On his latest No. 1, the singer shows why he might just be our era’s most defining star. With less than a month to go in the 2010s, the decade that has utterly confounded our understanding of what genre even means in popular music, perhaps it’s appropriate that genre-obliterator Post Malone has the top song [...] Read more

2019 is the year women figured out how to take back the pop charts. One year ago—52 weeks, on the button—an accomplished, social media–commanding pop star scored her first-ever No. 1 hit by portraying herself as the graceful heroine of her story and revealing just enough about her personal life to establish a sense of intimacy [...] Read more

Lewis Capaldi can thank Adele, Dancing With the Stars, and his song’s complete lack of bells and whistles. Memo to Adele: You … are recording a new album, right? It’s been about four years now. Surely you’re cooking something up for before Christmas? You might wanna get on that, because, just FYI, the whole world [...] Read more

  The singer has long been a hit with parents. “Truth Hurts” finally won over their kids. Tweet Share Comment <img src="https://compote.slate.com/images/51fb9b74-0ef8-4e08-9bff-6b7b76e582cb.jpeg?width=780&amp;height=520&amp;rect=1560x1040&amp;offset=0x0" alt="Lizzo onstage at Coachella." /> Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for Coachella. Recently in Music America’s New Favorite Song Cements This as the Summer of Gen Z Taylor Swift’s [...] Read more

No one older than 22 has topped the Hot 100 since April. If singer-slash–nonthreatening boy Shawn Mendes got to choose a day in his life to relive over and over—as a wistful, horny Bill Murray longs to do in Groundhog Day—I’ll bet he would choose Monday, Aug. 26, 2019. Mendes’ awesome day climaxed on the MTV [...] Read more

The 17-year-old singer followed the new rules for pop success—and held on till X couldn’t no more. Does anybody remember Jay Sean? Ten years ago, this British singer, born to Sikh parents, blended Bhangra and R&B and topped Billboard’s Hot 100 with a chirpy, Auto-Tuned hip-hop ditty called “Down.” Featuring a bridge rapped by the [...] Read more

  Music It wasn’t just the controversy, the memes, or all those remixes. By Chris Molanphy July 29, 20194:34 PM Tweet Share Comment In the nearly four months since I last had a new No. 1 hit to write about for Slate, there have been moments, I’ll admit, when I wondered whether Lil Nas X’s [...] Read more

  Music The debate about Lil Nas X’s No. 1 hit is only the latest sign that Billboard’s methodology is broken. By Chris Molanphy April 12, 20194:23 PM <img src="https://compote.slate.com/images/6f8b3507-72bb-4d74-928b-46a983211fe4.jpeg?width=780&amp;height=520&amp;rect=1560x1040&amp;offset=0x0" alt="Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus" /> Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Columbia Records; Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty [...] Read more

Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s journey to the top of the charts is virtually unprecedented. By Chris Molanphy Years from now, when pop critics and cultural historians write about the phenomenon that was Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s “Shallow,” it will be tagged as a Billboard chart-topper, but I’d wager that few, if any, of [...] Read more

Writing about popular music is lousy with obnoxious words. Indeed, there are so many—jangly, crunchy, seminal—that there is a whole book of them (and shamefully, I have used my share). Making things more complicated, much of this language is also subject to a generational divide—words coined by the young are understood to be off-limits to [...] Read more