Jeff Weiss @ [WashingtonPost]
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There's plenty more in the article.
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His music — one of the shallowest bastardizations of rap to date, and I don't say that lightly — has the creative tension of associates at a downtown law firm complaining that $150,000 a year just doesn't cut it. He looks like he got clubbed over the head by a cartoon peacock. He just turned 23.
Post Malone's music is dead-eyed and ignorant, astonishingly dull in its materialism, an abandoned lot of creativity with absolutely no evidence of traffic in his cerebral cortex — and there's also a negative side. Even if his intention is sincere homage, the bludgeoning witless imitation can't help but feel like minstrelsy. White people will inevitably appropriate the most culturally relevant music genre, one that's become almost intrinsically bound to the modern conception of pop, but it's not asking too much to attempt modest synthesis or the incorporation of a single new idea, or at least to not be so grotesquely desolate. We went from Eminem to Cheddar Bob. If Post Malone were black, he wouldn't have sold half; he simply wouldn't exist.
What followed sounded like Bon Iver cosplaying as Bon Scott right before he tried to drink himself to death. What Post Malone is selling is the chill-bro relatability of the third-most-sensitive member of a frat house, softly crooning acoustic guitar rap covers to seduce Gammas after a pledge paddling. He is the dynamite hack — the platonic playlist substitute at the Duke University coffee shop so the vice president doesn't fire you for playing Young Dolph.
What's most damning is Post Malone's bloodless abyss of soul and funk. His attempts at being emotional feel like hollow gestures. When he tries to be turned up, it feels inert and airless. His songs completely lack volatility and swing, leaving him as a little boy trying on oversized sequin suits and Versace loafers alternately trying to be a fake musty Elvis, a swaggering baller, a redneck backcountry rebel, but flailing somewhere in the doughy middle. It can't help but bring me back to his quote given late last year to a Polish interviewer, where Malone said if you're looking for lyrics that make you want to cry or think about life, you shouldn't listen to hip-hop.
Post Malone's problem isn't that he's a bad person or even completely untalented. It's that he stands for nothing at all. 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. It's always been a fairly straightforward compact when it comes to hip-hop: If you're a white person eating off what has historically been black culture, you have a certain obligation to repay that creative debt. Eminem continues to attack the hypocrisies and contradictions that allowed him to leapfrog equally gifted artists. Macklemore may have lacked subtlety or a rudimentary understanding of when to share text messages, but there was no questioning his dedication to confront his white privilege. Even G-Eazy — repeat, even G-Eazy — dropped out of that racist H&M advertising campaign.
There's plenty more in the article.
