Where Post Malone goes, controversy often follows. The most recent, overshadowing the start of the Texan’s latest European tour, involves an apparent snub towards recently incarcerated rapper 21 Savage. Rockstar, the hedonistic smash that turned Malone into one of hip-hop’s most lucrative new names in 2017, featured a guest verse from 21 Savage, but when the 23-year-old performed the track at last week’s Grammy awards, he declined to shout out his collaborator, currently being threatened with deportation after US immigration arrested him earlier this month for allegedly outstaying his visa.
The incident underlined a suspicion within the rap community that Malone, real name Austin Post, isn’t one of their own, but an interloper: a “rhinestone cowboy” offering “one of the shallowest bastardisations of rap to date”, to quote journalist Jeff Weiss in a scathing Washington Post takedown of the MC that went viral last year. Here is an artist, detractors insist, that benefits from the many white Americans who enjoy the murk and menace of Future and Migos, but would prefer to hear a white American doing it.
There’s no acknowledgment for Savage at Malone’s first Scottish show, either. Instead, what follows as the rapper bounds on stage, dressed in black, glugging from a red cup, is a perfunctory pop-rap spectacle that sees him thunder through country-infused hits from his two studio albums. Broken Whiskey Glass, from his debut Stoney, provides a Morricone-style cinematic opener, full of epic strings and cawing vulture noises. Outings for Psycho, the new single Wow and White Iverson – the airy blend of synths and 808 bass that put Malone on the music industry’s radar in 2015 – arrive soon after, before the star grabs an acoustic guitar for a stripped-down rendition of campfire singalong Stay.
It’s the more unabashedly pop moments like this that find Malone at his most natural, with the most to say. While trappy tracks such as No Option struggle to offer much beyond Mercedes-Benz brags and cliches about watches and women, bellowed anthems such as Better Now pull you inside fractured relationships and his even more fractured psyche, dousing fans with angst, emotion and impressive vocals. Sunflower, by contrast – his deliriously catchy theme song to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse – is a candy-coloured melodic tumble as vivid as the blockbuster it accompanied.
“You can be an astronaut, a heart surgeon, whatever you want,” he tells the crowd before the closer, Congratulations. Malone sometimes sounds as if he hasn’t yet worked out what he wants to be himself. Though his genre-hopping, drawing on emo and Americana as well as Atlanta hip-hop, has undoubtedly helped boost his success in the streaming era (he has a song for every Spotify playlist imaginable), the result is sometimes unfocused and jarring. You also realise that while controversy might follow Malone, unlike the last arena-entertaining white rapper before him, Eminem, it’s seldom his music that offends. Controversies such as the Savage saga are byproducts of the awkward intersection between musical cultures in which he exists.
Maybe it’s silly to expect Malone to shout out Savage, to acknowledge challenges facing those from the rap world whose sound and style he mines. After all, bowing out as a blaze of pyrotechnics erupt around him, Malone isn’t really a rap artist, or even the rockstar he proclaimed himself on his breakout hit. He’s a pop star, nothing more, nothing less.
• At Manchester Arena, 19 February. Then touring.
