In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
The Village Voice newsroom hated to see me coming. I was a problem up in there. Picture it: Tom Robbins on the phone with a source. Wayne Barrett fuming to his interns about Rudolph Giuliani or Donald Trump or some other power-drunk vampire. Rob Harvilla frantically trying to put together a Pazz & Jop special without too much interference from the assholes who bought the paper. And then the sound comes blasting from the crappy Nokia phone: “T-t-totally dude!”
All through 2007, my “Party Like A Rockstar” ringtone made life absolutely miserable for my co-workers at the Voice. Shop Boyz, an Atlanta rap group who never made another hit, went all the way to #2 with their song about partying like a rockstar. (It’s a 9.) That song sold a lot of ringtones, and one of them was mine. It never even occurred to me that I should keep my phone on vibrate. I always had my iPod earbuds in, so I barely ever even heard that ringtone. Instead, the ringtone was my gift to everyone around me. Within the hallowed halls of that journalistic institution, “Party Like A Rockstar” became my theme song. I think Lynn Yaeger yelled at me about it once.
This was obviously dumb and obnoxious professional behavior on my part. But I loved “Party Like A Rockstar” for dumb and obnoxious reasons. At a time when rock stardom was becoming an obsolete joke, we got these guys yelling over a tinny guitar-riff loop about being on a yacht with Marilyn Manson, getting a tan, man. The disrespect was probably unintentional, but that didn’t make it any less fun. It was the type of boisterous energy that actual rock music seldom supplied anymore — a lean-wit-it rock-wit-it dance on the grave of guitar music.
A decade after “Party Like A Rockstar,” the world was blessed with another Southern rap hit about partying like a rockstar, and this one was even bigger. This time, though, the tone was all different. The song wasn’t a playful sendup of rock music. Beyond a couple of lyrical namechecks, it barely had anything to do with the stuff. Instead, this new track was a bleak dirge about living a glamorous and self-destructive lifestyle, rendered in a sinister melodic croon that brought its own kind of magnetism to the table. This “Rockstar” didn’t come from a gleefully amateurish one-hit wonder. Instead, it was a team-up from two rising stars who remain on top to this day. One of them, the lead artist on the track, wasn’t even a rapper, really, and he was on his way to actual non-ironic rock stardom, or at least to something like it.
That’s right: Post Malone is here. He looked, sounded, and acted like a rapper, but he was quick to assert that he wasn’t one, sometimes to the point of disrespecting the genre in which he found a temporary home. He was a creature of the streaming age, one who seemed to internalize the entire musical landscape and to melt it all into his own form of robo-gargle digital blues. Before he sing-rapped about feeling like a rockstar, he sing-rapped about being the white Iverson, a claim so patently absurd and self-contradictory that its success allowed him to say or do pretty much anything after that. Post Malone continues to float freely across genre lines, making friends with every other A-lister and crafting vaporous hooks that worm their way into millions of brains. He was a star before “Rockstar,” but “Rockstar” made it official.
Before he was a quasi-rapper or a rockstar, Austin Richard Post was just another white kid. His parents met while they were both working at an industrial laundry business in the frozen town of Syracuse, New York, and Posty lived there until he was 10. That means that Post Malone and I both lived in Syracuse at the same time, though I was in college and he was in preschool. He still has a house in Baldwinsville, right outside Syracuse. (When Posty was born, Bryan Adams’ “Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman” was the #1 song in America.) When Post was 10, his father got a job managing the concession stands for the Dallas Cowboys, so the whole family moved down to Texas.
As a kid, Post Malone taught himself guitar after the Guitar Hero video game sparked his interest. At an eighth grade talent show, he and his band Dropshot played a metalcore cover of Rihanna’s “Umbrella.” One of his bandmates grew up to lead the Dallas metalcore band Crown The Empire, and Posty unsuccessfully auditioned to become that band’s guitarist. To this day, Post Malone is a big booster of DIY hardcore, and people in that world talk about him like he’s a human sunray. People in a lot of worlds talk about him like that. He must be a great hang.
Like a lot of people, I first assumed that Post Malone’s stage name was a reference to Karl Malone, the Mailman, but Post says that it’s just what he got when he entered his name into an online rap-name generator. Maybe that algorithm was making a Karl Malone reference. (Posty does live in Utah these days.) He started messing around with rap as a teenager, and he made a mixtape called Young And After Them Riches when he was 16. He also made a synthpop video under the name Leon DeChino for his high-school art class. He finished high school and spent a little time at a community college, but he dropped out when his childhood friend Jason Probst found some fame as an online Minecraft streamer. Probst moved out to California to live in a house with other Minecraft streamers, and Post came with him, crashing on his couch.
While he was out in California, Post Malone met FKi 1st, a rap producer who’d made his name working with the Atlanta group Travis Porter on early-’10s viral hits like “Make It Rain” and “Bring It Back.” FKi went on to work with people like Travis Scott and Ty Dolla $ign, and he produced Post Malone’s debut single “White Iverson.” What a weird song. Apparently, there wasn’t a whole lot of thought behind “White Iverson.” Post Malone got his hair braided and decided that he looked like Allen Iverson but white, so he made a song about it. I guess you can’t really plan something like that.
With “White Iverson,” Post Malone jumped into the post-Drake sing-rap wave with both feet. He melded his melancholy croon with trap production, and his voice found a pathos that didn’t really exist in the silly-ass lyrics: “I need that money like the ring I never won.” The first time I saw the video, shot out in the desert with some borrowed Rolls Royces, I assumed it was a joke — a Riff Raff-style white-hipster pisstake. But Post Malone has this weird thing where he’s always serious but also never serious. Everything is fun, but nothing is a joke, and there’s a strange sadness to “White Iverson” that lingers longer than the novelty that I first thought it was.
Post Malone was 19 years old when he posted “White Iverson” on SoundCloud in 2015. When he started ballin’, he was young. The song took off online, and that got Posty a deal with Republic. Soon enough, my kids were jumping around to “White Iverson” at our local trampoline park, and I had to confront the idea that maybe this bizarrely pretty song wasn’t such a joke after all. “White Iverson” eventually made it to #14, and it’s diamond now. On the strength of that song, Posty played Kylie Jenner’s 18th-birthday party, where he met Kanye West. Within a year, he was singing on Kanye’s 2016 single “Fade,” which peaked at #47. Posty also opened dates on Justin Bieber’s Purpose tour, and Bieber appeared on Posty’s “Deja Vu,” which peaked at #75.
Post Malone released his debut mixtape August 26th in spring 2016. The tape was supposed to be named after the release date for Posty’s album Stoney, but Stoney didn’t actually come out on that day. He was reportedly offered a spot as one of that year’s XXL Freshmen, but he turned it down. Depending on who you ask, that was either because of scheduling conflicts or Posty not wanting to pigeonhole himself as a rapper. In 2017, he pissed off a lot of the rap world when he told a Polish news outlet, “If you’re looking for lyrics, if you’re looking to cry, if you’re looking to think about life, don’t listen to hip-hop.” He later walked those comments back without fully apologizing, explaining that he was drunk when he did the interview. In retrospect, that kind of talk, along with the whole being-white thing, probably helped Post Malone move outside the rap world in ways that most rappers will never be able to do.
Stoney ultimately came out in December 2016, and it became the kind of slow-burn smash that hangs around in the upper reaches of the Billboard album charts for months. It’s quintuple platinum now. The album’s biggest hit was “Congratulations,” a team-up with former Number Ones artist Quavo. (That song peaked at #8. It’s a 7.) But the track that might’ve truly made Post Malone was “I Fall Apart,” a wounded-romantic ballad that took off despite never being officially released as a single. Instead, “I Fall Apart” when viral thanks to a video of a tearful live performance. More than a year after its release, “I Fall Apart” peaked at #16. Today, both “Congratulations” and “I Fall Apart” are diamond. Post Malone has a lot of diamond singles.
During this initial run, Post Malone was an absolute critical punching bag, and he remained one for years. It was easy to hold this guy up as an example of everything that was wrong with circa-2017 popular music — playlist-friendly mercenary genre-melt, clumsily clueless white-privilege bullshit, the rise of abjectly sloppy male pop stars who are happy to look like swamp creatures. Jeff Weiss’ 2018 live review is one of the greatest examples of pure critical hate that we’ve seen in the past decade or so. But Post Malone can be a charming motherfucker, and a little charm goes a long way. I didn’t much care about the music on Stoney, but I caught myself really enjoying a podcast episode where Posty sat down with Stone Cold Steve Austin. It was hard to stay mad at that guy.
Post Malone’s Stoney singles were still doing big numbers when he released “Rockstar.” The song came out in advance of Posty’s sophomore album Beerbongs & Bentleys. He might not have considered himself a rapper, but he was still working like a rapper when he made that record. “Rockstar” came together one day when Post Malone was at New York’s Quad Studios, recording with the young Brooklyn rapper Joey Bada$$. (Joey Bada$$ has no Hot 100 hits as lead artist, but he made it to #83 as a guest on future Number Ones artist XXXTentacion’s 2018 track “Infinity (888).”) Here’s the story that Post Malone told Billboard: “Some kid came in, and I guess he was in the session next door, and he was like, ‘Hey? Can I play you some beats?’ I’m like, ‘I guess so.’ You know, I’m a nice guy, I like music. I’ll listen to your beats. He played the beat, and it was incredible.”
The producer in question was a young New Yorker known professinally as Tank God. He was just 20 at the time, and he’d never landed a production credit before. Tank was in college at the University Of Hartford, and he made the “Rockstar” beat during finals week. Post Malone’s regular collaborator Louis Bell added a bunch of elements to the “Rockstar” beat, getting co-producer credit. Bell, a Massachusetts native, is more than a decade older than Post, but he broke in as Post’s vocal engineer. He got a bunch of production credits on Stoney tracks, including “Congratulations,” and he went on to become a hugely successful producer and songwriter; we’ll see his work in this column many more times.
In that Billboard interview, Post Malone says that “Rockstar” mostly came together in that first studio session: “We were just vibing on it, and the melody was sick. We just cut like a little scratch vocal, and we took it back to LA.” Joey Bada$$ got a songwriting credit on “Rockstar,” as did Post Malone, Tank God, Louis Bell, and someone named Carl Rosen. There’s an early version of “Rockstar” with verses from Bada$$ and T-Pain, someone who’s been in this column a bunch of times. T-Pain sounds good on it, even if his verse doesn’t quite fit the track’s tone. He’s too energetic. For “Rockstar” to have the right effect, it has to work as a vaguely menacing dirge.
The “Rockstar” thesis is right there on the hook: “I’ve been fucking hoes and popping pillies, man, I feel just like a rockstar.” The beat hums and glints slowly, with snaky minor-key keyboard melodies dissolving into gothed-out reverb. The lyrics are all about partying, but it’s not the kind of partying that the Shop Boyz described on “Party Like A Rockstar.” Instead, Post sounds numb and zombified, perhaps a sign of what happens when rap moves from lyrics about selling drugs to lyrics about consuming them. Posty might leave his own show in a cop car, or he might throw a TV out the window of the Montage. He’s surrounded by cocaine and liquor and groupies, and he doesn’t sound excited about any of it.
Post Malone doesn’t cram too many words into his “Rockstar” verses, but he does namecheck Bon Scott and Jim Morrison, two rockers who fell victim to their self-destructive tendencies. (Jim Morrison has been in this column a couple of times. AC/DC’s highest-charting Hot 100 hit is 1990’s “Moneytalks,” which peaked at #23, but that came out years after Bon Scott’s death. The only time Bon Scott ever landed on the Hot 100 was 1979’s “Highway To Hell,” which peaked at #47.) On “Rockstar,” Post Malone romanticizes the same kinds of indulgence that killed Morrison and Scott, but he doesn’t sound that serious about it. Instead, the point of the song is the way his sliding spectral melodies wrap around that beat. Instead of using those T-Pain and Joey Bada$$ verses, Post found a rapper who could match that tone. Enter 21 Savage.
Here’s how Post Malone describes 21 Savage when talking to Billboard: “I feel like he has a lot of attitude. You know, he’s really got his own lane and he really doesn’t care about anything, so I figured that embodied it perfectly.” Makes sense. 21 Savage doesn’t sound like a rock star on “Rockstar,” and he’s never shown any sign that he cares even remotely about rock music. But if you’re looking for a rapper who doesn’t care about anything, he’s right up at the top of the list.
21 Savage was born Shéyaa Bin Abraham-Joseph in London, and his UK citizenship wasn’t public knowledge before ICE arrested him in 2019. He’s not exactly a UK rapper, but if he was, he’d be the most successful UK rapper in history. (When Savage was born, Boyz II Men’s “End Of The Road” was the #1 song in America. In the UK, it was Tasmin Archer’s “Sleeping Satellite.”) Savage’s parents were both immigrants from Caribbean countries — mother from Dominica, father from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. When his parents broke up, Savage moved with his mother to Atlanta; he was seven when he arrived in the US.
Savage grew up rough, getting arrested for gun possession in seventh grade and dropping out of school in ninth. As a kid, he sold weed and stole cars, and he lost multiple friends and family members to street violence when he was still young. On his 21st birthday, he was shot six times, and his best friend was killed. In 2013, he started rapping, and he made an immediate impression on the Atlanta underground. Savage rapped about criminal life in a whispery hiss, playing the role of bloodthirsty wraith and carrying himself like a horror-movie villain. He didn’t bother with melodies or complex patterns. He didn’t even raise his voice. Instead, he said, simply and directly, that he would be happy to kill you. Before long, that style resonated with the rap world beyond Atlanta, and Savage’s 2016 song “Red Opps” made it to #72 on the Hot 100.
21 Savage’s rise was fast and disorienting. Even his name started trends. Soon, there was a rapper named 22 Savage whose whole gimmick was that he was harder than 21 Savage. More Savages emerged: 23 Savage, 24 Savage, all the way up to 30 Savage. None of the other Savages lasted. 21 Savage became an XXL Freshman, joining a packed class that included peers like Lil Uzi Vert, Kodak Black, and Lil Yachty. Later in 2016, Savage and future Number Ones artist Metro Boomin released the collaborative EP Savage Mode, a truly great piece of street-rap nastiness. On the song “X,” they teamed up with Future, another future Number Ones artist, and that song made it to #36.
21 Savage’s whole style was almost comically dark. In his most famous early moment, an interviewer asked him about the cross tattooed on his forehead, and Savage muttered back, “Issa knife.” His style seemed too limited and bleak to cross over, but his name and reputation steadily grew anyway. In summer 2017, Savage released his full-length debut Issa Album, and he made it to #12 with lead single “Bank Account.” When he showed up on “Rockstar,” Savage was right in the middle of his rookie-year run.
I don’t know how much Post Malone and 21 Savage have in common in their real lives, but they sound good together on “Rockstar.” Savage gets a star entrance, the music dropping away as his murmur-snarl arrives. He doesn’t say much in his “Rockstar” verse, and even his usual threats are pretty light: “Livin’ like a rockstar/ Smash out on a cop car/ Sweeter than a Pop-Tart/ You know you are not hard.” But he sounds cool, and the horror-movie haze of the beat clicks in with the music that he was already making with Metro Boomin. Simply by showing up on the song, Savage lends “Rockstar” a certain charge. Things become a little more heightened and urgent when he’s around. With that said, my favorite part of “Rockstar” is the end of the song, when the voices become chopped-up abstractions and the haunted music-box pianos get a few witchy moments in the spotlight.
“Rockstar” got a big rollout, and it debuted at #2 behind Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow.” Posty to Billboard: “You know, I wanted #1, but I guess Cardi B is dope too [Laughs]. She’s super sweet and super dope, but you know, hopefully we’ll have it.” Republic did a weird thing when pushing “Rockstar.” The song wasn’t on YouTube — or it was, but not the whole song. At first, the only “Rockstar” video on YouTube was a 30-second loop of the chorus, which repeated over and over for three and a half minutes. There were links to stream “Rockstar” on services like Spotify and Apple Music, which apparently paid better royalties than YouTube, but there were no notes about how this was just a snippet of the song and not the whole thing. The comments were disabled, so people couldn’t warn each other. That YouTube video still contributed to the chart placement of “Rockstar,” but people who wanted to hear the entire song had to do a little more legwork. This led to a lot of alarmed articles about sketchy record-label workarounds — an annoying new tactic in the old chart-manipulation game.
Honestly, I probably listened to that looped-chorus version of “Rockstar” on YouTube a few times without even realizing it. That’s kind of the problem with “Rockstar.” It’s a catchy, atmospheric track, but it blurs into the background. If you’re not paying enough attention, you might not realize that you’re just hearing the hook a bunch of times. In any case, the big labels didn’t adapt that looped-chorus YouTube tactic, so it wasn’t a harbinger of things to come.
A few weeks after “Rockstar” hit #1, we finally got the video, and it’s a weird one. Emil Nava directed a bloody fantasia where Post Malone wears a white suit and chops up would-be assassins with a samurai sword. The clip works as an obvious homage to the big fight in the first Kill Bill, and it’s striking to see a big pop hit visualized in such an R-rated manner. As someone who loves violent movies, I have to say that Post Malone looks pretty cool when drenched in blood, though I would’ve appreciated some sharper editing and choreography.
That hyper-violent “Rockstar” video now has more than a billion views, and the song went diamond in 2020. Post Malone’s Beerbongs & Bentleys album wouldn’t come out until about six months after Rockstar, and it would be another huge success. We’ll see both Post Malone and 21 Savage in this column again. We’ll see another rap song called “Rockstar,” too.
GRADE: 6/10
BONUS BEATS: Here’s former Number Ones artist Lil Wayne and his protege Nicki Minaj rapping over the “Rockstar” beat on Wayne’s 2017 Dedication 6 mixtape track “5 Star”:
(Nicki Minaj will eventually appear in this column.)
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Man, I feel just like a bookstar. Buy it here.
