a second. Radio is dead as a tastemaker. Radio BEEN dead, sis. There's only a couple formats - that's what they call the type of music a radio station plays in America, a format - that remain steadfastly unmixable. Obviously things like "oldies" stations are bound by time, though eventually The Strokes will end up on the rotation of a Greatest Bands Of Yesteryear station. Jazz and classical are also pretty set in stone at this point. Rock radio, and its various subformats (Modern, Active, Alternative, etc), are diluted to the point of uselessness, and hip-hop is essentially pop now - if Lorde got on Hot 97 (a rap station) AND alt rock radio AND top 40, like Chris DeVille says here, what's even the point of formats? Pretty much only country stations refuse to play anything that isn't noticeably country, and then country spent the 2010s diluting itself - with bro-country, as we discussed, but also with pop crossovers like "The Middle" by country singer/songwriter Maren Morris and EDM producer Zedd, or Kacey Musgraves winning over the indie lot, or even Taylor Swift's rise to the upper echelons of proper pop music - culminating in the debate over whether "Old Town Road" should have been allowed on country radio and the country charts. 

"Ugh, that was so racist, right?" Never accept the form of the media argument like that again, okay, sweetie? Have you learned nothing from this blog? Have I taught you that poorly? They were just trying to stop Lil Nas X doing what Post Malone did - using one genre to become successful in another. Let's just say for the sake of argument that a Nicki stan account kid sampling a Nine Inch Nails song, a kid that hasn't made another country song before or since, was really bothered about being perceived as country (hint: he weren't, y'know). Why did that require Billboard's approval? Couldn't everyone enjoying the song just agree amongst themselves that it was country, fuck what the feds say? No, because the point of getting it labelled country was to infiltrate another radio market. I'm sure everyone involved in that push sincerely thought they were helping to combat racism, but that's the thing about cultural appropriation debates: they seem like they're about morals but they're pretty much always about money. 

No one begrudges the slaves and the Scotch-Irish swapping the banjo and lined-out hymnody among themselves because both those groups are poor as shit and didn't make any money off the trade. Post Malone was the most streamed artist of 2019, and so 'cultural appropriation' immediately comes into play. I don't think it matters at this point. Was Hendrix appropriating rock or was he taking it back from the British kids who'd taken the blues as their own? Were OutKast appropriating fucking Big Star by making a power pop song? It's far too late to untangle these threads. Everything is far too mixed up, all part of the endless monogenre, all the same songs played by every radio station on the planet, for me to care that Post Malone doesn't have every UGK verse memorised or whatever would prove he "respects" rap. As I mentioned in 2010, Waka Flocka Flame hates rap, and he's never been called on it. Meanwhile, Eminem is white as hell and no one would ever question his commitment to rap, no matter how cringe he gets in his middle age. No one accused Lil Nas X of cultural appropriation even though he's clearly not a "country" artist now that he's established himself. Racism is bad because the more you question some kid's skin tone the less you are paying attention to Clear Channel, and only one of those entities has the ability to ruin your favourite genre.

oh well if HSBC wants us to be part of the monogenre I guess it's a sick idea then innit

For some people this is nirvana. "We're finally free of the shackles of genre!" Begrudgingly so, to my mind. The modern radio is what genreless freedom sounds like, and it sucks balls. This is the mission statement of the blog - you keep shit small and local and you keep shit vital. Clear Channel's eyes do not reach into the ends, the same way Google can't reach the dark web, the same way the American pigs couldn't get deep enough into Vietnam. You try and destroy genre and you end up still haunted by fragments of it everywhere you turn, a sick riff here, a drop there, a pedal steel elsewhere. That's what even the most avant-garde music sounds like now - people like Rina Sawayama and Poppy adding nu-metal breakdowns to their sugary turn of the millenium pop is one example, and obviously Post and Lil Nas X are others. Signifiers without signified.

Like I said, it's far too late to stop that shit, anyway. We're genreless and there's nothing you can do. You can't close the Pandora box and make streaming fair and radio diverse. The point is, Post Malone is the logical conclusion of all this, of all of America, really. All the economic consequences of the peace, all the cultural cross-pollination, all the machinations of the music industry, it all leads up to some punk kid from a sprawling Texas suburb that accidentally synthesises the entire history of popular music because he figured it would be the easiest way to secure the bag. Get that money, Austin. Not a monogenre fan, but Stoney is (sometimes) class.

And after all that I still have NO idea why it's called Stoney. I guess you really can hide some things from the all seeing cultural eyes.