Post Malone’s Final Form: Hootie & The Blowfish

Pop music is an unpredictable industry. Hit songs can emerge out of thin air and evaporate just as quickly. There’s never one concrete way to define what a hit sounds like. It’s not something that could be broken down to its atoms and studied as a science. It’s spontaneous. Billie Eilish is not the same artist as Dua Lipa, Taylor Swift is not The Weeknd, and Drake doesn’t enter the studio with the same creative mindset Ariana Grande has. “Blinding Lights” and “Levitating” don’t exist in the same orbit as “Driver’s License” outside of pure recognition. The pop ecosystem has never been this diverse. Nonetheless, music would not be as invigorating without its balance of the glaringly normal and safe.

Insert Post Malone, the once Iverson braided white guy turned guitar toting pop star. Regardless of the optics in Post’s initial clawing for chart success, he is a mastermind of the pop hit. Where a lot of the best songs on the Billboard charts considerably vary from one another, Malone identifies the right ear catching melodies with quantum precision. Drake and The Weeknd are his only rivals in contesting such a loaded track record of hits; their consistency is unheard of in this era. On pure musical skill, they all have tremendous talents at identifying the potential a song could take on. However, with Drake, there is larger speculation surrounding his ethos that…