Hip-Hop Has Had a Rough Year. Is This Really Its Great White Hope?

The biggest story in rap this year was all about the past. Hip-hop’s 50^th 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 celebrate the culture of rap. Critics, including your friendly Slate chart columnist, have been arguing for some time that the so-called Rock Era, which began in the mid-’50s, gave way to a Rap Era several decades ago, as hip-hop style and production tropes overtook all of popular music. Right through today, even on hits that aren’t rap, from Taylor Swift to Morgan Wallen to SZA, hip-hop’s sonic hallmarks—its trap beats and syncopated cadences—are all over the radio and Spotify.

But the sad irony in this year of #HipHop50 was that the music—i.e., current rap—had a pretty lousy year, both creatively and on the charts. Regarding the creative, theories abound: Cardi B’s second album is still long overdue. Kendrick Lamar has been busy on tour. Ice Spice does well as a supporting act but has yet to front a big hit by herself. Travis Scott is back and selling tons of albums, but he didn’t generate an undeniable banger this year. Kanye West self-imploded. As for the charts, for the first 36 weeks of 2023, not one rap song topped Billboard’s Hot 100, as hits by Swift, Miley Cyrus, Wallen, and a parade of improbable country hitmakers took turns on top. In fact, the rap drought started even earlier, in August 2022: After a one-week chart-topper by Nicki Minaj tumbled out of No. 1 that summer, it took more than a year—54 weeks—for a rap song to hit the top again. Billboard reported that it was rap’s longest ousting from the top of the pops since the early-’00s era of boy bands and post-grunge.

The song that finally ended the 2022–23 rap gap was Doja Cat’s “Paint the Town Red,” a salty boom-bap rant by the biracial singer-rapper that rides a very prominent sample of Dionne Warwick’s masterful 1964 hit “Walk on By.” Since Doja hit the top in September, rap has come back at No. 1 a handful of times—a week here, a week there—mostly in one-off tracks by Drake. As usual, anything the aging Drizzy drops is guaranteed a week of heavy streaming—yet Drake’s short-lived No. 1s “Slime You Out” (featuring SZA) and “First Person Shooter” (featuring J. Cole) have not caught on at radio and are already out of the Top 10.

But now, there’s another rap joint sitting atop the Hot 100—and unlike those fleeting Drake hits, it’s growing in both airplay and streams. It’s by Jack Harlow, the 2020s’ premier white rapper and would-be hip-hop heartthrob, whom many wrote off just a few months ago. It’s a combination of tongue-twisty bars and a fat melodic hook. And as it takes over No. 1—probably for only a week or two, before Mariah Carey returns with her Christmas perennial—Doja’s infectious banger “Paint the Town Red” sits alongside it in the Top Three, suggesting that maybe the answer to rap’s hitmaking drought is that old saw: “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus.” It’s the hooks, stupid.

Riding a sumptuous ’90s house beat, “Lovin’ on Me” is Harlow’s first chart-topper in over a year and a half—since “First Class,” which I covered in this Slate No. 1 hits series, rang the bell in April 2022. In the intervening 19 months, the curly-haired, flirtatious Louisville native has clocked several milestones in his quest to become a hybrid Internet boyfriend–slash–new Eminem: appearing on Saturday Night Live as both host and musical guest, dropping two albums, and even starring in a cinematic reboot of the 1992 Wesley Snipes–Woody Harrelson basketball comedy White Men Can’t Jump. The problem for Harlow is that none of these career moves was an unqualified success. Both ratings and reviews for his SNL double-duty episode were so-so. The movie, which premiered on Hulu six months ago, earned solid viewership but mostly savage coverage of the why-does-this-exist variety, though some critics said Harlow was charismatic enough to be a saving grace.

Perhaps most worrisome, the last two album releases suggested that Jack Harlow was like fetch: No matter how hard the music biz tried, he was never going to happen. After the Fergie-sampling “First Class” not only topped the Hot 100 in the spring of ’22 but debuted at No. 1 with massive streaming numbers, its parent album Come Home the Kids Miss You was naturally expected to open big as well. Reviews were not great, and the LP had bad timing, coming out the same week as a Bad Bunny album that wound up being 2022’s top LP, but none of that would matter if Harlow’s disc opened strong and hung around awhile. Come Home instead debuted at a ho-hum No. 3—even if there’d been no Bad Bunny album, Harlow would not have opened on top—and it was out of the album chart’s Top 10 after a month. It also spun off no followup hits after “First Class.” One year later, in a deliberate word-to-the-streets reset, Harlow dropped a followup, Jackman, that felt more like a rap mixtape, with a washed-out cover photo of a shirtless Jack chilling in a broke-ass Louisville alleyway. Jackman debuted at No. 8 in May 2023 and was off the Billboard 200 entirely in three weeks. Given that it lacked a pop crossover track, its modest commercial performance may have been semi-intentional.

What this mixed picture did not suggest, at all, was that Missionary Jack would come back with a super-pop-friendly track in the fall of ’23, see it debut on the Hot 100 at No. 2, and, one week later, oust Taylor Swift’s “Cruel Summer” from the No. 1 spot. “Lovin’” clearly has traction, not only connecting with Jack superfans (the Harlots? I’m just riffing here…) but more casual listeners. In its second week, the song’s radio audience jumped by more than 70 percent, Billboard reports, while its already-strong streams also grew modestly. For the song to grow at all is remarkable—unlike the typical hit by Drake (to whom Harlow is most often compared), the song didn’t launch at No. 1, egged on by the fan army, then plummet. When “Lovin’ on Me” launched at No. 2 last week, I low-key thought it might be a one-week wonder. I was wrong.

There are two bespoke chart patterns “Lovin’ on Me” is emulating, both prior Hot 100 No. 1s: last year’s Sam Smith–Kim Petras megasmash “Unholy,” and Doja Cat’s aforementioned “Paint the Town Red.” Like “Unholy,” “Lovin’” had an auspicious start on TikTok. And like “Paint,” “Lovin’” is a rap joint built out of a big, unmissable sample. However, Harlow’s hit tweaks the approach of both of these antecedents in interesting ways.

As I reported last year when it reached No. 1, “Unholy” arrived prefueled by a wave of TikTok hype. Somewhat unusually, this hype was driven by the artists themselves: An initial video of Smith and Petras jamming to their song in the studio drew millions of views and led to waves of user-generated clips that built anticipation before the single dropped. When it did, “Unholy” debuted on the Hot 100 all the way up at No. 3—notably high for both Smith and Petras—then kept climbing to No. 2 and then No. 1. This consistent early growth was also unorthodox, given current Hot 100 patterns where songs either debut at No. 1 or lurch around the chart. What “Unholy” proved was, for certain TikTok-sparked hits with strong artist visibility, the social audience is a base that can be built upon with more casual listeners; the Smith–Petras hit ultimately spent several months, off and on, within the Top 10. “Lovin’ on Me,” in its opening weeks, seems to be emulating this pattern. The original TikTok was by Jack Harlow himself, and like the Smith–Petras video, it was deceptively simple—Harlow half-rapping a few bars of his new jam, accompanied by a cute puppy.