billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - june 8, 2019 (VIDEO)

Well damn, this was a messy week (and by some miracle I dodged the copyright bots...) - anyway, next up it looks like I'm going to Ian Noe next, so stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - june 8, 2019

I think the chaos of 2018 warped how I normally see the Hot 100. Granted, part of this feels driven by the fact that at this point last year we had been hit by multiple album bombs where 2019 feels more quiet in general, but it also feels like projects that would normally hit with greater impact just aren't penetrating as deeply as you'd expect, leading to a more chart. So maybe consistency is our new normal...

video review: 'confessions of a dangerous mind' by logic

Yeah, this was bad... but really, was that a surprise to anyone?

Anyway, I've got this Emotional Oranges review I'd like to finish up before tomorrow and I leave for Sonic Temple, so stay tuned!

album review: 'confessions of a dangerous mind' by logic

I can pinpoint the exact time when I stopped actively looking forward to new Logic projects.

And believe it or not, it was actually earlier than Everybody, his famously polarizing 2017 release that took its concept and angst into messy territory across the board. No, for me it was the first Bobby Tarantino tape in 2016, a trap-leaning project that seemed unlike the high-concept textured hip-hop that had been his bread-and-butter... but it snagged chart success. And indeed, outside of the suicide hotline pop crossover riding the misspent star of Alessia Cara and the genuine rising tide of Khalid, the songs from Logic that have attained success have arguably been him at his least interesting or potent, mostly on trap production where he'll flow his ass off and say so little along the way. And while discussions of what caused that switch in sound and approach have been interesting, spanning from allegations of being an industry plant to just the wrong industry influences pushing him away from his organic following to even just Logic having bad creative instincts... at the end of the day the music has stopped being good or interesting enough for me to care all that much.

So yeah, I skipped over his reportedly terrible alt-rock soundtrack dalliance with Supermarket earlier this year and I was seriously considering skipping over this too - it's not like he wouldn't have chart success with it, and I did know coming after the conclusion of his Young Sinatra series that he'd probably skip away from that old fanbase forever, so there wasn't that much incentive to cover this... but I figured why not. Even on most of his worst projects he's delivered at least a few songs that are decent, so what did we get from Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind?

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - may 18, 2019 (VIDEO)

Okay, here we go - pretty bad week, but at least the Bazzi song was good, right? Right?

Anyway, I've got Logic or Emotional Oranges to be covered next, we'll see - stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - may 18, 2019

...so yeah, there are weeks where I'm wrong, and then there's this week, where I might have been expecting a slowdown - which in some categories we did get - only for a few big singles to disrupt the top 10 from out of nowhere and force me to re-evaluate where the chart could be going in the next few weeks. Now granted, one of those singles is coming from an album that's also out of nowhere - and boy oh boy, I can't tell you how much I don't want to cover it - but still, this is one of those cases where I feel I should have seen this coming, and I'm kicking myself that I didn't.

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - april 6, 2019 (VIDEO)

Okay, I'll be honest, I was worried about the shift to a new channel - but damn near a thousand subs in a day is exactly the sort of moment I needed for this, so thank you all so VERY much for this! This copyright nonsense has been a tremendous pain in the ass, but this was exactly the shot of adrenaline I needed!

Next up... let's kill all that adrenaline with a new Jake Owen album - stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - april 6, 2019

...you know, it's probably a good thing that I'm starting new episodes of this series on a new channel this week. Relatively slow and gradual, nothing too crazy or out of the ordinary, the Billie Eilish album bomb just around the corner - and with those consistent streaming numbers, it's absolutely getting there - about the best possible time for a pivot to leave the copyright takedowns behind and start afresh with a channel that's not deprioritized into the dirt. So yeah, welcome onboard, folks - this week we have Nav, Logic, and Bebe Rexha! 

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - february 2, 2019 (VIDEO)

And here we are - man, this took forever to put together, but I'm pretty happy this all came together with a minimal number of copyright hits.

Next up... you know, it might be Resonators or Boogie, I'm not sure yet - stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - february 2, 2019

So I'm not going to say I'm surprised by everything that happened this week - sure, I expected the Future album bomb, but I also expected that it would be more muted than ones in the past, and I seemed mostly correct about that. But beyond that, this is the sort of week that I expected would eventually come in 2019, where the new year begins to start shoveling away the last... although note that none of this guarantees said new year is good, we'll have to see.

video review: 'ysiv' by logic

So yeah, this was a tough one to push out... but now I'm heading into an overloaded October, and that means we've got twenty-one pilots next - stay tuned!

album review: 'ysiv' by logic

It's hard to believe it was just five years ago when I was openly praising a Logic album.

Hell, I think a lot of you remember my review of Under Pressure, his 2014 album that built on some pretty solid mixtape momentum and had some real significant weight to match Logic's flows and contemporary but distinctive boom bap production. I stand by that record as legitimately great, highlighting a rising talent who had great taste in production and a lot of ambition, which translated into his follow-up the next year The Incredible True Story which took his content into a space-themed concept record that couldn't quite stick the landing. And then he followed it two years later with Everybody that went for an even more ambitious and polarizing topic about being biracial in America that earned him even more backlash...

And yet it was that project that netted Logic his first massive smash hit, complete with guest appearances from Khalid and Alessia Cara he got a song with the title of the suicide hotline to break into the top 5. It hadn't been his first charting presence - the posse cut from Suicide Squad 'Sucker for Pain' gave him that, and it's important to note that his less conceptual, more mainstream mixtapes had a tendency to do very well on the Hot 100 - but the suicide hotline song set a narrative around Logic as an approachable, generally nonthreatening rapper who could flow his ass off but wound up speaking around platitudes that could feel misconceived or shallow... which yes, was something that had leaked into his songwriting on the albums, but I do remember when Logic had more to say and could stick the landing.

And I'll admit I had a bad feeling about this project in particular, coming hot on the heels of some particularly stupid comments that he made how he makes music for his 'fans', not hip-hop culture - a bit of a spicy statement and I guarantee it wasn't made with the Wu-Tang Clan in the room, even despite somehow getting a significant chunk of the members to contribute to a song on this album. But even calling the album YSIV was telling, an album follow-up to a series of mixtapes with four songs breaking the six minute mark and a lead-off single featuring Ryan Tedder's caterwauling on the hook. Suffice to say, I was not expecting this to be great or even good - was I wrong?

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - august 11, 2018 (VIDEO)

Hey look, the Hot 100 was crap enough that I completely forgot to update here, go figure.

Anyway, the more important update is...

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - august 11, 2018

You know, sometimes you just want to take the cooldown weeks when you can - given the streaming numbers I know Travis Scott has an album bomb coming for Astroworld, and while I haven't reviewed the record proper just yet, I can only imagine how big the impact will be on the rest of the Hot 100... joy.

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 24, 2018 (VIDEO)

My God, this was a weird week... honestly not a terrible week, but overall, I'm going to cherish what I have here before XXXTENTACION next week.

Next up... ooh boy, this is going to be crazy, so stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 24, 2018

You know, there's a part of me that's really getting sick of the streaming album bombs, mostly because it feels like it makes covering the albums in a full review kind of redundant... even though by covering them at some point on my schedule I'd probably get more traffic overall, which is all the more exasperating. But why get one album when you can get two, because this week, the big competition comes between Logic and Lil Yachty, the latter who I literally forgot dropped a mixtape a week or so back even despite some critics giving it praise. Eh, given that it's less of an album bomb than a scattering of songs in between Logic, we'll see what we get there.

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 17, 2018 (VIDEO)

And here we go - took a lot of processing power to get it out the door, but it turned out pretty well as I still keep tweaking my camera.

Next up, looks like Young Fathers - stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 17, 2018

...so I said last week that most of my general predictions surrounding the week came true about the expected activity, and while I also did say that I expected Meghan Trainor to break through this week, I also made the statement that I didn't expect much else to happen. And boy, was I wrong in the worst possible way, as despite a few very select gems, XXXTENTACION and Chris Brown of all people showed up to remind me that the charts might just be at their most intolerable since 2016, and there's far from enough good songs to save them!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 10, 2018 (VIDEO)

And here we are - I'm actually a little surprised with as many debuts as we got this is actually out on time.

Okay, Phonte is up next, stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 10, 2018

So it's pretty rare I get surprised on the Hot 100 - I've been doing this for three and a half years and I have chart records going back to the 2000s, I generally have an expectation what'll land here and be successful, and I've been long conditioned by disappointment to not expect the best. But it seems like this week we got a few welcome surprises that not only met my low expectations for this week, but might have even exceeded them. I'm not saying it was precisely a great week or that any of these new arrivals will last, but some of these are encouraging.