billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - january 12, 2019 (VIDEO)

Man alive, this took so damn long to finish... oh well, let's see what I can do next - stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - january 12, 2019

So this is one of those weeks on Billboard BREAKDOWN that can be draining to talk about, mostly because it's easy but time-consuming to explain at length. To put it simply, if you look at the Hot 100 a full half of it advanced ten positions or more, we have a ton of returning entries, and a full slate of fourteen new arrivals - and no, there wasn't an album bomb. No, as I said, I can explain this fairly easily: along with the album bomb from 21 Savage drying up, all the Christmas music exited the chart and a lot of older music this week picked up radio spins thanks to year-end countdowns, and given that there was no big releases to plug in the gap, the flood of music to replace it is all over the damn place and really shows no indication of what could last long term.

special comment: midland & authenticity in country music (VIDEO)

So this was something I basically did to avoid talking about the review I'm putting up tonight, but it was a pretty fascinating piece to dissect, especially given the current discussion around Midland. Glad to see it was received as well as it was!

special comment: midland & authenticity in country music

So in 1994, music journalist Bill Wyman made a statement praising three artists in the Chicago underground who were getting critical and popular acclaim by nudging their sound and marketing towards a mass audience - in other words, going pop but holding up enough trappings of alternative music to maintain their cred and avoiding the insularity of the 'strictly underground' crowd. These three acts - Bikini Overkill, Liz Phair, and a little group called the Smashing Pumpkins - were just breaking out with records that were starting to get real groundswell, even if with the benefit of historical context it'll tell you that would fade in the years to come. But to certain underground figures, in an era where the lines of alternative and mainstream music were blurring even further as popular culture tried to co-opt an organic revolution, this was damn close to heresy.

And leading the charge against these acts was acclaimed indie rock artist, producer and music writer Steve Albini, who fired back against Wyman in a blisteringly profane statement that these acts were never truly alternative but just co-opting a sound and trend without the actual depth to back it up, pop artists in the guise of something they never were. Now on some level the venom did feel a bit misplaced - Wyman wasn't claiming these acts were alternative but that it didn't really matter as long as the music was good, but Albini's larger point resonated, that through a disingenuous appropriation of the sound they were doing damage to both their own long-term careers and artistic ambitions, and the alternative scene as a whole, threatening labels of authenticity and years of hard work by underground acts that did pay their dues and would kill to have some of that same success without being pushed through the meat grinder of the music industry. And if you were to follow what happened to alternative rock and grunge and punk in the next decade or so, you'd see that Albini was mostly right on the money here.

With all of that established, let's talk about history repeating itself, and a little band called Midland.

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - may 27, 2017 (VIDEO)

Yeah, pretty short week overall, but not a bad one in my books.

Next up, Zac Brown Band and followed by one of the worst records I've covered thus far this year - stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - may 27, 2017

So we're now at the halfway point of the Billboard year - and wow, 2017 has been something, that's for damn sure. I'm still not quite sure how to evaluate it as a whole. One thing's for sure is that it's been a turbulent year thus far - Ed Sheeran might have held the top for a measurable time, but ever since then it has been song after song seizing the #1, showing the sort of turnover that you'd more expect on the UK charts than the United States.