Is country a lifestyle or an accessory? Depends on who you ask. Presently it’s fashionable to try and bridge that gap. Blue-state dwellers with email jobs are dressing up like duck hunters, donning Carhartt and Realtree camo to the warehouse rave or wine bar.
Costumed as a rodeo queen, waved the stars and stripes on the cover of her earlier this spring. In the video for July’s “ ,” rocked cutoffs and an A-frame, play-acting homestead fantasies with as she extolled the virtues of being tough as leather boots. Despite Spotify’s to fill any idle moment with the song of the summer is ’s country-fried flip of an old ringtone rap hit.
“ ,” an ode to drowning your 9-to-5 sorrows with double shots of Jack, has spent the past five weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. Currently just behind it is “I Had Some Help,” another twangy drinkin’ anthem, this one by and . With frizzy braids, glazed eyes and a debut single called “ ,” Post Malone emerged in 2015 as a reflection of the zeitgeist, echoing the slurry melodies of exquisitely medicated rappers.
Post spent his teenage years in the Dallas suburbs, playing guitar in hardcore bands and rapping over bedroom beats. The 19-year-old’s first SoundCloud upload racked up a million plays in a month, though he looked a little goofy in the “White Iverson” video dabbing on the hood of a rented Rolls Royce. “I’m not a rapper,” he insisted in a 2016 , calling genre a restrictive, dated notion, but rappers were alway.