billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - december 23, 2023
So album bomb weeks at this time of the year are… weird, mostly because there’s a hard limit on how much impact they really have. I’ve been predicting Nicki Minaj to get that album bomb for a few weeks now, but between the… let’s call it mixed critical response and the glut of holiday music near the very top, this was never going to be as big as she precisely wanted. And given that Tate McRae’s impact was very manageable, that makes for an easier week for me and I’m certainly not going to complain about that!
Anyway, our top ten, where given that we only have two non-holiday songs you’d think this would be pretty uneventful, but you’d be somewhat wrong because we have a new and somewhat predictable #1: ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ by Mariah Carey, riding her strong streaming to match with the sales boost and get the top spot. Look, it was inevitable, I’m not surprised, but it is interesting that ‘Rockin Around The Christmas Tree’ by Brenda Lee held at #2 while still maintaining the top spot on streaming, which to me implies the sales were that last boost for Mariah. The next three we can chalk up to streaming placements: ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ by Bobby Helms at #3, ‘Last Christmas’ by Wham!, and ‘A Holly Jolly Christmas’ by Burl Ives up to #5, overtaking ‘Lovin On Me’ by Jack Harlow at #6, who saw continued airplay growth but just not enough to compensate for position losses on streaming. Then we have two more holiday songs with ‘It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year’ by Andy Williams at #7 and ‘Sleigh Ride’ by The Ronettes rising into the top 10 at #8, and then as expected thanks to her album impact ‘Greedy’ by Tate McRae saw a spike up to #9 - even despite good radio placement, I don’t really expect it to last. Finally, ‘Let It Snow’ by Dean Martin hit #10, which doesn’t really align with the streaming numbers but maybe got just enough of a radio edge.
But again, we are in an album bomb week and that means we have a significant number of losers and dropouts, and in the latter category there are big ones. ‘Slime You Out’ by Drake and SZA, ‘Rich Men North Of Richmond’ by Oliver Anthony, both ‘bad idea, right?’ and ‘vampire’ by Olivia Rodrigo, ‘3D’ by Jungkook and Jack Harlow, ‘Perro Negro’ by Bad Bunny and Feid, ‘Great Gatsby’ by Rod Wave, ‘Save Me’ by Jelly Roll and Lainey Wilson, and ‘Now That We Don’t Talk’ by Taylor Swift after having a better run than I expected. And we have a decent chunk of losers too, with the only continued loss coming for ‘Can’t Have Mine’ by Dylan Scott at 100 and the only gain seeing a collapse with ‘You’re Losing Me’ by Taylor Swift at 68. What’s notable about the losses is that nearly all happened lower on the Hot 100 where Nicki’s album bomb predominantly landed, with the only other songs above the top 50 taking blows being ‘fukumean’ by Gunna at 50, ‘First Person Shooter’ by Drake and J. Cole at 51 - he also had ‘IDGAF’ with Yeat at 66, ‘You Broke My Heart’ fall to 83 and ‘Virginia Beach’ at 98 - and ‘Stick Season’ by Noah Kahan at 54. The rest… ‘Harley Quinn’ by Fuerza Regida and Marshmello at 76 - the former who also saw a blow with ‘Que Onda’ with Calle 24 and Chino Pacas at 92 - ‘Strangers’ by Kenya Grace at 78, ‘500 lbs’ by Lil Tecca at 81, ‘Can’t Catch Me Now’ by Olivia Rodrigo at 84 - man, she had a rough week - and ‘TRUCK BED’ by HARDY at 85. And to round it out… ‘Qiona’ by Karol G and Peso Pluma at 86, ‘The Painter’ by Cody Johnson at 88, ‘Segun Quien’ by Maluma and Carin Leon at 91, ‘Hey Driver’ by Zach Bryan and the War and Treaty at 97, and ‘Standing Next To You’ by Jungkook at 99.
Now as expected we didn’t get a ton in the way of returns or gains - hell, to my surprise, all the returns we got were holiday songs, with ‘Please Come Home For Christmas’ by The Eagles at 45, ‘Like It’s Christmas’ by the Jonas Brothers at 46, and ‘Happy Holiday’ by Andy Williams at 49. The gains make a bit more sense: Tate McRae had ‘exes’ surge back to 57, and the rest are just holiday songs fluctuating, like ‘Little Saint Nick’ by The Beach Boys at 40, ‘Wonderful Christmastime’ by Paul McCartney at 35, ‘Santa Baby’ by Eartha Kitt at 31, and ‘It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas’ by Perry Como retaking all of its losses at 24 - I wonder why it saw such a huge fluctuation, that’s weird. Anyway, we are absolutely in large album bomb territory for Nicki Minaj, especially as I already reviewed the album at length on my main channel, so outside of the top 20 and the best or worst… ‘Bahm Bahm’ at 95, ‘Pink Birthday’ at 89, ‘Pink Friday Girls’ at 82, ‘RNB’ with Lil Wayne and Tate Kobang at 80, ‘Fallin 4 U’ at 74, ‘Big Difference’ at 73, ‘Beep Beep’ at 64, ‘Barbie Dangerous’ at 58, ‘FTCU’ at 42, and ‘Needle’ with Drake at 34.
Alright, that should make this list of new arrivals pretty succinct to get through, so let’s start with…
87. ‘Cowgirl’ by Nicki Minaj ft. Lourdiz - you know, in a year where we got a Morgan Wallen and ERNEST trap collab called ‘Cowgirls’, I’m a little shocked we got a worse song with nearly the same title! But here we go, the limp acoustic guitar, the painfully cheap trap percussion with the bass that distorts the mix, the faint shouts - my God, Dr. Luke can’t produce trap to save his life - and the hazy, vacant vocals from Lourdiz, another of Dr. Luke’s proteges who has done precisely nothing outside of take cheap shots at Kesha - classy. At least Kesha has a personality compared to Nicki playing insert verse for two utterly interchangeable flexes full of brand name porn, filler bars, and half-formed sex references where it’s probably for the best not to think that hard, she certainly didn’t. I’m honestly shocked it doesn’t have a big overused sample to match the rest of the low-grade crappiness on display - this sucks, next!
69. ‘run for the hills’ by Tate McRae - I honestly expected more Tate McRae songs to show up this week - I guess RCA hasn’t fully figured out how to make her a priority, but given their usual incompetence it’s not that surprising. Anyway, much to all of your disappointment this is not Tate McRae covering Iron Maiden, instead sounding like a washed out late 2010s trap pop song that Camila Cabello would have rejected down to the vocal runs on the hook. For what it’s worth, I don’t think this is badly produced, and I don’t mind the content - Tate McRae knows hooking up with this guy is a bad idea, right, with this bad hookup that should have her running, but it’s just so irresistible - and her sounding credibly nervous is not a bad dimension. But I think this song is missing another gear, another level of darkness or melodrama, and barely running over two minutes it doesn’t get there. Not bad, per se, but like the rest of THINK LATER, it’s not exactly interesting, or memorable.
63. ‘Let Me Calm Down’ by Nicki Minaj ft. J. Cole - it’s still weird to me that Nicki Minaj got a J. Cole verse - I know they’re contemporaries and came up in a similar time, but Cole’s attempts at introspection seem to be on a different planet than most of the plastic flair Nicki delivers. But credit to her, I like her verse where she fights against her mingled desires to be alone in her own space or fight it out with her partner, and pairing it with the hazy sung vocal samples… well, okay, the vocal mastering is more compressed and processed than I’d prefer when she’s singing, but it’s not bad. And Cole’s verse from a sheer rapping standpoint is really good, as he tries to play the guy giving advice to Nicki’s partner about how to work with her, hold her down, and keep the family together. Does it feel a bit pushy or like an overshare, and would her partner potentially give him the side eye at being compared to Will Smith given the past few years... yeah, probably, but in fairness to J. Cole - and I don’t say this often - I think his intentions were good here and he has long had a tendency to go too far with good intentions. That said, it is one of the more introspective cuts on the album and I think it’s pretty good, similar to…
60. ‘Are You Gone Already’ by Nicki Minaj - yes, I know, I’m in the minority of people who like this song, and it’s not to say that there aren’t problems here. I don’t like that it’s the opener and setting the tone for the album even if it does make a certain amount of sense as a bookend, the sample of ‘when the party’s over’ feels overused, especially when including the bridge, and the recency of the sample feels like a reach. That said, with the idea of sampling this song in this way, I think Nicki made about as good of a song as she could get - I like that she got Finneas to produce it, the vocal mix is considerably better than the majority of her album, and I really like how serious she took it in discussing her father’s hit-and-run death and framing it as talking to her baby, where she knows that child will never know her father but will know far more about Nicki and her own missteps and unhappiness, even in the face of success. Honestly, the song suffers in comparison with the rest of the album because it promised a more introspective and mature project for Nicki than we didn’t get, but I don’t think that’s completely fair to take away from a really good song. Unlike, say…
26. ‘Everybody’ by Nicki Minaj ft. Lil Uzi Vert - so this is a weird one to discuss, mostly because I was not that familiar with ‘Move Your Feet’ by Junior Senior - it was big about twenty years ago, but it never really came up on the radio I was hearing in the early 2000s. What I can say is that the sample integration here is terrible - both Nicki and Uzi use it as a cheap excuse to barely finish rhymes and for Uzi to dump in a bunch of interpolations of ‘Just Wanna Rock’ amidst their usual debauchery and flexing. But I’d argue Nicki is the bigger spoiler for the tone here - ‘Move Your Feet’ is jaunty and upbeat, damn near pop friendly, and Nicki loads her bars with gun references and some of the most phoned-in sex lines she’s ever had? It leads to a song that screams of laziness on all fronts, and my continued assertion that Uzi and Nicki have shockingly little chemistry - they have intensity but the interplay is nonexistent and they only engage with each other at their most disposable and shallow. In other words… yeah, didn’t care for this at all.
And that was our week - nice to keep it short where Nicki picks up all the spots here: worst goes to ‘Cowgirl’ with Lourdiz with Dishonourable Mention for ‘Everybody’ with Lil Uzi Vert, but the best is going to ‘Are You Gone Already’ with Honourable Mention to ‘Let Me Calm Down’ with J. Cole. Next week… provided it’s not delayed because of the timing of Christmas and Boxing Day, it could be a bit of a shitshow with the album bomb fallout, we’ll have to see.