

Post wasn't tired yet, nor was he tired by the time the city's bars closed, so he met up with his friends from Beach Fossils, an indie band he loves. Viewers at home didn't see the moment when Post fell into the gap between the stage and the crowd and had to be rescued by security he smiled the whole time. (“Since I was a kid, I've always been obsessed with knights and medieval times and ancient Egypt and ancient Rome and shit like that,” he says.) As the New Year approached, he took the stage, singing a pair of his biggest hits, “Circles” and then “Congratulations,” which was punctuated by an explosion of silver confetti. Near his hotel, he was set upon by a TMZ cameraman, who broke the news that Post had added to his face-tattoo collection: a ball-and-chain flail, covering much of his right cheek. He was one of the marquee attractions on New Year's Rockin' Eve, the Times Square celebration that is now hosted, on ABC, by Ryan Seacrest. Post Malone was still celebrating a few weeks later, when he arrived in New York. And by the time the shoot wrapped, sometime around midnight, Post's day was just beginning-he disappeared into the Los Angeles night, ready to find something to celebrate. “And I couldn't sleep, so I'd get hammered and stay up till fuckin' 3 p.m.” He managed to be charming on-camera, despite the schedule. “There was not a second of not-inebriation,” he said. By the time Post Malone arrived at that auto-body shop, in December, he was near the beginning of a two-month break from touring, and enjoying what he described, fondly, as a “rough” fortnight in L.A. He says that his diet has changed since then-he now likes to consume nothing stronger than alcohol.

The first line of the first song on Stoney goes: I done drank codeine from a broken whiskey glass. Post Malone's first album was called Stoney, which was what some of his friends used to call him, but he says he quit smoking marijuana after a pot-induced anxiety attack that never completely subsided. “A little self-deprecation goes a long way,” he says. But I think that's a way for me to say, ‘Not everybody's going to like your shit, and there's a lot of people who don't like your shit, and it's okay.’ ” He laughs. “I don't think my songs are shitty,” he says. And he is resolutely unpretentious, with a tendency to refer to his music as “shitty.” When pressed on this self-assessment, he concedes, eventually, that it is inaccurate. Indeed, just about every song in his catalog has a melancholy streak, which is part of what makes it so easy to root for him.

His albums have received increasingly respectful reviews: Rolling Stone called Beerbongs & Bentleys, his 2018 album, “an ouroboros of new-money narcissism” (rating: two stars out of five) but last year, the magazine wrote that Hollywood's Bleeding showed “his gift for turning dreamy darkness into Top 40 gold” (rating: four stars out of five). But even skeptics have discovered, over the past few years, that he is surprisingly hard to hate.
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He takes hip-hop bravado and turns it into suburban pop, a white guy with a face full of tattoos singing lyrics about treacherous exes and small-minded critics: They was never friendly, yeah / Now I'm jumping out the Bentley. In the abstract, Post Malone's music might seem obnoxious. (He renamed himself Post Limón for the occasion.) He is now a global celebrity, but Post Malone still acts like an interloper in this exclusive club, wandering through A-list parties with heavy eyelids and a sheepish smile.

Along with Bud Light, his sponsors have included Crocs, which has created limited-edition Post-branded clogs, and Doritos, which used Post Malone to help publicize its Flamin' Hot Limón chips. He is only 24, and he has reacted to success with amusement and amazement while taking care to reassure fans that he hasn't lost his taste for cheap thrills, now that he can afford expensive ones. Even as his music dominates the planet, Post Malone cultivates a gregarious image. Spotify named him the most streamed artist of 2019, and according to Nielsen, his 2019 album, Hollywood's Bleeding, was the most-listened-to album of the year, though it only arrived in September. In the past few years, pretty much no one has been more consistent in making blockbuster hits: “Rockstar” and “Sunflower” and “Circles” and fistfuls more. Post Malone knows that he is not generally perceived as shy, and not just because he is one of the most popular musicians in the world.
