Guess who has the #6 song on Billboard’s Hot 100 this week? If you said Drake, you win a prize! ‘God’s Plan’ is his third track in the top six. I featured it a couple of months back.
At #7 is Juice WRLD with ‘Lucid Dreams,’ a heartbreak song driven by a sample of Sting’s ‘Shape of My Heart.’ Or, as Juice WLRD put it, “my producer Nick Mira used a sample from the band Sting, and I was like ‘Wow, I gotta really take off on this.'”
Drake makes his second appearance in the top five with ‘Nice For What,’ a song I’ve already featured (the last time I looked at the charts). That song, like Maroon 5’s ‘Girls Like You,’ features a video full of cameos by female celebrities.
At #5 is a female on her way to becoming famous enough to appear in one of those videos. Ella Mai, an English singer-songwriter, is the first woman since Beyoncé (in 2012) to top the Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop, R&B/Hip-Hop and Adult R&B charts.
Cardi B shows up again in Billboard’s #2 spot, in support of Maroon 5 on the song ‘Girl Like You.’ Maroon 5 is such a consistent hit machine at this point it’s almost silly. No other band churns out hooky pop tunes like this one. They have had 29 songs on the Hot 100, 14 in the Top Ten and three at #1.
‘Girls Like You’ is a good song but an even better video. Edited to look like one unbroken take, the video puts Adam Levine in the middle of a room as a succession of notable women appear and disappear behind him. Gal Gadot, Camila Cabello, Ellen DeGeneres, Tiffany Haddish, Aly Raisman and on and on. Here’s a list of all 26 women in the order they appear.
‘Despacito’ was the undisputed Song of the Summer last year. Could Cardi B’s ‘I Like It’ be the second track sung primarily in Spanish to claim that title?
It’s a catchy multi-cultural hodge-podge, with a “trap salsa” beat, a prominent sample of a 60s boogaloo song and rapped verses by Cardi along with Puerto Rico’s Bad Bunny and Colombia’s J Balvin.
Welcome to the latest installment of ‘What the Kids are Listening to,’ wherein I post the songs currently topping Billboard’s Hot 100.
In the #1 position is an artist whose name you will hear a lot over the next two weeks. Drake is dominating the charts in historic fashion. He has had at least one song on this chart for a record eight straight years, and right now he has — wait for it — 16 of them. Most artists are lucky to have that many in a career. He has them on a random Monday in July.
Meet Me In Montauk 