So I'll be honest: when I created my album bomb rules, there inevitably were going to be projects that just skirt around them - it hasn't been a perfect process, and one that I'll probably revisit for the next Billboard year, just taking the data I have into account. Normally it has been the albums that have a full six or seven songs released - just under my eight song cut-off - and in those cases it's normally the full swathe of other releases that leads to a lengthy episode. Of course, the other factor comes when the artist is so big that the vast majority of his new entries hit in the top 40, and given this happened with Post Malone... yeah, album bomb rules are in effect, but I'm still going to wind up covering the majority of the album anyway, so mission accomplished, I guess?
Frankly I'm surprised this video is holding up as well as it is... well, we'll see where everything lands as I work on Resonators and that Flying Lotus album - stay tuned!
So I'll admit I didn't quite predict this. I knew that Tyler, The Creator would have his album bomb - and with just enough songs to squeak into my qualifying rules, for the record - but I'll admit I did not expect DJ Khaled to do as well as he did. Now part of that is the suspicion that DJ Khaled didn't have the blowout single ready to hit beyond a song like 'No Brainer' - which was released last year, packaged on the album, and didn't re-enter the Hot 100 here - but he did see enough measurable chart success that I have to pay attention... even if I have less than zero interest in reviewing the album and it'll probably wind up on the Trailing Edge at best.
I think the best way to describe this week would be a deflation of expectations - yeah, I knew this week wouldn't quite have the same impact as what happened with album releases, but I was open to the possibility of larger hits from acts like ScHoolboy Q or P!nk or even AJR. Now thankfully for a change we mostly missed this and seemed to walk away with about as good of a result as we could hope for, although with still more quiet weeks ahead it begs the question where the hell the Hot 100 could even go in the next week or two.
There are a lot of narratives that need to be considered going into this week, most of which I predicted and those that I didn't I'm not sure I wanted to entertain. Of course the biggest story is the Cardi B album bomb, but like last week the Hot 100 would have been plenty busy without her.
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!
...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!
So for as short as this is, it actually wound up going up pretty late... hey, what I can say, I was busy. But not enough that something might be dropping early this evening, so stay tuned!
I feel like this week is close to the flip side of the coin to the last - and I'm honestly not sure if that's better overall. Where last week the Top 10 was fairly static with a huge amount of upward movement and no significant losses - with a relatively small number of new arrivals - this week the top ten saw major disruption, the gains were pretty modest, and the losses and dropouts were quite significant... all with a relatively small number of new arrivals. Now, whether this makes this week better remains to be seen, but I'd argue it does seem to be a return to form, and thus is a little more interesting overall.
So we're now in our last two months of the Billboard year - it ends in November, and yes, that makes both more and less sense than you think it does - and yet I'm a little surprised how uncertain the Hot 100 feels right now. Granted, this is one of those weeks that feels deceptively quiet in that we only had a few new arrivals, but again, major turbulence is coming considering the albums on the horizon, and it'll be fascinating to see what cracks first.
Because this is what I want to deal with on my first few days back from vacation, a double album bomb from records that I had no reason to expect were anything close to good or interesting, just goddamn perfect. And of course there is more news than that, but at this point, if I want to keep this episode at a sane length for the twenty new arrivals we have, we're going to have to keep this moving...
And here's an especially long episode of Billboard BREAKDOWN... man, this took a while to put together, as they always do... But still not all tonight, stay tuned!
It's never the album bomb weeks that are actually interesting - it's the weeks that come after, the fallout period where you see the headlong rush to plug the holes. And considering the summer music season tends to have a dry spell in album releases, this is the time where songs that might not otherwise crossover have a shot for some traction, where the weird or strange stuff might bubble up.
Well, look at that, a pretty damn good week on the show - and with Lorde coming up, it looks to be even better. And speaking of Lorde... well, stay tuned!
This week surprised me. In more ways than one actually, and for the most part they seem to be good surprises, where songs I was not looking forward to didn't show up, and a few that I never dared to dream would chart actually cracked through. To me, this is the sort of good news I've been conditioned not to expect going into the summer slowdown, and considering next week we'll probably get a big push for Lorde... yeah, maybe things are looking up?
