So it might not be obvious, but I've had a fucking miserable night trying to get all of this put together. Jesus Fucking CHRIST, YouTube can fellate several shotgun barrels, their horrible UI design and worthless back-end deserves all the scorn in the world and every developer and QA tester should be fired into the goddamn sun.
ANYWAY, I have no idea what I'm going to review next, so stay tuned!
So regardless of any scattered tidbits of information we might get the next week or two, I'm at least confident that this week is in the 2020 Billboard year - a pretty busy week too, mostly thanks to the abortive mini-album bomb of Trippie Redd and the return of Christmas music, but I guess I'll take what I can get here as the charts continue to slow down as we head deeper into the holidays?
Oh boy, this was a total mess... and about the last time I'm properly rendering a video in 4K, because I'm not entirely pleased with how this turned out when it came to this timeline. Anyway, next up... not sure, as the schedule gets messy, but we'll see how it turns - enjoy!
You know, normally Billboard is a bit more organized when they delineate when their tracking year begins and ends - not this year. A lot of this is tied into some of the messiness that came when they adjusted their tracking week to be closer to current activity instead being so far post-dated, but since the calendar doesn't exactly correlate, this could well be counted as a 53rd week in this year... or the first next year. It's annoying, to say the least, but I'll adjust my records and thumbnail as we get new information.
And here we go - bit of a messy recording process to get here, but here we are. Next up, I think I'm ready to talk about Emotional Oranges, so stay tuned!
You know, it feels like it's been a while since we've had a week that I'd otherwise describe as 'normal' on the Hot 100 - a respectable number of entries, everything seems somewhat stable, only the rapidly fading remnants of an album bomb that's best forgotten. And it's also one of those 'normal' weeks that seems deceptively busy - more of a correction to what the equilibrium of the chart should have been the past few weeks, at least to me.
Okay, that was a long episode... and yet amazingly I'm ahead of schedule with it, go figure. Anyway, next up is the equivalent of a double album, so stay tuned!
So this is one of those weeks that I'm just convinced whatever I review, I'm going to wind up pissing people off. And while I'd normally be able to skate by such thoughts on Billboard BREAKDOWN, given that it's in its own separate, equally annoying ecosystem... yeah, a quick glance at our new arrivals is telling me everything I need to know, there's no getting out of the stupid here.
So this was a living hell to get online - and knowing my luck, it'll be copyright claimed within the hour, so catch it while you can. Next up, Little Mix - stay tuned!
And so we reached the end of the fourth year of Billboard BREAKDOWN, a weekly series that at the end of every Billboard year I rhetorically ask whether you want me to continue it. Now of course there's a part of me that wants to keep doing it - as someone who loves delving into the history of popular music, the annals and intricacy of the Hot 100 is fascinating to me - but in 2018... look, I'm not going to mince words, this has been a rough year. More than ever, this was the year of the album bomb, when week after week the charts were blitzed with full albums backed by the streaming machine and I was stuck trying to pick up the pieces, and while I'll have plenty more to say about this when year-end lists roll around in a month or so, on a week-by-week basis it's proven exhausting and I can argue worse for the Hot 100's overall quality. And given that there's no sign any streaming platform will self-regulate against this - sometimes even being willing co-conspirators in the manipulation - I don't see it getting better, and that just makes me feel all the more exhausted by it all.
So yeah, this week blew... but at least the Democrats grabbed the House. But I'm Canadian, so we'll handle the aftershocks regardless. Next up, some Poppy - stay tuned!
I'm just going to say this right now, this is the second time I'm putting together an episode of Billboard BREAKDOWN on an election evening and I'm just not a fan of it - somehow the songs just don't wind up feeling very good... even if, instead of dealing with a Meek Mill album bomb we've just got a pileup of assorted, forgettable cuts. Hell, in most cases I'll treat that like a net positive.
Man alive, this took WAY too damn long to put out - hell, I had something ready in Birmingham, but the footage got corrupted. But not to worry, I've got more reviews on the docket and then the next episode of Billboard BREAKDOWN, so stay tuned!
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!
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.
And this week was pretty damn rough too... goddamn it, 2018 is not looking good going forward... But okay, we've got some better hip-hop coming, so stay tuned!
So as I've been predicting, the charts are heading into the lull around the holiday season - and I mean that more than most, because I don't think I've seen the Hot 100 this static in months, with only a pretty sparse crop of new arrivals to bring any real disruption. Hopefully that means I can keep this episode short and get to work on my last few reviews before year-end lists, but hey, you never know, right?
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...
