billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - april 30, 2022

So full disclosure, I did get some good news from YouTube on the back-end that their bug has been ‘fixed’ and the escrow issue shouldn’t be a thing anymore… but since I trust YouTube about as much as I trust Billboard, like last week there’s going to be a little less copyrighted footage and content here. Glad y’all were understanding, I really do appreciate it, especially on another slightly slower week.

So let’s get into it: top ten, where as predicted ‘As It Was’ by Harry Styles reclaimed the #1 - when you have this much radio momentum plus strong sales and streaming, there’s not much that can really compete, especially when ‘First Class’ by Jack Harlow tumbles a bit back to earth at #2. Now it still rules streaming which will keep it in position, especially as the sales are still there, but with radio slower to get in gear, it might not be a serious challenger in the weeks ahead, especially given other major streaming disruptions. I’d say that places ‘Heat Waves’ by Glass Animals on the downturn - yeah, it picked up a bit on streaming, but it lost the top spot on the radio and is getting rotated out… unfortunately in favour of ‘Big Energy’ by Latto, Mariah Carey & DJ Khaled at #4 which also has a sales boost, and ‘Enemy’ by Imagine Dragons and JID at #5, which has slightly better streaming. Then there’s ‘Stay’ by Kid LAROI and Justin Bieber at #6 - it’s not quite falling off on the radio as quickly as you’d expect - but it’s facing competition debuting at #7, ‘Don’t Think Jesus’ by Morgan Wallen. I’ll talk about the song more later on, but with huge sales, big streaming, it’s the same formula and approach his team had before and even if Nashville radio is slow to catch up, it looks like enough folks have gotten right back behind him. Next we have ‘Woman’ by Doja Cat at #8, where it looks like she topped out on the radio and that’s about all she has, followed by a dip for ‘Super Gremlin’ by Kodak Black at #9 as streaming that is mostly stable won’t be enough to support a position more on the upswing, and ‘Ghost’ by Justin Bieber at #10 because it’s even more radio dependent and it’s on its way out too.

That takes us to our losers and dropouts - in the latter category nothing really that big beyond ‘Drunk (And I Don’t Wanna Go Home)’ by Elle King and Miranda Lambert exiting yet again along with ‘To Be Loved By You’ by Parker McCollum fading out and likely missing the year end list. Our losers, meanwhile, feel all over the place: off the debut we saw ‘Right On’ by Lil Baby hit 28, off gains we saw ‘Nail Tech’ by Jack Harlow skid to 56, ‘Handsomer’ by Russ and ktlyn hit 70, and ‘City Of Gods’ by Fivio Foreign, Kanye West, and Alicia Keys fall back to 84 - not complaining about those last two. Also not complaining about our continued losses for ‘In My Head’ by Lil Tjay at 78, ‘Soy El Unico’ by Yahritza Su Esenica at 80, or ‘The Family Madrigal’ by the Encanto Cast at 93. The last two losses are country, with ‘Slow Down Summer’ by Thomas Rhett hitting 64 - again, this is out of season, I’m not surprised - and ‘Circles Around This Town’ by Maren Morris at 77, which is kind of a shame because the song has grown on me a bit, I wouldn’t have minded this sticking around.

Now flipping over to our returns and gains… well, in the former category I don’t have much faith that ‘Hate Our Love’ by Queen Naija and Big Sean is going anywhere at 94, nor ‘Money So Big’ by Yeat at 97 - forget their own traction, I know what’s coming that’s going to keep them off. But it did feel like gains slowed to a crawl this week, because they’re basically all in country. On the one hand, I’m not pleased that ‘Trouble With A Heartbreak’ by Jason Aldean went up to 59, but on the other hand, we saw a big boost for ‘If I Was A Cowboy’ by Miranda Lambert at 53 and ‘Damn Strait’ by Scotty McCreery up to 76; even if I’m not especially crazy about the former song, I’m chalking that up as a win!

But now we have our new arrivals - pretty reasonable list, so let’s start with…

99. ‘Fall In Love’ by Bailey Zimmerman - I guess country songs going viral on Tiktok is going to become a thing now, so okay, here’s Bailey Zimmerman - this is a song that seems to have gone independently viral, he does not seem to have an album yet… and wow, this guy really wants to sound like Morgan Wallen. The gravelly delivery, the sour, melancholic tone post-breakup where he’s very much not over it, the questionably over-polished vocal production… and yet I’m not sure I dislike this. For one the guitars have more warmth overall against live drums - guitar solo was nice too - and I really like how the composition changes up so sharply from the bridges to the hook. And while the song feels remarkably bitter and a little adolescent in its melodrama that you don’t wanna fall in love - there’s enough of a rollick to the hook that I can basically get behind the main emotionality here. I’m not gonna say this is great - again, the influence really hangs over this - but it’s not bad either; curious where he winds up going.

86. ‘Leave You Alone’ by Kane Brown - and speaking of acts who built their careers on going viral, Kane Brown has a new song… and yep, can’t say I’m surprised he locked into the boyfriend country niche that leans a little more on R&B and soul given his trajectory the past few years. But in fairness, he’s also opting for more organic percussion, some supple bass presence, warmer guitars, and even subtle hints of strings beneath him. But when you realize that he’s leaning more than he probably shouldn’t on some synthesized backing vocals to obscure how lacking in passion he sounds, alongside a kind of dicey sentiment for a love song in how his love will persist and not leave her alone, forever and ever… well, it highlights how a lot of boyfriend country is starting to fall towards formula and can sound a little trite. Yes, I know I’m not the target audience, but I can recognize when Kane Brown sounds checked out, and this is one of those cases - it’s fine, but I’m not a fan.

83. ‘GINÉ’ by 6ix9ine - hey, I thought we were done with this guy. He had his flicker in 2020, and then everyone got back to the same point of him being insufferably one-dimensional and moved on. But apparently there’s enough people who are still backing the snitching sex offender so we’ve got this… which is mostly the same bargain barrel gunplay we always get, but there are a few revealing moments. One is that he’s noticing that shouting out everyone’s names isn’t working because the rap game realized he’s an attention-seeking troll best ignored… and then he takes the next step, drops the beat out, and shouts at Lil Durk to go kill people because King Von got shot, and if he doesn’t fight back, he’s not riding. First off, YoungBoy and Lil Durk have been going back and forth most of this year - I should know, I’ve been covering it with increasing dismay - and 6ix9ine is not a factor in King Von’s death - he’s just bringing it up because nobody otherwise would give a shit that his broke ass is still flailing for his mistake of a career. Because really, what else does he have - the flow is basic and increasingly clunky, especially with the stuttered hook, the piano line backing him is menacing but the trap groove sounds cheap, and once again, he has nothing interesting to say, empty shock tactics from the Soundcloud waifu whose fifteen minutes are up. In other words, it sucks, and is not worth caring about - next!

55. ‘Flowers’ by Lauren Spencer-Smith - I’ll admit I’m kind of shocked that Lauren Spencer-Smith was able to notch a second song on the Hot 100… and then I realized at some point she had signed to Republic and that likely gave her a boost in distribution to help a second song pick up virality. And… yeah, I don’t really care for this one either, a very spare piano ballad where you get the post-breakup angst and a lot going on throughout the song in terms of the dynamic. Because on the one hand, if he was cheating, it makes sense for her to call out some behaviour that seems manipulative, especially if he now wants her back. On the other hand the emotional dynamics of the song seem really wonky, because the first half sets up how she fell very hard very fast and he wasn’t at that same point - which is fair - and then there’s the line on the hook of how when they’d fight, he’d ‘give her space and not communicate’, which could seem emotionally distant or just being conscious of someone’s feelings so they can calm down. But the general sentiment of the song is basically how flowers shouldn’t be just for apologies, they should find someone who gives them that love and attention everyday all the time, which she totally has now… so why does this entire track scream ‘not over it’? You can tell there’s a desire to write a retrospective, mature post-breakup song, but there’s no complexity or looking outside of herself in this moment, and when you pair it with drippy vocals and an underwhelming composition and production, it can’t sell the drama. So yeah, just okay - at best.

51. ‘Shake It’ by Kay Flock, Cardi B, Dougie B & Bory300 - okay, so originally Kay Flock put out a version of this New York drill track back in January that went viral on TikTok thanks to the Akon and Sean Paul samples and then the label got their hands on it to throw on Cardi B and Dougie B for the added starpower. Not exactly surprising - and it’s starting to get exasperating how so many of these drill beats are just 2000s samples fed with the same stock bass warping and percussion stutter - but even if the rappers are defaulting to standard gunplay and flexing they all sound pretty visceral on this production and that normally is enough. But Cardi is the big presence for the track… and I’m kind of conflicted, because on the one hand she absolutely has the personality to ride this beat and her flow is surprisingly solid. On the other hand, her punchlines are nothing all that interesting - that ‘Hakuna matata’ line is both derivative and kind of corny - and when she dropped the r-slur, I was about done with this. What songs like are telling me is that the loss of Pop Smoke has created a real vacuum in drill that the industry wants to fill, but they’re struggling to find the way to do it - and this doesn’t impress me.

50. ‘About Damn Time’ by Lizzo - I keep seeing people surprised that Lizzo is not a bigger popstar, and at this point, I think it’s worth asking the question whether she caught a moment thanks to flashy production and a lot of personality and there wasn’t much backing it up; it’s not like Ricky Reed as a producer has a reputation for acts in this lane or something! I dunno, I’ve always been considerably cooler on her music the past few years, and I never thought ‘Rumors’ was remotely special with Cardi B - the label clearly had plans for that to be way bigger than it was - so now with the next big single… wow, they really just want a second shot to make ‘Juice’ work, don’t they? Same nu-disco bassline and flashy melody that’s leaning on Lizzo’s personality to anchor the bounce, she brings out the flute for the bridge, and it’s all about relying on Lizzo drawing bad bitch energy to have a good time on the dance floor. But there’s something about it that feels a little off - like all Ricky Reed songs there’s limited texture of the production, which is not how I like my disco, but I think the problem is the vibe - ‘Juice’ was exuberant with flair and a loose sense of fun, whereas this is leaning into bravado that even on the prechorus feels a bit undercut. I’m not saying it’s bad by any means - it’s certainly built to be a proper hit and get the run ‘Juice’ deserved - but I’m not sure Lizzo plays ‘cool’ well, and a song like this needs that, which keeps in the realm of just decent, at least for me.

7. ‘Don’t Think Jesus’ by Morgan Wallen - you know, I think I’d be more willing to give Morgan Wallen a proper second chance if I saw that Music Row had remotely changed or learned anything in the past fifteen months, and it sucks that he’s now stuck in a culture war where he’s likely still battling his own demons, and that I’ve had mixed and messy opinions on his music going back years, in which any complicated opinion is set to get stripped down in the grist mill of modern internet discourse. It certainly has impacted my opinions of the music, where paradoxically ‘Sand In My Boots’ weirdly works more after the incident, but it also exposed how much the rest of his catalog was badly produced junk where if his marketing and promotion plan was copied by better artists we wouldn’t even have to bother with this conversation. So leaving it at that… well, I’ve got mixed opinions on it. On the one hand, it’s nice to hear a warmer country palette in the guitars, pedal steel and heavier drums, and you can tell that Wallen is really trying to sell it with a lot of passion - probably why he thought that falsetto on the hook was a good idea, of which I’d disagree. But then we get to the content, where you get a story about a guy who writes songs but has his heart broken and drinks way too much and questions what forgiveness looks like and what Jesus would do - and if you don’t think the subtext is explicit about his own situation, it certainly circles around by the outro, it’s very obvious what this song is trying to do, that’s why I mentioned all that stuff at the start. And you know, it’s not my place to forgive Morgan Wallen one way or the other - it’s not like he did anything to me - and with that I do believe he’s dearly sorry… but this sort of public contrition winds up feeling a little hollow when you know it’s backed by a label that’s going to make ‘the redemption arc’ his next big marketing swing, especially with a newfound top ten hit on a song he didn’t even write. And it’s going to work too - hell, it already has, he’s got the hit, and America loves a redemption arc. The frustrating thing is that the song is otherwise fine, but given what it’s doing and how thoroughly tired I am of that conversation… can’t say I’m going to go back to it much.

And it’s neither the best nor worst of this week, which wound up pretty straightforward with the worst, that going to ‘GINÉ’ by 6ix9ine. The best… kind of a tossup between Lizzo and Bailey Zimmerman of all people, but I think Lizzo gets it if only because the groove is really strong and a lesser version of ‘Juice’ still has quality. Next week, though… I keep hearing that Pusha T could have actually gotten an album bomb based on some promising numbers, we’ll have to see…