In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
Took him long enough. For the better part of a decade, Drake circled the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 like a hungry shark. He got in there a couple of times, but only as a guest on two Rihanna songs. On his own, Drake got as far as #2 twice, and he launched a premature public celebration before his 2015 hit “Hotline Bling” stalled out in the runner-up spot. (It’s a 5.) Drake wanted that #1 spot bad, and he tried just about everything in his considerable arsenal to capture it.
Long before he had a #1 hit of his own, Drake was easily the biggest name in all of rap music, and he was up near the top of the pop heap, too. He was a polymath who could play around in different genres but who always sounded like himself, and he commanded vast audiences. The only time that I ever went to Coachella was 2015, when Drake was the undisputed main attraction of the entire weekend. During Drake’s headlining set, only one other person walked onstage: surprise guest Madonna, who sang a couple of songs, gave Drake a lapdance, and shoved her tongue down his throat. (As she left the stage, Drake theatrically wiped off his mouth and asked, “What the fuck was that?” By the time I made it back to my rental car, that moment was already a meme.) I watched this guy control a crowd of 100,000 dazed, exhausted revelers all by himself; it was really something. When you can do that, you don’t necessarily need a #1 hit, but Drake wanted one anyway.
In his quest to reach #1, Drake did all kinds of things. He sang. He rapped. He sing-rapped. He rap-sang. He tried R&B, trap, boom-bap, indie-pop, dancehall, hyphy, synthpop, bounce, smartypants dance music, and various combinations thereof. One thing that Drake did not try was the Max Martin/Dr. Luke maximalist turbo-pop that was running the charts in those days. Drake developed his own aesthetic, a moody and sleek tasteful-minimal thing that had very little to do with the pop song-machine. Drake wanted to conquer the pop charts on his own terms, and he finally succeeded, making the biggest hit of summer 2016. Turns out he just needed a one dance.
who got that a one dance?
— dr. jay, ph. d. Basketball Ethics (@itsashameabtjay) February 2, 2024
Really, technology just needed to catch up to Drake. In the first half of the ’10s, Drake sold tons of downloads and got tons of radio play, but he truly became a king in the streaming era. Drake was made for streaming. His restrained-aesthete style might’ve kept his tracks from exploding on the radio, but they always worked as vibe-setting background music, stuff that you could put on if you didn’t want to pay too much attention to what you were hearing. When streaming became the center of the pop world, you couldn’t keep Drake out of the #1 spot, and we’re about to see so much of him in this column.
Unfortunately, that means that the Drake we’ll cover in this column is mostly the post-peak version of Drake. His most innovative, exciting, generally gratifying records tend to be the ones that he made when he was exploring and figuring his sound out. I didn’t take Drake seriously when he first emerged on the international scene, and I was annoyed at Lil Wayne for foisting this Canadian soap-opera kid upon me. But by the time he made 2011’s Take Care, still his best album, I couldn’t deny that Drake had tapped into something. He could rap hard when he wanted, but he excelled at flaunting his softer side, getting elegantly befuddled over the girls in his life and his own emotional shortcomings. Over the years, that approach hardened, ossified, and turned into schtick. Drake became the creepy grown man in the club, constantly bitching about the girls who won’t text him back right away. He became exhausting.
The Drake of “One Dance” is not exhausting. “One Dance” launched Drake’s 2016 blockbuster Views, an album that I found just numbingly boring and indulgent. But “One Dance” was one of the rare moments on that record where Drake still sounded like he was discovering something. From the beginning, Drake’s curious ear has always been one of his greatest weapons. He’s notorious for jumping on emerging trends just as they’re starting to explode, turning exciting new rappers and singers into supporting players in the ongoing Drake psychodrama. That tendency, the so-called Drake Effect, has undoubtably helped a lot of careers, but it’s also reinforced the idea that Drake is the permanent center of the rap universe, the star around which everything else revolves. The Drake Effect can be a good thing or a bad one. On “One Dance,” it worked out.
“One Dance” is a true international record — a hybrid of a bunch of styles that are themselves hybrids of other styles. The bones of “One Dance” almost predate Drake’s entire career. In 2008, when Drake was still acting on Degrassi and just easing his way into Lil Wayne’s orbit, Kyla Smith, a London woman who worked teaching English as a second language, released “Do You Mind,” a song about a serious crush. (When Kyla was born, Michael Sembello’s “Maniac” was the #1 song in America. In the UK, it was UB40’s “Red Red Wine.”) Working with producer Errol “Paleface” Reid, Kyla recorded “Do You Mind,” a winding and insinuating track that belonged to the UK dance subgenre known as bassline. Paleface was half of a duo called Crazy Cousinz, and they remixed the track, moving it into another dance subgenre, this one known as funky house.
I don’t know shit about dick when it comes to these little club micro-genres; I’m just repeating what I’ve heard. But “Do You Mind” is a great song. It’s hard to separate the track from “One Dance” when I didn’t hear it in its moment, but “Do You Mind” has a lot of the streamlined-but-twitchy R&B smoothness of UK garage. There’s other stuff in there, too — Latin percussion, dancehall bass-tones, flirty insouciance. “Do You Mind” was a minor UK hit, peaking at #48 over there. When they were making the track, Kyla and Paleface fell in love. Kyla’s music career never really took off. She and Paleface got married; she’s Kyla Reid now. They moved out of London and started a family. Then she got a call about a Drake sample. She didn’t believe it at first, and who could blame her?
Drake loved “Do You Mind.” For a few years, it was a song that he and his friends would play at their own parties. Drake brought the idea of sampling “Do You Mind” to Paul Jefferies, the Canadian producer known as Ninteen85. Nineteen85 worked on a bunch of Drake’s biggest, hits, including “Hotline Bling,” and he turned that sample into a beat. Around the same time, Drake met Ayodeji Ibrahim Balogun, the Nigerian star known as Wizkid. Wizkid grew up in a huge family in Lagos, sang in a group called the Glorious Five as a kid, and dropped out of college to work on music. (When Wizkid was born, the #1 song in America was New Kids On The Block’s “Step By Step.” I have no idea what it was in Nigeria.)
Starting with his 2009 debut single “Holla At Your Boy,” Wizkid emerged as one of the young stars of Afrobeats, an umbrella term that covers a lot of the pop music coming out of West Africa. Afrobeats fuses various different African styles with Western sounds like dancehall and R&B, and it’s become a force on the Hot 100 in recent years. The sound was pretty new when Wizkid first broke out, but it had a huge international audience. Wizkid won a bunch of Nigerian awards with his 2009 debut album Superstar, and his 2014 follow-up Ayo had appearances from international artists like Akon, Tyga, and Wale, as well as Nigerian torch-bearer Femi Kuti. Ayo also had the Nigerian hit “Ojuelegba.” Drake, a big grime fan, learned about Wizkid through the UK grime star Skepta, the British son of Nigerian immigrants. Drake is a big grime fan who became friendly with Skepta. Together, he and Skepta jumped on a remix of “Ojuelegba.” With that track, Drake found another wave to ride.
“One Dance” came together bit by bit, and lots of people worked on it. Nineteen85 made the initial track from the “Do You Mind” sample, and then the beat made its way to the Pretoria producer DJ Maphorisa, who comes from the South African house subgenre known as amapiano. (There are so many house subgenres around the world.) Wizkid also did some production work on “One Dance,” as did Drake’s regular producer Noah “40” Shebib. In its final version, “One Dance” plays out as a slower, more sensual take on “Do You Mind” — one that doesn’t belong to any genre in particular.
The drum programming on “One Dance” isn’t really the four-four thump of house music. Instead, it’s a genteel version of the dembow riddim, the beat that’s powered virtually every reggaeton record since the genre’s beginning. The lush piano comes from “Do You Mind,” and so does Kyla’s sampled voice, a ghostly stutter that winds prettily through the track. A sparkly guitar riff evokes West African highlife. Eventually, Wizkid shows up, but he’s not really singing. Instead, he’s chanting dance instructions like a dancehall deejay, and his voice, recorded over what sounds like a crackly phone connection, is buried deep in the mix. (For a long time, I figured Wizkid’s vocal, like Kyla’s, came from a sample, but no.) Near the end of the track, everything drops out, and we hear a sudden machine-gun rat-tat-tat. That could be the sign of a sudden build-up or beat-drop, but it’s just a moment, and the lush hip-sway groove comes right back in.
It just sounds cool. “One Dance” doesn’t force its way into your brain. It percolates lightly, casting its own spell. Drake doesn’t rap on “One Dance.” He sings in a lonely, distracted croon, with just a hint of fake patois in his voice. He’s got movie-star-level charisma, and there’s a bit of Dean Martin his his voice — the guy who seems like he’d be a fun hang, no matter how sad and drunk he is. His vocal isn’t too sharp or athletic, but it gets the job done.
Drake’s “One Dance” narrator faces all kinds of turmoil, whether it’s street violence or romantic bickering. He alludes to both. But Drake’s narrator wants to shut all that out and ignore it. He just wants to take that moment to have a one dance with someone and drink his Hennessy until he’s forced to confront reality again. There’s a bit of sadness in his voice, and you can’t really tell whether it’s because the streets are not safe or because he has to wait too long for a reply text. Here and elsewhere, Drake treats both of those things with equal weight. But Drake also sounds smooth enough that a one dance sounds like a good idea. The voices of Kyla and Wizkid fade into the background, almost as if they’re the ones making the songs that Drake wants to dance to.
There is a lot to say about Drake’s most obnoxious tendencies, and lord knows this column will catalog that shit exhaustively. But when Drake finds the right groove on the right day, he knows exactly what to do with it. “One Dance” doesn’t sound like a blockbuster. It’s a quiet, inward jam that still works in just about every situation — a crowded peak-of-the-night club, a mind-numbing morning commute, a workout, a moment of blissful early-evening calm. It sounds good when you’re shopping or cooking dinner, and when it’s over, it fades right away. It’s just a one dance.
“One Dance” is the same kind of smooth-talking pan-genre version of Drake that the world heard on “Hotline Bling,” but I think it’s a way better song. When “Hotline Bling” came out in summer 2015, Drake was building to the release of the new album then known as Views From The 6. (Eventually, that changed to just Views.) Drake had other stuff going on, like What A Time To Be Alive, his 2015 collaborative mixtape with future Number Ones artist Future, but Views was always on the horizon. In January 2016, Drake dropped “Summer Sixteen,” a tough-talking non-album single that was meant to foreshadow the dominant year that Drake was about to have. “Summer Sixteen” was a legitimate hit, debuting #6, but it was just the appetizer. (It’s a 7.)
Drake was worried about releasing a single as fundamentally non-rap as “One Dance,” so he dropped it on the same day as “Pop Style,” his A-list summit meeting with Jay-Z and Kanye West, two names that should be familiar to anyone who reads this column. “Pop Style” is a pretty good song, but West pretty much obliterated Drake on it. When “Pop Style” appeared on Views, the Kanye verse had been removed, and feelings were hurt. On the day that those two songs came out, “Pop Style” seemed like the bigger deal. On the Hot 100, “Pop Style” debuted at #16, with “One Dance” at #21. But “Pop Style” never got any higher, and “One Dance” just kept rising.
Drake never bothered to make a video for “One Dance.” The song didn’t need one. Instead, the track kept growing on its own, becoming a summertime party staple. Drake performed “One Dance” for the first time when he made a guest appearance at a Rihanna show in Toronto, and he sang the song on Saturday Night Live a month later. A week after that SNL, “One Dance” was the #1 song in America. “One Dance” also became Drake’s first #1 hit in the UK, where the track had plenty of cultural resonance. Over there, “One Dance” stayed at #1 for almost 15 weeks, stopping just shy of an all-time record. It topped charts all over the world. For a while, it was the most-streamed song in Spotify history.
With 3.3 billion streams and counting, “One Dance” remains Drake’s biggest track on Spotify. The single went diamond in 2022, and it’s gone platinum one more time since then. “One Dance” set the stage beautifully for Drake to release Views in April 2016. The week that the album came out, Drake had 20 songs in the Hot 100 — the most ever for any artist at that point. The prominence of streaming has made this a much more common thing, and Drake has exceeded that record himself a few times.
Even with that big chart week, Views wasn’t exactly jam-packed with chart hits. It’s a stultifying mood-piece record, not a collection of bangers. “Hotline Bling” appears as the last track on Views, almost as an afterthought, and none of the other songs made the top 10. The dancehall-adjacent “Controlla” peaked at #16, while the Rihanna collab “Too Good” made it to #14. Most of the Views deep cuts wound up in the middle of the charts. Still, Views became the biggest-selling new album in 2016, though it didn’t move enough copies to keep Adele’s 25 from dominating the chart for a second straight year. Views is now octuple platinum, which leaves it tied with Take Care as the biggest album in Drake’s career.
More hits followed in short order. Later in 2016, Drake released “Fake Love,” a persecution-complex singalong that intentionally echoed “Hotline Bling.” (It’s a 5.) That turned out to be the lead single from Drake’s 2017 full-length More Life, which was confusingly marketed not as an album or a mixtape but as a playlist. People were really just trying things back then. If More Life was an album, it would be one of Drake’s best. It’s an overstuffed jumble of genres and hooks, and it hits much more often than it misses. On the twinkly house track “Passionfruit,” Drake managed to tap back into the “One Dance” feeling, and I might like it just a little bit better than “One Dance.” (“Passionfruit” peaked at #8. It’s an 8.)
Pretty soon, Drake would reach the point where every new song’s release became an event. He wasn’t quite there yet, but “One Dance” was a huge step in that direction. “One Dance” didn’t quite have the same effect on Kyla and Wizkid — who, to be fair, are barely even on the song. Kyla appeared on a couple more minor UK hits. The most recent of those was “Hello Mate,” a 2022 single from the funny white grime rapper ArrDee, and that song, like “One Dance” before it, was built on a sample of “Do You Mind.” Wizkid really did become a big star, though I don’t know how much “One Dance” had to do with that. Afrobeats has grown steadily as a commercial presence around the world, and Wizkid is one of its faces. In 2022, he released “Essence,” a collaboration with Tems, another Nigerian singer who will appear as a guest on a Drake collaboration. When Justin Bieber jumped on an “Essence” remix, the song reached #9 on the Hot 100. (It’s a 6.)
In the years after “One Dance,” Drake became a constant and borderline oppressive presence on the Hot 100. For a long time, it seemed as if his run of #1 hits would never end. Thanks to some dramatic events earlier this year, Drake’s long imperial era might be over; we’ll have to see. In any case, Drake will return to this space again and again. Most of those times, we won’t be talking about songs as good as “One Dance.”
GRADE: 8/10
BONUS BEATS: The aforementioned Justin Bieber, someone who’s been in this column a bunch of times and who will be back a bunch more, recorded a “One Dance” remix in 2016. Drake never released it. Maybe the different record labels couldn’t come to an arrangement, or maybe this was just Drake peacocking about having this Bieber remix that he didn’t even need. Either way, Drake just played the track once on his OVO Sound streaming radio show and then let it go, and it exists as an internet curio today. Here it is:
THE NUMBER TWOS: Fifth Harmony and Ty Dolla $ign’s sweatily hypnotic plinky-plonk sex incantation “Work From Home” peaked at #4 behind “One Dance.” It’s a 10, and not just because I was already working from home when the song came out.
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now on paperback via Hachette Books. You need a one book. Buy it here.
