Yep, I know it's late - stupid Warner forcing me to re-edit a chunk on a song that I apparently didn't call out immediately as being owned by them... fuck, that's embarrassing. Anyway, I want some light-hearted fun, so this next one might just be the ticket...
...am I the only one who thinks something strange is happening with the Hot 100 right now? I wouldn't say it was anything that felt too far afield, but while last week was near-complete garbage - and the fact that a disturbing amount of it appears to be sticking around does not bode well - but this week seems rather slapdash, and I have a hard time seeing much of this sticking around beyond a brief blip on the radar before the holiday season sweeps a chunk of it away.
This was... well, an interesting week to say the least. I genuinely hope we get a shakeup instead of a summer lull, because I don't have much patience for the rest of this. In the mean time, though, I've got Weval, then probably Grace and a few others coming soon, so stay tuned!
So here's the thing about the summer lull period with the charts: you get out of it basically what you put in. If you have good songs primed to go live in May or June that'll have some momentum, you'll basically have your summer lineup providing there's no big shakeup or surprises. But if you don't... well, basically you're left with most of the Hot 100 right now, which isn't so much outright awful but full of tracks that engender barely a reaction at all. Fellow music critic Todd In The Shadows described these tracks as fragments, but I'd prefer the term hollow: they fill time on the radio, but you're left feeling like nothing sticks in the way some years have, which is bad even for pop.
Well, this was a weird week - and arguably one of my weakest episodes of Billboard BREAKDOWN in a while. Flubs, not catching on that Drake's revival was thanks to Spotify... ugh, not pleased with this. And on that note, ANOHNI review is up next, so stay tuned!
So we're now settling back into routine - well, as much routine as we can expect, especially when Ariana Grande is coming around the corner next week - and this has led to something of a bizarre case that I've observed happen to big debuts in the past. They have tons of songs smash onto the Hot 100 the first week, and yet while things cool off dramatically the second week, the third week a whole group of them seem to bounce back. Now there are a lot of reasons for this: initial fatigue after a binge feeding into renewed interest; the radio picking up a few for rotation; or even the case of compensation against a reset to equilibrium...
Man, this took way too long to get out. Glad it's here, but between computer problems and editing... Want to know what else took WAY too long to put out? My next review, so stay tuned!
So here's the funny thing about when songs fall off the very top - it can take a bit of time for everything to start breaking down and getting interesting, or at least allow a little more instability into the charts. And while last week was the one that got all the big headlines, this week is where things started to shake up a little. Coupled with the Academy of Country Music having its annual awards - even though they were a complete joke - we got a couple surprises on the charts this week, even if the quality of said surprises remains to be seen.
