LIVING LIKE A ROCKSTAR GIF POST MALONE SERIES
LIVING LIKE A ROCKSTAR GIF POST MALONE TV

(Interviews and other media appearances have also come fewer and farther between in the years since “Rockstar,” suggesting that Post realizes the safest way to say nothing publicly that he’ll regret is to say nothing at all.) Nonetheless, Post Malone’s career momentum has been little disrupted by these controversies, as his general amiability seems to largely diffuse any public anger towards him. He also struggled often to properly check his privilege as a white artist in a historically black artform, notably balking when asked in a Breakfast Club radio interview about what he was doing for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Critics were extremely negative, with the Washington Post savaging his headlining set at his eponymous Posty Fest in 2018, and a Vulture article worriedly asking, “What If Post Malone Is Here Forever?” Many gatekeepers called him out for not treating the genre with the proper respect, particularly after a video interview where he claimed to connect more emotionally to rock than rap (“If you’re looking to think about life, don’t listen to hip-hop”). Today, “Rockstar” is one of four Post songs to break the billion-stream mark on Spotify only Justin Bieber has more.īut while Post found enormous popularity as a rock star operating in a primarily hip-hop space, he also found considerable backlash. The song topped Billboard’s Streaming Songs chart for 13 weeks across 20, while parent album beerbongs and bentleys broke the single-week streaming record for an LP upon its release in April 2018. “Rockstar” was also a smash on streaming services, where Post Malone’s genre-elastic, playlist-friendly sound had an almost magnetic pull on listeners. And still today, it’s one of our most popular. “It went on rhythm stations and urban stations, pop stations, all at the same time. “It’s one of those records where probably every time somebody heard it for the first time, they thought, ‘Oh my God, I found something that nobody else is gonna like, but I love it,’” says John Ivey, president of CHR programming strategy for iHeartMedia.

“But it can’t be an actual guitar because it’s 2017.”

“I wanted to add a long outro with a guitar,” co-producer Louis Bell told Billboard shortly after the single’s release. Both artists sound eerily calm for claims of such revelry, letting the spitting beat and waves of distortion raise the energy level around them.

LIVING LIKE A ROCKSTAR GIF POST MALONE TV

Over a twinkling trap production that sounds like the sun setting, Post details living up to the titular lifestyle by risking arrest on stage and throwing a TV out of his hotel room, all built around his chorus hook, “I’ve been f–king h–s and popping pillies, man, I feel just like a rock star.” Guest rapper 21 Savage doubles down with boasts of “f–king superstars” and making the “Hot Chart,” while imitating Post’s sing-song delivery.

And with “Rockstar” - a hedonistic turn-up anthem whose actual sound is highly melodic, unthreatening, even kind of sedate - he found the perfect anthem for a generation who might not have even known the difference between The Doors and AC/DC. It wasn’t quite rap, and it definitely wasn’t rock, but it electrified young listeners from both worlds.

LIVING LIKE A ROCKSTAR GIF POST MALONE SERIES

With the rise of EDM and hip-hop in the age of streaming, guitars had largely been reduced to a seasoning in popular music, and most of the biggest acts that still operated from a rock home base - Imagine Dragons, Twenty One Pilots, Panic! At the Disco - had decentralized the instrument or removed it entirely, in favor of heavy beats and dense soundscapes.īut the artist born Austin Richard Post backdoored his way into a 2010s version of rock stardom, via a series of contagious trap-pop singles, with soupy production, knockout choruses, and Post’s one-of-a-kind warble. By the time Post Malone broke out as a rapper in the mid-’10s, conventional rock stardom had all but been left for dead.

Living like a rockstar gif post malone