Lil Nas X once again proves he’s a master memester. Plus, he gives great lap dances. In the fall of 2018, when Montero Lamar Hill stumbled across the beat he would turn into “Old Town Road,” the 19-year-old built the track as a meme as much as a song. Everything was devised for virality: the [...] Read more

“Up” is the rapper’s fifth chart topper, but this time it took a Grammy Bump to put the superstar back on top. When I watch the Grammys every year, I like to play a chart-nerd parlor game I call “Grammy Bump.” It doesn’t happen every time, but in many years, a song, an album, or [...] Read more

The singer’s overnight success is about more than the Sabrina Carpenter–Joshua Bassett drama. If, as the actor, comedian, and belletrist “Judge” John Hodgman has declared, “Specificity is the soul of narrative,” actress–singer Olivia Rodrigo just won the Soulful Specificity prize for 2021, before the year was even a month old. It’s rare that a debut [...] Read more

“Life Goes On” broke the language barrier—but there are still other obstacles holding them back. K-pop fans got a bracing reminder this week that North and South Korea are still technically at war, 67 years after the armistice that ended fighting between the two territories. Why should this still-simmering conflict matter to pop fans? Because [...] Read more

24kGoldn and Iann Dior’s “Mood” is uniting rap fans, rock fans, and fans too young to care about the difference. In the fall of 1988, when Billboard launched its Modern Rock Tracks chart, it was more diverse than what came to be known later as “alternative rock.” In that first Modern Rock top 30, there [...] Read more

“Savage Love (Laxed – Siren Beat)” was born of Korea, a Kiwi, TikTok, and Jason Derulo. A quarter-century ago this week, in October 1995, the No. 1 song in America, Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” represented a number of firsts. It was the first single by a woman to debut at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100—then a new [...] Read more

Did the boy band adapt for America, or did they make America adapt for them? On a business trip through Japan in 1962, the president of Britain’s Pye Records heard an enchanting pop song by the young Japanese singer Kyu Sakamoto and brought a copy of the 45 back with him to the U.K. He [...] Read more

The video is a smash, but it’s the song that put it on top. This month marks the centennial of vaudeville performer Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” a watershed for both blues recordings and Black women’s cultural expression. Smith’s August 1920 recording, lamenting a love gone wrong, eventually sold about 2 million copies and, over the next [...] Read more

Like any boy band alumnus, he first had to overcome radio’s bias against teen heartthrobs. Late summer is a great time for sleeper hits: songs that have been hanging around the charts for months and finally hit their stride. Four years ago, in August 2016, Sia’s “Cheap Thrills” reached No. 1 after knocking around the [...] Read more

With Folklore, she figured out the streaming era—and she didn’t even have to turn herself into a rapper. Maybe it’s appropriate that, in the dead of August in a year when we mostly can’t leave the house, our No. 1 song has the counterintuitive title “Cardigan.” But then, Taylor Swift has long been the music [...] Read more