“No skateboards or rollerblades allowed” reads a sign near the entrance of Grapevine High School, a beige brick building with newer additions to accommodate growth. The place looks a bit like High School USA, with long glass cases of sports trophies and metal lockers painted red, the school’s color.
Guitars were apparently welcome, at least in 2012, when Austin Post brought his to U.S. History. The class had 32 students, but his teacher, Bryan Humphreys, still remembers the tall skinny kid with the curly hair.
“He was very shy but funny and inquisitive,” said Humphreys. “Very interested in the world.” Looking back, Humphreys wonders if the guitar was a kind of security blanket, one way for a sensitive teen to shield himself in a chaotic world.
Post Malone is a uniquely 21st-century artist, whose rise to fame crosses genres, platforms and product endorsements. With six studio albums in less than 10 years, he’s set streaming records and collaborated with a color wheel of artists from hip-hop (Swae Lee) to pop (Taylor Swift) to country (Morgan Wallen). He’s landed promotion deals with Oreos, Crocs, Doritos and Raising Cane’s, which has a rare Post Malone-inspired restaurant on Dallas’ Northwest Highway. Most famously, Malone has long been sponsored by Bud Light, which placed him in a 2025 Super Bowl commercial with comedian Shane Gillis. A teaser clip featured the duo arriving on someone’s doorstep with a case of Bud Light, looking like normie sports bros, if one of those bros had face tattoos.
Malone headlined Coachella this year, and a Pitchfork review called him a “Dallas native, although really, he sprang from a suburban basement of the mind.” Clever line, but what it misses is how much of North Texas got tattooed on Post Malone, who began his meteoric rise in the flat blackland prairie as a kid named Austin Post.
Born on the Fourth of July
Post was born on July 4, 1995, in Syracuse, N.Y. His parents split when he was young, and his father got a job in North Texas running concessions for the Dallas Cowboys. Grapevine is a modestly affluent suburb that abuts two very affluent suburbs, Southlake and Colleyville. His mother didn’t come to Texas.
“My dad is my biggest fan,” the artist told an interviewer in 2015. (Malone declined to be interviewed for this story.) “My mom doesn’t get it,” he said of his then-burgeoning music career. “My mom is crazy. I love you though.” There are icebergs underneath most parent-child dynamics, but that casual aside suggests a big one.
Austin Post was a quintessential ’90s kid. He learned guitar from Guitar Hero. He spent hours playing The Elder Scrolls: Legends and Magic: The Gathering, games of strategy and skill. When he rolled out of bed on weekdays, he listened to The Kidd Kraddick Morning Show on 106.1 Kiss FM. “He got me through school,” Post said once about Kraddick, a Dallas radio legend.
He had braces at some point and a mop of brown frizz-curl he eventually grew long, like a headbanger. In interviews, the adult Malone has talked about anxiety and insecurities, though his U.S. History teacher considered him pretty well-adjusted. In the Breakfast Club of the high school hallways, Post got along with everyone: the jocks, the brains, the nerds, the basket cases.
“He’s one of those guys who can filter into any group and blend in,” Humphreys said. “He genuinely liked people.”
Music was his thing. He brought his guitar to a red-sauce Italian restaurant in Grapevine’s downtown square called Napoli’s. “He did a lot of old-school country, classic rock,” said Jaime Gage, Napoli’s manager in 2011 and 2012, which was around the time a skinny teen named Austin started showing up and asking the evening’s performers if he could join them for a song.
“Great kid,” said Gage. “Very respectful.”
Post auditioned for a metalcore band called Crown the Empire, but they went with someone else. That band built an international fanbase, with nearly a million followers on Facebook these days. No worries. He became Post Malone.
He used an online rap-name generator to come up with his now-famous moniker. His real last name — a sturdy word, both noun and verb — and a surname redolent of ‘30s gangsters. He stuck around North Texas after high school, tried his hand at Tarrant County College and got a job at Chicken Express. His friend Jason Probst was heading to Los Angeles — Probst would eventually become a professional Minecraft streamer — and Post went, too.
His senior class had voted him “most likely to be famous.” Some kids just have that shine.
Dollar signs in his eyes
Post Malone — or Austin Post, however he thought of himself in those days — entered the hip-hop scene of mid-2010’s LA when he was still a teenager. “Chopped and screwed” was blowing up, music to drink cough syrup to, along with a bass-heavy Southern rap style called trap. He wrote a song called “White Iverson,” a reference to the basketball Hall of Famer, and recorded it with the help of a producer he met in California named Rex Kudo.
“White Iverson” was cool and mid-tempo, with lyrics that could send old people to Urban Dictionary. “I’m saucin‘, I’m swaggin’.”
“That spacey-melodic Auto-Tune stuff was catching on big in hip-hop and rap, and this song checked all the boxes,” said Mason LaDue, a tour and artist manager who heard “White Iverson” on SoundCloud in early 2015 when it was just taking off. LaDue is a character, with LIVE LIFE tattooed across his knuckles and an inky sketch of knobby carpals and metacarpals of skeleton bones tattooed across his right hand.
LaDue left the family ranch in East Texas for the circus of the music industry, where he operated from Dallas and went by the name Bric Mason. He was out in LA at the time, working with the rapper Wiz Khalifa, and the two of them dug “White Iverson.”
LaDue looked up this Post Malone on Twitter, and lo and behold, the kid was from Dallas. LaDue sent him a direct message — with Wiz in the studio, see you’re in LA — and Malone responded almost instantaneously. He came over, and LaDue met a 19-year-old talent with dollar signs in his eyes.
“Remember that movie Blank Check?” said LaDue, referencing a 1994 Disney fantasy about a kid who stumbles across a million dollars. “That’s kinda how he was. ‘I’m gonna have 500 Lamborghinis and pet zebras.’ I’m like, oh brother. This kid needs somebody to look out for him.”
That kid had chops, though. “He had the magic fairy dust sprinkled on him,” said LaDue. “You just know.”
“White Iverson” became a hit — the song would eventually pass a billion streams on Spotify — and LaDue became an older-brother figure and mentor. He booked Malone at South by Southwest that March, where he played 15 shows. You can find a video of one set on YouTube, the underage performer holding a mic in one hand and a tall boy of Lone Star in the other.
That May, he played his first big hometown show at Trees, a 600-capacity venue in Deep Ellum that sold out lightning-quick. He wore a Dallas Mavericks jersey (No. 41, Dirk Nowitzki) and placed a Cowboys cap over his hair, braided into cornrows. Chin-strap beard, silver grill flashing in his mouth, not exactly a common look for Grapevine High, Class of 2013, but Austin Post had transformed.
“You could feel the energy in the room,” said Gavin Mulloy, a concert promoter who was then working as the creative director of Trees. “Bodies were vibrating.”
The show kicked off with “White Iverson,” and Malone ended the show with it, too.
“‘This kid is legit,’” Mulloy remembers thinking. Ten years later, the show still holds up for him. “I’ve been to tons of concerts, I’ve seen tons of breaking artists,” Mulloy says now. “He had it from day one.”
Beerbongs & face tattoos
The 19-year-old Post Malone had the hallmarks of a one-hit wonder. The white kid from the suburbs role-playing a rap-star baddie, the Autotune and Soundcloud of it all.
Malone signed with Republic Records, and his first album, Stoney, came out in 2016, debuting at No. 6 on the Billboard 200. “White Iverson” climbed to No. 14 on the charts, but another single, “Congratulations,” featuring the rapper Quavo, rose to No. 8. When his sophomore release, Beerbongs & Bentleys, dropped in 2018, the album debuted at No. 1.
To understand Malone’s success, it might help to recall that he emerged in a decade dominated by hip-hop, with its inner-city brags and wannabe thugs, but most kids buying (or streaming or pirating) this music were softies with curfews and enough disposable income to rent limos for prom.
Malone’s explosion isn’t unlike Eminem’s in the early years of the new century — another white kid sounding Black, giving voice to the rebellion of the suburbs and facing accusations of appropriation, for which the only real comeback is to keep slinging hits.
But where Eminem had his wingman, Dr. Dre, Post Malone seemed to be scrolling through a contact list of high-profile collaborators: Doja Cat, Ty Dolla $ign, The Weeknd. Where Eminem spat bangers about dumping his ex-wife’s corpse in a trunk (a joke!), Malone put out melancholy trap with titles like “Rich & Sad.”
Shooting to fame at 19 might be a dream come true, but it can also be a nightmare. “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face,” wrote John Updike, and that was before TMZ. Post’s actual face began to change. Maybe you noticed the tattoos. “Stay Away,” the name of a Nirvana song, was inked in swirly script over his right brow, while cursive words under each eye read, “Always Tired” (not a song, but a state of being).
“I don’t like how I look,” he told GQ Style. “So I’m going to put something cool on there so I can look at myself and say, ‘You look cool, kid.’”
Flashing cameras and the panopticon of social media will change how a person moves through this world. Post showed up to the Grammys in a rhinestone Nudie suit. He was husky, then skinny, maybe too skinny. He had a habit of performing so wasted that strangers on the internet worried about him. He was looking more and more like a product of Bud Light, the sponsor that, according to his mentor LaDue, gave the young star a Bud Light vending machine.
“I never saw him do a drug,” said LaDue, who was going through his own “knucklehead” portion of adulthood in the mid-2010s. LaDue remembers Malone as an old-fashioned beer binger. “A beer drunk can be a dangerous soul,” he said.
LaDue and Malone had a falling out around 2018, which seemed to be a pattern for the artist. That’s the year he split from girlfriend Ashlen Diaz, who hired a law firm to sue him for palimony in 2019. She dropped the case after settling privately with Malone for $350,000, according to a suit filed a few years later by the law firm she once retained, which was now suing Malone and Diaz for cutting it out of the deal, a conveyor belt of legal drama that fed a string of clickbait headlines.
Hollywood’s Bleeding was the name of Malone’s 2019 album, one more No. 1 debut. It featured a smash song, “Circles,” that spent 61 weeks on the charts. “We couldn’t turn around,” the song began, “Til we were upside down.”
‘I Had Some Help’
In 2020, Post Malone appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast, where he said “no, sir” and “thank you, sir,” like a good Texas boy. The pair talked about writing while high, how substances can unloose the muse — Stephen King wrote Cujo in a blackout, Rogan pointed out — and Malone characterized his songwriting process as “eight Bud Lights and a tiny bit of shrooms.”
He’d moved to a $3 million home in a vast and serene compound outside Salt Lake City, Utah. He seemed to be entering a quieter, gentler phase of stardom. In 2022, in his late 20s, he had a baby girl with Hee Sung “Jamie” Park, a woman whose identity was kept under the radar until lawsuits and a custody battle brought it to light in 2025. But fatherhood changed him. During the delivery, he told Rogan with awe, he helped pull out the baby. With his own hands!
That last part was on his second Rogan appearance in 2024, a four-and-a-half-hour ramble through UFOs, Mortal Kombat, government surveillance and nuclear war, with the occasional fizz-crack of a pop-top opening.
“I bought a $2 million Magic: The Gathering card,” he told Rogan, a needle-scratch moment, but possibly a relatable splurge for the podcast’s young nerd-bro audience. The card was collectible, a Lord of the Rings crossover, and maybe it was nuts, but Malone liked being the only person in the world who owned it.
Post Malone feels like an everyday dude who just happened to become a major star. He’s not boy-band handsome, neither Eddie Van Halen on guitar nor Bob Dylan with a pen. His songs are simple and hummable, and they sound — as his writing process might suggest — like a guy who drank eight Bud Lights sprinkled with ‘shrooms.
“I Had Some Help” became his first country hit, off his 2024 album, F-1 Trillion. The duet with country star Morgan Wallen is as easy as a cold brew on a summer day.
Malone’s music catalog is a mish-mash of influences — grunge, country, R&B, rap — which might mean he has no sound, though it could also mean his sound is cross-pollinated, the logical extension of a kid who grew up in the casually multi-ethnic mix of North Texas and wakeboarded the culture as the once-tidy categories of terrestrial radio gave way to the information overload of YouTube and Spotify.
Malone’s pivot to country coincided with that once-derided genre becoming cool again. He was on trend once more, following the path of Lil Nas X and Beyoncé. Unlike Cowboy Carter, the country album from the Houston superstar largely ignored by the genre’s fanbase, F-1 Trillion got nominated for five Academy of Country Music Awards, including album of the year. The awards ceremony will be at The Star in Frisco on May 8, the day before Malone performs at AT&T Stadium, so who knows? It’s not impossible a hometown hero could drop in on the awards show, sprinkle a little fairy dust on the land that raised him.
Austin Post turns 30 this July. He may be a global phenomenon and a Utah resident, but so much of him is still Big D. The rhinestone suits and sports jerseys and outlaw denim. The casual swirl of sounds and cultures in his music, the rootlessness of the Texas suburbs. You can even sense the influence in his Raising Cane’s order, which is four chicken fingers, crinkle-cut fries, two Cane’s Sauces, two Texas Toasts, with extra packets of salt and pepper, because leave it to a Texan to order a basket of fried food — and then add seasoning.
Earlier this month, the Grapevine High School band got a surprise. At an “emergency meeting,” dozens of high schoolers listened as a radio station program director told them about the upcoming Post Malone show in Arlington on May 9.
“We are interested in seeing if the Grapevine High School band would be interested in bringing all of its members to perform some of Post Malone’s hits,” the program director said, as one girl in the audience placed both hands on her head, then over her mouth, as if to stop herself from squealing.
More than a decade has passed since Austin Post walked those halls. Malone may not live in Texas anymore, but the place never left him.
