Hear F-1 Trillion, Post Malone’s sixth album, a rapper turned country singer, is to wrap himself in the sounds of Nashville. The record is loaded with collaborations with genre superstars such as Dolly Parton, Tim McGraw, Chris Stapleton and Luke Combs. Paradoxically, the cover of this new best-seller does not illustrate deep America. It is a dreamlike scene that took place thousands of miles from Tennessee on the windless morning of Tuesday, April 23. Then, a 1971 Ford F100 pickup truck falls from the sky onto the Salto del Nogal dam in Jalisco, Mexico.
That’s the face of an end-of-summer hit. F-1 Trillion is the new monarch on the US charts, ending the 15-week long reign of Taylor Swift and her The Tortured Poets Department on the Billboard 200. The 29-year-old artist, whose name is Austin Richard Ford, made his name rapping on tracks uploaded to SoundCloud, a digital platform that helped launch his career. By 2015, he was one of the new voices of the genre in the United States. May of that year he tweeted who would become a folk and country singer before he was 30.
He kept his promise. This year, Post Malone has left several clues about his transformation. In April, he changed his urban rapper outfit to that of a cowboy for Stagecoach, the festival that is Coachella’s rural brother. His act was full of 90s country anthems, a nod to the sound that marked him in his childhood in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas. He was also seen at other festivals, with other stars of the genre such as Morgan Wallen and Blake Sheltonthe husband of Gwen Stefani, lead singer of No Doubt, and judge of the popular reality show The Voice. Both are some of the stars of the genre who support him in his new adventure.
The image that decorates F-1 Trillion It is by the artist Gonzalo Lebrija (Mexico City, 1972). “It came to me as a kind of dream. I saw this idea and became obsessed with making it into a photograph,” says the artist from his home in Guadalajara, where he lives and works. The obsession became the work called A Brief History of Time (2008). The image captures a Valiant Duster, a muscle American car in free fall. It was taken with a film camera that took 150 frames per second.
The image evokes in Lebrija a feeling of nostalgia for an era in which the automobile was one of the most important objects for humanity. “Cars gave you a sense of freedom or a longing for freedom, and putting it reflected against the water is a tribute to the end of an era,” says Lebrija. The piece occupies a prominent place in a work full of playfulness and with constant references to the passage of time.
A Brief History of Time has found a strong connection with the public. That’s why it has had a number of iterations over the years. Lebrija turned the scene into a sculpture. “The idea came to my head to turn the dizzying experience that photographs provoke into a three-dimensional experience,” he explains.
History of Suspended Time (2010) was the result of this project and was on display at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art in Colorado for the Biennial of the Americas. The work later traveled to Marfa Contemporary, the famous art space in Texas, which dedicated an exhibition to Lebrija in 2015, three years after the space’s final closure. In that city, near the border with Mexico, the vehicle suspended in the air was a 1968 Chevy Malibu. The Jumex Museum in Mexico City also had a similar one outside its main entrance in 2020.
It was one of these sculptures that caught Post Malone’s eye. The artist was one of the first to perform at the Fontainebleau, the most recently opened casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Malone gave two concerts there to welcome 2024. At the southwest entrance to the complex, a 1.1-tonne 1966 Ford Galaxie in free fall welcomes visitors. It is the only permanent piece of the Fontainebleau currently in existence. History of Suspended Time. “The sculpture creates a multi-layered narrative with unique imagery,” the casino said of the work at its opening. That’s where the idea for the collaboration between Post Malone and Lebrija was born.
The rapper first proposed making a sculpture to be in Nashville and become the album cover. The idea of using a van was Post Malone’s. But time was too tight to get it done before the album’s release. So Lebrija suggested he go back to photography. “I have a van exactly like the one I threw and I proposed to throw it in the Tapalpa dam, but then I felt bad about sacrificing my van and I started looking. I found an identical one with very good color and it’s the one that appears on the cover,” says Lebrija. The image was taken this time with a high-speed Phantom camera, like the one used in sports for super slow motion shots. The machine captures 930 frames per second and requires an electric generator because of the amount of energy it consumes.
The artist and his team had 90 minutes to capture the image. On April 23, they found a windless morning that left the water in the dam like a mirror. Lebrija has always considered A Brief History of Time an introspective work that also addresses the relationship between fragility and power. Since August 16, however, it has become a massive object that has reached at least 250,000 people in the first week of its release. It is the second best country release in 2024 after Cowboy Carter by Beyoncé, who became a phenomenon four months ago.
Post Malone was so pleased with the image that his team converted the Ford F100 into a ready-made advertising, extending the impact of the work. The truck, already with the hood destroyed after the crash, made the trip north to be present at the launch events of F-1 Trillion. Many of the fans took selfies with her for the networks. Post Malone has used a more open angle of the photo for an extended version of the album, called F-1 Trillion: Long BedFinally, the Jalisco van ended its journey in Nashville.
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