Post Malone’s been on quite the journey since he debuted a decade ago rapping over trap beats with a voice soaked in laconic charisma and Auto-Tune (a lot of Auto-Tune). He’s duetted with Ozzy Osbourne, he livestreamed Nirvana covers for charity during lockdown. Now, on latest album F-1 Trillion, he’s gone country, explaining the preponderance among the audience of Stetsons and cowboy boots, doubtless getting their first airing since Beyoncé’s Country Carter shows here in June.
Tonight, Malone ricochets with chaotic panache between rock, trap and twang, never making a big deal out of it. To create this patchwork of supposedly divergent elements in a moment when the culture war is using such divisions to break America apart, feels almost political. His hand-picked opening act – fellow chart-topping rap-to-country convert Jelly Roll – references those divisions explicitly, offering his music as “medicine” and promising, on breakthrough hit I Am Not Okay, “it’s gonna be alright”.
Malone, however, isn’t one for preaching. He’s an entertainer, a genial, gently wasted presence who’ll drag a guy from the audience to sit cross-legged beside him on a campfire reading of Stay, who’ll lead the crowd in chants of “Ozzy! Ozzy!” and do press-ups on the gangway as barrages of pyro explode around him. With his just-woke-up hair, scruffy beard, vintage Ozzy T-shirt, cigarette and polystyrene beaker always in hand, Malone’s styled himself like an outlaw country shit-kicker from the 70s (albeit one with facial tattoos and platinum grills), though his music is slick and owes more to Jon Bon Jovi than Johnny Cash. If he leans too often towards power-balladry, it’s because he’s a genre-blind shark, hunting hooks and anthemic moments wherever he finds them.
He finishes the set in a glass box above the audience, telling them they can do whatever they want if they try – that enduring American dream, one that’s getting ever harder to believe in. But when it’s sold by a man with a whiskey-stewed rocker’s rasp that keeps slipping into the sweet, singsong melodiousness of a dancehall lothario, simply dripping dangerous, oblivious charm as he swaggers, “I’ve got ‘Fuck you’ money!”, it’s not hard to see how it seduces.