billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - february 3, 2024

The funny thing about January album releases is that if they aren’t met with immediate competition, they tend to stick around - it’s not like there’s anything else coming, so they tend to get a little more run without major disruption. This looks to have been the case with american dream by 21 Savage - which has more traction than I frankly expected even beyond opportune timing - and that translates to a bit of a delayed collapse on a breather week… and again, hard for me to complain about it.

Granted, I do have some complaints about our top ten, mostly centered on our returning #1: from Jack Harlow, ‘Lovin On Me’. I still don’t like the song at all, but when you take the top spot on both the radio and streaming with no sign of slowing down, we’re going to need a bigger disruption to throw this off, and I don’t think that’s coming with any of the Megan Thee Stallion / Nicki Minaj nonsense right now. And it handily beat out ‘Cruel Summer’ by Taylor Swift at #2, which is getting dumped on streaming and radio and the only thing really sustaining it is momentum. This might open up a door for ‘greedy’ by Tate McRae at #3, given that it does have a bit of traction with streaming and airplay, but it has a ways to go… and that takes us to a competitor that at least for me came out of left-field: ‘Lose Control’ by Teddy Swims at #4. A dominant sales week, good streaming, and if radio can pick up, this is a contender… which again, caught me off-guard, but overly stiff pop soul that reminds me too much of ‘Earned It’ by The Weeknd has a track record of working. It overtook ‘I Remember Everything’ by Zach Bryan and Kacey Musgraves at #5, which is still dominant on streaming, but given radio is barely moving on it, I’m not surprised the momentum has stalled out. And yet it held over ‘yes, and?’ by Ariana Grande, falling off the #1 to #6; let’s be clear, this was predictable, despite radio onboarding this fast, it wasn’t enough to compensate for streaming and sales falling back - I suspect this’ll jump up again at some point, it’ll just be a question of when. Then we have two Doja Cat songs on opposite trajectories, one being ‘Agora Hills’ at #7 surging on the radio to compensate for streaming really lagging behind, and ‘Paint The Town Red’ at #8 which is also lagging on streaming but the radio is dumping it with speed. Then we have ‘Snooze’ by SZA - a largely inconsistent week across the board here, as streams were up but radio was wavering, and then we have ‘redrum’ by 21 Savage at #10 with the expected streaming dropoff after an album bomb with radio nowhere close to filling in the gaps.

Which naturally takes us to our losers and dropouts, where in the latter group we actually did get a few notable exits alongside residual 21 Savage: ‘Used To Be Young’ by Miley Cyrus, ‘Great Gatsby’ by Rod Wave, and ‘Rich Men North Of Richmond’ by Oliver Anthony. But when we get to the losers… well, outside of ‘Save Me The Trouble’ by Dan + Shay falling off sharply to 99, it’s all 21 Savage here. Let’s start with the Metro Boomin collabs: with Travis Scott we have ‘nee-nah’ at 30, with Lil Durk we have ‘dangerous’ at 76, and with Young Thug we have ‘pop ur shit’ at 80, and outside of those… ‘n.h.i.e.’ with Doja Cat at 52, ‘all of me’ at 55, ‘prove it’ with Summer Walker at 57, ‘should’ve wore a bonnet’ with Brent Faiyaz at 63, ‘sneaky’ at 71, and ‘red sky’ with Tommy Newport and Mikky Ekko at 100.

Now where things get more interesting come with what’s filling in the gaps - not so much our returns, where the only three that came back were ‘Worth It’ by Offset and Don Toliver at 95, ‘When It Comes To You’ by Fridayy at 97, and ‘IDGAF’ by Tee Grizzley, Mariah The Scientist and Chris Brown at 98. Where it gets more wild comes in our gains, especially for our new arrivals where ‘Made for Me’ by Muni Long got shipped to radio and jumped big to 44, alongside ‘02.02.99’ by That Mexican OT getting a nice pickup to 74. I’m not as thrilled by ‘Coal’ by Dylan Gossett getting a boost to 86 off its losses, but country as a whole had an okay week, with ‘Pretty Little Poison’ by Warren Zeiders jumping to 26 and ‘Where The Wild Things Are’ by Luke Combs continuing a very steady run up to 31! Unfortunately the rest here is quite mixed: ‘Never Lose Me’ by Flo Milli is up to 19 as streaming has really gotten behind it, ‘Soak City (Do It)’ by 310babii has tangible radio traction at 61, and ‘Act II: Date @ 8’ by 4batz rose to 62 because his mild virality isn’t going away - charming.

And that leaves us with a very reasonable list of new arrivals… unfortunately starting with…

96. ‘Sensational’ by Chris Brown ft. Davido & Lojay - you know, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Chris Brown would try to get to Afrobeats to maintain relevance, and if he’s going to put on established acts like Davido or up-and-comers like Lojay… that’s a net good, right? Well, that’s all balanced out by Brown putting on an accent to try and fit with this sound and once again highlight the worst part of the song is him. And that’s a shame because the rest of this is pretty good - the fizzy afrobeat percussion builds a decent groove against the synths and distant sax - perhaps a bit more synthetic than it needs to be, but there’s a humid flow that at least Davido handles well. I’m not as fond of Lojay’s voice - he just sounds a little flimsy here - and the lyrics as a whole are pretty embarrassing, more horny that credibly sensual, and while that’s Chris Brown’s forte, I’m not sure all of that is his fault this time; discovering that Sean Kingston has a writing credit on this makes a lot of sense. I dunno, a good groove and hook is doing a lot of heavy lifting to make this passable - can’t go beyond that.

94. ‘First Love’ by Oscar Ortiz & Edgardo Nunez - alright, so the last time I talked about Edgardo Nunez was when he was on Peso Pluma’s album, and he was a vocalist on probably the best song - that’s enough to create an expectation alongside Oscar Ortiz, who I’ll admit hasn’t crossed my radar before. And the vibe is pretty straightforward: Ortiz has a smoother voice, Nunez is louder with more texture in his delivery, and honestly fits against the accordion and admittedly decently produced regional Mexican sound with the more textured percussion and defined bass. The content is not much to write home about, though - basically they’re commiserating about getting dumped, and while they’re certainly more sensitive than most of the guys I’ve encountered in this sound, they also trade off lines on the hook that might confuse you into thinking they’re singing to each other; they’re obviously not, but it’s interplay that they don’t do anything interesting with, just an odd choice. Far from the worst thing I’ve heard in the subgenre… I’m not sure I’m impressed, though.

70. ‘Skin And Bones’ by David Kushner - …you know, we do have Hozier back near the public zeitgeist, we don’t need to keep trying the David Kushner experiment! But when I heard he was at least trying to make a song about the temptations of lust… look, it’s closer to the right ballpark in comparison with how ‘Daylight’ was such a ripoff that also lost the flavour. Those were all thoughts I had before hearing the actual song… and my god, it’s worse than ‘Daylight’: that lifeless snap, how every elegant texture seems to degrade fidelity around a mix that wallows in the murk, and the vocal mix… none of the emphasis is sold well, Kushner’s utter vacuum of charisma only feels more obvious when Rob Kirwan doesn’t seem to have a clue where to place him! But now we get to those lyrics… look, there’s a way to play the evil woman song, the succubus who you condemn to hell but can’t resist, and Kushner perhaps delivers the worst version of it: the hectoring moral scold who then appears to write about sex like he needs it explained to him with PowerPoint. ‘I fantasize to feel you like a bullet / and all your layers to the fullest’, ‘the condition of your soul is eroding’, the entire second verse that’s trying to evoke gothic Catholic melodrama but never fully goes over the edge when you have it end with ‘my salvation won’t be sacrificed’ - if there’s no risk of hellfire, there’s no drama, no matter how flailing the bridge is to set it up; hell, Disney got this right in the animated Hunchback of Notre Dame! I was going to call David Kushner ‘Hozier for virgins at Christian youth camp’… but honestly, they deserve better than this, this blows.

58. ‘No Caller ID’ by Megan Moroney - So one of the gaps in my listening last year was Megan Moroney’s breakthough album, which for a mainstream country release was received quite well, especially as it produced by one of the guys behind Sugarland which definitely shows forth in the warmer guitar tones and poppy touches. I made some time to check it out and… yeah, it’s really good, with an eye for clever detail and emotional nuance that makes me wish I had given it a proper spin last year. This is her first single from her next album, and… yeah, it’s good for the most part. It’s hard for me to complain about plentiful pedal steel and a pretty well-written song about being on the recovery of a bad relationship, only for a number with no caller ID to hit her up incredibly late at night and that can only be that ex. And credit to Moroney for selling the song as haggard and exhausted as she probably would feel at that time… although I have to wonder if the melody was shifted into more minor chords, it would not be hard to view these late calls as harassment or stalking, especially as it’s clear these drunk dials have happened more than once… it might have also made the melody a bit more distinctive than what we got. That’s not the tone we have, and it leaves a pretty good song, but I’m not sure there’s quite enough here for me to call it great.

15. ‘Beautiful Things’ by Benson Boone - you know, when Benson Boone left American Idol to do TikTok and he saw some middling success with mediocre at best songs, I was hoping that meant we were done with this guy… not giving him his biggest debut to date! So for context here, after his brief success in 2022, he got scooped up by Warner - he put out an EP in 2023 that somehow did worse, but now we have this song that’s been slow-walked properly across social media until release, which nabbed him a big streaming debut. And… you know, I was going to start by saying that the melody on the first verse felt oddly familiar against the pianos, or how the lyrics were hitting the boyfriend country notes of being distressingly clingy towards the girl he’s fallen for as he’s gotten his life back together, with the sort of raging, self-sabotaging insecurity that should be worrisome… and then the guitars started ramping up. And while I have always said Boone is often the worst part of his own songs because of his singing, and nowhere is that more obvious than here, where the comparison is less Harry Styles by way of Lewis Capaldi, and more ‘…oh, this is Lukas Graham at his absolute worst’, made all the more damning because the vocal mixing is terrible, especially the harmonies that sound audibly punched in! I mean, say what you want about Bruno Mars’ early 2010s pop histrionics, he could at least sing way better than this - this sucks, skip it.

And yeah, it makes for a pretty rough week, where I honestly can’t pick the worst… so we’re getting a tie with ‘Beautiful Things’ by Benson Boone and ‘Skin and Bones’ by David Kushner. Best is going to ‘No Caller ID’ by Megan Moroney… kind of by default, the competition was not exceptional. Next week, though… between new Justin Timberlake and the beef between Megan and Nicki, it could get messy - stay tuned…