Dua Lipa sits at #5 on the Billboard Hot 100 with a remix of ‘Levitating’ featuring DaBaby. This is another case of an artist tweaking a song to squeeze out some additional time on the charts.
The original version of ‘Levitating,’ however, didn’t make it to the U.S. chart, though it did land on charts in several other countries. It took the DaBaby remix to get this one on the Hot 100, where it has spent 30 weeks, peaking right here at #5.
Rapper Polo G sits at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘Rapstar,’ a song that debuted at #1 and spent two weeks there before falling three spots.
‘Rapstar’ is a single from Polo G’s upcoming album Hall of Fame, which will be the young rapper’s third full-length release. I’d never heard of him, but that is true of pretty much every rap artist these days.
In the #3 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 is Justin Bieber with ‘Peaches.’ This is the fifth single from his 2021 album Justice.
After five anticipatory single releases, ‘Peaches’ was dropped the same day as Justice and both the song and album debuted at #1. Bieber became the first male solo artist to debut at #1 on both the Hot 100 and Billboard 200 charts simultaneously.
At the #2 spot on this week’s Billboard Hot 100 is ‘Leave the Door Open,’ a smooth R&B jam by Silk Sonic.
If you’re like me, this is the first you’ve heard of Silk Sonic, which you’ll quickly realize is a super-duo formed by Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak. Paak opened for Mars a few years ago and the two began a collaboration that culminated in the surprise drop of this song and a promise of a future album.
I last posted an installment of my ‘What the Kids Are Listening To’ series more than a year ago, before the coronavirus had even reached U.S. soil. The final song back then was The Weeknd’s ‘Blinding Lights,’ sitting at #15 prior to the release of his album After Hours.
‘Blinding Lights’ is at #11 now, after setting a record by becoming the first song in history to spend a full year in Billboard’s Top 10. It holds the record for the most weeks spent in the Top 5, Top 10, Top 20 and Top 40. If only the rest of the world could have had as rewarding a year as that song.
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