billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - june 6, 2020

…so, this is late - and given I have a platform, I feel obligated to explain why it is late. And given that I have always described my mandate as speaking on ‘music, movies, art & culture’, that last word implies politics; really, they all do, as everything in society is political on some level, but I have never been one to keep it ‘just about the music, man’, because I don’t think you can. And increasingly, I’ve been proven right in that assessment, and as I have a platform, I will be using it to speak clearly and directly - and the gloves are off.

So last week a police officer murdered a black man in Minnesota - his delay in being charged, the relative lightness of those charges, and the lack of charges for his accomplices has set off widespread protests across the United States and world. The vast majority of these protests were entirely peaceful, until the sadistic, extra-judicial, unprovoked, and frequently illegal escalation by police and far-right militias operating to kick off widespread conflict all over the United States. Egged on by a proto-fascist coward in the White House and an administration at multiple levels built on unchecked capitalism, graft, pseudo-religious propaganda, intellectual and moral bankruptcy, and white supremacy, there have been popular uprisings across the country in response, asserting the truth that black lives matter and that the military-industrial complex of the police must be put in check and significantly defunded. There are concrete, well-disseminated goals in this uprising that are available to be heard should you be willing to listen, which is why yesterday after making my own donations to bail funds I took to social media silence in solidarity and used my platform instead to amplify voices of colour driving towards emotional solace and real, tangible change. Unfortunately, the music industry - which has spent decades valuing the art of black creators while systemically denying them a voice and a great deal of the profits - chose to also fall silent and delay the charts.

And while on the surface amplification is laudable, major record labels and businesses have not put their money where their mouths are, and given Billboard is an arm of the music industry, are they willing to own up to how they have been flagrantly complicit in systemic disenfranchisement? From their formalization of the genre hierarchy built as marketing to segregate white and black music splitting country and blues, from their blind eye to radio payola and the blackballing of artists across the early days of rock and roll, to the segregation of black music to its own charts unwilling to see the differences and complexities there in genre barriers they created - except when convenient miscategorizations have allowed the charts to be overrun by white acts, look up what happened to the R&B charts in the early 60s or even how such a chart was called ‘Race Records’ in the 40s. And I can go on - so I will: how some of the best R&B was barred from the pop charts which as a genre has been coded white - really to this day - and rarely afforded chart crossover, the failures to accommodate early rap to just bucket it with R&B, how into the late 2000s digital sales were not counted for those R&B and hip-hop charts even as they were the mainstream Hot 100, which later also became the case for Spotify and YouTube, which only got worse in the early 2010s, where all genre specific charts were instructed to pull from the same airplay set which meant crossover pop records were far more likely to top those charts and placed Billboard in the hopeless role of defining genre - which takes us to last year, because when Billboard must bow at the face of indignant and frequently racist Nashville radio, Lil Nas X gets thrown off the country charts, and while he ultimately had the last laugh, at this point does Billboard really think they have the moral authority to ‘spread awareness’ by being silent, when they refuse to acknowledge how complicit they are.

I understand if this is a lot to process, especially around what I’ve always deemed a glorified stat pad; it’s one reason I make fun of Billboard’s frequent ineptitude as much as I do, because there’s a whole lot of artists - predominantly black - who have decided they don’t have to care about Billboard as they work around or outside that system. But there are a lot of artists who do work within it and care, but may not know nor understand the long-running systemic failures of this arm of the music industry - or they do and they’re going to try and beat the odds anyway. And while I might be tempted to make a bad taste crack at the expense of Gunna’s album bomb this week in parallel when it comes to failures, the truth is a lot more serious, and I only gave you a sample. Black historians like Dart Adams have an encyclopedic knowledge of this, and I don’t think it’s noted how much that knowledge can be a load - one that we all should share when we are to make this better. And I’m not about to apologize for this being heavy or aggressive - we reflect the times in which we live, but we also control what is in our mirror.

And thus from there, the top ten - where I’ll admit I was completely wrong with what was surging to #1, even if in these times it feels completely weird this is it: ‘Rain On Me’ by Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande, riding enormous sales, a radio surge, and robust streaming and YouTube. It’s probably the most well-supported new #1 I’ve seen the past several weeks, and if this momentum continues - and I frankly have no idea if it will, you cannot predict times like these in the same way - it might have this spot on lock for a bit. Or it could fall back and ‘Savage’ by Megan Thee Stallion and Beyonce take back over from #2, where frankly it was a margins game, only lagging a bit on streaming and sales despite consistent and stronger radio growth. And that’s not to discount ‘ROCKSTAR’ by DaBaby and Roddy Ricch moving up to #3, where it’s become a streaming titan and has picked up real sales even if its radio is lagging. From there, ‘Blinding Lights’ by The Weeknd fell to #4 - it spent the entire week wavering on the radio, and while it’s consistently strong elsewhere it’s not about to get much bigger - and I can say something similar for ‘Say So’ by Doja Cat ft. Nicki Minaj at #5, where despite good streams it had a rough week both in sales and the radio. Then we had ‘Toosie Slide’ by Drake falling back to #6 - it’s just losing everywhere - and that takes us to a small rebound of ‘Don’t Start Now’ by Dua Lipa at #7, which is just propped up on radio at this point and is wavering. Then we had ‘The Box’ by Roddy Ricch skid to #8 - streaming might be stable but the radio is done with it, which I wish was the same from ‘Intentions’ by Justin Bieber and Quavo at #9, which is because the radio is propping this up despite being total ass. Finally, as the album bomb fades hard and fast, we have ‘Life Is Good’ by Future ft. Drake at #10 - basically just clinging to streaming at this point.

On that note, our losers and dropouts, in the latter case we saw the collapse of both Future and Polo G - although it’s very telling that Future fell off harder than Polo G on the Hot 100, with the majority exiting along with ‘Ballin’ by Mustard and Roddy Ricch and ‘Someone You Loved’ by Lewis Capaldi - FINALLY. But of our losers, from Polo G we had ‘21’ at 95, ‘Martin & Gina’ at 94, ‘Be Something’ ft. Lil Baby at 93, ‘Go Stupid’ with NLE Choppa and Stunna 4 Vegas at 91, and ‘Flex’ ft. the late Juice WRLD at 49, and for Future ‘Solitaires’ with Travis Scott at 83 and ‘Trillionaire’ with YoungBoy Never Broke Again at 85. And as for what’s left… ‘Daisies’ by Katy Perry and ‘X’ by Jonas Brothers and Karol G slid off the debut to 79 and 66, and ‘GOOBA’ by 6ix9ine took a collapse to 22, partially because its video got taken down for a few days and that’s really all it has.

Now given we have an album bomb situation, there wasn’t much that rebounded or returned - yeah, ‘SKYBOX’ by Gunna is back at 65, but it also rolled back with Lil Baby bringing back ‘All In’ at 99 and ‘Grace’ with 42 Dugg at 97 and thankfully ‘Don’t Rush’ by Young T & Bugsey ft. Headie One at 92. And when it comes to our gains… I can point to Lil Baby rebounding again with ‘We Paid’ with 42 Dugg at 60, but in reality it’s all over the place here. ‘Be A Light’ by Thomas Rhett and co. rebounded to 89, ‘I Love My Country’ by Florida Georgia Line at 64, and ‘Drinking Alone’ by Carrie Underwood at 87 in our country gains, ‘Go Crazy’ by Chris Brown and Young Thug returned to 52, ‘Supalonely’ by BENEE and Gus Dapperton picked up to 44, ‘In Your Eyes’ by The Weeknd picked up a remix featuring Doja Cat to rise to 32, ‘Watermelon Sugar’ by Harry Styles rising to 45 on its radio run, and ‘Party Girl’ by StaySolidRocky somehow continuing up to 27. But now we got the album bomb from Gunna… and the vast majority of it is below the top 40, thank god. So discounting the best and - let’s be honest - the worst to be discussed, we have ‘FEIGNING’ at 98 - although with that backing melody, it was close to the worst this week - ‘MOTW’ at 84 - which features the now classic line ‘I been droppin’ these hits like bird shit’ - ‘NASTY GIRL / ON CAMERA’ at 78, ‘MET GALA’ at 70, ‘ARGENTINA’ at 67 - amazing how Gunna can hit the tone-deaf point of bad guitar tuning and a mostly neutral Trump punchline - ‘BLINDFOLD’ with Lil Baby at 59, ‘WUNNA’ at 57, ‘TOP FLOOR’ with Travis Scott at 55, and ‘COOLER THAN A BITCH’ with Roddy Ricch, who has probably the best verse of what I heard on the album.

And now for our new arrivals, which actually start with…

100. ‘ily’ by surf mesa ft. Emilee - …we’re now at the point where basically any song that’s off the beaten path on the Hot 100, we just have to assume TikTok’s behind it, right? And to explain this… well, remember the Frankie Valli song ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ that I actually talked about on my main channel in my best hit songs of 1967? Well, taking the previously over-the-top hook that operated in contrast to the slow elegance of the rest of the song and giving it the ‘Summertime Sadness’ treatment with even more faded textures in the guitar and the sandy groove and we have this barely formed whiff of a song - in other words, perfect for TikTok. Now I’m not going to lie and say I dislike the groove or vibe of this, but it has the feel of those remixes from the 90s where they’d just take a fragment of an established standard and drop a generic beat beneath it, and once I heard that, I couldn’t stop hearing it. As it is… eh, I’ll stick with the original.

86. ‘GIMMICK’ by Gunna - so let me give Gunna the faintest bit of credit surrounding the songs he has that ‘work’ - they’re effectively musical wallpaper, they fill up the background with underweight melodies and grooves to compliment his complete lack of personality, but at least there’s a sense of momentum. ‘GIMMICK’, meanwhile, takes its washed out bells and marries it to an utter clunker of a beat that is leaden with weak snares and no serious power, and that’s before all those burbling squonks creak around it. But the problem remains Gunna, who not only has no vocal presence as a rapper, he proceeds to alternate between overdone brand name advertisements I mean references and some truly disgusting sex lines - ‘nut inside, look like glue in your pretty kitty’. I mean, once you hit that point, the disingenuous comparisons to Tupac and claims that he invented lingo at all when in reality everything he has was appropriated from Young Thug, Future and Migos, they’re almost irrelevant because of how nauseating that one line is! This is gross and bad, next!

76. ‘Daechwita’ by Agust D - okay, for those of you who don’t follow k-pop - who given their activism the past week I’m inclined to be nice to - let me describe this: Agust D is a member of BTS who also goes under the name Suga, and this is a single from his second solo album, where he actually sampled daechwita music to form the horns and backdrop of this song behind the trap beat…. which can get a little awkward when you remember that in the past this music was specifically reserved for Korean military usage. Now this leads to about as much culture clash as you’d expect, which I’d normally be fine with especially as Agust D is delivering a lot of intensity with his spitting… until you translate this, where it shifts more to flexing and some very militaristic lyrical reference points that don’t quite hit the same way nowadays? Granted, I’m willing to accept a bad translation here, but when you’re not exactly crazy about the melodic tones behind this as it is, the intensity just doesn’t quite resonate as strongly. I definitely get why this might have an audience, but given the hip-hop side of BTS has usually been their clumsiest, this isn’t really winning me over.

62. ‘Need It’ by Migos ft. YoungBoy Never Broke Again - …wasn’t Culture III supposed to be coming at some point? Okay, apparently this is not a single from that, but from a mixtape they’re planning to release ahead of time called Quarantine Tape. And yet as exasperated as I am about any music referencing that… I actually thing this is pretty decent. I’m serious: I’ve always liked when Migos get away from long, interchangeable verses and they stay on faster flows, and if they’re going to interweave their bars the way they do here opposite the melody sampled from 50 Cent, a pretty legit bassline, and better sounding percussion than usual, where YoungBoy Never Broke Again actually fits, I’m on-board, especially when it’s pure gunplay mode targeting everyone who has bit their style… which is a lot of people. But again, it shows Migos focused and on good production, and they do well more often than they don’t in this lane - this is good, check it out.

38. ‘DOLLAZ ON MY HEAD’ by Gunna ft. Young Thug - remember when Young Thug could at least fake like he cared? I mean his verse is empty brand names and sex references where this girl is ‘drinking his spit’, but there’s no flair to his delivery at all; if he was being a good sport so that Gunna could get the attention, he should have tried to show up everyone regardless! But let’s be real, the reason I can’t stand this song isn’t Thugger underperforming or Gunna throwing out more forgettable lines over a leaden beat and dreary melody - it’s that someone decided that layered behind his vocals across half the hook and most of his ad-libs, he chose to chipmunk his vocals. Was this his attempt to be interesting, because somehow he became even less likable - and while I have a far lower tolerance for that pitch shift than most, it’s not like this was good before it. Next!

1. ‘Rain On Me’ by Lady Gaga ft. Ariana Grande - oh thank god, at least there’s one great song here! And yes, you heard me right: outside of ‘Shallow’, this is probably one of Lady Gaga’s best singles in years, albeit one of her more conventional ones. The splashy keys playing off the warping bass and guitars with hints of saxophone, the great touches around the prechorus, how Gaga and Ariana have legit vocal chemistry and are both great singers, how the song can strike the balance between smoothness to compliment Ariana while still picking up some sinuous swell and bombast for Gaga, even if I do think the vocals and post-chorus sound a little overproduced. And the content is solid too - of course they’d prefer not to be sad or heartbroken after getting taken advantage of in a cruel world, but they’re here, and they’re going to let that emotion flow; granted, if you’re going for that this song could have afforded to be a little more frenetic or chaotic to match that, but I do get why it’s not

And even if it didn’t have much competition, it’s easily the best of this week, with ‘Need It’ by Migos and YoungBoy Never Broke Again as an easy Honourable Mention. Worst of the week… ‘GIMMICK’ by Gunna, with ‘DOLLAZ ON MY HEAD’ with Young Thug as the Dishonourable Mention, but really it’s close there, and there’s a few other Gunna songs like ‘FEIGNING’ that were close here too. Next week… it’d be where I’d say Gaga album bomb, but she’s not dominant on streaming like Ariana or Billie, and it doesn’t look like anyone is checking for Lil Yachty, so maybe things will calm down here… if nowhere else, at least for now.