Covered in Tattoos and Somehow Still Sincere

Rockstar was the song that made clear Post Malone wasn’t just another SoundCloud rapper who’d gotten lucky. That descending bassline with 21 Savage barely whispering over it—the track barely tried and still sat at the top of the charts for weeks. Beerbongs & Bentleys was full of songs built that way, tracks that sounded effortless in a way that revealed exactly how much thought went into making them feel that way.

He grew up outside Dallas, his father worked for the Cowboys, and someone handed him a copy of Terror Squad’s Lean Back at the right age and apparently that was enough to set the whole thing in motion. He moved to Los Angeles at nineteen, put out White Iverson in 2015, and within a few years had become one of the stranger mainstream phenomena in American music—face covered in tattoos, genres blurred beyond recognition, a voice that sat somewhere between rap and country and pop and none of those things, somehow beloved by people who claimed to hate all of them.

The video for Wow doesn’t complicate that picture much, but it doesn’t try to. What it does is let him exist on camera without performing—no narrative, no flex inventory, just him in his element, which turns out to be a studied nonchalance that reads as more honest than most artists’ attempts at openness. The authenticity doesn’t announce itself. It just sits there. That’s rare enough to notice.