As the story goes, Post Malone uploaded the song “White Iverson” to his SoundCloud page on the night of February 4, 2015. When he went to sleep, he was anonymous and broke. Within a day, the song had changed his life. Like many viral hits, “White Iverson” succeeded in part because it was divisive, inspiring awe and annoyance, bewilderment and mild scorn. The cavernous, slightly melancholy beat conjured both R. & B. and New Age meditation music. Post, who was born Austin Post, sang with a conviction that seemed strange and unearned, even a bit ridiculous: he was a white teen-ager invoking the legendarily tough basketball player Allen Iverson to describe his own triumphs over adversity. It was the sound of a profoundly unlikely victory lap, “swaggin’ ” and “ballin’ ” against all odds.

Post’s road to stardom has been thoroughly modern. He was born in Syracuse and grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, and became interested in the guitar after playing the video game Guitar Hero II. In his teens, he performed in a series of rock bands, rapped, and made videos that he posted on YouTube and Vine. After high school, he moved to Los Angeles, where he lived in a house full of aspiring gamers and YouTubers. As they streamed their Minecraft sessions, he would play the guitar and sing songs by Queen and Frank Sinatra. The name Post Malone came from an online rap-name generator.

Genre meant less to Post than fame did. He eventually began working with the producers FKi 1st and Rex Kudo on songs that merged hip-hop’s low end with rock- and folk-influenced melodies. “White Iverson,” which came to him as he was having his hair braided in the style of the basketball player, was one of these. While Post didn’t exactly come from nowhere—when he uploaded what would become his viral hit, he was already working with a savvy management team—his career trajectory was unusually accelerated. Within months, he went from playing on packed bills in not-so-packed clubs to touring with Justin Bieber and collaborating with Kanye West.

His début album, “Stoney,” from 2016, went double platinum; it was filled with catchy, charmingly uncouth songs, like the swirly and majestic rags-to-riches anthem “Congratulations.” The songs were goofy, fun, and perfectly paced for drunken, arena-wide sing-alongs. Post flitted between the rat-a-tat rhythms of rapping and gristly, power-ballad crooning. He seemed incapable of angst, and came across as a gleeful and self-effacing hero who appreciated designer labels and room-temperature Bud Light. He became a kind of patron saint of living your best life.

Last year, Post released “rockstar,” featuring the impassive Atlanta rapper 21 Savage, as the lead single for his second album, “beerbongs & bentleys.” There were rumors that Post’s label, Republic Records, had figured out a way to hack the Billboard charts by releasing a video on YouTube that included a loop of the song’s chorus, and also links to streaming services where fans could hear the rest. The loop video was only a free “preview” for the song, yet both YouTube views and full streams were counted in the single’s Billboard stats.

This manipulation seemed plausible, given Post’s intuitive feel for how the Internet works. Regardless, “rockstar,” a menacing I.V. drip of a song, captured something essential about his appeal as a white artist who knows his way around the guitar. Rock once represented a rival genre to hip-hop, or at least a mainstream to reckon with. But rock’s rebellion now feels remote. When rappers today embrace punk-era leather jackets and heavy-metal-style typefaces, they do so to channel a past that seems purely hedonistic, a constant pursuit of release. It’s less about finding joy in struggle—hip-hop’s underlying impulse—than about seeing how far you can throw a TV out a hotel window. As Post’s chorus attests, “Ayy, I’ve been fuckin’ hos and poppin’ pillies / Man, I feel just like a rockstar.”

“Beerbongs & bentleys” was released late last month, and set a record on Spotify for first-day streams. It is, as the title suggests, a celebration of Post’s multitudes. “Made a hundred bands, so all your hands out / No, my friend, can’t do no handouts,” he raps, on “Zack and Codeine,” one of many songs about partying through the night. He is a full-fledged rock star now, and his life is defined by that status, whether he’s buying out the bar every night in every city or just expressing nostalgia for the life he has left behind. For every small mountain of cocaine, there’s a realization that some things will never be the same. “One hundred models I could follow all the way to hell and back / But they can’t replace you,” he sings to a bygone lover and confidante, on “Otherside.” I already feel sympathy for all the people whose breakups will be chased first by the defiant bounce of “Better Now” and later, once reality sets in, by the acoustic ballad “Stay.”

Much of this feels like the kind of thing you’re obliged to say on your second album, now that fame threatens to imprison you. “Can’t trust a soul / Like I’m Snowden,” he wails, on “Paranoid.” Post still sings with a soulful, warbling commitment, but increasingly he relies on power chords and heavy-metal drumming (Tommy Lee, of Mötley Crüe, performs on “Over Now”) to convey his wish to leave it all behind. “I used to say I was free / Now all these people wanna keep on takin’ pieces of me,” Post sings, on the sludgy, atmospheric “Blame It on Me.” “It’s not my fault, it’s not my fault,” he protests, his voice rising in an anguished, Auto-Tuned mangle.

In 2017, Post told an interviewer in Poland that he rarely turned to hip-hop for emotional nourishment. “If you’re looking for lyrics, if you’re looking to cry, if you’re looking to think about life, don’t listen to hip-hop,” he said. For that, he preferred Bob Dylan. He described hip-hop as “fun,” a way to “have a good time and stay in a positive mood.”

Being a white rapper is no longer all that unusual or fraught a career path, but, in an interview with GQ earlier this year, Post alluded to his unique “struggle.” He has tried, on occasion, to distance himself from hip-hop, even speculating that he might someday embrace country music. But Post is indeed different from other white rappers, most of whom try to prove their bona fides through virtuosity or political solidarity. On one track from “beerbongs,” G-Eazy (who is white) and YG (who is black) trade verses about encountering the “same bitches” everywhere they go. It’s on a song like this that Post’s low-key innovations become apparent. G-Eazy sounds workmanlike, punchy, direct. Post’s verse, by contrast, is full of melodies, half rapped and half sung, that seem to weave around the beat, digressing into the Zombies’ “Time of the Season.”

Post later apologized for his comments in Poland, which seemed to demonstrate a deep misunderstanding of hip-hop’s origins. Yet it’s likely that he was saying something that many of his fans, particularly those who discovered him through Bieber, or who took seriously the trials of “White Iverson,” accept unquestioningly: that hip-hop is an idiom, a stylistic flourish, a way to wear your hair, not a history or a tradition to which one pays homage, or at least lip service. “I’m just trying to keep living and make the music that I love,” Post said in a video he posted on Twitter.