Hmm, so this turned out all right... filmed it the same day as the Ought review dropping tonight, so stay tuned for that, but overall it was a pretty decent week. Okay, so next up, Ought and Courtney Patton, then probably something from my backlog, then Resonators - stay tuned!
This is one of the weeks where everything seemed muted - I made predictions about what was coming, and while most of those predictions came to pass, the impact was less than expected. Sure, I was planning for the Black Panther soundtrack to make an impact, but it wasn't much of an album bomb, and there were larger debuts that disrupted the top 10 and Hot 100 more. Not precisely bad, sure, but in a year where I have felt oddly disconnected with a lot of the songs that have shown up, it leaves me with a very weird feeling.
Alright, this went up late... and really, this one was painful to put out, so much fucking Migos... But now onto something a little more local - stay tuned!
...well, we all knew this was coming. There were two pretty disruptive events on the Hot 100 this week and we all had a rough idea of the ramifications: the Grammys would trigger some shifts, and more importantly, Migos would unleash the album bomb of Culture II. Friendly warning, since I already covered that release my recaps of individual songs are going to be pretty short, and given we have seventeen new arrivals and there really isn't much to say about individual tracks from that record, I'm sure you'll understand.
So okay, up a little early this week... a little shorter too, but really, there was not much to say about this, I've said my piece on Drake too many times. So okay, next up... hmm, probably close to having enough for Resonators, so stay tuned!
...okay, you know what? I'll say this for Drake: despite him being the biggest story of the week by a mile, there's a certain cold comfort in knowing it came from only two new songs and not twenty. And when Migos are coming next week with the sort of streaming numbers that indicate an album bomb, I'll take whatever the hell I can get!
It's here, it's already controversial, and apparently the damn video malfunctioned because after rendering the damn thing three times I can't catch a break. Ah well, best hits of 2017 is coming in a day or two, stay tuned!
There have been years where writing this list is easy. Sometimes it's like 2015 or 2012, where the bad songs can't diminish otherwise diminish a strong or interesting year - or on the flip side we get years like 2016, where the avalanche of awful is so pronounced I almost have too much material, and while that list might be painful to revisit, sheer rage makes it all surge out. 2017 has not been that year, and it's a little tough to explain why. You could make a comparison to 2014 in how so much of this year defaulted towards average instead of a more pronounced brand of awful - I'm certainly not as angry towards this list as I've been in previous years - but the truly excellent hits were much stronger in 2017. What I think has befuddled some critics is how pop was effectively overtaken by the hip-hop and R&B aesthetic on the Hot 100 - it might have become more pronounced in 2013 but in 2017 the takeover was complete, and if you weren't paying more attention to streaming instead of radio, you were going to be left behind. And thus in 2017 the truly bad songs are a bit of a mix of the pop songs tumbling towards the monogenre and the lazy, bargain-barrel dumpster fire that is the dregs of trap. And again, to establish the rules the songs had to debut on the year-end Hot 100 list for 2017, and purely boring doesn't just cut it for me. Given how much of this I've covered on Billboard BREAKDOWN, I've long been numbed to the endless swirl of interchangeable trap bangers and their brand of disposable mediocrity. If you want to land on this list, you need to really irritate me or piss me off, so let's get going with some Dishonourable Mentions!
This was one of those weeks where I expected a lot more activity than what actually happened. It's actually a little uncanny, given how busy I am right now I was almost expecting there to be more here thanks to big album releases - and sure, that did make an impact to the charts, but it felt oddly muted, not quite causing the upheaval that could really change the direction of the summer.
So yeah, another pretty rough week here... but on the plus side, I've got an interesting record on the docket next (in fact, a fair few of them) so stay tuned!
Do you ever have the feeling looking at the Hot 100 that no matter what happens, it's not going to be a good week? Yeah, that was my gut feel going through the Hot 100 this week - which yes, did slow down a bit as things settle in for the summer with no major releases, but at the same time, looking at some of these new arrivals... well, we'll get to it.
So this was torturous to film. And edit. My god, being sick doing it too was horrible. Not sure I'm proud of this one, but I'm just happy I won't have to worry about Drake for a few months more at least... or at least I hope so. Next up, though... okay, nothing tonight, but I'm working on the AllttA and Creeper episodes, so stay tuned!
You know, it didn't use to be like this. Oh sure, make no mistake, there were times where artists could have multiple singles on the Hot 100 at once, and I remember distinctly how much some chart watchers hated how Glee would get a few charting entries every single week to eventually accrue the most Hot 100 entries of all time. But do you want to know the big distinction between Glee and Drake, who thanks to streaming got all twenty-four of his album/playlist/background noise to debut on the Hot 100 this week? Glee may have had cheap, watered down production and attempted to appropriate styles they didn't understand, but there was at least color and passion and diversity in the sounds and styles they were trying to cover! Whereas with Drake it seems like we get all of that, plus refocused into a hazy hall of mirrors that all circle back on this Canadian, minus the existential horror that could potentially make any of this interesting!
So this happened... I'm not exactly complaining I covered this, but it is the sort of project where it really should be so much more interesting than it is, especially given all the styles and sounds it's touching. Eh, whatever. Anyway, first I've got Billboard BREAKDOWN dropping in a few minutes, and then Zara Larsson, so stay tuned!
So I was hoping this week was going to be where things started to get back to normal. Of course it wasn't all going to get there - Nicki Minaj is working on rolling out her newest record while beefing with Remy Ma, and as such we got the results of that showing up, but otherwise it looks like we have a breather - at least until Drake swamps the chart next week, but we'll get to that.
I've not been looking forward to this project, if you can't tell. And I've had a bad feeling about this for months now. Forget the lead-off singles, all of which have been mediocre at best and awful at worst. Forget the fact that Drake's been seeing increasingly limited critical returns on his projects, even despite somehow being more popular than ever - somehow, he seems to be getting worse. Forget that just like Views, this project is eighty-one minutes - that's right folks, over an hour of Drake, and given that I was extremely skeptical that he'd be telling any stories or crafting any sort of narrative, that was a problem. No, what gave me the real sinking feeling was the branding of this: not as an album, not as a mixtape, but as a playlist. And of course music "journalists" got their knees to take the hot load and gush about how Drake was 'revolutionizing music distribution'... that of course he was still selling for 10.99 on iTunes. Now I'm not going to deny there is a certain craft in putting together a good playlist in reading the flow of the audience and the room and controlling transitions and so forth. But if this album is all new songs, with the only real distinctive factor being Drake rolling it out on streaming platforms before physical copies are available, it screams of being a really cheap way to avoid calling it, you know, an album - if anything, it makes him look like he's running from critics who have been steadily charting his decline. Just because Drake tried to change the nomenclature and prioritized one form of distribution doesn't mean this is anything new - if anything, it perpetuates the utterly asinine trend that 'playlist makers' will be the new drivers of taste, when in reality it's the same format that mainstream radio DJs used to do before they were forced by delusional executives to play the same list of tracks every time. But for some ungodly reason you people wanted this. You wanted to hear me talk about Drake, even though this'll likely wind up overloading another episode of Billboard BREAKDOWN and I'll be forced to talk about this all over again. So what did Drake deliver on his newest album?
This was the sort of week I didn't expect - on the one hand it's the aftermath of J. Cole's big debut so inevitably there was going to be a pretty major course correction... but that wasn't the only thing that happened, because Christmas music came back in force to compete with a pileup of hip-hop that I don't think anyone was asking for. And yet that's not the biggest story of this week... because we have a new #1.
