Don't Give Up on the South!

Post Malone's F-1 Trillion in an Election Year

ICYMI: Post Malone’s sixth studio album, F-1 Trillion, released last week in a genre-bending splash with a prolific cast of features spanning Dolly Parton to Jelly Roll.

Aforementioned “splash” pun intended.

For me, Post Malone lives in an untouchable, crystallized place. Such is the nature of artists you’re introduced to in high school, perhaps. He’s all at once iconic and nostalgic, charming and unproblematic. Easy to love, easy to play; my following has never been fanatic, but my diffuse admiration has never wavered.

I have core memories attached to the entirety of his discography, with a particular attachment to beerbongs & bentleys (2018). Released a week before my high school graduation, the album soundtracked my first four-hour solo drive to Tuscaloosa for college orientation.

Car packed with a defiant hope for the future and my childhood bedroom’s orange and pink twin sheets, I navigated the Alabama backroads that would become my holiday commute home; windows down, hair flying the entire way —the AC wasn’t working. (Just low on coolant, but I didn’t know that yet.)

I sweat and sang to “Rich & Sad” as if it was written for me, then I stepped onto campus —into the next chapter of my young life. It still feels so visceral, the entire thing. I roomed with three absolute weirdos for the weekend, was peer pressured to underage drink at a dorm party, and had a perfect 48-hour flirtationship that never materialized; he transferred before we returned in the fall. Rites of passage, every one of them, and Post Malone theme songed them all.

The 18 tracks comprising F-1 Trillion establish Post as more than the R&B rooted rapper he broke onto the scene as. Longstanding western wear-ing habits aside, he didn’t make an (impeccably booted) step into the camp of country music until the release of “I Had Some Help (Feat. Morgan Wallen).” A choice feature, for sure, but more on that later.

Me and Post Malone’s boot maker 🤝 (accident, happy) | June 1, 2021 in Cody, WY

Post’s foray into the Country music world was predated by the release of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter earlier this year, trailblazing an intersectional conversation about what “country” means, about who country music belongs to.

Implicit in all disputes over territory —especially regarding the South— is the larger muddied debate about what it means to be an American …and the tension of this struggle is never felt more acutely than in an election year.

Last week on Substack, I read and was delighted by Canadian writer Brendon Holder’s “Is America Out of Its Flop Era?” In it, he catalogs America’s impressive branding (apple pie and guns) and its singular ability to “self-mythologize:”

“The way a nation, more acutely than others, can become a commodity, rich with symbols and artifacts that archive a persona, a history, a collective dream.”

If American iconography is all “American Dream” and bootstraps, the South is “The Lost Cause” that supplies the boots. A microcosm of its larger entity, the South doubles down on matters of identity, hyper-individualism, and territorial disputes.

It achieves this identity project with symbols: music, statues, food, clothing. From the innocuous iced sweet tea and white barbecue sauce to the more harmful hoop skirts and Robert E. Lee monuments, these talismans affirm the South as a distinct region with shared beliefs —ones which focus on domesticity, privacy, and tradition.

But it depends on who you ask, no?

There are also the oral histories of Black resilience and joy from descendants of free and enslaved people, passed down from generation to generation on their families’ front porches; there are the queer and trans youth who learn belonging with the hard earned knowledge that people like them have always existed there; and there are folks who were born and raised in the Bible Belt, who will never leave, but choose love over judgement —unity over division— everyday.

The South, and America at large, is not a monolith.

While its symbology can be romantic, it can also be reductive. If we call people-a place-ourselves any one thing —take up these familiar, myopic views— we lose the detail, the texture, and most of all: the potential.

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So I attended the University of Alabama (without my Orientation crush, like I said).

I never put much thought into it. I couldn’t really afford anything else, and they were paying. It had Greek life, football: the full college experience in the ways I’d always imagined it. Check, check. Easy.

I chose Alabama from a place of what I’d known, which (spoiler alert!) wasn’t much.

It is ironic now how much my safe bet, comfort choice of a school stretched, challenged, and fortified me as a person.

Of course, there was 2020.

If I hadn’t put much thought behind my college decision, it goes without saying that I hadn’t taken ample time to recognize my position —both politically and geographically— in the larger context of my privilege.

The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery were the latest instances in a long string of routine state-sanctioned violence I had just started to become privy to. It is difficult for me, even now, to reconcile my ignorance.

I know that, as a product of my surroundings, I was not given the tools for political or social literacy. My high school history teacher was the football coach and I’d never put much weight behind the subject, never cared much for the outcomes of decades ago wars; I was always reading from and identifying with the perspective of the winner.

Such is the insidious nature of Lost Cause mythology. Of the Civil War, the teachers of my youth would say “there were good guys on both sides;” “it was about states rights;” and maybe, if I was lucky, “it’s unfortunate, but this is the way it was.”

I wasn’t interested in—it wasn’t in my interest to complicate the narrative, to ask questions.

They say ignorance is bliss, and I believe it’s not always insidious. I didn’t know better, and the problem is that I lived in a world where I didn’t have to. I was never discomforted by harder truths, never made to contemplate why injustice exists, never even pressed to use the word “racism” instead of “prejudice.” That’s what they mean by privilege, no? Comfort is a synonym.

So 2020 brought with it a reckoning.

And once I moved past the anger and guilt I was projecting at myself —useless— I found a worthy target in the South as an institution, as a symbol, as tradition, myth.

My college years were colored by so much disillusionment and dis-identification with my surroundings. It was like finding out Santa Claus wasn’t real, your parents had lied. Only now, they’d dropped the curtain to a whole new facet of history —of your reality— joke’s on you! Nearly everyone around you (or at least the ones with a social media presence) is a bigot. Oh, and you’re implicated.

The same people who pridefully taught me that “America is a melting pot” were voting for someone who wanted to build a wall.

It was easy to have enemies, and somehow it didn’t make you feel any better. Incendiary times to exist, they were. I took my anger-fear out on my old identities; frantically tore down pillars of the houses that built me. (Fought my grandfather at Thanksgiving etc. etc. You get the picture.)

I was set to graduate, move; vowed silently to never go back. I relinquished my hope.

But it’s not 2020 anymore.

It is an election year, and while sometimes —if I think about it too hard— that elicits a dissociative trauma response in me, I am cautiously letting hope back in.

Brendon, in his American commentary Substack post writes:

“With the announcement of Kamala Harris replacing Joe Biden on the ballot and the positive response to her selection of Tim Walz as a running mate, there has been a noticeable injection of American pride in the culture.”

Like me, it seems the United States doesn’t want to repeat the hopelessness, the division of four years ago.

Since then I’ve remedied a lot of my anger; I’ve reintegrated the parts of me I was cutting loose to stay afloat. If you’re curious, I’ve also patched things over with my grandpa. I think life’s too short, and while I’m an advocate for separating yourself from unsafe people, I don’t really think my PawPaw is my enemy. He’s a convenient, sometimes infuriating distraction.

Rather than feeling hopeless, and contributing to the infighting that seems to be our American curse, I am choosing to hope. Not naively or with too much belief in politicians as people, but in our potential as a People —as a group whose liberation is bound up together— in doing better.

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Post Malone’s break into the country music scene —alongside (as Brendon points out) Beyoncé, Kacey Musgraves, and forthcoming from Lana Del Rey— signals what I’ve been feeling for months: a homecoming, a reclamation.

I’m tired of hating —myself, where I came from, anyone or anything. And my posture of apology, my embarrassment over the South, and disassociation with my identity, have all been made in vain; they don’t change a single thing. They have no utility in this fight.

What does is a refusal to forfeit, a brave unwillingness to give up on an entire region of people just because they have an established, compelling mythology. What could is a belief in people’s goodness; in their willingness to learn, to change, and in our shared possibility.

The thing I’ve always loved about country music is that it tells a story. I am excited by the arrival of new actors —and actresses— on the scene, who stretch across gender, race, socioeconomic, and regional backgrounds. Who problematize the idea of who country belongs to, and what country even is —who genre-bend and bring playfulness and honesty to the conversation.

Post’s album proves that when we’re less attached to walls, to separateness, to categories, magic can really happen. My America is a melting pot; in my American Dream, we stretch across genres, we reach across the aisle. There’s room enough for everyone.

As for Morgan Wallen, I think he’s still proof there’s a lot of work to be done. Inherent in stories of the South is an immense violence, both direct and implicit, but like I’ve said, no one ever won by giving up on hope. Lest we forget, even Georgia went blue.

There are still bad apples, surely. But there are also the remarkably good ones. How else would we make apple pie? <3

I encourage you to check your Voter Status here and make a plan to vote in November. Join me in my camp of hopefulness! I think it’s the brave thing to do, and it’s kind of nice over here.

Some good country songs: