Hollywood's Bleeding
The back of his neck looked like an aerial picture I had seen of the Mississippi delta. I wondered how a persons neck could get to look like that. It wasn't just that the skin was wrinkled. It was also discolored in odd ways. The lines looked carved and the texture was leathery. The mans neck told a story. Probably some ball games. Time in a yard on a tractor smoking a pipe. Maybe a few fights. Definitely many years doing some job somewhere. Nothing remarkable. The sun certainly played a major role in the story. The sun may actually have been the main character. This guys neck was just one thing in a sea of things that the sun had baked. My eyes drifted downward to the stack of tiny plastic communion cups placed into the... well whatever that thing is, that is made to hold the cups, right next to where the pencils and prayer cards go, right next to the baptist hymnal, right next to the holy bible itself. Gods word. The dudes ears were a little too big for his head. Thats what I remember really.
I put the mirror that I had been using to stare at the back of my own head with down on a pile of cords from a left out hair dryer and makeup and pieces of floss. The bathroom counter is a mess.
As I leave the bathroom I get my fake earpods and put on the new Post Malone album. It is my 7th time listening to it from the beginning. I choose to listen to the “Posty's Universe” version on Spotify so that I can hear him talk about some of the songs while marveling at his face tattoos in the video clips. I'm struck by how disarmingly genuine he comes off in his monologues. There doesn't seem to be anything contrived about him. Even the playboy bunny tattooed next to his right eye seems genuine.
Hollywood's Bleeding is the 24 year olds third album. Its pop. Its hip hop. Its rock. Its Motown. The lyrics are simple and observational. Every song has a hard hook. The album is sweet and hopeful (“flossy” in the words of the man himself). Its also a devastating lament. He sings about insta-love and the internet. He says what we all feel here in the west. There's too much, “the world has gone to shit and we all know that”. The album moves me to stare at nothing for what seems to be an eternity.
“I want you out of my head, I want you out of my bedroom tonight, theres no way I can save you, cause I need to be saved too”.
The track “myself” starts playing. As I listen this song becomes the fulcrum of the album for me. It is the part where the artist Post Malone becomes the conduit of something collectively felt. He sings
“Its what it is, its how I live, all the places I've been
I wish I could have been there myself
I made so much, spent so much, but I can't get enough
I wish I could have been there myself”
Its a song about us. How disconnected we are from the experiences we are “having”. Much like Solomon from the Old Testament, Post has denied himself nothing in the way of pleasure and accumulation and has discovered in the empty aftermath the absurd gem of existential longing.
“all of this American dreaming, everybody's sick of believing, lets not give a fuck, till giving a fuck has no meaning”.
Perhaps the most profound aspect of the song is how it refuses to resolve. The ghost hangs. This is in part the power of the whole record. Its not getting at anything. It has no perceivable agenda and like the artist himself is simply a reflection of what is happening. Floss and all.