THERE ARE MORE THAN EIGHT BILLION PEOPLE ON PLANET earth, and very few of them can remain relatable while they’re telling you about the time the diamond fell out of their mouth. Not just relatable, likable. Your heart breaks when you hear how he hungrily bit into a Chicken McNugget that night in Rome, and how he just knew he’d lost that $600,000 fang. It hardly matters that the story has already been spoiled. The two massive, real-ass jewels are right there on his canines where they belong; a happy ending is a sure thing. But still: “I had the left one in my hand, and I dropped it right into the sink hole,” he says. (Under normal circumstances, you’d correct him and say, “Drain,” but you don’t, because the guy is on a roll.) “I’m like, ‘Fuck, man, I’m going to have to go into the ancient Roman sewers.’ ” You find yourself rooting for this guy to locate the twelve-carat gem that a team of dentists and jewelers shaped and polished and drilled into his teeth. You applaud his ingenuity when he tells you about how he rigged up a scooping device with a pair of pliers and a plastic takeout-pizza tripod; you relax a little when he retrieves it; you feel his victory when a Roman dentista gets it re-embedded. He did it!
It’s all going to work out for Post Malone. Good for him. Let’s get the man another beer.
Since the February night in 2015 when the then-nineteen-year-old uploaded a demo called “White Iverson” to his SoundCloud—from an inflatable twin mattress on the floor of a closet in a friend’s furniture-free house in Encino … or was it Tarzana?—he’s dropped three multiplatinum studio albums, one greatest-hits compilation, and his latest release, (out this past July). He’s been nominated for the Album of the Year Grammy Award twice and Record of the Year three times. He currently holds the record for the most diamond-certified ten-million-selling singles with eight, cruising past Bruno Mars’s six earlier this year, and that’s In an era when superstars are from the era before—Drake, Harry, Taylor, and Beyoncé were already well established by the time he hit that upload button in Encino or Tarzana—Post Malone is one of the few new faces to have saturated the culture. Everyone knows who he is. You mention Post Malone and people say, “Oh, I him.” And they it.
