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

The Beatles’ record once seemed unbeatable, and then Swift doubled it. But this unprecedented debut was planned weeks in advance. You may have heard that, this week, one artist—a notorious cat-lover with an increasingly foul mouth—has locked down the entire Top 10 on Billboard’s Hot 100. Before I dissect how this happened, gather ’round the [...] Read more

Sam Smith and Kim Petras both make history atop the Hot 100, but “Unholy” is not without precedent. From the summer of 1978 through the summer of 1979, singer-songwriter Sylvester James Jr., known by the mononym Sylvester, scored three consecutive Top 40 hits on Billboard’s Hot 100: “Dance (Disco Heat)” (No. 19), the hi-NRG landmark [...] Read more

Steve Lacy’s “Bad Habit” is a chart-topping hit that’s queer in every sense of the word. Consider, for a moment, the fate of Shuggie Otis, the shoulda-been music legend of the 1970s. The multiracial Los Angeles–based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist was compared to the likes of Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. Otis spent years working on [...] Read more