Today we throw back to the week of April 24, 1993, and the most popular white reggae song of all time — Snow’s ‘Informer.’
This borderline incomprehensible track was written by the Canadian artist (real name Darrin Kenneth O’Brien) after he was jailed on charges of attempted murder. The song is a diatribe against the titular snitches who put him behind bars, and seemingly promises violent retribution (Snow pantomimes firing a gun in the video while singing “I lick he boom-boom down”).
It’s week two of Throwback Weekends, and rather than go into all the parameters again I’ll just dive in to the music (you can read the guidelines for these weekends on last week’s post if you’d like).
Today we’re throwing back to the week of April 23, 1983, when English pop band Dexys Midnight Runners topped the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘Come On Eileen.’ This is a classic one-hit wonder in the States, though the band had a decent number of hits in their home country.
We have two more repeats at #11 and #12 on this week’s Billboard Hot 100.
Morgan Wallen has his second track in the top 11 with ‘You Proof,’ a bro country anthem that predates his 36-track opus.
And Harry Styles’ ‘As It Was‘ continues its chart dominance, still hanging on at #12 a full year after it debuted at #1. This song spent a total of 15 weeks in the top spot, becoming the fourth longest-running #1 in Hot 100 history, and the longest-running by a solo artist.
At #9 on the Billboard Hot 100 we have the first song I’ve already featured on the blog — Taylor Swift’s ‘Anti-Hero.’ I didn’t do the song any justice at the time, sliding it in without comment as a last-minute substitution during a disrupted theme week. I did give it another mention during my countdown of all the tracks on Swift’s Midnight.
Moving on, the #10 song on this week’s chart is the delightful ‘Players’ by singer/rapper Coi Leray. This song samples Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s 1982 hip-hop classic ‘The Message‘ to deliver a very different sort of message, namely that “girls is players too.”
Remixes are the order of the day on the back half of the top ten this week on the Billboard Hot 100. In the eighth spot, Nigerian singer Rema is joined by Selena Gomez for a new take on his song ‘Calm Down.’
In its original form, this song did well in Europe in early 2022, prompting the team-up with Gomez to attract an American audience. The new version was released last August and has spent 30 weeks on the chart, peaking at its current position.
Meet Me In Montauk 