Post Malone’s rockstar, the No 1 song in the US and UK this week, is a tale of drugs and loveless sex – and joins similarly empty-sounding hits from 21 Savage, Future, Lil Uzi Vert and more. Why has mainstream rap become so bleak?
After releasing his single rockstar in mid-September, the US rapper Post Malone, accompanied by fellow MC 21 Savage, broke Apple Music’s streaming record with 25m plays in a single week. Since then, the pair have reached No 1 in the US charts, and now the UK charts, too, interrupting the month-long reign of Sam Smith’s ballad Too Good at Goodbyes and a year dominated by shiny, relatively toothless pop. With its dreary, droning loops, and dark lyrics about drugs and women, Rockstar is part of a menacing, nihilistic sound that is taking over the top 40.
A burgeoning generation of rappers are spitting bleak, hedonistic rhymes about prescription pills, loveless sex and premature death – and their presence on the charts swells week after week. Lil Uzi Vert’s XO Tour Lif3 spent 28 weeks on the Hot 100 charts with a catchy wail about a couple’s suicidal thoughts; Future extols an unnerving concoction of ecstasy and prescription drugs on Mask Off’s softly rapped chorus, “Percocet / Molly, Percocet”, creating one of the biggest rap hits of the year in the process; and 21 Savage reached No 2 in the US with his LP Issa Album, with tracks that advise “numb the pain with the money”, retelling Savage’s rise from an impoverished Atlanta childhood that saw him start carrying a gun at 14.
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