I was expecting to say that we now have just a couple of weeks of the chart year to go, but Billboard had other ideas. According to a memo in their own press release concerning the upcoming Billboard Music Awards, that nobody cares about, the chart year already ended in mid-October.
I’m in agreement with everyone else that this is pretty fucking stupid for the obvious reason that years run January to December. Ending it in mid-November was already sub-optimum but bringing it back by another three weeks is just plain stupid. The only saving grace for me is that I don’t really care about any of the songs whose year-end chances this will likely scupper, so rules should be as normal for my 2023 lists. So with that, onto the first of next year’s hits…
“Good Good” by Usher, Summer Walker & 21 Savage
Peak #25, Current #25
Usher having an actual hit with the lead single for his album next year is a surprise to me, even if it is being totally carried by radio. I saw these three artists together and thought we would be in for some typically sour R&B song that I can’t stand, but the content here was a pleasant surprise. It concerns the end of a relationship where the pair remain great friends afterwards and it just makes a nice change to hear a song with a pleasant story like this, especially in this genre.
Musically it’s pretty solid as well with a decent chorus and a beat that has at least a little bit of texture to it with some brighter flourishes along with the bassy knock and claps. Summer Walker’s verse is nice enough and would’ve turned this into a nice duet if it weren’t for a third verse from 21 Savage that lets things down a bit.
He uses half his lines to talk about all the money he spent on her which strikes slightly the wrong tone, as does his defensive “you shouldn’t attack me” line. He then goes on to say that the reason they should stay friends is actually just because he’s friends with her new man and then rounds out the verse by saying he can still shag her sometimes, which rather misses the point of the song altogether. I’m also just not convinced that 21 has the right expressiveness to sell the tone that the song is going for, he has improved a bit in recent years but he’s still quite one-dimensional and sounds too aggressive and flat here.
So yeah if you cut out the third verse and maybe got Usher and Summer to sing on the final chorus together this could’ve been a great duet. As it is, it’s still a good song but misses the resonance it could have had.
7/10
“What It Is (Block Boy)” by Doechii ft. Kodak Black
Peak #29, Current #30
And speaking of songs carried by radio, this is the only song in the current top 50 that has a higher percentage of its chart points from airplay than Good Good, which feels like a weird thing to say about a song with Kodak Black on it. We’ll come to him in a minute but this is primarily the breakthrough single for Florida rapper/singer Doechii. The solo version absolutely fucks. It’s really got everything I would look for in a contemporary R&B song: engaging performance; a nice skittering trap-pop beat; and a hook that is just maddeningly catchy. Seriously the hook goes crazy, you can repeat it as many times as you like, I’ll still be vibing.
So who in God’s name decided that Kodak fucking Black was required for a remix?????? You’re telling me that radio wouldn’t have played the solo version of this? I don’t believe you! And if you have to push a remix then whhhyyyy him? Just anyone else not named Chris Brown would’ve been so much better. Even putting aside the fact that Kodak Black is a vile piece of shit rapist who should be in prison, which makes him a terrible choice for a label to put on a song with a new female artist they’re trying to push, he is also possibly the single worst rapper of the past five years to get mainstream recognition. Everything he does is just awful; his voice is disgusting, his flow is terrible and so are his lyrics. He’s a total guaranteed vibe killer in any song he appears on and this is no exception.
The most exasperating thing is that this version isn’t even that popular. Despite being on the radio every five minutes, at the time of writing the remix has 72 million Spotify streams whilst the solo version has 208 million. Kodak Black isn’t even a popular rapper, he has literally like two solo hits ever, stop pushing him and for God’s sake stop making women collaborate with him. I don’t know how to rate this because it’s an 8/10 with a 1/10 feature, what a disappointment.
6/10
“Agora Hills” by Doja Cat
Peak #18, Current #31
I gave a brief listen to Doja Cat’s new album Scarlet, and I didn’t find much to interest me. I get that she wants to move away a little from her pop stuff, but I find her trap stuff pretty dull to be honest, in fact most of the beats on here are dead. Ironically it seems as though her lighter pop stuff is the only thing that people are really checking for, as shown by this track being the only real hit of the album, other than Paint the Town Red.
I did quite like both PTTR and Attention, but I don’t get the interest in Agora Hills really, it’s a bit boring for me. The production and melody are very wish-washy and don’t evolve at all, and her voice sounds really weird here, I barely recognize her. The faint delivery directs attention away from the lyrics, although the couplet “Like Fortnite I’mma need your skin, don’t give a fuck where the penis been” still manages to stand out for being so awful. Yeah it’s just very meh for me, maybe there could’ve been something in the dream-like production but the core song is too weak to make anything of it.
5/10
“Save Me” by Jelly Roll ft. Lainey Wilson
Peak #27, Current #27
This song was originally released as a single back in June 2020, but since Jelly Roll wasn’t popular then and presumably his label doesn’t have much confidence in any material from his newest album, they’ve instead pushed a new remix with Lainey Wilson, who’s also had a huge year, and it’s worked out as a big hit. Musically it makes a welcome return to the soft touch of Son of a Sinner with a very spare arrangement built almost entirely off a simple acoustic loop, and not adding the percussion until the final chorus, which even then resists the urge to go totally overboard with the bombast.
The content is again not dissimilar to Mr Roll’s breakthrough hit as he laments his broken life ravaged by drinking and smoking. He calls out for someone to save him from himself but then later asks them not to waste their time on him because he’s “damaged beyond repair”. Now for a remix with a female singer I was thinking that the song might’ve been rewritten for some sort of interesting dynamic to balance things out à la I Remember Everything. But instead the lyrics are unchanged and Lainey simply sings the second verse and then they sing the last chorus together. Narratively in a song about loneliness and self-destruction this makes fuck all sense, so it’s obviously one of those remixes that was done purely for commercial rather than artistic purposes.
That being said, they do sound good together and adding another voice does add some colour to what is otherwise quite a barren song. It’s decent enough I think, the emotion does shine through even if the re-framing as a duet was lazily done.
6/10
“Better Place” by *NSYNC
Peak #25, Current #78
What is it with this month and all these forced radio hits? If seeing Usher in the top 40 in 2023 was surprising, seeing NSYNC was downright baffling. Apparently this is the first time they’ve reunited since breaking up in 2002 and yet I haven’t seen a single thing about it. And now having heard the song I can understand why.
This is really shit. It’s the final boss of sanitized, radio bait, soundtrack boy band music. The past few years of Jonas Brothers, OneRepublic and BTS have all been leading up to this moment where NSYNC deliver the single most featureless hit of the year. Musically this is just insulting. You guys like nu-disco right? You like little basslines and synthy drum sounds? And we’ll even throw a little whistle riff in there for good measure, what a perfect pop song! It just makes me feel sad I’m sorry. I don’t know why I hate this so much more than the singles of the aforementioned groups but I just do. The melody is a fucking joke lmao. It’s a song without being a song.
Also, the lyrics. “You like the bass down low, I wanna lose control, I wanna dance all night, you like it nice and slow”. What the fuck are you talking about? You’re just putting words together, it doesn’t mean anything. “I’m so excited to see you excited”, what a terrible line to make the crux of your song. And what the fuck is going on with the vocals? I had this and the Jung Kook song back to back in my October playlist and when I wasn’t paying attention I thought it was that track I was listening to. Something about the vocals, presumably the processing, is so off that it sounds like when Koreans try to sing in English, it’s firmly in the uncanny valley of weird sounds.
Yeah this whole song is grossly offensive to my tastes. I’m not normally the type to get so triggered by bland, commercial music but this is really a textbook example of the worst of mainstream pop music. Just serves no purpose whatsoever other than to fill airtime on bad radio stations, nobody else cares about this. The soundtrack for the third installment of the Trolls franchise is a fitting place for this to be left to rot.
2/10
“3D” by Jung Kook ft. Jack Harlow
Peak #5, Current #75
Right, before we get into discussing this song we have to make mention of Jung Kook’s previous single Seven which has seen record breaking streaming success. Or at least that’s how it seems, but the validity of this is highly questionable. If you don’t know what I’m talking about then I recommend doing your own research but essentially the song has had various bizarre and unexplainable streaming statistics, from huge day-to-day fluctuations in streams from certain countries to somehow managing to get more daily streams in Thailand than the country has Spotify users. Allegations of streaming farms have been around for a while in relation to various artists but I’ve never seen such a blatant example and for such a big song. I have to bring it up because it calls into question the validity of anything chart-related pertaining to the artist in future, not that it was enough to actually make Seven a stable hit in the US.
Anyhow his next single keeps with the early 2000s garage/R&B vibes to similarly decent results. The Justin Timberlake comparisons have been widely made and they are accurate as Jung Kook emits confident energy across a very tight, wiry instrumental. It’s for the most part pretty effective even if the tune and performance fall some way short of 2000s JT/Timbaland levels. A Jack Harlow verse breaks up the monotony although he does drop a couple of stinking lines (“When I seen that body, you would think it was a dead body the way I told my boys, Come look”), (you’re my bae just like Tampa), and the momentum gets lost for a moment as he does his little counting gimmick and the beat stalls out.
All in all it’s not bad though, and I am mildly impressed by the fact that Jung Kook has already established some sort of a unique sound in his first two singles, something that BTS failed to do as a band with any of their already forgotten English singles. Let’s see if the bots can make this one a hit as well.
6/10
“Rich Baby Daddy” by Drake ft. Sexyy Red & SZA
Peak #11, Current #15
Whisper it quietly, but Drake’s star does at last seem to be waning. For All the Dogs still put up big numbers week one, but it was a way down on Drake’s previous studio album Certified Lover Boy, and a couple of weeks on I think it’s safe to say that it’s fading much faster as well. I haven’t listened to the album. I haven’t particularly enjoyed any of Drake’s projects as a complete work in the past several years, and when even the usual defenders are largely saying that it’s mid, that doesn’t give me any incentive to listen for myself, especially when it’s another incredibly long record.
Right now it’s slightly ambiguous which songs will hold the most traction long term, so I’m covering three to be on the safe side. This track sees Drake recruiting Sza again, alongside 2023’s biggest thot rap breakout star Sexyy Red for the obligatory strip club song on a Drake album, because apparently that niche needs filling every time.
For what it is I guess it’s fine. The production is decent enough with an up-tempo groove, whilst Sexyy Red’s hook is dumb and annoying after the second repetition, but it works for the song. Sza’s contributions sound nice but feel as though they were made for a song with more class than this, whilst Drake drones his way through his verse in the expected manner. It would be an OK song if it ended there, but for some reason with the time already running over four minutes we get a beat drop-out that leads into a dour outro where Drake sounds utterly miserable as he strangely croons his way through the chorus of Dog Days Are Over with a frankly offensive amount of autotune drizzled onto his vocals.
It’s a baffling end to a song that was trending towards above average up til that point, but once again Drake is the worst part of his own music.
5/10
“IDGAF” by Drake ft. Yeat
Peak #2, Current #8
Yeat has narrowly avoided qualifying for this series up until now, and I’ve largely tried to avoid his music. I think I’m too old for him. I’ve heard bits of it and I don’t get it, although I’m not sure how much there is to really get. Take this song which is clearly trying to be some rage anthem that’s so totally badass in the way it “gives no fucks”. In the verses Yeat sounds like an even less comprehensible Young Thug and on the hook he sounds like an even less enthusiastic 21 Savage. Both of these are very impressive negative feats.
It doesn’t even have the right energy to it, the whole thing sounds so tired. I don’t mind the buzzy, dynamic production but pairing it with such a bored “I don’t be giving no fucks” chorus just kills it. And then we also have Drake who’s effectively a feature on his own song, and sounds like he has about as much clue as to what this track is trying to be as I do. Combine this with content that is all boring flexing and you’ve got a real damp squib of a song whose energy transpires as more annoying than psychedelic or whatever it was supposed to be. So yeah, it’s pretty bad and doesn’t even make sense on a Drake album.
3/10
“First Person Shooter” by Drake ft. J. Cole
Peak #1, Current #13
Finally we have the number one hit, Drake’s thirteenth and J Cole’s first. I’ve widely seen this touted as one of the best tracks on For All the Dogs, but am I the only person who doesn’t like it that much? There’s basically one reason to listen to this which is Cole’s genuinely excellent verse that is cleverly written without having to dissect Genius annotations to understand it, and it flows really well.
But Drake’s incessant “Who the GOAT? Who the GOAT?” whispering sounds so pathetic and this beat really gets on my tits after a while as well as it just cycles through this four-note loop with quite a cheap drum sound to boot. And then we get the beat switch into Drake’s outro verse that doesn’t fit with anything. These random beat switches that serve no purpose are becoming a bit of a habit of Drake’s and I don’t think he’s ever really pulled one off. The second part isn’t very interesting, in fact it reminds me a lot of the DJ Khaled collaboration Popstar, which isn’t a compliment.
I did at least get a small laugh out of Drake recounting the names of the girls in his phone as “Nadine, Christine, Justine, Kathleen, Charlene, Pauline, Claudine”. Bro how old are the girls you’re talking to? Sixty?
Otherwise it’s another pretty forgettable song that becomes yet another one week chart-topper for Drake but doesn’t have any replay value. At least we got a good Cole verse, but yet again Drake himself fails to shine.
5/10
“My Love Mine All Mine” by Mitski
Peak #26, Current #26
My lack of musical knowledge is exposed yet again as I have to confess that Mitski is an artist whose music I’ve never given the proper time to. I remember seeing a ton of praise for Be the Cowboy when it was released in 2018 right around when I was starting to be more aware of music discourse but for whatever reason I never made the time to fully check her stuff out beyond skimming through a few songs. Sorry but I’m a very lazy music listener, I tend to just play the same stuff I know I like over and over.
Anyhow she’s not an artist I would’ve ever expected to be covering here since she’s never come close to charting a song before. However by the power of TikTok anything is possible and thus her new record has yielded this shock hit. And it’s……… decent? The little two seconds where it goes into the chorus is gorgeous melodically, and Mitski’s eerie vocals and the subtle, organic instrumentation do a good job of building off that atmosphere.
But beyond that there’s nothing really to it. It’s more of an interlude than a full song at barely two minutes and only sixteen unique lines. It’s definitely pretty and I can see why the chorus would soundtrack a million TikToks but let’s be real there’s not much here outside of that. At the risk of grossly offending certain people I’d put it on par with a song like Romantic Homicide or Here With Me by D4vd, and just because Mitski has been an acclaimed indie artist for years it doesn’t automatically make this any more special than her bedroom-pop contemporaries in the mainstream. Cute little lullaby, nothing more.
6/10
“MONACO” by Bad Bunny
Peak #5, Current #9
You know the drill, there was a new Bad Bunny album, I haven’t listened to it, this is the biggest hit from it. It’s OK. I guess the main thing to note is that it’s not reggaeton but Latin trap, a sound that he was apparently a part of many years ago according to people who know more about this than me. I find Bad Bunny’s rapping less grating than his singing and I think we’ve all heard enough reggaeton beats by now for one lifetime so it’s a welcome change. Unfortunately the language barrier, lack of melody and my general lack of appreciation for Bad Bunny as a performer stops me liking this any further but I tolerate it at least. If this is your sort of thing then I wish you well with it. Moving on.
5/10
“Lil Boo Thang” by Paul Russell
Peak #35, Current #35
Shall I bother repeating this argument again or is there no point? You cannot just sample a flawless classic song, substitute your own inferior parts in, and then coast by on the original production. I don’t know where this Paul Russell bloke has come from or how the cash was stumped up to sample Best of My Love by The Emotions, but he sounds like somebody doing an impression of the black guy from MKTO, but only about 60% as good.
Of course this song sounds great but that’s because it’s literally just Best of My Love. The only difference is a worse performance and modern slang lyrics about “lil boo thang” and referencing the 2K video games, which will turn an original song that is utterly timeless into something that will be totally dated in a decade or two. I can’t hate this because you could make fart noises over this instrumental and it would still sound great, but for a less than two minute jingle I see no reason to seek this out when the original exists.
5/10
“Water” by Tyla
Peak #21, Current #21
Apparently this is the first song by a South African singer to chart on the Hot 100 in 55 years. I feel like that can’t be true but I’m not going to be the person to go back and check so we’ll roll with it. Tyla is a 21 year-old singer from Johannesburg who has been blessed by the TikTok Gods allowing a dance for this song to go viral. Somewhat surprisingly Tyla seems to already have a rather large online fanbase seemingly based almost entirely off this one song. I’m going to largely put this down to Black Twitter having to find another non-white female singer to hype up as the next Beyoncé since Chloe Bailey fell off and Normani appears to have retired.
And I’ll say this, she’s certainly gorgeous and a great performer so I can understand why some will root for her. I personally am of course much more interested in the actual music, where I was pleasantly surprised. Tyla oozes sensuality effortlessly. She doesn’t try too hard, everything feels natural. The production is subtle but it’s a nice mix of afrobeat and contemporary R&B. I know that the hook is the reason this song blew up but I think I actually prefer the rhythm of the verses and I think the chorus doesn’t quite fit as it juts in a bit compared to the rest of the song. It’s still a good hook though so I guess that makes it 3/3 R&B-adjacent songs from this month that I enjoyed. What a turn-up for the books.
6/10
October average: 5.2/10
Worth listening to: So nothing quite qualified again despite a decent average. I feel like that’s been a bit of a theme for this year; decent overall quality but not that many top standouts. I’ll shoutout Sarah’s Place by Zach Bryan and Noah Kahan which debuted in the top 40 but dropped out before the end of the month so doesn’t get reviewed as per my rules. Really good song.
🙂
Hot 100 Reviews 