Album of the Week: Post Malone's "Hollywood's Bleeding"

By Jamie Weiss

What do Post Malone, Ed Sheeran, Drake and Beyoncé have in common? They’re all like Teflon. Let me explain. All four are some of the most successful artists of the 21st century, all worth many million dollars, with even bigger album and ticket sales. Any music they release is bound to attract love and hate in equal measure: when you’re that big, it comes with the territory. And that notoriety extends far beyond music – celebrities of their calibre can hardly breathe without someone praising or cursing their name. But let me get to the point.

They’re all huge, sure, but more importantly, they’ve all attracted – and survived –controversies that would kill otherwise smaller artists’ careers. Beyoncé’s had her music labelled “anti-police”. Drake controversially hid his son from the world. Ed Sheeran’s been accused of copyright infringement multiple times. And Post Malone’s been called a “culture vulture”; a white artist who apes black music and style while benefitting from the privilege and novelty of being a white rapper.

But let me get to my point. They’re all like Teflon because no matter what they do, they sell records. Love them or hate them, anything they release will be listened to. That’s just a fact.
Yet what sets these four apart from other superstars is that they don’t sit on their laurels.
Their bulletproof appeal gives them the freedom to experiment creatively – and it’s this experimentation that, in turn, makes them such popular and unique artists.

Drake has collaborated with grime – so has Ed Sheeran, for that matter. These collaborations have contributed to British hip-hop’s meteoric rise in recent years. Beyoncé’s curation of The Lion King remake’s soundtrack, working with African as well as African-American artists, is emblematic of an artist not afraid to step outside her comfort zone.

And Post Malone (real name Austin Post)’s 2019 album Hollywood’s Bleeding shares this experimental spirit. Posty could put out just about anything and people would listen, but instead he took some risks, roped in some frankly huge names, and gave us maybe his best album yet.

Let’s start by talking about the collaborators. Kanye West, Ozzy Osbourne, Travis Scott, Young Thug, Father John Misty, Halsey, Future, SZA… Need I say more? The album is objectively stacked, and everyone brought their fucking A-game. Posty is an incredibly versatile artist, with a very impressive vocal range, but he really needs other artists on a track to provide contrast; help make him shine. Appropriately, it’s the tracks with features that are the highlights of the album. DaBaby’s verse on ‘Enemies’ is one of his hottest – a savvy choice by Posty there, to harness his rising star power. ‘Staring at the Sun’ is elevated from mediocre to amazing by SZA, and Young Thug’s iconic, flurried delivery compliments Posty’s emotional drawling on ‘Goodbyes’. The exception to this rule is ‘Wow.’, where Post goes really hard on his own – reminding us that he’s no slouch.

Post Malone has always existed in a sometimes uneasy place between rock, country and rap, and Hollywood’s Bleeding certainly leans more into those former two genres than his other albums. Tracks like ‘Allergic’, ‘Circles’ and the title track have particularly pronounced guitar sounds, and while the album has plenty of those jittery trap drums that’s almost a signature of Posty’s at this point, it’s also nice to see some more acoustic percussion and more complex production coming from young Austin. Don’t fret: there’s a lot of quintessential Posty for those who liked his previous releases on songs like ‘Die For Me’, ‘On The Road’, ‘I’m Gonna Be’ and ‘I Know’ as well.

First featured on the soundtrack for last year’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, ‘Sunflower’ pops up again on Hollywood’s Bleeding. I think this was a somewhat weird inclusion: Hollywood’s Bleeding is already a fairly long album and ‘Sunflower’ is so stylistically different to everything else on here that it just feels out of place. It’s a great track, but it doesn’t make sense to be on the album.

‘Take What You Want’ is easily the highlight of the record. Ozzy Osbourne puts in his most spirited performance in years. Oh yeah, and Travis Scott’s there. You could almost miss that because Malone and Osbourne are just so good on this one! It’s hard to imagine any other artist but Post Malone uniting such disparate icons on a single track, and it works. So well. The guitar solo is ridiculous, too. This track typifies the creative freedom that is part of Post Malone’s success. He’s so huge that he has that capacity and ability to take risks and create unexpectedly beautiful things. 

I won’t pretend as if Hollywood’s Bleeding is some grand work of art. It’s still a flawed album: some of Posty’s lyrics are painfully cringey (e.g. on ‘Saint-Tropez’ - “Ooh, this shit bliss, I'm so rich / Abs like Abercrombie Fitch / Mille on my wrist”) and while he takes advantage of his star power to expose listeners to new sounds or collaborations, not every track or combination of artists makes sense (like Future and Halsey on ‘Die For Me’).
But hand on heart, the worst thing I can say about this album is that it’s too easily digestible. Post Malone might be innovating – or at least, not staying complacent – but this album is not a challenge to listen to. He tries new things and presents new(ish) sounds but they’re never so boundary-pushing that the average consumer is going to be put off. Maybe that’s his brilliance; maybe that’s his flaw. It’s change, but a slow pace of change. Agreeable change.

Post Malone’s never going to be in the same echelon as some of the artists he collaborates or shares the charts with. Like them, he might court controversy or be divisive, but he doesn’t have the same impact on modern music. Will we be talking about in ten years’ time the same way we’ll talk about Kanye West, Justin Bieber or Ozzy Osbourne?  I don’t know. At the end of the day, Hollywood’s Bleeding is an above-average album. You can call him a culture vulture but his domination of the charts is inevitable. At least it’s Hollywood’s Bleeding doing the domination: we could do a lot worse.