billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - january 15, 2022

This is always one of the most exasperating times of the year to be a chart follower - yeah, the Christmas music is gone and the chart ‘resets back to equilibrium’, but often that comes with an influx of minor charting tracks that are using the open space to lodge traction when they wouldn’t get it any other time… mostly because they might not be good. But now it’s even more odd, because not only is Encanto charting more songs, next week we’re going to get an album bomb from The Weeknd and who knows how long any of this is going to last!

But what is somewhat predictable is our top 10, where to nobody’s surprise ‘Easy On Me’ by Adele reclaimed the #1 - consistently dominant on radio with good sales and streaming, she probably stands the best chance against the album bomb coming, although ‘Stay’ by Kid LAROI and Justin Bieber could make an argument with #2, although they lag in every category and may be close to peaking. Then we have ‘Heat Waves’ by Glass Animals at #3 - somehow the radio and streaming run for this song is not dead yet - and it leads over ‘Shivers’ by Ed Sheeran at #4, which didn’t have anything close to the stable radio growth I was expecting. Then we have the biggest streaming song right now at #5: ‘We Don’t Talk About Bruno’ by the Encanto cast. Make no mistake, this has no radio, just huge streaming and solid sales - in other words, I feel really bad for any parents stuck at home with kids that has to hear this on loop. Then leaping back into the top 10 we have ‘INDUSTRY BABY’ by Lil Nas X and Jack Harlow at #6 - streaming is still good but the radio is rotating this out - and ‘Cold Heart (PNAU Remix)’ by Elton John and Dua Lipa at #7, which is huge on sales and has solid radio, but lags on streaming - possibly because it’s terrible, but I couldn’t possibly comment. Our next two songs are both returns to the top 10: ‘Bad Habits’ by Ed Sheeran at #8 which got a big, unexpected radio surge this week that died off fast, and ‘Need To Know’ by Doja Cat at #9, which has radio inertia but is definitely rotating out. And that leaves a new arrival to the top 10 that’s depressingly unsurprising: ‘Super Gremlin’ by Kodak Black at #10, which is huge on streaming and nowhere else.

Now this takes us to our losers and dropouts… and we don’t actually have any losers this week and all the dropouts are holiday music. But that places us in a quandary when it comes to returns and gains, because outside of our seventeen returns, fifty-eight songs picked up ten or more positions and would qualify as a gain. Hell, outside of the top 10, it makes more sense for me to list the songs that didn’t pick up more positions rather than rattle through over half the chart… so that’s what I’m going to do: ‘abcdefu’ by GAYLE remains stranded outside the top 10 at 11, mostly because the radio isn’t there, ‘Broadway Girls’ by Lil Durk and Morgan Wallen couldn’t make headway beyond 27, and the last few are actually all from the late Juice WRLD in the bottom quarter of the Hot 100: ‘Burn’ at 77, ‘Wandered To L.A.’ with Justin Bieber at 89, and ‘Already Dead’ at 92. Charming.

Honestly, the returns are more interesting, because we have the ‘probably should be recurrent’ songs in the top 50 and at the very bottom of the chart we have a slew of songs clinging to life where there’s no guarantee they’ll last. In the former category, ‘Chasing After You’ by Ryan Hurd and Maren Morris at 50, ‘Leave The Door Open’ by Silk Sonic at 49, ‘Pepas’ by Farruko at 46 - I’m thrilled that it’s back, even if it’s now thoroughly caught between years - ‘Montero (Call Me By Your Name)’ by Lil Nas X at 41, ‘Beggin’ by Maneskin at 38, ‘If I Didn’t Love You’ by Jason Aldean and Carrie Underwood at 35, and the two largest returns that even broke past Billboard’s rule of falling below the top 25 after a year means you’re out: ‘Save Your Tears’ by The Weeknd and Ariana Grande at 18, and ‘Levitating’ by Dua Lipa at 12 - yeah, it appears they still have that much traction! Now in the bottom half… it’s tough for me to gauge if any of this will stick, especially with the album bomb coming, and a lot of these we’ve seen fall off and on the chart before: ‘Too Easy’ by Gunna and Future at 84, ‘Fair Trade’ by Drake ft. Travis Scott at 85, ‘Volvi’ by Aventura and Bad Bunny at 86, ‘Come Through’ by H.E.R. ft. Chris Brown at 88, ‘Baddest’ by Yung Bleu, Chris Brown and 2 Chainz at 94, ‘Me Or Sum’ by Nardo Wick, Lil Baby and Future at 96, ‘Bad Man (Smooth Criminal)’ by Polo G at 98, and ‘Just About Over You’ by Priscilla Block at 100. The only song I think might have more of a future is ‘Moth To A Flame’ by Swedish House Mafia and The Weeknd at 95 - it may get a parallel boost with The Weeknd’s album bomb next week, you occasionally see that sort of cross-pollination and it could be interesting.

But we now have a pretty stacked list of twelve new arrivals, starting with…

99. ‘Never Wanted To Be That Girl’ by Carly Pearce & Ashley McBryde - this is one of those cases where I’m happy this song is charting because it’s legit great and both of these women can make a lot out of it… but I’m still pissed off about the label machinations that stuck us here. ‘Next Girl’ was on a chart run and is a legitimately fantastic song, and Big Machine can’t get it out of the top twenty on country radio, are you kidding me? And you can’t let both of these women get a solid run of their own, you have to push the duet instead? It’s frustrating because again, the song is great: the sandy percussion playing off the low smolder of the electric guitars and prominent twang, some solid vocal interplay on the hook, and the content is multi-faceted and morally complicated, McBryde playing the woman who got caught up in the affair, Pearce playing the wife who got cheated on and who’ll take whatever method she has to find the truth, and there’s a lot of humanity in the bone-deep sadness and vulnerability of everyone involved - it plays in the ‘Does He Love You’ mold and it does so really well. But I dunno, I think it sucks that Music Row feels it has to push women against each other on single choices like this, but then combine them on a single record while letting mediocre, interchangeable guys get all the space they want. Great song… but I really hope more singles from that Carly Pearce album get the airtime they deserve.

97. ‘I Love You So’ by The Walters - …this is a song from 2014 from an utterly unknown folk rock act that went viral on Tiktok - because that’s what 2022 needs more of, right? Seriously, this band had effectively broken up after their self-released 2015 album went nowhere until this song caught on and then they got back together because, hey, why not? And… alright, it would be a cute story if the song was good… and wow, this isn’t good at all, the sort of midrange TV soundtrack filler or borderline commercialcore that at least bands like The 88 could make catchy! This, meanwhile, has an utterly limp watery guitarline, willowy vocal harmonies that make this feel more saccharine than it really should be… which in the tradition of the sour edges of most of this dreck, is all about a miserable scene where a guy is one of many partners of this girl and needs to get some self-respect and leave, but is still hopelessly in love and won’t go away. The reason I generally hate most of this is because it feels so smarmy and insincere in how pathetic it is - it’s mewling and whiny, basically a guilt trip to plead for this girl to let him go… or really just let everyone else go so they can be toxic together. So you have something deeply derivative and insufferable - Tiktok, you sure you want to revive these guys’ careers? Really?

93. ‘Black Ball’ by YoungBoy Never Broke Again & Birdman - okay, question: how many of you actually knew that YoungBoy Never Broke Again put out an entire collaborative mixtape with Birdman? Second question… why? What blackmail material does Birdman have in order to engineer this happening? Doing a little more research I discovered this has been a thing in the works since 2018, and right now I’m asking who the hell this is even for. Well, what you realize is that Birdman doesn’t seem to be on this song at all but still has a credit as YoungBoy tries to croon through a dying woodwind and frail acoustic line that is so faded alongside the brittle tapping trap skitter that it’s barely there opposite his vocals - did anyone master this properly? Now maybe this is me being too charitable, but I do think the hook is fine enough… until you realize the entire song is an extended paranoid gloating session with the sort of gunplay and flimsy flexing that tends to be Youngboy’s usual - and he wonders why on the second verse the girl doesn’t seem to like him that much. No, in the end I’m just kind of baffled by this - it’s charting because of the video, not because 2022 is going to see a Birdman revival, so let’s move on.

91. ‘Come Back As A Country Boy’ by Blake Shelton - there’s a part of me that’s sincerely tempted to throw the title line here in Blake Shelton’s face, because if you want to die and then come back as a country boy, what the hell are you now? Well, that’s the thing: he’s plenty comfortable being this country boy now complete with verses overstuffed with oversold cliches - you can thank HARDY for that, along with the overblown production from Scott Hendricks with all the grunts, ridiculous adlibs, fizzy clapping percussion, and synth-driven bombast - so he doesn’t want to do anything remotely different… so where’s the drama of the song? It honestly damn near a parody of itself, that’s how hard it’s leaning on country buzzwords with so much stomping presence and the guitars wailing through it, and with the lack of any conflict, it feels like so much flash but with no punch at all. It’s clearly trying to rip off the formula that made ‘God’s Country’ a thing, but that song at least tried to lean into blues rock and gospel, whereas this is overproduced crap - next!

90. ‘Home Sweet’ by Russell Dickerson - see what I mean about male country acts that have no good reason to be still charting hits? I don’t think Russell Dickerson has made a single song I remember, let alone like, especially with this single from a 2020 album I didn’t know existed… and you know, I’ll give him this, for this sort of boyfriend country he’s at least trying to crank up some swell and bombast driving off the handclaps, booming percussion, and his belting, which when you factor in the higher backing vocals you realize the guitar is just getting swallowed and there’s no groove to speak of, especially with how filmy the acoustics sound with the weird spongy effects around them. Yeah, the piano accents are nice, and I think the song actually does earn its build-up off the bridge as the guitars smash back through for the final hook, especially as the love song builds its ‘finding love anywhere’ message reasonably well, but it feels overproduced and had me thinking that a more organic, warm instrumental would do better… and when you discover that Charles Kelley of Lady A is a cowriter of this, I realized you could kill two birds with one stone: give the song to Charles Kelley, leave Dann Huff out of the production, have Lady A break up because let’s face it, it’s over, and we can go back to forgetting Russell Dickerson ever existed and maybe get another solo Charles Kelley album! And while I can dream… honestly, not great, but it’s harmless… unlike…

87. ‘AA’ by Walker Hayes - you know, just because he got one hit on a fluke doesn’t mean it needs to be a thing - putting aside ‘Fancy Like’, Walker Hayes is a profoundly limited performer, it’s why he didn’t really have hits for a long time. But no, we have another song from his upcoming album, one that in certain circles I follow had already been called really damn bad… and my god, it absolutely is, but for different reasons. For one, I don’t know what the hell Shane McAnally is doing here on production, every pickup sounds like shit - the acoustics have no warm, the electric guitar is more ugly texture clipping the mix, which also describes how painfully ugly Hayes’ voice sounds in the mix, all backed up by the cheapest sounding programmed percussion in a mix that somehow still sounds muddy! But then there’s the writing, and where I’ve seen backlash of how he doesn’t want his girls on the pole as anti sex worker - trust me when I say he did not remotely think about this that hard, because in the bigger picture this is just playing to hacky sitcom dad archetypes, where he doesn’t drink or chew or smoke anymore, just trying to be the upright standup man who can change his own oil, have a beer, and satisfy a wife where he outright says she married down - dude, between this and ‘Fancy Like’, you’re not exactly revealing a healthy marriage here. But the line that jumped out to me was the very obvious Alabama coach Nick Saban reference, and while I could highlight outside of Alabama there are some folks distinctly less fond of him - Cleveland and Miami spring to mind - but I think I can appreciate the irony of Georgia rolling tide right back to Alabama just a day or two ago. Whatever, this is bad, less novelty and quotably offensive than ‘Fancy Like’, but it sounds considerably worse. Let’s not make this a thing.

83. ‘Dos Oruguitas’ by Sebastian Yatra - so, there are four songs from Encanto that hit the Hot 100 just this week, and this one is actually from a Colombian artist as one of the few songs that’s fully in Spanish from the film… although still written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, although to someone who doesn’t speak Spanish, it seems less obvious. I also think it helps that the gentle acoustics build up really nicely off the touches of arranged instrumentation and pattering percussion, and Sebastian Yatra is a singer who can sell the lightweight fable about two caterpillars growing up together with the quivering sensitivity without feeling sappy. Maybe it’s how it doesn’t feel as ‘Disney-fied’ as so many of these can be, but this is generally nice - a decent enough song, I’ll take it.

82. ‘Waiting On a Miracle’ by Stephanie Beatriz - I’m going to try and appreciate this without the knowledge that Stephanie Beatriz played Rosa on Brooklyn Nine-Nine - she’s a terrific actress and pretty expressive and talented with voicework, so I had some hopes for this. And honestly, there’s a lot to like about this song: the cycling acoustics playing off the arranged swells and escalating handclaps that build to a pretty solid crescendo, the frustrated sentiment of Mirabel not having powers while the rest of her family does, it does build to a climax… and man, I wish the vocals were remotely good. I can’t speak to Beatriz in the movie, which I still haven’t seen, but trying to sing in character is hard and between the nasal vocal tone and how poorly her vocals seem to be coming in - they sound weirdly compressed and with no support the flaws are all the more evident - she just can’t sell the bombast here. Again, I want to be nice here because I do think this is also pretty good… but the delivery holds it back from being great, have to say it.

69. ‘Fingers Crossed’ by Lauren Spencer-Smith - okay, how to explain this one… so Lauren Spencer-Smith is a Canadian teenager who was actually on American Idol for a brief time and after leaving pretty early, she’s been self-releasing songs and this went viral on TikTok. What I find interesting is that she doesn’t seem to be signed yet according to Billboard, so while some are making Olivia Rodrigo comparisons, she doesn’t seem to be nearly as well connected, at least right now. So with this song… well, I get the ‘driver’s license’ comparison with the slightly quicker groove, the teenage post-breakup vibe for what sounds like another musician, but while playing to the same market, this is different: it’s more acoustic with those snaps, Spencer-Smith has a much throatier vocal tone that can sound a little husky, not quite as clear or refined, and unlike Rodrigo where she was clearly not over things, Spencer-Smith absolutely is and is looking to vent at everything she gave this guy only for him to lie and lead her on. But I don’t think it’s better - there’s none of those subtle touches in the production that add flavour, there’s less to the central metaphor, and while Rodrigo always had a ‘theater girl’ vibe, she was able to mostly transcend it with details or at least a groove that didn’t feel this oddly bouncy. I dunno, I don’t think this is bad by any means, but I don’t see this as having the same magnetism or becoming the same phenomenon. Just okay, I think.

68. ‘Flower Shops’ by ERNEST ft. Morgan Wallen - I really wish I could avoid talking about the controversy with this track… but I sadly can’t, because the Grand Ole Opry decided that in letting ERNEST perform, they brought Morgan Wallen on stage as well. Now there’s a lot of tangled, ugly baggage surrounding how much anyone should care about the Opry - I could go on for a solid hour with my grievances - I think a huge point of frustration is the mixed messaging: if country music’s institutions are committed to reform and platforming Black artists, where to their credit the Opry seems to be trying, it sends a really mixed message to then give Morgan Wallen the stage backing a guy who was originally known for cutting country rap songs and cowriting for Chris Lane and Sam Hunt. Just because he’s successful does not mean he’s owed this platform - the Opry has made a point of that plenty of times, and that goes all the way back to Hank Williams - and instead of the circle remaining unbroken, it highlights which people are allowed to be comfortable within it. And you know, all of that’s a goddamn shame… because otherwise, this is really damn good. The pedal steel playing off the warm acoustics and crisp sandy drums, the writing describing the imploding relationship where the love is gone but it might be a good day for flower shops as he buys something to apologize. Honestly, I’m a little surprised Wallen is even here - ERNEST could have sold this on his own just fine, especially as Wallen doesn’t have any credits beyond performance, which again highlights just how much he’s a name draw rather than adding anything that special. Kind of a shame the business of all of this sours an otherwise really good song, at least for me - leaves me wanting to like this more than I do.

67. ‘What Else Can I Do?’ by Diane Guerrero & Stephanie Beatriz - alright, two more Encanto songs… and you know, I mostly liked this too. Diane Guerrero is a better singer and takes more of the lead off the electric guitars to play to a more interesting groove, with Beatriz mostly throwing in ad libs or more subdued vocal passages to play off the bouncier acoustics and fizzy shudder of the percussion. You can definitely tell that Lin-Manuel Miranda’s tendency to overwrite his lyrics is still present - his voice still cuts through whoever is singing, even if I think the struggle that Isabela describes to create something less perfect but more true feels well-realized. But then there’s the electric guitar - Miranda said he was inspired by the Spanish rock movement from the 90s for the rhythms, but he seems to have left any trace of actual texture or edge on the wayside… maybe because this is Disney, but more likely because the production on this soundtrack is just not consistently good. Again, I mostly like this, especially given how it builds, but I haven’t found that great moment to win me over, and that leaves us with…

62. ‘The Family Madrigal’ by Encanto Cast - well, this is an introduction song playing off the accordion and more developed rhythm section… and you know, there are songs that can work standalone, and this is just not one of them, the sort of broad, cast showcase where Mirabel rattles through all of her family members and the powers they have while dancing around how she doesn’t have any. This is another song where Lin-Manuel Miranda’s writing cuts through very obviously, and while Beatriz has less to do in terms of singing in handling the fast-paced flow of the track, it’s still overwritten and clunky in a way that doesn’t seem to be well-paced, especially in setting up some of the characters - hell, Bruno is mentioned in the second verse and that just feels a little too early to set the right tension. Overall it just feels deflective and lacking in focus, and while of course some of that is the point, it doesn’t make for an overture that really wins me over have to say.

But that’s this week… my god, there are snippets of quality here, but not nearly enough where I can’t tack on stupid asterisks. Hell, both of the country songs that are getting the best and honourable mention - ‘I Never Wanted To Be That Girl’ by Carly Pearce and Ashley McBryde and ‘Flower Shops’ by ERNEST ft. Morgan Wallen - have big industry frustrations surrounding them. Now for the worst… yeah, ‘AA’ by Walker Hayes is getting it, but more because the production is atrocious rather any offense taken, and there’s actually a tie for Dishonourable Mention: ‘Come Back As A Country Boy’ by Blake Shelton, and ‘I Love You So’ by The Walters, the latter of which might be innocuous but pisses me off in surprising ways. Anyway, next week is The Weeknd’s album bomb for Dawn FM, and maybe Gunna sneaks a song or two through, so stay tuned for that!