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While this chart-topping interruption by Post/Swae seemed at the time like the Hot 100 reverting to its late-’10s mode of male-centric hip-hop, really “Sunflower” had a lot more in common with Grande’s and especially Halsey’s hits. Both hits, especially “Psycho,” turned Post from a left-field rap figure to an improbable pop star, making him a fixture on Top 40 radio, and follow-up hits like “ Better Now” extended his melancholy dudebro brand. This boosted both their hip-hop bona fides and their chart success at the peak moment in 2017–18 for downbeat trap anthems. Both “Rockstar” and “Psycho” also included featured performances by established rappers-the former supported by 21 Savage, the latter by Ty Dolla Sign. Billboard tracked them not only on the Hot 100 but on its genre charts Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs and Hot Rap Songs (which in the digital era are both basically just mini–Hot 100s more on that momentarily). Notably, in the post-Drake era where most rap is sung, Post’s hits were classified by the music industry as “rap” and charted accordingly. This Post subspecies persisted on his slightly brighter, marginally more up tempo No. 1 “ Psycho” in the spring of 2018.
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Post first topped the Hot 100 in the fall of 2017 with “ Rockstar,” which refined the template he inaugurated with his 2015 debut single “ White Iverson” and was, until fairly recently, Post’s calling card: glum, trap-adjacent downers from an intermittently guitar-playing white dude.
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He has once again read the zeitgeist and gotten ahead of pop’s move back to the center.
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(By the way, that Post-Ozzy team up, “ Take What You Want,” is now being fed to radio, too.) If Post Malone is far from the most critically appreciated music star of our time, he is possibly the most definitive of his era-less a trendsetter than a remarkably well-tuned Geiger counter for what travels on America’s airwaves. Post is now a guaranteed-enough hit-maker that, this fall, none other than Ozzy Osbourne scored his first Top 10 hit in three decades just by teaming up with him. Even if we exclude his deep cuts-when his last two albums dropped, every track on them made momentary Hot 100 appearances due to streaming-he has still generated more than a dozen actively promoted Top 20 hits, more than half of them Top 5 hits. Post has racked up more than two dozen Top 40 hits in just four years. But even that statistic understates the depth of his late ’10s success. It’s the fourth Hot 100 chart topper in just over two years for the 24-year-old born Austin Richard Post. “Circles” has been a fairly omnipresent hit all fall, strong in all of the Hot 100 chart metrics-it reached the runner-up slot in streaming back in September, got as high as second place at radio in late November, and is currently the top-selling digital song, all of which eventually propelled it to No. 1 on the big chart.