Chris Molanphy

The K-pop group’s “Butter” is the Song of the Summer, so why doesn’t it feel like it? Tweet Share Comment A year ago around this time, in our family car, I was auditioning my annual summer playlist for my teenage stepkids. The two Zoomers are a useful focus group for this Gen Xer, who’s trying [...] Read more

Is anyone surprised that BTS’s newest English-language single became an instant hit? I don’t know who’s handling the Twitter feed for Queen these days, but they either don’t know pop history or have some seriously misplaced chutzpah. When “Butter,” the latest single from global pop dominators BTS, dropped in late May, someone at Queen HQ [...] Read more

The versatile Disney star might be the dying genre’s best hope. Tweet Share Comment Tweet Share Comment When Olivia Rodrigo made her much-anticipated appearance on Saturday Night Live two weekends ago, the focus was, overwhelmingly, on the first song she performed, “Drivers License.” Over the winter, that out-of-nowhere chart-topping debut had instantly made her a [...] Read more

The singer’s previous chart-topper is so huge that it’s actually become a problem for him. Stories about how DJs have turned underdog records into smash hits are legion, but few hitmaking radio pros have as long a legacy as Gary Guthrie. In 1978, when Guthrie was the program director for Louisville pop station WAKY, he [...] Read more

The song’s riff alone threatened to eclipse the rapper’s entire last album. Imagine if TikTok had existed in the late ’60s: Maybe Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” would’ve been a hit sooner. Zep bassist John Paul Jones has claimed that the band’s guitar god Jimmy Page had the immortal riff for their biggest-ever pop hit [...] Read more

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