billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - june 29, 2024
See, this is the sort of week on the Hot 100 I find difficult to handle… because we didn’t actually get album bombs, but just enough songs from three different projects to make this a handful at an inopportune time; at this time of year when I’m knee-deep in bigger projects, I don’t need Billboard BREAKDOWN to get more complicated, especially when I don’t have a lot of faith any of this is going to last that long!
But that’s just me whinging, let’s get to the top ten and a big story: for the first time in her career, Sabrina Carpenter has taken the #1 with ‘Please Please Please’. And let’s make this clear, she did it on damn near streaming alone - sales were solid, and the song appears to have been finally shipped to radio, but it was streaming that got her to the top spot, and at least for a little while it’ll be the condition that determines if she stays there. Compare this to ‘I Had Some Help’ by Post Malone and Morgan Wallen pushed to #2 - sales are better and it spent the week running up the radio margin… but when the gulf in streaming is wide enough, that margin will matter more. And let’s make it clear, the competition was between those two songs - I like that ‘A Bar Song (Tipsy)’ by Shaboozey jumped to #3 on sales dominance and strong streaming and the radio finally giving him some serious muscle, but those margins are just too wide at this point… although it was enough to get over ‘Espresso’ by Sabrina Carpenter at #4, which has better airplay but slipped on streaming and lags on sales. The next three songs didn’t shift position mostly because the upward momentum remained consistent: ‘MILLION DOLLAR BABY’ by Tommy Richman at #5 which is really trying to chase down ‘Espresso’, ‘Not Like Us’ by Kendrick Lamar at #6 where the radio growth may have stalled and it got overtaken on streaming, but that big Juneteenth concert is likely going to spike it in a big way, and ‘Too Sweet’ by Hozier at #7 where airplay is slowing down, but streaming and sales are both holding up! At least it was enough to beat out ‘Beautiful Things’ by Benson Boone, which rose back up to #8 mostly as a factor of other songs not collapsing as quickly as they should and an okay sales week, which was likely enough to edge the margins for ‘Lose Control’ by Teddy Swims at #9, which has better radio but worse streaming overall. Finally we have ‘BIRDS OF A FEATHER’ by Billie Eilish slipping back to #10, which is what happens when your streaming is stable, but you have a long way to go on the radio to fill in the gaps.
This naturally takes us to our losers and dropouts, and there’s a surprising number of the latter. The biggest of note are probably ‘Made For Me’ by Muni Long clinching a year-end list spot and ‘FE!N’ by Travis Scott and Playboi Carti hopefully falling short - sadly likely the case for ‘obsessed’ by Olivia Rodrigo as well - but then we saw a lot of album bomb cuts from Taylor Swift make their exit too, like ‘But Daddy I Love Him’, ‘My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys’, and ‘So Long, London’. Oh, and ‘Family Matters’ by Drake is gone too, I’m not going to complain. And we got a lot of losers here too, with a few more from Taylor with ‘Down Bad’ at 64 and ‘Who's Afraid Of Little Old Me’ at 83. This also spilled into Billie Eilish as well, with ‘CHIHIRO’ at 36, ‘WILDFLOWER’ at 57, ‘L’AMOUR DE MA VIE’ at 70, and ‘BLUE’ at 84… and while we’re talking continued losers, ‘Enough (Miami)’ by Cardi B is just out of traction at 89 and ‘Carnival’ by Kanye West, Ty Dolla $ign, Rich The Kid and Playboi Carti hit 99. Then off the debut ‘Close To You’ by Gracie Abrams stumbled to 69, off the return ‘the boy is mine’ remix from Ariana Grande hit 74, and the one gain for Koe Wetzel just evaporated to fall back to 49. Outside of those… ‘one of wun’ by Gunna lost a step to 50, ‘I Think I’m In Love With You’ by Chris Stapleton and Dua Lipa is just not getting any momentum at 66, ‘Halfway To Hell’ by Jelly Roll fell to 75, and ‘Take Her Home’ by Kenny Chesney hit 93.
Now this is where I might say that our returns and gains compensated by being more interesting… and yet in the former group, alongside Don Toliver’s album impact bringing back ‘Attitude’ with Charlie Wilson and Cash Cobain to 58 and ‘Bandit’ to 73, we also got ‘Let Your Boys Be Country’ by Jason Aldean at 94 and I’m inclined to check out. But the gains are mostly better - just try to ignore ‘Beautiful As You’ by Thomas Rhett rising to 85 and ‘Wine Into Whiskey’ by Tucker Wetmore continuing up to 68. The rest of the gains are considerably better - I like ‘The Door’ by Teddy Swims getting traction as a second hit to 76, ‘The Man He Sees In Me’ by Luke Combs got a nice album boost to 39, and most importantly, Chappell Roan is seeing consistent gains for multiple songs, with ‘Hot To Go!’ up to 55 and ‘Red Wine Supernova’ at 54 - and when it’s not her only success this week, that’s a huge plus!
Unfortunately, we have a lot of new arrivals to work through, and unfortunately we have to start with…
100. ‘Chevrolet’ by Dustin Lynch ft. Jelly Roll - I don’t know why Dustin Lynch has had the chart longevity that he has, especially when most of his minor hits are otherwise completely forgettable… but then I remember about ten years ago I gave him some light praise and I think we’ve all been paying for it ever since. Anyway this is a collab with Jelly Roll where if you just read the lyrics, it’s a generally tedious barroom hookup that’s rooted in car brand name porn, what else is new… but that melody was instantly familiar. For those who don’t know the Dobie Grey version or even the cover by Uncle Kracker from the 2000s that’s better than it has any right to be, this is liberally borrowing from ‘Drift Away’, a classic of 70s soul and one of my all time favourite songs and karaoke staples - and these two can’t muster any soulful swell or texture beyond the oversold twang, which you’d think would be right in Jelly Roll’s wheelhouse! He admittedly sounds better than Dustin Lynch, but is that really saying much when the song is played so broadly? So yeah, bastardization of a classic song for dated garbage, both of these men have long worn out any good will or welcome, this is trash - next!
98. ‘Kryptonite’ by Don Toliver - so the Don Toliver reviews are largely in and… honestly, they’ve been inconsistent for this new album, mostly some praise for a unique voice but little else in production and content that is that compelling or interesting, which has basically been my issue with Don Toliver for years now. Just our luck he charted four new songs this week, with this being the album opener… well, at first there were cool ideas? The wiry snarl of the thicker guitar against the trap knock with that distant snare, it was kind of nifty… before we slip into the fractured glassy mix where the bass swamps the mix and any melody gets subsumed into the mass with the feminine backing vocals from fka twigs of all people. It’s trying to sell this drugged-out, biker attitude with this girl who goes as hard as he does, but I’m not sure Don Toliver is that convincing in this lane - he doesn’t have that darker edge in his delivery, and when you get lines like ‘treat her panties like a rover / I pull her over’, I find it hard to take that seriously. Not saying this is bad, but after the beat switch this doesn’t hit nearly as hard as it thinks it does, let’s move on.
95. ‘Front Door Famous’ by Luke Combs - I’ve seen some folks cite this as the best song on the new Luke Combs album - I disagree, there are a lot of cuts with more emotional weight that feel a little more nuanced, but as an opener this still has a lot of charm, a nice midtempo neotraditional country tune with gentle touches of fiddle and piano to accent the lead acoustic line. And the underlying sentiment as a new father where despite his fame and success on the road, there’s nothing like the moment of your son acknowledging you coming home… hell, I don’t have kids, but Combs can sell that resonance, it’s very real. Again, I think there are cuts that aim to do a little more - the verses feel very abbreviated overall - but I also can’t deny that this does exactly what it’s designed to do. Really good song, no problem at all that it’s here.
92. ‘Ice Age’ by Don Toliver ft. Travis Scott - So the way Don Toliver structured his newest album is a bit like a compilation of EPs, each with four songs, with pretty much the only songs that charted coming on the first two with this likely only crossing over thanks to the Travis Scott feature, who handles both the hooks and one verse… have to wonder why we even bother with Don Toliver sometimes! Maybe to some audiences another selling point would be Cash Cobain and BNYX contributing to production - and honestly I do like the beat here, the nocturnal rattle of guitars against the scratches and bass rumble with the occasional ragged synth sizzle, and that’s before we get to the beat change that justifies Don Toliver being here at all that’s more watery with a sharper groove. Shame that we’re stuck with Travis Scott in lethargic humming ‘flex for girls’ mode where everyone is high, he’s hyping his crew, and he’s making veiled shots at the Kardashians for not being ‘real’, as if I buy a shred of depth or authenticity in anything Travis Scott has ever released! But hey, it’s a chill vibe, and I think I might prefer Don Toliver’s more direct hedonism overall - not really wowing me, but the hook is decent enough… I guess I’ll take it.
91. ‘Thorns’ by $uicideBoy$ - it seems like we were just waiting for the floodgates to break open properly for $uicideBoy$, especially given how long they’ve been lurking just below the Hot 100 for chart success. And thus their newest album New World Depression lodged three songs this week, with this being an abbreviated laid-back trap clanker with admittedly a pretty keyboard line that really compliments the piano flourishes and DJ Fela sample well! I can’t say the song does the most with it - it doesn’t have much of a hook beyond the sample and that melody, and the two verses are gunplay and flexing, and while there’s a few good lines - Ruby da Cherry has that Gambit reference, $crim reps well for New Orleans and staying sober - I feel like this is a little more meat to being genuinely great. Overall good… I just wanted to hear more!
90. ‘Pink Pony Club’ by Chappell Roan - I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams that Chappell Roan would get four songs charting on the Hot 100 and so much upward momentum, especially for a song this old! ‘Pink Pony Club’ dates back to 2020, it was a song released when she was still on Atlantic right before they dropped her - world class fumbling of the bag there - and even though it’s been repackaged for her album last year, it’s still excellent! I love the slow build across the piano that drops suddenly into those synthetic stings and fizzy percussion before getting a glittery guitar solo, I love how well the song showcases Roan’s classical vocal training before the girlish exuberance of the hook, and I love how well it nails the odd balance of joy and melancholy, leaving her home in the midwest and likely not making her parents happy as she goes to dance in drag clubs in Santa Monica, where there’s still love in the memories of Tennessee and a lingering hope that connection could be reforged. If I was nitpicking, it could be that the song sounds a little threadbare at points - I’m not sure it rises to a ‘Casual’ or ‘Coffee’ or ‘My Kink Is Karma’ - but it’s still a terrific song, thrilled she’s seeing this kind of success, please check it out!
86. ‘Burgundy’ by $uicideBoy$ - alright, next up from $uicideboy$, where again we don’t get a hook, but the song is much longer and off of that grisly trap knock and haunted vocal samples - that apparently originate from this duo’s earliest work, although the mastering is really well done here - you get more developed scenes running through the debauchery they used to live. The one thing I’ll give them credit for is how serious they frame this drug abuse and the toll it’s taken on them, for $crim translating to a bad relationship with his folks and newfound guns and violence, for Ruby it’s more flexing but an acknowledgement that it’s barely holding him back from the brink… but I’m left thinking that there should be more here; a vivid picture, but it feels a little two-dimensional. Still solid, I’m getting more of the appeal… maybe not fully there, though.
78. ‘Tore Up’ by Don Toliver - …why am I listening to this and thinking, ‘this is something that Lil Uzi Vert would make’? Seriously, the flashy guitar work washed out and wedged behind the trap groove with the screamo samples, where the song is more built for rockstar flexing on a festival stage and I’m not remotely convinced it pulls it off, even if the tremolo riffs on the final solo were kind of rad? But at least Lil Uzi Vert has an intensity and desire to go hard that Don Toliver’s crooning doesn’t fit nearly as well - he just doesn’t have the raw flair to go harder, and when the lyrical detail is so flimsy, the most you get is an admittedly okay hook! Maybe this could have worked more if Don Toliver bothered to write more than one verse - this is only about two minutes long and it feels shorter - but as it is… more an interesting idea than much in execution.
71. ‘The Thin Grey Line’ by $uicideBoy$ - So the downside of not knowing as much about $uicideboy$ is that when I started digging into the details about this song, I didn’t immediately recognize the alter egos that the boys credit for the song… and given that this song’s title references the prison-industrial complex, I was curious just how deeply they were going in. That’s not really what this song is about at all - it seems to be referencing more of their “suicide” cult-like fanbase who would stand in line alongside their company Grey 59, and even then it’s more of an excuse for the duo to keep on relentlessly flexing. And I’ll be honest, I’m not as impressed this time around: ‘bitches belong in the kitchen’ lines are tired even before $crim’s flexing on the second verse, and given how this song also doesn’t have a hook and runs under two minutes, why do I get the feeling that they could really do more with this? I do like the haunted warbling melody behind the grim trap knock… but I’m not sure that’s enough at this point, just okay.
61. ‘Brother Stone’ by Don Toliver ft. Kodak Black - Alright, last of the Don Toliver songs, and naturally the one that charts the highest has the Kodak Black feature, always great to see. And naturally, Kodak Black takes the majority of this song, from the hook to multiple verses, so you’re stuck with his painfully awkward flow where it seems like he’s always half struggling to string the punchline together, not helped by his opening lines referencing serving Activis out of a baby bottle, which he thought was so charming that on a later verse he doubles down on the baby talk! What’s so obnoxious about this is that after multiple verses and years where Kodak tried to showcase how he’s a ‘changed man’ through a long redemption arc, a song full of his smarmy, half-formed gloating doesn’t exactly do a lot to convince me anything stuck - he’s leaning into darker iconography because he can get away with it, and now he has even less to say around it. Not that Don Toliver covers himself in glory here, with gunplay and flexing and dissing the girls who want something out of them after they fuck - he calls them one-hit wonders - but the line that jumped out to me was on his first verse where he compares himself to a president with his opps ‘more like Hillary’ - I get that in election years there tend to be more political bars on average that show a lot of folks don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about, including comparing oneself to the treasonous convicted felon and sex pest that was the ex-president… but hey, when you have Kodak plainly unremorseful on the track and given his record, the birds stick together and wind up stinking, what do you know. What might be worst is that I do think the hook is catchy off the stumbling pianos, but the leaden trap groove and clipping bass really expose how undercooked this instrumental actually is outside of some distant sizzling guitar that of course has no actual bite - but it’s probably going to be enough for this to stick around. And it utterly sucks, next!
47. ‘Devil Is A Lie’ by Tommy Richman - The big challenge for Tommy Richman was always going to be the second hit - I generally liked ‘MILLION DOLLAR BABY’ but I haven’t really been inclined to revisit it much - I have Nourished By Time at home - so this was going to be the test. And… oh, this is what I was worried about, as basically we have Richman trying to thread the needle between his very 80s R&B voice and a more grimy, Pharrell-esque mid-2000s beat, hit two different nostalgia windows simultaneously; hell, even his falsetto reminds me a bit of Pharrell. But ‘MILLION DOLLAR BABY’ could get away with some of its pissier elements because the groove and hook had some swagger - here the percussion sounds cheap and grainy against the strings and weedy melodic flourishes, and his singing is a lot screechier, which doesn’t work for another song where he’s emphasizing he’s on the come-up and this girl should pipe down and know her place - she’s got no confidence, you see, and while she wants to chase his hype, can’t you just pay him properly instead? That combined with the stupid ass Travis Scott reference on the hook is giving me hypebeast vibes of a different era, and it’s not nearly as charming, especially when the song can barely run longer than two minutes. I dunno, this guy screams ‘flash in the pan’ to me - maybe if/when an album drops I might change my mind, but this is a lot weaker than it needs to be.
35. ‘Remember Him That Way’ by Luke Combs - okay, finally, we get to something legit great, one of the album highlights as Luke Combs reflects on his father who he saw as Superman, but as he’s getting older, he’s slowing down and Combs wants to remember him at his strongest - that memory can never fade. And when the song feels so organic with the prominent mandolin flutters opposite the supple bass and dobro, especially as Luke Combs lets his band jam out across acoustic instruments into the outro… there’s a warmth and comfort that’s unmistakable. And yeah, part of it is just me being a sucker for that mandolin, but I really like how Combs actually keeps the Superman motif going into the second verse, not just with ‘time being his kryptonite’, but the truth about Superman about how hard it can be to be a good person in this world all the time, and how much Combs admires that. Still not sure it’s my favourite on the album - ‘Huntin By Yourself’, ‘Ride Around Heaven’, ‘Take Me Out To The Ballgame’ are a high bar to clear - but this is still great, and I hope country radio gives it a proper shot!
30. ‘I Am Not Okay’ by Jelly Roll - …well, at least he was kind enough to make the title self-evident, and no, I’m still not over ‘Chevrolet’ and what he and Dustin Lynch did to a classic! But okay, this looks like it’s being positioned for Jelly Roll’s next album, lyrically hitting a lot of the same notes of his usual struggles with his demons and a vaguely optimistic hope for redemption… and yet, this one is falling really flat for me. Maybe it’s the thicker cushion of reverb which pushes the guitars deeper back in favour of strings - even the attempt at a solo! - or maybe how it all feels a little too clean… I’ll just say it, this reminds me of Christian contemporary music and that’s not a compliment, especially when Jelly Roll had a richer palette of soul to draw from. The one line I like is the flip from ‘I’m not okay’ to ‘It’s not okay’ - it’s populist, it’s a good subtle moment - but outside of that, Jelly Roll’s formula is feeling increasingly tired and going in a very predictable if depressing direction… I do hope he gets better, if only so he can make less of this.
21. ‘Whiskey Whiskey’ by Moneybagg Yo ft. Morgan Wallen - I knew it wouldn’t just be Lil Durk for long - at some point, other rappers would have the genre crossover savvy to look at Morgan Wallen’s numbers and see dollar signs; Post Malone was going to make the full country fusion album, but Moneybagg Yo grabbing the quick Wallen feature is just smart marketing. Shame that just like with Durk the song turns out pretty lousy, starting with a hook that’s flipping a nursery rhyme about whiskey, which I’m not sure even makes Wallen’s list of worst references to my favourite booze, especially given by his verse he’s bitterly comparing his ex to whiskey in the most tired and overused cliche across his entire catalog! What gets actively distracting, however, is the production - the tumbling brittleness of the guitars feels perpetually off sync with the trap percussion and Wallen’s singing, which actively feels louder than Moneybagg Yo is on his verse, of which I don’t think he grasped the sentiment of the song! Well, I say that, but the intro has him in that same commiserating vibe… but the verse is him doing shots of tequila and hooking up with a country girl with some of the laziest puns imaginable - are you even surprised he references Megan Thee Stallion? If he can’t even get the booze right that’s in the title of the song, should I be surprised at how much non-effort is on display here? The more listens I give this, the more I get the vibe of a favour being exchanged - Wallen gets another rapper cosign, Moneybagg Yo gets a crossover single - and the result is a song that’s crappy in the laziest way possible, and especially from Morgan Wallen, I’m tired of it.
So that was a week that felt way too damn long… worst is honestly a tossup, but I’m giving it to ‘Brother Stone’ by Don Toliver and Kodak Black with ‘Chevrolet’ by Dustin Lynch and Jelly Roll tying for the Dishonourable Mention with ‘Whiskey Whiskey’ by Moneybagg Yo and Morgan Wallen. Best of the week… it’s close, but I think Luke Combs just snags the top spot for ‘Remember Him That Way’ over ‘Pink Pony Club’ by Chappell Roan as the Honourable Mention - ridiculously close competition there! Next week… maybe we get a bit of a breather, I’m not seeing a major release on the horizon, although maybe Kehlani will surprise us, stay tuned…