billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - june 24, 2023

So I’m comfortable calling this a transitional week - otherwise pretty slow, but we’re very likely going to get a Gunna album bomb next week and that means it’s tough to put a ton of stock in what’s going to stick around or last, even if there are changes that did catch me a little offguard, both in what’s leaving, what’s sticking around, and what seems to be gaining speed… although in the last group, it’s tough to determine what’ll last, as expected.

Sadly, also expected the top ten did not move that much, and that starts with ‘Last Night’ by Morgan Wallen firmly entrenched at #1. At this point, I can say that its radio is starting to slow, but it’s got so much inertia there and it rules streaming - it’s going to take a bigger name to smash through across multiple channels, and truth be told, I don’t who that’ll be - Olivia Rodrigo, maybe, but that’s not guaranteed. Then we have ‘Flowers’ by Miley Cyrus picking up a spot to #2 - apparently there was a pop radio recalibration that gave this its last bit of staying power, but I don’t see that lasting, especially as ‘Fast Car’ by Luke Combs rose up to #3 with a really strong radio surge and streaming that is absolutely competitive - it was damn near one spot higher. Hell, it overtook ‘Calm Down’ by Rema and Selena Gomez, but that’s not really surprising - it has better radio but the streaming lags considerably, it’s a comment on margins more than anything. Next we have ‘All My Life’ by Lil Durk ft. J. Cole comfortably holding #5 - again, better streaming as the radio races to catch up, and it is moving relatively quickly - and while we’re here, ‘Favorite Song’ by Toosii also picked up a spot to #6, with slightly weaker streaming but with enough radio stability to hold up over ‘Kill Bill’ by SZA at #7, absolutely on its way out. Then we have pickups for ‘Creepin’ by Metro Boomin, 21 Savage and The Weeknd to #8 even as it bleeds radio, and ‘Karma’ by Taylor Swift and Ice Spice at #9 as it surges on the radio but sees its streaming start to give out - I chalk more of their positional gains to ‘Ella Baila Sola’ by Eslabon Armado and Peso Pluma sinking to #10 - the radio never caught on, and it seems like streaming is starting to ebb back, at least on the margins.

That neatly takes us to our losers and dropouts, where in the latter category there were a few surprises. No, I’m not happy that ‘Human’ by Cody Johnson could never get going so it’s gone, but ‘AMG’ by Gabito Ballesteros, Peso Pluma, and Natanael Cano is also gone after twenty weeks and it looks to be just on the borderline of missing the year-end list for 2023, which I reckon might wind up more common for a lot of the regional Mexican songs beyond isolated crossovers, it’ll be fascinating to watch for the rest of the year. As for losers… well, we have the Metro Boomin Across The Spiderverse album bomb cuts fading like ‘All The Way Live’ with Future and Lil Uzi Vert at 92 and ‘Hummingbird’ with James Blake at 100, but truth be told a lot of losses came from debuts: ‘Put It On Da Floor Again’ by Latto and Cardi B slipped to 29, ‘Popular’ by The Weeknd, Playboi Carti and Madonna fell hard to 72, ‘Ocean Spray’ by Moneybagg Yo hit 88, ‘Save Me’ by Jelly Roll and Lainey Wilson hit 96, and ‘bread & butter’ by Gunna fell to 81 - that one is going to rebound big next week. Outside of those… ‘Pound Town 2’ by Sexyy Red, Nicki Minaj and Tay Keith slid after losing their little sales boost to 86, ‘Thank God’ by Kane & Katelyn Brown fell to 50 comfortably on its way out having notched its year-end spot, and ‘Stand By Me’ by Lil Durk and Morgan Wallen fell to 41 because maybe there is a higher power that is helping restore a fraction of America’s taste - also the streaming is falling and there’s no radio support.

Now for the returns and gains… which are an odd group, I have to say. Again, with an album bomb coming, I don’t expect any of our returns to stick around, so with ‘Too Many Nights’ by Metro Boomin, Future and Don Toliver at 95, ‘Yandel 150’ by Yandel and Feid at 97, and ‘I Wrote The Book’ by Morgan Wallen at 99, I don’t expect these to last. But I also didn’t expect ‘TRUSTFALL’ by P!nk to last off its return and it rose to 82; same case for ‘Jaded’ by Miley Cyrus rising to 85! Then off the debut ‘Peaches & Eggplants’ by Young Nudy and 21 Savage continued its viral boost to 74 - again, this is where I’m happy the Gunna album bomb will do a number here, probably will help with ‘What It Is (Block Boy)’ by Doechii and Kodak Black up to 60 as well, maybe even knock back ‘Baby Don’t Hurt Me’ by David Guetta, Anne-Marie, and Coi Leray from 71. Then we had a few country gains - ‘Next Thing You Know’ by Jordan Davis saw a nice boost to 28, ‘Bury Me In Georgia’ by Kane Brown is getting a sustained push to 64, and ‘Your Heart Or Mine’ by Jon Pardi is looking to get traction up to 67. But I want to track is ‘People’ by Libianca, mostly because the radio is quietly throwing something behind this, and I want to see if it can weather the storm.

But that storm is next week - in the mean time we have a pretty short list of new arrivals, starting with…

93. ‘The Hillbillies’ by Baby Keem & Kendrick Lamar - this is one of those cases where the discourse around the song has been more interesting than the song itself, with a lot of folks referencing how the song appears to utilize Drake’s flow from ‘Sticky’ last year and thoughts that some tension is rekindling between Drake and Kendrick about seven years late. That combined with the groove and the blurry Bon Iver sample, it seemed to spark conversation for a few days… that didn’t really circle around the song, which has left me a little underwhelmed compared to other collabs between the cousins. I think a lot of it surrounds the hook, which feels a little flat and lacking the expressive energy they both can usually bring - the soccer references and low-key fashion and international bragging work, but Baby Keem keeps going to focus on women and even as they trade bars it’s not quite as smooth as it could be. So yeah, it feels like an interesting moment and if the beef with Drake heats up it’ll be interesting to examine in retrospect, but as of now… it’s cool, but I won’t return to it much.

89. ‘TRUCK BED’ by HARDY - I wasn’t planning to return to this at all - I knew that because ‘wait in the truck’ was a success that HARDY’s career would last, at least behind the scenes, but the backlash and bad buzz around his worse album earlier this year had me convinced he had hit the wall. So colour me shocked he decided to push a song from the “rock” side of his double album, and easily one of the worst ones! I guess he thought it could work with the country trap approach that Morgan Wallen has kept moving this year, but what is with those horrible weedy synths that don’t match anything - nor does that trap skitter or his godawful attempt at hollering hard rock for the final hook with the noisier guitars replacing that badly tuned liquid warble; if the song is meant to sound miserable and hungover, it succeeds a little too well but it’s also the sort of headache I sure as shit don’t want! Then there’s the content, where HARDY goes out and drinks too hard, isn’t let back into the house, sleeps in his truck, and by the bridge is threatening to shoot the girl who locked him out the next morning - not a healthy response to a breakup, dude! I get why someone at his label looking to salvage something is pushing this as a single, especially with the Morgan Wallen parallels, but even at his most downbeat and sarcastic Wallen has charisma HARDY does not have - in other works, this blows, next!

68. ‘Plebaba’ by El Alfa & Peso Pluma - okay, let me walk you through this - y’all should know Peso Pluma by now, but you’d only recognize El Alfa from the Latin charts as a guy who works in dembow and Latin trap, the former a genre from the Dominican republic with roots in dancehall and is similar to reggaeton but with a faster groove. It certainly has a different feel here - the rattling snares, the eerie melodies, the rounded bass, the farty synths and horns, it’s trying to create a sense of violent menace even the vocal pickups sound painfully compressed and nasal. El Alfa seems at least more descriptively nasty, but given how repetitive the hook feels, the most I get from this is Peso Pluma continuing to dabble with more sounds outside of his own and be very loose with his cosign - not always sure that’s a good thing.

48. ‘Take Two’ by BTS - it’s fascinating just how quickly BTS becomes ignorable when the sales are de-emphasized on Billboard, I have to say - they topped the digital sales charts this week with this tenth anniversary song while the group is on hiatus, and they could only barely crack the top 50. But honestly for this song, it kind of makes sense - a midtempo pop song leaning on hazy acoustic and electric guitar and a pretty languid if developed bassline as they trade vocal passages describing a love story that could very easily be directed at a hope their fanbase sticks around for the next arc of their career. For what it’s worth, given that I’ve covered more solo projects from BTS I can recognize their individual voices way more quickly these days, and that adds a bit more character than I expected, but I can tell this is predominantly pitched for the army as a song to hold them over - fine for what it is, kind of reminds me a little of ‘Life Goes On’, but it doesn’t stick that much for me.

43. ‘Dial Drunk’ by Noah Kahan - …I called it. For those of you who don’t know, I reviewed Noah Kahan on my main channel last year, and while I did not like Stick Season at all, I predicted that on tunes and accessibility alone, if managed properly he could be a folk pop superstar. Now he’s got his viral breakthrough - proving that everyone mocking late-2000s/early 2010s stomp clap folk pop online do not speak for the silent majority that will eat this up - and… to his credit, it’s a song I didn’t cover from his deluxe album and it’s shockingly good. If anything, the comparison that leaps to mind immediately is ‘Little Lion Man’ - it ramps the tempo up to match the banjo picking, gives the groove a little electric muscle, cranks a big crescendo through the bridge that leans on stacking the vocal harmonies, and it’s about a man on a downward spiral with enough dry sarcasm to cut the earnestness but can come across as possessive and creepy if you think about it too hard. I should stress this is not better than ‘Little Lion Man’ - the hook and crescendo just do not go as hard, Marcus Mumford is a better singer than Noah Kahan, as the more basic, straightforward storytelling of this guy getting pulled over by the cops for driving drunk and him calling an ex to plea for help to the exasperated disbelief of said cops doesn’t have that poetic flair - but I also know that by my fourth listen this had grown on me enough to know that if I add it to my karaoke list, it’ll go off. So yeah, I guess he found a good one - and given that this has already peaked higher than ‘Little Lion Man’ ever did on the Hot 100, just watch this be huge…

Well, we’ll see after Gunna next week. For now it is the best of the week while ‘TRUCK BED’ by HARDY runs away with the worst - ironic as being a drunken mess near your car seems to be running themes of both, clearly summer is in full swing. Next week we do have that album bomb, we’ll have to see what survives so stay tuned…