billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - december 19, 2020

I wish I could say I predicted this would be a cooldown week. I mean, I was hedging my bets last week because of Shawn Mendes’ new release and he’s surprised me in the past… but not this time. Nope, it looks like we’ve got a bit of a breather before Taylor Swift, Jack Harlow, and Kid Cudi try to penetrate the gauntlet of holiday music that now effectively rules the Hot 100.

And we have to start in our top ten, where as I predicted ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ Mariah Carey is now ruling at #1. thanks to utter streaming dominance. The question now is how long it’ll hold this position through the holidays, because honestly, I don’t see the challenger. Yes, I still like ‘Mood’ by 24kGoldn ft. iann dior at #2, but given how it’s losing in all categories, even despite holding a healthy margin on the radio, by the end of 2020 this might be very much on its way out. Then we have ‘Rockin Around The Christmas Tree’ by Brenda Lee pulling up a step to #3 thanks to holiday streaming, which puts it above ‘positions’ by Ariana Grande at #4, which despite even stronger radio traffic took a major dip on streaming; this song might be in a precarious position by the time holiday music fades, it could be interesting here. Then we have ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ by Bobby Helms at #5 - again, holiday traffic, it’s explainable - which is also the case for ‘It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year’ by Andy Williams up to #6. But then we got something interesting: ‘Blinding Lights’ by The Weeknd rebounded to #7… mostly because of a cheap remix to prop up one last bit of traction despite consistently losing. But it did put it above ‘Laugh Now Cry Later’ by Drake ft. Lil Durk, which fell to #8 thanks to a surprisingly rough week on the radio, and ‘Holy’ by Justin Bieber ft. Chance The Rapper at #9, where despite its insane radio momentum just cannot hold against better sales and having no streaming. Finally, pulling up the rear here we have ‘Feliz Navidad’ by Jose Feliciano at #10 - yeah, if this is making the top ten, holiday music has thoroughly overwhelmed everything.

And yet… when I go to our losers and dropouts, there’s a part of me that doesn’t mind that it clears away the chaff of last year, pushing a lot of 2020 into recurrence with the dropouts of ‘Watermelon Sugar’ by Harry Styles, ‘Said Sum’ by Moneybagg Yo, ‘ily’ by surf mesa ft. Emilee, ‘Before You Go’ by Lewis Capaldi, and ‘Be Like That’ by Kane Brown, Khalid, and Swae Lee. Granted, our losers are more scattered, with the most prominent coming from the fading impact of albums: from Bad Bunny with have ‘Dakiti’ with Jhay Cortez at 17, ‘La Noche de Anoche’ with ROSALIA at 74, and ‘Te Mudaste’ at 99, and from Miley Cyrus’ abortive boost we have ‘Midnight Sky’ falling back to 73. Also off the debut we saw ‘Dicked Down In Dallas’ by Trey Lewis shoved back to 75 - I can only hope it has the shortest chart run of a bad meme song - and from our continued losers we have ‘More Than My Hometown’ by Morgan Wallen at 49, ‘WAP’ by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion at 43, and ‘Savage Love’ by Jawsh 685 and Jason Derulo at 44. I’d say the BTS correlation may have propped it up a little longer, but they didn’t have a good week at all, with ‘Dynamite’ slid to 24 and ‘Life Goes On’ fell hard to 93.

But since we are ‘post-album bomb’, we got a combination of returns and gains picking up from both holiday music and whatever can survive filling in the gaps. So for instance, in our returns we got ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ by Paul McCartney back at 45, ‘Run Rudolph Run’ by Chuck Berry at 40, and everyone’s favourite song about fucking Santa Claus by Ariana Grande ‘Santa Tell Me’ at 39… but along with that we also saw ‘Heather’ by Conan Grey back at 95, ‘Practice’ by DaBaby at 97, and - unfortunately - ‘Put Your Records On’ by Ritt Momney at 98. And when we look at our gains, the spread is even wider. For the holiday side, we got ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham! at 11, ‘A Holly Jolly Christmas’ by Burl Ives at 14, ‘Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)’ by Darlene Love at 31, ‘It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas’ and ‘Home For The Holidays’ by Perry Como at 35 and 37 respectively, and even gains from new arrivals last week with ‘Under The Mistletoe’ from Kelly Clarkson and Brett Eldredge at 59, ‘Rockin Around The Christmas Tree’ by Justin Bieber at 71, and ‘Favorite Time Of Year’ by Carrie Underwood at 80. But outside of holiday music, it’s a pretty motley group here: ‘Whoopty’ by CJ is somehow still gaining at 51, ‘Tyler Herro’ by Jack Harlow hit 77 - it gives me the impression his album bomb might be bigger than expected - ‘Good Time’ by Niko Moon hit 79, ‘hole in the bottle’ by Kelsea Ballerini clawed back to 87, and ‘Bichota’ by Karol G hit 89.

But that leads to our new arrivals - spoilers, about half of these are holiday songs, so we’re going to start with…

100. ‘Silent Night’ by Carrie Underwood - I mean, if you’re covering ‘Silent Night’, there’s only a few things you need to do right; don’t oversell it in the arrangement, keep it low-key, maybe don’t go full hymnal but it’s a deceptively difficult carol to sing especially for the passage at the end of each verse. Unfortunately, that sense of subtlety doesn’t really translate for Carrie Underwood, who brings in the full strings passage for the third verse so she can open up and belt with as much vibrato as she can get away with, even if I do think she eases back at the very end, which is the right choice. What bothers me is that Underwood’s vocals still feel very awkwardly produced: not only does she sound unsupported in the mix, there’s something about her timbre that’s not hitting as cleanly - maybe it’s mic placement or the range they’re focusing on, it just doesn’t sound as good as it should. That being said, that’s me nitpicking - otherwise this is another cover of ‘Silent Night’, it’s fine.

96. ‘Hallelujah’ by Carrie Underwood & John Legend - am I the only one weirded out that Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ has just become a Christmas standard, more because of vague allusions to religion than anything else in the content? It was weird with Pentatonix a few years ago, it’s just as weird here with Carrie Underwood and John Legend… except this isn’t that song at all, it’s an original duet Legend cowrote. Now I’ll say this, off the spare piano backdrop I do think Underwood and Legend have decent enough chemistry and are better balanced than I would have expected - even if Legend’s falsetto is an odd choice - but going even a little deeper I find this sort of Christmas music falls flat for me, especially in trying to blend the ‘peace on earth’, quasi-Biblical material with ‘let’s find warmth in each other on a winter’s night’. It feels more sterile than it should, putting me closer in the mind to modern Christian music including some of the questionable vocal mixing, and my soul is distinctly not stirred by it. Fine enough, I guess, but I won’t care about this in record time.

88. ‘Take Me Home For Christmas’ by Dan + Shay - I’m not even surprised Dan + Shay put out a Christmas song - for their brand of safe, whitebread pop country, holiday music is inevitable so with this being their first original Christmas song… and wow, if you wanted them to make the sort of jaunty material with a snap beat, questionably synthetic backing vocals, and primed for the cheesiest modern Hallmark movie, this is it. But here’s the odd thing: even with that, you can tell they tried a little harder with this and I found myself warming a bit to it - the little guitar solo was more developed than it had any right to be, there was some warmth in the rollicking arrangement even before the key change, and there’s a bit more to the content, where they’re talking about going to visit their partners’ family and hometown for the holidays. Where I think the song has a bit more character comes in the second verse, where it’s a little more jittery as they go drinking with old friends and try to follow along with unfamiliar family traditions. In other words, it falls into the territory of Dan + Shay songs I actually like, where if you’re not onboard with the formula you’ll find them treacly and a bit too chipper… but if you are, they aim a little higher than they need to, and this turned out nice as a result.

76. ‘Oh Santa!’ by Mariah Carey ft. Ariana Grande & Jennifer Hudson - okay, backstory: in 2010, Mariah Carey wrote and released a song called ‘Oh Santa’ tied into a follow-up Christmas album clearly trying to recapture the magic of ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’. It didn’t really become the perennial holiday standard, so now we have a remix with Ariana Grande and Jennifer Hudson. Now because I didn’t review the original at any point, so let me say that it might have been wishful thinking to assume the original ‘Oh Santa’ would have worked, because it’s very 2010 R&B: the flat clap beat and leaden beat, the melody outside of the bells getting subsumed into an overlayered cushion of vocals, and it feels very shouty and in-your-face - exactly what you’d want for the holiday season. Shame that this remix has much of the same vibe in its arrangement, just with more distinctive vocal textures which might fill out the mix with a bit more colour and to her credit Ariana is trying to underplay things and make the song more sensual… but that takes us to the content, where the song is all about begging Santa to get her ex to leave his current girl and come back to her, and yet it wouldn’t be hard to escape the feeling that they want to fuck Santa at some point too! Again, this doesn’t come close to evoking holiday cheer for me - it’s clunky and it feels like a collaborative cash-grab, and I don’t have much patience for that, let’s move on.

72. ‘Real Shit’ by Juice WRLD & benny blanco - granted, if the alternative is benny blanco trying to milk Juice WRLD’s posthumous career, I have considerably less patience. Now from interviews it did suggest that benny blanco and Juice WRLD did work together on this so it’s a cut above the standard posthumous cash grab, where Juice WRLD brags about good living, getting money, and all the women he’s sleeping with fighting each other and he’s going to make her cry. Granted, this is also the song where he says ‘she look like a trampoline from the way she bouncin’, so we’re not dealing with his best content either… and honestly, I’m not really digging the production. The shuffling stutter of the guitars before they get swamped out against the blown out trap beat is more whirring texture than tune, and the mix can feel simultaneously both under- and over-mixed for as often benny blanco will drop out the beat. Ugh, I dunno, I don’t hate this, but I don’t think it’s all that good either, just saying.

63. ‘Without You’ by Kid LAROI - granted, if the other option is Juice WRLD’s protege working to rip him off expeditiously on an acoustic breakup ballad that features both the lines, ‘you cut out a piece of me, and now I bleed internally’ and ‘can’t make a wife out of a ho’, maybe we should be grateful for small blessings. And what’s more obnoxious is that this song is rooted in Kid LAROI doing something toxic or stupid, she leaves as apparently she has many times before, and then he tries for a huge cloying guilt trip when he gets dumped again. Again, it’s just toxic and manipulative, and since it’s all backed with willowy acoustic guitar, it’s plainly trying to frame itself as more sincere and can’t stick the landing. And if that was intentional, I can see that as the one defense of this crap, but that would imply any degree of complexity in the writing that Kid LAROI has never shown here. So no, this is once again crap - next!

41. ‘Errbody’ by Lil Baby - so I’ve actually been thinking a lot about Lil Baby in the past few weeks as I sort through hits for my best and worst of 2020, and while I’m more tolerant of him, I still don’t think I’d call myself a fan - I don’t love his beat choices, he can be very inconsistent in content, and his voice only seems to work for me in specific scenarios; but it’s not even so much that I dislike him but just find him a little dull and not particularly gripping, especially compared to some of his peers. Anyway, this is the first of two singles he dropped ahead of his next album coming and… well, the production doesn’t give me much to work with in its washed out melody behind the sandy but rote trap percussion, and I can’t say the content impresses me either. It’s more flexing about how successful he is, moving past haters, brand names and drinking lean, with the lines I like more focusing on him not hitting up girls to spare the boyfriends, or how people shouldn’t beef over trifling crap when he’s supposedly above it all. I guess if that’s true he could move past the gloating and say something interesting, but that’s apparently a step or two away from this. The frustrating thing is that again, it’s not even bad, but he’s made this song four or five times already and it just doesn’t do much for me - let’s move on.

30. ‘On Me’ by Lil Baby - this is the other single he dropped… and look, even he described this as a track he threw together bored in the house, and it sure as hell feels like it. Desaturated piano, stale trap beat, brand name bragging, talking about actually saving his money more than flexing… unless he’s spending it on his girl. I guess this is where I’m supposed to mention that the last song referenced said girl by name as they go on trips together, and that the timing of songs reaffirming their commitment might seem suspicious given that an adult entertainer reportedly outed him as cheating, and that can’t be a coincidence. Honestly, with these two songs I doubt you could even tell that he’s smoothing anything over, because he’s got the same flat, nasal inflection that makes his material run together so much, so he’s barely even capitalizing off the drama in his performance. Again, I can’t say this is bad so much as it is kind of dull, but if he’s trying to frame these as lead-off singles… honestly, it’s worked for him before, it could work again, but this formula does have diminishing returns, that’s all I’m saying

So that was our week… somehow I’m stuck thinking that if we had gotten a Shawn Mendes album bomb it could have wound up more interesting than this, but our best… I’m going to give it to ‘Take Me Home For Christmas’ by Dan + Shay, in that I don’t mind this formula and it kind of worked, with Honourable Mention to Carrie Underwood’s cover of ‘Silent Night’. The worst of the week… yeah, ‘Without You’ by Kid LAROI, with Dishonourable Mention going to the late Juice WRLD and benny blanco for ‘Real Shit’ - this is one that could have been left on the shelf, that’s all I’m saying. Next week, we could very well have some chaos between Taylor Swift, Kid Cudi, and Jack Harlow in the uphill battle against holiday music, so stay tuned…