billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - february 9, 2019 (VIDEO)

So this was a pretty reasonable episode, generally liked this fine enough...

Anyway, next up... hmm, I've got some time ahead, let's see where this goes - stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - february 9, 2019

There's a part of me that wants to invest this cooldown week with a bit more significance than it probably deserves. Sure, none of the debuts seem all that big and the song rising to the top ten isn't all that interesting and more of the story seems to come in the returns than the new arrivals or dropouts, but I get the impression that the current relative stasis is more unstable than it appears, especially with the number of 2018 songs that are lingering a bit longer than expected.

the top ten worst hit songs of 2017 (VIDEO)

It's here, it's already controversial, and apparently the damn video malfunctioned because after rendering the damn thing three times I can't catch a break. Ah well, best hits of 2017 is coming in a day or two, stay tuned!

the top ten worst hit songs of 2017

There have been years where writing this list is easy. Sometimes it's like 2015 or 2012, where the bad songs can't diminish otherwise diminish a strong or interesting year - or on the flip side we get years like 2016, where the avalanche of awful is so pronounced I almost have too much material, and while that list might be painful to revisit, sheer rage makes it all surge out.

2017 has not been that year, and it's a little tough to explain why. You could make a comparison to 2014 in how so much of this year defaulted towards average instead of a more pronounced brand of awful - I'm certainly not as angry towards this list as I've been in previous years - but the truly excellent hits were much stronger in 2017. What I think has befuddled some critics is how pop was effectively overtaken by the hip-hop and R&B aesthetic on the Hot 100 - it might have become more pronounced in 2013 but in 2017 the takeover was complete, and if you weren't paying more attention to streaming instead of radio, you were going to be left behind. And thus in 2017 the truly bad songs are a bit of a mix of the pop songs tumbling towards the monogenre and the lazy, bargain-barrel dumpster fire that is the dregs of trap. And again, to establish the rules the songs had to debut on the year-end Hot 100 list for 2017, and purely boring doesn't just cut it for me. Given how much of this I've covered on Billboard BREAKDOWN, I've long been numbed to the endless swirl of interchangeable trap bangers and their brand of disposable mediocrity. If you want to land on this list, you need to really irritate me or piss me off, so let's get going with some Dishonourable Mentions!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - december 23, 2017 (VIDEO)

So yeah, this was actually a pretty decent week. What will come next... I'm honestly not sure, will need to check the schedule - so stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - december 23, 2017

This is one of those weeks where I'm not really sure how to evaluate things, where I had a big prediction that came true faster than I could have predicted, and the rest that... didn't, because this turned out to be a slightly busier week than I predicted, partially triggered by the mass return of Christmas music - most of which I've already talked about in detail a while ago, so hopefully this'll be pretty short?

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 - july 22, 2017 (VIDEO)

My lord, this was a rough week to get through. Not exactly terrible, but mediocrity is almost worse on some level.

Eh, whatever, time for something more recent, so stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - july 22, 2017

Okay, maybe I'm just not as in-tune with what will cross onto the Hot 100 as I thought as I was, especially when it comes to album tracks. I knew that Jay-Z's 4:44 would take the wide release to land on the Hot 100, but I did think that there'd be at least a few album tracks from Calvin Harris' last release that'd have a chance, or maybe a bit of traction for Kesha's big comeback single 'Praying'... but while of course it landed on the Canadian charts, thanks to not getting a full tracking week it just missed the Hot 100, and what we got instead... well, it's interesting, I'll say that.

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - july 2, 2016 (VIDEO)

So this week sucked on the Hot 100... thank god the album release schedule has improved and I've got YG and Swans next, or I'd just be flat-out miserable.

And speaking of which...

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - july 2, 2016

So a week or so back I might have said that I was gearing up for one of the worst upcoming album release dates in recent memory... and yet just days after I said that, all of my concerns seemed to drop away. Both Iggy Azalea and Rae Sremmurd pushed back their albums and that just leaves me with Riff Raff, and I can handle him. But apparently the universe was unwilling to let me get off that easy, because from a quick look through the charts, we've got a really bad week ahead of us, folks.

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

Pretty decent week, but a bit of a weird one too - get the feeling it's right before the storm too.

Next up, Parquet Courts and A$AP Ferg, so stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - april 30, 2016

Okay, so normally after a week with a ton of debuts, the following week tends to be a real pain, as everything resets to compensate. And given the massive falloff from Kanye's Life Of Pablo - which yes, we'll be talking about here - you'd think that it'd mean this week was incredibly busy. But while it was turbulent across the board, it was so in a way that we had enough returning entries to keep the new arrival list relatively small, and since I no longer cover returning entries in as extensive detail as I did last year, this might actually mean I'll get a breather, at least before the top ten collapses in upon itself.

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - december 19, 2015 (VIDEO)

The upload failed five times. Five times. Well, it's here now.

Next up... honestly, I've got a bit of an old business before I deal with Cam, Baroness, and Cage The Elephant. I guess I might have to cover goddamn Jeremih as well, but before then...

Sure, Alabama Shakes, stay tuned!

billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - december 19, 2015

This is one of those weeks that I can imagine seems slow - the top ten barely moved, only a few new songs, and we even got the return of Christmas songs which imply that the annual winter slowdown is coming into place. But the more I delved into this week, the more I'm seeing some shifts that have real implications down the road - the 2015 charting trends seem to be fading faster than I expected, with the new ones - good and bad - creeping up to replace them.