If you don’t know who Post Malone is, you’re showing your age.

I’m not really familiar with much of his music – it’s not my style – but the guy is everywhere, and the suburban-Dallas-raised rapper was just named 2018’s most popular musician in America by data and measurement company Nielsen.

Fine by me, but the Washington Post’s Jeff Weiss is less impressed.

He’s written a piece titled “Post Malone is the perfect pop star for this American moment. That’s not a compliment”, and right from the start, it’s brutal.

Let’s dive in:

Him?

The most popular young artist in the most unpopular young nation is a rhinestone cowboy who looks like he crawled out of a primordial swamp of nacho cheese. Post Malone is a Halloween rental, a removable platinum grill, a Cubic Zirconium proposal on the jumbo screen of a last-place team.

His music — one of the shallowest bastardizations [sic] 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.

Not a fan.

Weiss goes on:

[He is] an avatar of algorithm culture that rewards pleasant banality over the creatively vexing. At his own festival in his hometown, he had the opportunity to lucidly state his mission and values. Instead, he revealed himself to be Jack Johnson with 808s and nakedly grafted hip-hop slang…

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…

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.

A bombshell finish, too:

What Post Malone so perfectly represents is the idiotic currents that have carried us to this present cultural submersion — where an objective notion of the truth has been systematically muddied, facts are negotiable and any hint of criticism — be it for lacking integrity, dignity or talent — can be brazenly dismissed as the pitiful cries of the “haters.” So congratulations, I guess.

Who allowed this happen? What hole in the system allowed this greasy discarded barbecue wrapper to prosper? A fake pale king sitting on a tinfoil throne. Return to sender.

Yoh.

Look, I don’t have a dog in this fight. Post Malone’s music does not affect my life in any way, and to me, he’s just another guy with face tattoos making noise.

If his music tickles your loins then good for you. If you’ve never heard his music, we’ll finish with his most-viewed music video on YouTube. which has in excess of 900 million views:

[source:washpost]