Post Malone Hollywood’s Bleeding
The ascension of Post Malone has been grippingly awkward. His narrow escape from the recesses of YouTube cover hell would be somewhat less remarkable if he hadn’t somehow emerged as one of hip hop’s most controversial figures, warbling his way into collaborations with Justin Bieber and Kanye West with bewildering ease. Even by today’s warp-speed standards, Austin Post’s rapid celebrity is baffling, a pop culture predicament that inspires both awe and cringe in equal measure. Post is a marginally gifted singer with a penchant for the cliched, a haphazard hip hop star that thinks hip hop sucks. In turn, his work has inspired widespread cultural criticism - even in a pop landscape that positively thrives on cultural appropriation, does the world have room for a star like Post Malone? Furthermore, is his music somehow good enough for us to look the other way?
The answer is no. Even if you, like me, thought that Post Malone’s death-defying 2018 might have added some depth to his frustratingly one-dimensional shtick, Hollywood’s Bleeding is confoundingly, if reliably, dull. Framed as a grim reflection on the pitfalls of fame, the record offers little but worn out one-liners and Twitter-era tropes. “Enemies” goes exactly as deep as “used to have friends/now I got enemies,” and the Kanye-assisted “Internet” lives and dies by the term “Instalove.” It’s an unquestionably angsty affair, but Malone’s musings on fame ring spectacularly hollow. Hollywood’s title track conjures up a city drawn of all life by hungry vampires, the kind of concept that succeeds only through total conviction or extreme camp. Malone commits to neither, settling instead for the tepid and ultimately meaningless.
This said, the most engaging aspect of Hollywood’s Bleeding is Malone’s sizable disregard for expectation. He trudges willfully in the direction of pop punk with “Allergic” and gets Young Thug to play his blissfully emo counterpart on “Goodbyes.” Weirdest of all is “Take What You Want,” which paints Ozzy Osbourne and Travis Scott as feasible contemporaries, and it succeeds only through the fact that it somehow exists. The album’s most enveloping endeavors suggest that Malone is best skilled as a tastemaker of sorts, á la Travis Scott himself, and in turn, its least tolerable moments are its most conventional - features from Future, Halsey, Meek Mill, Lil Baby, and SZA are all wasted on the kind of paint-by-numbers radio fodder that makes Hollywood a tiring listen.
If Hollywood’s Bleeding does little to elevate Austin Post to a greater level of artistic relevance, it makes his continued success all the more puzzling. His presence on the pop charts verges on suffocating, and he still sounds like he couldn’t be less interested in being here. Most of Hollywood suggests that Malone is ready to leave the party, spamming his social media feeds to pass the time. He has talents to cultivate yet, but the question remains: if Posty is so sick of fame, why is he still famous? F