Three songs into his Coachella headliner set on Sunday, Post Malone asked his band to stop and restart. It wasn’t that he’d made a mistake; rather, he had to get serious for a second. “How the fuck is everyone doing?” he asked, before reiterating for the second time already how thankful he was, how he hopes “everyone is taking care of themselves and having a great fucking night.” The 29-year-old singer, so adept at shape-shifting that he has bounced from trap to hip-hop to pop to rock to country in less than a decade, maintains at least one consistency: with an exceedingly foul mouth and a beer in hand, he will always be polite. He will check in. He will refer humbly to the “ladies and gentlemen”, even when asking “how fucking bitchin’ is it to be able to come here and play for you tonight?”
That warmhearted goofball from high school you still want to party with, who also happens to be one of the most-listened to artists in the world? Such is the appeal of the musician born Austin Richard Post, a self-styled party guy who just wants to have a good time, so redolent with good vibes that he’s the only conceivable person who could collaborate with Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Morgan Wallen in one year. You could see said appeal working the Coachella crowd on Sunday night – the youngest-skewing of the headliners by far, Post being one of gen Z’s top avatars for the good life: fame, fortune, freedom from boundaries, wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve but keeping it chill. This is, after all, a man who started out on Soundcloud and credits the video game Guitar Hero for inspiring him to go into music. He speaks the language of dreams and passions and fun, not ego or self-seriousness.
