Rap beef records were once too inside baseball to touch the Hot 100. Now they’re topping it. Growing up listening to New York radio in the ’80s, I was exposed to a parallel universe of rap singles that missed the pop Top 40 but were treated by local deejays as if they were mainstream hits. [...] Read more

“We Can’t Be Friends” is a master class in how to ride backlash all the way to No. 1. Tweet Share Share Comment In the summer of 1997, Swedish songwriter and producer Max Martin scored his first Top 10 hit in America with a song co-written and fronted by a fellow Swede, a teenager who [...] Read more

The singer has the No. 1 song on Billboard’s country chart. That’s not the same as being No. 1 on country radio. In the summer of 1984, Lionel Richie, in the middle of an epic run of pop and R&B hits from his blockbuster album Can’t Slow Down, chose a fourth single from the LP [...] Read more

A 78-year-old has America’s biggest song. Here’s how she pulled it off. This installment of “Why Is This Song No. 1?” is momentous for at least a couple of reasons. First, as of this month, this Slate series is 10 years old. We launched it in December 2013 with an entry on the Eminem–Rihanna duet “The [...] Read more

2023 saw rap’s longest drought in decades. Is Jack Harlow the man to save it? The biggest story in rap this year was all about the past. Hip-hop’s 50th anniversary—timed to a DJ Kool Herc rec-room party in the South Bronx in August 1973, a somewhat arbitrary but reasonable musical marker—was a fine excuse to [...] Read more

How “Cruel Summer” assumed its rightful place at the top of the charts. What do you get for the woman who already has everything—a billion-dollar-grossing tour, the keys to several cities, a smash movie, a strapping boyfriend? Some collectors are completists about their Beanie Babies or their Dickens first editions. But the perfect matched set [...] Read more

Two months in, it’s not the Taylor Swift rumors that put her back on top. It’s the parents. A decade ago this month, in late September 2013, Miley Cyrus scored her first ever No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 with “Wrecking Ball.” Way back then, I reported on some skepticism about whether “Wrecking Ball” was a [...] Read more

Oliver Anthony’s overnight smash shows how passionate niches have taken over the Hot 100. It’s not all bad. At a time of national polarization, a singer-songwriter who has never recorded professionally before scores an improbable chart-topper that finds favor with America Firsters. The artist, a high-school dropout trying to make something of himself, claims to [...] Read more

Two years ago, Nashville tried to cut ties with Morgan Wallen. Now he’s scored the genre’s first real chart-topper in decades. When I was in fourth grade, I got into a magnet public school on the other side of Brooklyn, and two other kids and I had to get there by carpool. The local mom [...] Read more

It’s been a long road back, but a bit of celebrity gossip carried her the final mile. Until a few days ago, I thought I was going to be writing in this space about a chart-topper by Solána Imani Rowe, the artist who calls herself SZA. Since late December, SZA has had the top album [...] Read more