billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - november 19, 2022

I wish the new Billboard year for 2023 wasn’t starting like this.

And I can say that for a number of reasons that go beyond how this is not the best way to start a new season of this show - oh great, another Drake album bomb with the vast majority in songs in the top 20, and a lot of it is completely lousy, haven’t been down this road before! Now you can argue that the majority of it is because the Hot 100 is weak right now and Drake faced little competition, but quite frankly, if Billboard had tacked on another tracking week for 2022, we could have left this in that year and had a slightly more representative of 2022 - it would never fully match a proper calendar tracking week but it could have been closer!

But we do have another story in our top ten, and that is what’s holding the #1: ‘Anti-Hero’ by Taylor Swift, backed up by a big radio surge, just enough streaming, and a massive sales influx driven off a bunch of remixes. And yes, I get that the remix games is part of all this and has been for years, and I’d argue ‘Anti-Hero’ is a better song than all of its competition, and I might even understand the root cause given Drake’s connections with Scooter Braun and Taylor Swift being petty. My point is that at this point of her career, Swift doesn’t need to play the Hot 100 game - even if you’re owning all the negative aspects about yourself and your persona, this can just wind up… well, exhausting. Not quite as exhausting as the eight Drake and 21 Savage songs that charted all courtesy of streaming, so in order: ‘Rich Flex’ at #2, ‘Major Distribution’ at #3, ‘On BS’ at #4, ‘Spin Bout You’ at #5, ‘Pussy & Millions’ with Travis Scott at #6, ‘Privileged Rappers’ at #7, ‘Circo Loco’ at #8, and ‘BackOutsideBoyz’ with just Drake at #9. Finally, clinging onto the bottom we have ‘Unholy’ by Sam Smith and Kim Petras at #10 - it really just held on courtesy of big radio gains, and it’ll last when all of these Drake songs fall back anyways.

Speaking of which, losers and dropouts, and as expected it was a big week, as in nearly half of the Hot 100 again. And given that this is a new Billboard year, I want to do a proper level set, so our dropouts first… of which there’s not that many, album bombs in succession tend to purge them pretty quick, so all we had was ‘Late Night Talking’ by Harry Styles, ‘Me Porto Bonito’ by Bad Bunny and Chencho Corleone, ‘Betty (Get Money)’ by Yung Gravy, and ‘Gatubela’ by Karol G and Maldy. And now for our losers… let’s just deal with all the Taylor Swift ones first: ‘High Infidelity’ at 98, ‘Paris’ at 90, ‘The Great War’ at 87, ‘Bigger Than The Whole Sky’ at 85, ‘Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve’ at 76, ‘Sweet Nothing’ at 71, ‘Labrinth’ at 67, ‘Mastermind’ at 65, ‘Question..?’ at 56, ‘Vigilante Shit’ at 51, ‘You’re On Your Own, Kid’ at 42, ‘Snow On The Beach’ with Lana Del Rey at 40, ‘Karma’ at 39, ‘Maroon’ at 36, ‘Bejeweled’ at 33, ‘Midnight Rain’ at 30, and ‘Lavender Haze’ at 23. Then whatever’s left of the Lil Baby album bomb: ‘Forever’ with Fridayy at 84, ‘Heyy’ at 77, and ‘California Breeze’ at 73. And now, the rest: ‘Staying Alive’ by DJ Khaled ft. Drake and Lil Baby at 100, ‘2 Be Loved (Am I Ready)’ by Lizzo at 97 - might as well through in ‘About Damn Time’ down to 48 as well - ‘All Mine’ by Brent Faiyaz at 86, ‘No Se Va’ by Grupo Frontera at 81, ‘Music for A Sushi Restaurant’ by Harry Styles losing its gains at 80, ‘Free Mind’ by Tems at 79, and ‘Wishful Drinking’ by Ingrid Andress and Sam Hunt at 78. Then we have ‘Son Of A Sinner’ by Jelly Roll at 69, ‘Victoria’s Secret’ by Jax at 66, ‘Golden Hour’ by JVKE at 57, ‘Hold Me Closer’ by Elton John and Britney Spears at 55, ‘5 Foot 9’ by Tyler Hubbard looking to be making a more natural exit at 54, and ‘Unstoppable’ by Sia at 50. Then there’s ‘Tomorrow 2’ by Glorilla and Cardi B at 49, ‘She Had Me At Heads Carolina’ by Cole Swindell at 47, ‘Shirt’ by SZA losing off the debut to 46, ‘Titi Me Pregunto’ by Bad Bunny at 43, ‘Wait For U’ by Future, Tems and Drake at 41, ‘Wasted On You’ by Morgan Wallen at 37, and ‘Sunroof’ by Nicky Youre and dazy at 35. And finally, to round this up: ‘Vegas’ by Doja Cat at 29, ‘I Ain’t Worried’ by OneRepublic at 28, ‘You Proof’ by Morgan Wallen at 25, ‘I Like You (A Happier Song)’ by Post Malone and Doja Cat at 24, ‘Lift Me Up’ by Rihanna falling off the debut to 22, ‘Super Freaky Girl’ by Nicki Minaj at 21, and ‘As It Was’ by Harry Styles at 17.

Now we’d get to our returns and gains… except there are no returns and the only gain is for ‘Hotel Lobby (Unc and Phew)’ by Quavo and the late Takeoff to 62. Now this would also be where I’d talk about the album bomb… but it’s all in the top twenty except for one song that I’m probably going to want to talk about anyway, so we’re pretty much out of luck there too. So might as well get started with our lengthy list of new arrivals with…

83. ‘My Mind & Me’ by Selena Gomez - it’s not a good sign when the buzz I hear about this song is that it was crap even below the tier of Drake’s project… but I also tend to think a lot of the critique thrown at Selena Gomez is inconsistent and I liked that collab she had with Rema, so for a one-off single tied to her documentary, it couldn’t be that bad, right? Well, I get why it’s not great - a very spare, minimalist piano arrangement with a vocal pickup that’s way too close doesn’t flatter Selena Gomez, especially as she doesn’t really have the expressiveness to sell it well; her delivery on the song is shaky, to be sure. But that kind of works in context - under tabloid overexposure Gomez knows that her life can be a bit of a trainwreck and her mental health isn’t great and she feels a bit of guilt even asking for help or attention, but she’s conscious of the fact that simply having her struggle visible can be inspirational for her fans; not always flattering, but it’s more truthful. Now Selena Gomez is not the first person to present an arc like this - a lot of pop acts seem to have been leaning into it - but the song doesn’t feel oversold, and the smaller stakes and solid pop songwriting from Jon Bellion keeps this with just enough quality. So yeah, this is fine, I’m okay with this.

53. ‘Die For You’ by Joji - I’m going to say this outright, Joji should be trying to get away from 88rising; I might not think SMITHEREENS is good, but you can tell that it was rushed to capitalize on ‘Glimpse Of Us’ and between poor artistic development and promotion especially on streaming, he should be much bigger than he is! And I can say all that even if I don’t think this is good at all, a watery post-breakup song where once again there’s no sense of grandeur or bombast and while the gentle drums do help build to a nice, well-balanced hook with a nice vocal arrangement, after said hook it dissolves into bassy synth layers that feel like they should have more actually going on beyond a vaguely ethereal vibe. But it’s the lyrics that irk me the most: you kind of lose all credibility for being able to move on when you say you’re still dreaming about them and that you’d die for them - the latter sentiment needs to have some actual weight behind the delivery, otherwise it just comes across as mopey and clingy in the least likable way. It’s not going to be the worst thing we hear about women in the episode ahead - you’re all forewarned here - but god, this is mediocre; unlike ‘Glimpse Of Us’, let’s not make this become a hit.

27. ‘3AM On Glenwood’ by 21 Savage - the rest of the songs in this episode are from Her Loss - given that I’ve already covered this album on my main channel, I’m going to try and keep these observations relatively brief, especially given that I think the album is pretty bad… and thus it’s kind of ironic that what I consider the best song on the project is its lowest charting entry, the one solo 21 Savage song on the album. And it’s actually decent - 21 muses about his friends in jail or killed while he still has to keep moving in the streets and chasing money, with very real PTSD reflected against the spare blocky beat and faint sample behind him. The song doesn’t do much with the processed guitar on the outro, but the real problem I had with the line ‘watch these hoes when you’re rich, they play games with the semen’ - not just for the obvious ugliness in the bars, they don’t fit with anything else in the song, and drag everything back as a result. It’s still passable, at least to me, but it could have been better.

19. ‘I Guess It’s Fuck Me’ by Drake - and now we have a solo venture from Drake where he submerges himself in autotune again a mournful horn and watery piano. This is supposed to be the moment when Drake reveals the roots of his antipathy towards women on the album, where it’s his line of work and he’d prefer to keep living a lie to keep her at a distance even if it’s guaranteed to ruin his relationships, where he knows none of this is healthy. And… nah, I’m not buying it, it feels like a self-serving justification that implies more complexity than we actually get, Drake chooses this life and his stature, maybe he needs to do the work instead of very obviously fishing for sympathy he hasn’t earned. So no, don’t care for this.

18. ‘More M’s’ by Drake & 21 Savage - hey look, it’s a beat from Metro Boomin, so the eerie synths and sharper trap progressions feel better balanced even if it’s a glorified leftover from SAVAGE MODE II - you’d think the multi-millionaires here would have shelled out for more of these! But overall it feels a bit more like 21’s song with his hook and a menacing verse where in succession he calls the girl who didn’t fuck rappers a dinosaur, that she better not throw up on his seat, that she better not argue with him, and that she better cook like she’s Asian because he likes fried rice - wow. Somehow Drake comes off looking a bit better with a strangely flat verse - although that sub he threw in Kendrick’s direction was certainly a choice, but given the entire song is about goading jealous MCs, I’m not surprised. On most albums this would be filler, here’s it’s one of the better tracks - go figure.

16. ‘Jumbotron Shit Poppin’ by Drake - we have two more Drake solo joints, with this feeling like a glorified interlude with a really messy pitch-shifted sample and blocky percussion that swamps the mix; you can tell that Lil Yachty cowrote this with maybe Young Thug in mind and it’s a mess. And the content is nothing to write home about either - flexing, doing drugs, wanting a girl to lick him like a mail stamp, and the end of his verse stuffed with ad-libs because this is an obvious throwaway. This should have been left in the drafts or cut outright, the hook isn’t good enough to justify it - next!

15. ‘Middle Of The Ocean’ by Drake - So Drake normally does this at least once an album: he just raps for nearly six minutes on what he now has decided is cool or uncool with a string of flexes that at this point I find profoundly uninteresting. Yes, there’s some okay wordplay - I liked the string of football punchlines - and the production is plenty opulent with its overused pitched-up soul sample and gentle drums, although some of the beats feel buzzier and heavier than they should - but does that really excuse the concern-trolling on Serena Williams’ husband that he’s a groupie, where Drake says he’s getting spicy, or that line ‘feel like an amber alert the way I can take her to the mall and she find Tiffany’ - given your history, Drake, it might be a touch flagrant to compare you taking a woman to the mall to a police signal for child trafficking! Granted, that line overshadowed how he calls himself a cup-holder the way these dimes stick to him - that’s early Big Sean levels of cringey wordplay - so at the end… I can’t appreciate Drake shoving his wealth in my face because it’s clear it comes with neither the taste nor class to back it up. Some of us aspire to better. And the Birdman outro was fucking pointless.

14. ‘Treacherous Twins’ by Drake & 21 Savage - this was being called one of the better songs on the project with its spare chalky beat and very muted sample, despite the fact that it’s about Drake and 21 doing the bare minimum to express camaraderie. And some of these lines just aren’t good - ‘I don’t show ID at the clubs, they know I’m 21’, that bar was getting so much attention and it feels like the most obvious flex possible! There’s just very little here worth caring about, next!

12. ‘Broke Boys’ by Drake & 21 Savage - god, I hate how this song is mastered - the distorted bass sounds like shit clipping the mix against the sandy warping trap percussion and ugly drone of the mix, this instrumental just kills any fondness I have for the song right out of the gate. Kind of a shame because Drake’s hook isn’t bad here and this is one of the few cuts where he has any interplay with 21 on that second verse, with the disses at Adidas alongside how he compares himself to Justin Bieber unironically. Granted, it’s alongside 21 comparing his guns to Wiimotes and has the line ‘she call me mucus / I stay in her throat’ - disgusting - and then the beat completely switches to a different, better mixed piano trap instrumental where Drake to badly croon about how he doesn’t talk to broke boys and everyone who doesn’t spend their money wisely; given how much you spend on gambling, there’s some glass houses you might want to examine. So no, this doesn’t work either.

11. ‘Hours Of Silence’ by Drake & 21 Savage - the discourse around this song in particular is a bit fascinating - I’d argue it’s one of the better songs here with the very muted melodic swell off the sandy percussion and some of the best mastering on the entire album as Drake croons through a cheating encounter with some girl he’s paying to support, with a surprisingly well placed ‘I Took A Pill In Ibiza’ line to sell the hazy melancholy, especially given the mess of secrets they’re trying to keep and that he’s enabling. In other words, it sounds like a vintage Drake song - it samples ‘Come Thru’ from Nothing Was The Same, so it’s obvious he’s recycling - and it’s still got a lot of the clingy, manipulative paranoia that characterizes his refrain ‘you’re were lost without me’ - he’s done this before, and pushing 40 it’s harder to excuse. I think the larger issue is how repetitive and slogging the song feels - it didn’t need a fourth verse or to run to the six minute mark. Still, it’s the last even semi-decent song we’ll see on this album, I’ll take what I can get.

9. ‘BackOutsideBoyz’ by Drake - If Drake is going to accept these songs obviously cowritten by Lil Yachty, he should do a better job hiding it - the weirdly buzzy blocks of synth, Yachty’s adlibs, the bricked mix, the shambling fragments of melody, it’s just distractingly obvious, especially when the content isn’t good. For one on the hook he tries to brush past how he stole ‘Cha-Cha’ from D.R.A.M. for ‘Hotline Bling’ - who actually addressed it the release day in remarking how Drake’s people assaulted him - and then on the verses has fetishization of bi women, the line ‘I’m an owl, I’ll never tell you who’, saying how he’s never voted but if he would it’d be for porn star Teanna Trump - we’ll come back to this - and the most infamous line, ‘She’s a ten tryna rap, it’s good on mute’. It’s an Ice Spice reference - her viral song is better than the majority of this album, as are pretty much every woman who raps whose album I’ve covered this year. But while we’re on the topic of casual misogyny.

8. ‘Circo Loco’ by Drake & 21 Savage - let’s get the easy piece out of the way: the line ‘This bitch lie about getting shots, she a stallion’ is the most flagrant and inexplicable moment on this project - you’re throwing your support behind Tory Lanez, the wannabe loser who has spent most of his career ripping off you, Drake, instead of Megan Thee Stallion, who is backed by Jay-Z? More to the point, he follows up the diss a few lines later with ‘shorty say she graduated, she ain’t learn enough / play your album, track one, kay I heard enough’ - it’s not just wack bars, it’s bad business, and it reveals a lot of insecurity that you feel you have to do this. It also doesn’t help that the song is garbage - I stopped caring about everyone’s brand name flexes and you namedropping J Prince as if in the aftermath of Takeoff’s death you think you’re in bad taste enough, or any of the flexes and violence 21 adds, or the absolutely atrocious flip of ‘One More Time’ by Daft Punk that’s mixed into downtuned slush. This is bitch-ass loser shit made by a wildly overrated rapper and is up there with ‘I’m Upset’ and ‘Way 2 Sexy’ as among the worst songs in his catalog - gross.

7. ‘Privileged Rappers’ by Drake & 21 Savage - See Drake, when you reference that you didn’t vote, I went to this song where you’re dissing the ‘privileged rapper who doesn’t know what it takes’ or who doesn’t have a proper hit and who are acting like they’re taking their time, as if Drake isn’t someone who’s had the luxury of coming up under Lil Wayne’s crew from a TV show backed by J Prince as an industry darling - you have the gall to call anyone privileged when you couldn’t even bother to vote in Canadian politics at any level is deeply ironic and thoroughly contemptible. Kind of a shame because his flows here are okay and I think 21’s verse is decent playing off the minimalist synth loop… and then he goes how the girl must be stupid because she didn’t get his string of emojis or she dared come over at her time of the month, but he gave her his dick for brunch and then wipes his dick with her bra. So yeah, this blows too, next!

6. ‘Pussy & Millions’ by Drake & 21 Savage ft. Travis Scott - Drake would be the one to give Travis Scott more career longevity with this, admittedly riding a pretty decent sample flip off the sandy percussion and a hook I don’t mind - yeah, more money more problems, but Drake says bring it on… and then immediately reverses on it to dump the girl where they’re getting too close as he wants a sex symbol to suck him off. And then Travis shows up and the mix picks up some actual bombast - the bass is badly mixed and the content is empty flexing but it’s the first time the song picks up real momentum and highlights the one thing Travis has over Drake, in that he has a sex symbol to give him blowjobs. At this point, the empty debauchery just washes over you and becomes boring - that’s a problem.

5. ‘Spin Bout You’ by Drake & 21 Savage - It’s hard for me to dislike the B.G.O.T.I. sample, but damn they’re going to try by dropping on top some of the most canned-sounding snares and hi-hats as the bass smothers the mix. But fine, 21’s verse is decent playing into the empty hedonism, and even as Drake’s hook kills the momentum, I was prepping to try and defend this… but then Drake opens his verse taking a shot at the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade, who he calls a bunch of guys who never got laid in high school who now want to dictate how women can live their lives. Which would be an interesting angle… until Drake makes it clear that it’s him who wants to control this woman so she can keep fucking him and has all the power to take her around the world and isolate her from her friends who he also might have fucked who might be skeptical of Drake for obvious reasons. This isn’t some feminist statement, this is Drake playing power games pure and simple, and while it’s not one of the worst here, I don’t have much time for it.

4. ‘On BS’ by Drake & 21 Savage - funnily enough, this is not one of the songs that obviously lives up to its title, mostly because Drake and 21 Savage have a bit more back-and-forth on their verses even if the snares and hi-hats sound distractingly tinny against the oily keys and bass rumble. Of course that back-and-forth is a response to Pusha T saying he’s been banned from touring in Canada thanks to Drake’s people attacking him at Toronto in 2018 - Drake calls him a coward, I’m inclined to believe Push because there are no tour stops anywhere in Canada not just not Toronto - followed by Drake saying he’s ‘in and out her best friends’, and how he calls himself a feminist by blowing money on hoes - classy. It’s worth highlighting that some think there’s a line where he references XXXTENTACION’s death and the accusations X made at Drake for stealing flows - I personally think that’s a stretch to get to anything conspiratorial, but it’s also a punchline on that second verse that isn’t as hard as Drake thinks it is. Just like this song, next!

3. ‘Major Distribution’ by Drake & 21 Savage - Drake, would it kill you to stop fucking the friends of girls you’re around, you’d think you’d learn after the umpteenth time! Granted, this is a song with a hook of him muttering ‘go stupid’ around the cheapest sounding piano and generic trap beat possible with some lazy strip club references and gently mocking this girl for not being able to spell ‘persuasive’. And the fun doesn’t stop, as 21 then says he gets IG models to run errands for him and then ends his verse with some forced One Direction references that I have to assume are here for gaming search engines, they’re not good enough to excuse otherwise. Anyway, this sounds like a badly performed demo that has no business being on an album, skip it.

2. ‘Rich Flex’ by Drake & 21 Savage - and this is the last one, the one that is actually getting a radio push - and what do you know, it sucks too! I know some people are trying to make the ‘21 can you do something for me’ as a faintly ironic TikTok meme, but there’s no menace to setting it up after Young Nudy’s intro and the distorted sample - instead you get this watery, faux-gothic warble as the leaden percussion slides in that doesn’t sell me on atmosphere at all. Of course what 21 actually delivers is an interpolation of Megan Thee Stallion’s ‘Savage’ along with the second reference to not having sex with a girl on her period, instead wanting blowjobs, and then a clunky beat switch into Drake with some truly abysmal offkey rapping to open his verse. And said verse is mostly fine - a few of the acronyms are clever, the gang and number references are decent - but the line that killed the verse for me was ‘I’m steady pushin p, you pushing PTSD’. So not only are you sticking to a bad meme from Gunna that was dead at least six months ago, and flipping on the best song from your partner on this album, you’re once again exposing how much of a hypocritical privileged rapper you are in the scene today. I’ve spoken at length in this series how the violence and psychological trauma those kids have to live in their rhymes, even if I don’t like the music I can empathize for the escape they seek; this is scornfully deriding that while all over this album perpetuating the same brand of violence; fuck off with that shit.

And yeah, Drake and 21 are absolutely getting the worst of this week: I’m thinking ‘Circo Loco’ for the worst spot, with Dishonourable Mention as a tie between ‘Rich Flex’ and ‘BackOutsideBoyz’ with just Drake. Best of the week… I’m giving it to 21 Savage for ‘3AM In Glenwood’ - it’s got problems, but it’s at least decent, with Honourable Mention to ‘My Mind & Me’ by Selena Gomez, which is nowhere near as bad as some have made it out to be, especially this week. It can only get better going forward, right?