billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - september 15, 2018

So this is still somewhat in copyright hell, so we'll see how long it lasts up... but for now, check it out. 

And on that note...

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - september 15, 2018

I think you all might be expecting me to be more angry about this album bomb than I am - given the review and how much vitriol I spewed, you'd probably think seeing it all show up here would piss me off all the more... and yet if I'm being brutally honest, in viewing the songs outside of the larger, slightly nauseating context of the record, I reckon some of them might hold up better on their own, and given that it's an album I covered at length, I'm definitely going to streamline the coverage here.

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - september 30, 2017 (VIDEO)

Overall not a bad week, and I have to say, it's going to be interesting in the days ahead here, especially given all the coming shakeups.

But on the topic of one of those shakeups not quite going according to plan... well, stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - september 30, 2017

This is one of those weeks where I'm increasingly unsure where the hell the Billboard Hot 100 is going, and not just because we've got a few albums bombs in the making that are going to be dropping over the next few weeks for further destabilize things. And while part of it is also linked to the headlong race for what'll make the year-end lists, the larger point is that as a whole, songs that you'd expect to not seem fragile feel increasingly perilous, especially when you take a look at the top ten.

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 4, 2017 (VIDEO)

Well, this week was all over the place - and seemingly like every meme-associated review I do will probably wind up with a ton of hits, go figure.

Next up, though... actually, I have no idea how many hits this next review will accrue, we'll see. Stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 4, 2017

Okay, so as you can all probably see, this episode of Billboard BREAKDOWN is a day late. This is because of President's Day in the United States, another holiday that extends the chart week... and considering the Grammys happened, it also seems to have the peculiar impact of blunting their overall impact on the Hot 100, at least in the way I expected. Now that didn't mean it didn't cascade through - we'll get to that - but it also meant that we got another overloaded week full of changes...

video review: 'the hamilton mixtape' by lin-manuel miranda & various artists

I honestly thought this review would do a little better, given how dedicated the Hamilton fanbase is... eh, it happens, I guess, I'm guessing more people are looking forward to year-end lists or a J. Cole review.

In the mean time, though... Billboard BREAKDOWN up next, so stay tuned!

album review: 'the hamilton mixtape' by lin-manuel miranda & various artists

Let's talk about one of my biggest mistakes last year, or at least one that has weighed on me pretty heavily: I didn't talk about Hamilton. Oh, I considered it, a lot: I like hip-hop, I like musical theater, and I like Lin-Manuel Miranda. I might not have loved his debut In The Heights but it had a lot of charm and potential, so when he took the world by storm in 2015 with his musical chronicling the fascinating and tumultuous life of Alexander Hamilton... I didn't cover it. I don't really remember what my reasoning was for it either - the musical, while having its flaws in pacing and historical context, is indeed pretty awesome, with some of the most immediately catchy songs you'll ever hear. And hell, I even knew Daveed Diggs from clipping., I had an obvious inroad here!

And yet even with that Hamilton became the sort of Broadway crossover into popular culture that you so rarely see. Forget that it cleaned up at the Tony Awards, it was the sort of show where you'd probably have a better chance of winning the lottery than getting tickets. As such, the vast majority of us made do with the soundtrack, which wound up on a surprising number of year-end lists from professional music critics and as of now has crossed over a billion streams on Spotify, which does say a lot. Would it have landed on mine? Well, it would have had a shot, and that is saying a lot, especially given how strong 2015 was, especially for rap music.

And then we all got word about the mixtape... and if you've seen the list of huge names that have signed on for it, it's more than a little mindblowing! I would have gotten it for Usher covering 'Wait For It', but when you have Black Thought, Busta Rhymes, Joell Ortiz, and Nate Ruess doing 'My Shot', Kelly Clarkson doing 'It's Quiet Uptown', John Legend doing 'History Has Its Eyes On You', Chance The Rapper working on the reprise of 'Dear Theodosia', Regina Spektor and Ben Folds covering the regular 'Dear Theodosia', Ashanti doing 'Helpless' - which is such an obvious choice it's not even funny - Nas, Dave East, and Aloe Blacc working on 'Wrote My Way Out', Common and Ingrid Michaelson handling 'Who Tells Your Story' with The Roots - and The Roots are all over this project - and then add in a bonus track like 'Congratulations' with Dessa on it... at some point, you might as well give this project a spot on my year end list! I was primed to love this, and that meant I came in with the highest of expectations - were they paid off?

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - september 24, 2016 (VIDEO)

Well, this happened - I can imagine people might be a little surprised that I'd actually brand a Kendrick verse as subpar... but yeah, it happens, he hasn't quite mastered the tactic of coasting on pop guest verses yet like Lil Wayne (in his prime) or Ludacris could do effortlessly. The king does have weaknesses, folks.

Beyond that... I think I'm about ready to talk about Nick Cave. Brace yourselves, folks: this one gets heavy. Stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - september 24, 2016

Do you ever have those weeks where you were expecting a lot to happen... only for very little to actually materialize? I was expecting Lady Gaga to debut, for Travis Scott's album to make a major splash, for some pretty significant shakeups... and yet I didn't really see that, as we otherwise had a pretty quiet week, with a sparse number of debuts, a few returning entries, and overall very little to complain about. 

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 5, 2016 (VIDEO)

Well, that was okay. Little late to blast this episode, but here it is.

And speaking of late... well, stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - march 5, 2016

I was expecting this week to be busier than it is. I mean sure, it wasn't exactly a quiet week - new number one, a bunch of new arrivals and some considerable jumps around the chart - but I was oddly expecting more. Turns out one of the biggest factors that I was expecting - Kanye's big release - actually made no impact, because he kept it TIDAL exclusive, which Billboard doesn't count. And as for the Grammys... well, maybe it's just me, but with a few exceptions, it actually seemed more reasonable.

video review: 'this is acting' by sia

Ugh, this mess took way too long to get to, not helped by my schedule over the past weekend. Things have righted themselves, thankfully, but it's still been hectic.

Okay, next up is Foxes, so stay tuned!

album review: 'this is acting' by sia

Let's talk briefly about being a pop songwriter.

Now I've said in the past - hell, I did an entire Special Comment on it - that being a pop songwriter is arguably even harder. Let's be honest, you can write anything in the indie scene and some hipster somewhere will declare it a work of absolute genius - working within the pop framework is trickier, walking that tightrope between popular appeal with a hook and conventional structure and those sparks of individuality that make you a unique artist. And that's when you're writing for yourself - writing for another artist is often even harder, because while you want some of your personality to come through in the composition, you also need to consider the strengths and weaknesses and unique character of that performer too.

And yet whenever I hear a pop song written by Sia Furler, former indie pop darling turned songwriter and pop star in her own right, it's hard not hear Sia's unique tone and personality ring through in the writing. And in a sense that's a good thing: even though I have my issues with Sia's underwritten style and hyperbolic imagery and the tip away from more complex material that's occurred since her early work, she does have a defiantly unique voice in her writing. The problem becomes that said voice is often matched by her voice-shredding vocals to elevate the material - she's the one who sounds best on her own material.

Where things get interesting is that other artists appear to have recognized this, and for one reason or another a fair few of Sia's tracks have been rejected by artists over the past while, even with her writing her most pop-centric tracks to date. So in a fit of inspiration, Sia decided to pull all of these tracks together and release them as her own, putting her own spin on her attempts to match the style of others. Okay, nifty concept, I'm intrigued - so what does Sia deliver?

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - january 30, 2016 (VIDEO)

Well, this was a fun week. Always nice to find a world hit I like, too, I've been struggling for that the past while. In any case, hope to have that Randy Rogers Band video up some time later today, and then Brothers Osborne, Savages, and Ty Segall - stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - january 30, 2016

So yeah, Billboard BREAKDOWN is late again, and while it might have been late regardless thanks to a blown lightbulb that I couldn't replace last night at the right wattage and luminescence, in this case the charts were delayed because of Martin Luther King Day, which is a holiday in the United States. And that's fine, the holiday is very relevant, but the fact that this happened and will continue to happen throughout the upcoming months - the delays of charts because Billboard shifted their timelines last year - is just another example of how Billboard doesn't think before they make changes. Remember when they added YouTube streams in the middle of the Harlem Shake, or the absolute disaster that were the charts in the late 90s? In comparison with that this is a minor inconvenience, mostly for folks like myself, but it's still exasperating.

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - november 28, 2015 (VIDEO)

To quote one of my favourite comedy groups, we had some... well, we had some times. Yeah, that's it. Times.

But for real, thank you all for sticking around for the first year of this series! It was a lot of work, but I honestly think it was worth it. I've got some ideas how I might want to switch it up in the new year, but we'll see how things percolate out. Until then, I've got Bieber and a few country records, then I can finally dive into some of those black metal albums I've been dying to tackle, so stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - november 28, 2015

And now we're here - one year of Billboard BREAKDOWN is completed. Over the past fifty-plus episodes I've covered all the eccentricities of the Billboard Hot 100 charts, and it has been an eventful year! Between a switch in release scheduling, the chart-spanning weeks for artists too big to fail, and especially in the last quarter of this year the dominance of Canadian artists at the top that has tested my running thesis that the Canadian charts are always better. And I'll admit it's been a real learning experience for me too. Billboard BREAKDOWN has done a lot to define my channel, and though there have been many, many late nights where I swore up and down that after one year I'd be done with this, I'm going to leave that decision up to you. If you guys want me to continue with Billboard BREAKDOWN or revise the format at all, please let me know in the comments, I'm always grateful for your feedback and your support, especially as it's been the most consistent draw across my entire year.

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - october 17, 2015 (VIDEO)

Wow, I'm amazed I got this out at all. Multiple crashes, editing was absolute hell, but here it is. 

Next up... I want to cover something I'm actually going to like, so how about The Underachievers? Stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - october 17, 2015

Okay, normally what happens on a week full of new arrivals from a big release, you can normally expect a bunch of them to fall off the week after or at least take a sizeable dip after the hype fades. What you don't normally expect is nearly all of them to gain traction and for the charts to pick up all of the remaining tracks from that album you didn't cover and add them too! Such was the apparent magnetism of Drake & Future that not only did they not go away, they got bigger and even brought more along for the ride. Joy.