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.
In retrospect, it’s obvious. In retrospect, it’s always obvious. The game shifts, and the world acts like this was always going to happen, like the outcome was preordained fate. Maybe it was. In the moment, though, it never feels that way. In the moment, new developments seem to arrive out of nowhere, even though they almost never do.
For the Migos’ “Bad And Boujee” to finish its long climb to #1, lots of things had to fall into place. Streaming services had to change the way that people consume music, turning radio and downloads into obsolete relics. The vast and extremely-online audience for aggressive street-rap had to make its presence known, adapting to the music business’ new focus on streaming services before any other genre’s fans caught up. A years-long surge of excitement in the Atlanta rap underground had to bring a squad of new voices to the fore. And one already-great rap group had to make a perfect song, transforming regional and internet buzz into viral-phenomenon status.
All of those things happened, and now “Bad And Boujee” is written into pop history. Today, it looks like destiny. In the moment, it was an exciting surprise. Sometime around Christmas 2016, I realized that I was absolutely addicted to “Bad And Boujee,” that I needed to hear the song at least 10 times a day to function. That happens sometimes. It had already happened with a couple of Migos tracks. Often, it can feel like I’m the only one who falls in love with a song like that. In the case of “Bad And Boujee,” it didn’t feel that way. The entire world didn’t fall in love with “Bad And Boujee,” but enough people did. A great song gained steam until the buzz fed itself. Suddenly, a frantically creative and proudly unrestrained rap group, one who’d never come anywhere near the top 10 and who’d never chased pop-crossover money, had the #1 song in America. Sometimes — not often enough, but sometimes — things happen the way they should.
When I first heard them, they sounded like absolute chaos — this riot of spluttery-stuttery staccato voices tumbling all over one another, presenting drug-dealer lingo as speedrun nursery-rhyme. The energy was frantic and infectious, and it never relented. The beats were springy, and the voices were different from one another, but they built their lines from the same cadences — a chaotic but intricate three-man weave where where content was secondary to the percussive power of the voices themselves. On their choruses, they’d sometimes repeat the same word over and over, putting stresses on different syllables until meaning disappeared, leaving only the pitter-patter of word-sounds falling like rain. You couldn’t hope to understand what was happening; you could only submit to the freewheeling tangle of the thing.
When you kept listening, patterns emerged, and so did personalities. The voices all sounded similar at first, but then the fuzzy shapes sharpened into defined edges. I started to get the old Sleater-Kinney feeling where you fully lock in on each participant’s contributions, one at a time, until you can fully appreciate what all three of them bring to the whole. First it was Quavo, flashy and playful and overconfident, with singsong melodies that seemed to arrive and disappear at will. Then it was Offset, the one with the deep and authoritative voice and the outlaw backstory. It took too long, but then I came to appreciate Takeoff, the one who seemed shy and quiet and half-embarrassed in interviews but whose gruff and virtuosic baritone yammer worked as the engine on so many Migos tracks.
I wrote a lot about the Migos over the years, and I developed a bad habit of pitting those voices against one another, when the overlapping totality — the way that they seemed to be speaking their own private language, cheering each other one and finishing one another’s sentences — was what truly made them special. Takeoff isn’t even on “Bad And Boujee,” something that became a big sticking point within the group later on. Writing about the song’s miraculous magnetism in the moment, I made too many jokes at Takeoff’s expense, referring to him as nobody’s favorite Migo. Today, Takeoff is my favorite Migo, and he’s the one who’s no longer with us. I miss him terribly. I took him for granted. I took all of them for granted.
Even though Takeoff isn’t on “Bad And Boujee,” let’s start out with him. Kirsnick Khari Ball was the youngest and most taciturn of the Migos, but he was the one who came to rap first. (When Takeoff was born, All-4-One’s “I Swear” was the #1 song in America.) If you listen to the other two, Takeoff was the one who convinced all of them to rap together and who figured out the skip-and-dip cadence that would become known as the Migos flow. Takeoff spent most of his life in the northern Atlanta area of Lawrenceville, and he got deep into the art of rapping and making beats as a teenager while the two older Migos were on the football field or in the streets.
Quavo was technically Takeoff’s uncle, but he was only three years older, and the two of them really grew up as brothers. (Gloria Estefan’s “Coming Out Of The Dark” was the #1 song in America when Quavo was born.) Quavious Keyate Marshall was born in Athens, Georgia, but his family moved to Lawrenceville when he was a kid. Quavo, garrulous and outgoing, played quarterback on his high school football team, but he dropped out before graduation. As teenagers, Quavo and Takeoff had a rap duo called Polo Club, and they performed together at their local skating rink before adding Offset to the mix.
Kiari Kendrell Cephus was a wide receiver on Quavo’s football team. (When Offset was born, Michael Jackson’s “Black Or White” was the #1 song in America.) Before that, Offset was a little-kid dancer, and he appeared in videos from Whitney Houston and TLC. When the Migos got famous, Quavo and Takeoff referred to Offset as their cousin, but he’s not a blood relative. Instead, he’s a childhood friend who was always over at Quavo’s mom’s house when they were kids. Offset became a father when he was 17, and he was determined not to be a deadbeat dad like his own father. As a result of his own wilder tendencies and his need to support a young family, he took to breaking into people’s houses.
Soon after Quavo and Takeoff recruited Offset to join Polo Club, the trio changed its name to Migos — partly a reference to The Three Amigos and partly a nod to the Mexican cartels that used Lawrenceville as a drug distribution hub. The Migos released their home-recorded debut mixtape Juug Season in 2011. Around the same time, Offset got a felony conviction for possessing stolen property. For much of the Migos’ rise, Offset was absent, doing time on a series of parole violations. Offset was around when Migos recorded “Bando,” the song that became their regional breakthrough, but when its no-budget video made the rounds in Atlanta rap circles, he was locked up.
“Bando” is a song about selling and cooking drugs in abandoned houses, and it works as a rough draft for the group’s choppy and insistent style. All three Migos sound at least a little bit like Gucci Mane, the Atlanta trap figurehead discussed in my recent “Black Beatles” column. The beat, from a producer named Juvie, sounds a lot like Gucci’s go-to producer Zaytoven. Atlanta rapper Yung LA showed the “Bando” video to Zaytoven, assuming that Zaytoven had produced it. (Yung LA’s only Hot 100 hit, the great 2008 T.I./Young Dro collab “Ain’t I,” peaked at #47.) Zaytoven, in turn, brought the song to Gucci Mane, who summoned Quavo and Takeoff to his Brick Factory studio.
In my man Joe Coscarelli’s Rap Capital, a great book about the largely self-contained Atlanta rap universe, there’s a story about Quavo and Takeoff, seeking to impress Gucci, showing up to Brick Factory with fake jewelry on. Gucci allegedly took two of the chains off his own neck and placed them on the young Migos, and he also set aside $45,000 for the three Migos to share. (Offset’s third went to a lawyer.) When the two Migos left the studio, Gucci noticed that they’d thrown their fake jewelry in a trash can. The Migos have disputed that story, but print the legend.
Rap Capital has stories about Quavo and Takeoff going into rap-star boot camp at the Hit Factory, recording new music at a rapid pace and developing a reputation in Atlanta rap circles. They attracted the attention of Gucci’s former manager Kevin “Coach K” Lee, who was in the midst of launching a new music venture with veteran street figure Pierre “P” Thomas. Coach got Gucci’s blessing to sign the Migos to the new venture, which became known as Quality Control Music. Quavo and Takeoff were adamant that they wouldn’t do business without their incarcerated comrade Takeoff, and Coach and P decided that they could make it work. In return, the Migos vowed that they would remain together as a unit, that they would not break up. They kept that promise for a long time.
With Quality Control behind them, Quavo and Takeoff shot a bigger-budget “Bando” video, filling it with friends in “Free Offset” shirts. At the same time, they got to work on 2013’s YRN (Yung Rich N***as), the first mixtape that they made with any kind of backing. YRN had some notable guest appearances — Gucci Mane, Trinidad James, Soulja Boy — and it worked as the larger world’s introduction to the Migos. YRN was my first exposure to the group, and I loved it. The way those three guys bounced their voices off of each other was joyous and distinctive. “Flow” is really the wrong word for the Migos flow. The voices don’t swirl along like water; they do something much more jagged and disjointed. Their quick repetition was hypnotic, and their one-for-all spirit, with everyone ad-libbing and encouraging everyone else, burst with excitement. It reminded me of Das EFX, the early-’90s duo whose iggity-iggity style inspired a million imitators in their day. As with Das EFX, a whole lot of other people started rapping like the Migos soon after.
People who know more than me about musical notation have written about how Migos rapped in triplets. (David Drake had a great Complex piece about the evolution of the Migos flow, but the internet seems to have swallowed it up.) The Migos’ delivery wasn’t an altogether new approach. Rappers had been using triplets since the ’80s, and the late Three 6 Mafia member Lord Infamous popularized that style in the ’90s. Gucci Mane occasionally employed the triplet flow, and the Migos might’ve picked it up from him. But the Migos built an entire style out of those triplets, using it to convey icy exuberance and closed-loop camaraderie. The Migos flow soon became a popular rap technique in Atlanta and elsewhere; you can hear echoes of it on a track like Desiigner’s “Panda.” Still, nobody did it like the Migos.
In Rap Capital, Joe Coscarelli captures the Migos’ songwriting style at work — the three guys, holed up at a Manhattan studio and hiding out from their handlers during an impromptu session, figuring out what to do with a Zaytoven beat. They each head into the studio, wordlessly establishing a cadence and then figuring out what they want to say, one line at a time, as the engineer cues up the same sections of track again and again. That recording approach sounds boring and painstaking, and it’s much more suited to free-associative shit-talk than any kind of structured or consistent songwriting. But when the end result comes together, it has a momentum all its own.
Shortly after the release of YRN, the Migos were surprise guests during DJ Drama’s set at Birthday Bash, the Atlanta rap station Hot 107.9’s annual all-star concert. Backstage, they met ascendant superstar Drake, a fervent fan of regional rap scenes all over the planet. Drake told the Migos how much he loved YRN, and they suggested a collaboration. Soon afterward, Drake rapped on a remix of the Zaytoven-produced Migos song “Versace,” and the Migos became perhaps the trademark example of the Drake Effect, the phenomenon in which Drake continually latches onto rising rappers and jumps on their tracks, validating those rappers while also burnishing his own reputation as a talent incubator. When it works right, Drake can help make new stars, though his stamp of approval always threatens to turn those new stars into supporting players in the larger Drake narrative.
In this case, the Drake Effect worked out just right. Thanks to the Drake remix, “Versace” got airplay across the country, though DJs too often cut the song off after the Drake verse. In the years that followed, Drake continued to record with the Migos, and he brought them out on an arena tour at one point. Quality Control put up a few hundred thousand dollars to film a lavish “Versace” video at a rented Miami mansion, with a whole lot of girls and a leopard on a leash. The song just barely grazed the Hot 100, peaking at #99. Still, the Migos were on their way.
After “Versace,” the Migos cranked out a constant stream of mixtapes — 14 in a three-year period — as Quality Control worked out a deal with Lyor Cohen’s Atlantic-distributed label 300 Entertainment. There was a ton of excitement surrounding the Migos and the booming Atlanta rap underground in general. In spring 2014, I saw the Migos play a packed SXSW showcase. The show was supposed to be the debut of Low Pros, the duo of dance DJ A-Trak and trap producer Lex Luger. Instead, it turned out to be a parade of next-generation rap stars, one after the other: Que, PeeWee Longway, Young Thug, Travis Scott, YG. Some of those names faded into obscurity; others will soon appear in this column. Not all of them are from Atlanta, but all of them seemed to be part of the same wave. In the middle of that parade, the three Migos stood shoulder-to-shoulder onstage, careening through verses with the same focus that they brought to their mixtapes.
Shortly after that SXSW performance, the Migos reportedly got into a high-speed highway gunfight with another car in Miami. The trio was never media-trained, and they remained entrenched in street life even as their music career took off. Police stormed into a disastrous 2015 performance at Georgia Southern University, arresting all three group members and their entourage for weed and gun possession. That resulted in another probation violation for Offset, who got into more trouble for beating someone up in jail. Still, 300 wanted an album, so the Migos released their proper commercial debut Yung Rich Nation in 2015. Offset wasn’t around to record some of the album or to promote any of it, and it flopped, even though it sent a few tracks into the Hot 100. I love “Fight Night,” a propulsive Takeoff-driven track that peaked at #69. Until “Bad And Boujee,” that was the Migos’ highest-charting single.
Offset’s incarceration and the failure of Yung Rich Nation both hit the group hard. At that point, there was so much Migos music that it was easy to take the group for granted. The actual album release seemed sloppy and haphazard, and I thought it came out too late to capitalize on their buzz. Still, Migos had mystique. Online, people loved to make jokes about how they were better than the Beatles. Their associate Skippa Da Flippa popularized the dab, the kid-friendly dance move that looked like sneezing into your elbow, and the Migos capitalized on it with the #87 hit “Look At My Dab” and their Dab Of Ranch potato-chip flavor. For a while, little kids were dabbing at every elementary school in America. My son owned a shirt that said “Dab-A-Saurus Rex,” with a picture of a dinosaur hitting the move. Hillary Clinton attempted to dab on Ellen. Migos were impacting popular culture, bit it’s hard to properly monetize something like that.
While Migos tried to figure out their next step, another mini-generation of Atlanta rappers arrived on the scene. Some of them didn’t even come from Atlanta. One of them was Symere Bysil Woods, the diminutive and creaky-voiced figure known as Lil Uzi Vert. (When Uzi was born, TLC’s “Waterfalls” was the #1 song in America.) Like the late TLC member Left Eye, Uzi is a Philadelphia-born rapper whose career took off after they moved to Atlanta. Uzi was a hyperactive kid who dropped out of school, got kicked out of their house, and started making glitchy, very-online rap music as a teenager in the early ’10s. Their wild-eyed expressionist spirit and style were reminiscent of Young Thug. Atlanta fixtures DJ Drama and Don Cannon, Philadelphia transplants themselves, took note of Uzi’s SpaceGhostPurrp-produced underground track “White Shit,” and they signed Uzi to their Atlantic imprint Generation Now.
In 2015, Lil Uzi Vert was part of a much-discussed class of XXL Freshmen, and they released their Luv Is Rage mixtape, a big underground hit. I thought they sucked, but I thought they sucked in ways that were kind of fun and interesting. Uzi made a big show of trolling old-guard rap types and claiming that their biggest influences were punks and alt-rockers. They dressed like they’d gone Supermarket Sweep on a Hot Topic in 2000, and they rapped in a nasal singsong honk that definitely owed something to the previous generation’s Warped Tour emo. That style struck a chord with people much younger than me. Eventually, I started to come around on it.
Uzi’s 2016 mixtape Lil Uzi Vert Vs. The World sent a couple of tracks into the Hot 100; the bigger of them, “You Was Right,” peaked at #40. In retrospect, that’s a pretty good song. That same year, they also released The Perfect LUV tape, which included the Offset collaboration “Of Course We Ghetto Flowers.” (Atlanta upstart Playboi Carti, also featured on that track, will eventually appear in this column in a guest-rapper capacity.) “Bad And Boujee” started off as another Lil Uzi Vert/Offset collab. Offset hadn’t been around when the Migos hit many of their career milestones, and he was still catching up to his two partners as a songwriter. But when he came up with the “Bad And Boujee” hook, Offset knew that he had something.
The “Bad And Boujee” beat came from two different producers. One of them was Metro Boomin, a young St. Louis native who’d quickly became one of the biggest beatmakers in the Atlanta rap world. Metro will eventually appear in this column as a lead artist, so I won’t get too deep into his story here, but he found an important early ally in Future, another future Number Ones artist. Metro figured out an eerie, spacious take on the Atlanta trap sound, and his tracks had a cinematic grandeur that elevated his collaborators. He already had a bunch of hits to his credit before “Bad And Boujee,” but none of them ever quite crossed over to the top 10 of the Hot 100. (A couple came close. The 2014 iLoveMakonnen/Drake collab “Tuesday” and the 2015 Future/Drake collab “Jumpman” both peaked at #12. Uzi’s “You Was Right” is a Metro production, too.)
On “Bad And Boujee,” Metro’s co-producer was G Koop, a much older white guy who comes from Boston. He graduated from Berklee College Of Music and started out as a jazz musician, but he really came into his own in the late ’00s, collaborating with Jake One, a producer with both underground and mainstream rap credentials. Koop had an important role: As a session-musician wizard, he could recreate the sound of old records when samples of those old records proved impossible or expensive to clear. That ability led to G Koop landing credits on tracks from artists like MF DOOM, Atmosphere, Nelly, Drake, and Rihanna. By 2016, Koop became known for something else: making his own instrumental music, which he then sent to producers so that they could sample it. He sent one sample pack to Metro Boomin, and that’s how he got co-writer and co-producer credit on “Bad And Boujee.”
The “Bad And Boujee” beat is stark and slow, full of zero-gravity horror-movie chords and slow-rotating keyboard riffs. The drum programming and the globs of bass are relatively minimal and quiet, and they leave plenty of room for voices to cut through. When Offset got ahold of that track, he played around with it for a while before coming up with the line that brought everything together. In his halting but assured baritone, Offset muttered, “Raindrop, drop-top, smokin’ on cookie in the hotbox.” Those lines, spoken the way Offset speaks them, have a cellar door-type appeal that’s difficult to quantify. It just sounds good. You hear Offset say that, and you want to hear him say it again.
In some versions of the story, Offset and Lil Uzi Vert were going to put out “Bad And Boujee” as a collaboration. But once the demo started making the rounds, Quavo jumped on it, too. It’s not entirely clear why Takeoff never recorded a verse for the song, but these things happen sometimes. In any case, Offset is the song’s center of attention. The intro swirls ominously for a couple of seconds, and when the drums kick in, Offset locks right in with them. His voice merges with the rhythm track, but he also stands apart from the drums — pushing them around, finding new pockets, exuding dank cool everywhere. His voice speeds recklessly, but he also sounds matter-of-fact enough that you can imagine his heartrate never changes, except once. In the first moments of his verse, Offset barks out his name and then a series of hoots: “Offset! Whoo whoo whoo whoo!” From there, the flossy menace of his lyrics — the machine guns he’s got stashed, the money so heavy that it leaves his back aching — takes a backseat to the magnetic force of his delivery.
If you go by the title and single cover art, “Bad And Boujee” is about a girl who’s both attractive and stuck-up; that’s why the the Migos bring a bunch of well-dressed model-looking women into a housing project and a takeout chicken joint in the video. But Migos tracks are almost never about any one particular subject. Instead, these fancy ladies are status symbols. So are the Migos’ street connections, guns, cars, jewelry, and crack-cooking abilities. But if you get too caught up in the lyrics, you’re missing the point. What really matters is the way Offset’s voice confidently trips over the track, building his own fractal geometry inside the track’s architecture. He sounds cool. That’s the point.
For more than two minutes, “Bad And Boujee” belongs entirely to Offset. When Quavo arrives on the track, he finds his own pockets. Offset and Quavo both rap in versions of the then-standard Migos flow, but those versions are not the same. Quavo starts delivering his lines in a syrupy chant. He gradually speeds up, but his accents are all on different parts of his lines. After the Offset verse and hook, Quavo almost sounds like he’s fighting upstream, and that sounds cool, too. Even when Quavo’s delivery reaches full speed, he’s still mellow and conversational, with just a hint of melody. Parts of Quavo’s verse could work as hooks unto themselves: “Unh! Yeah! That way! Float on the track like a Segway! Yeah! That way! I used to trap by the Subway!”
Offset and Quavo don’t pull any of the old, obvious rap-crossover moves on “Bad And Boujee.” They don’t compromise their lyrics for mass consumption. There are plenty of of cusswords and references to sex and guns. Just as importantly, the lingo and local references are dense. If you don’t understand everything that they say, you can look it up online, or you can just let it all drift past you. Both approaches work. It’s fun to consider all the little cultural references that they weave in there: Slick Rick, Kid Cudi, Nutty Buddies, Boobie Miles from Friday Night Lights (movie, not show). I’ll never understand why Quavo hits Macy Gray with a stray homophobic epithet, but the track keeps moving quickly enough that I never think about it for long. One favorite line: “I’m always hangin’ with shooters/ Might be posted somewhere secluded/ Still be playin’ with pots and pans, call me Quavo Ratatouille.” He says it like “Rat-a-toolie,” too. Another favorite line: “Bitch, I’m a dog, roof!”
Things change when Lil Uzi Vert arrives. Here’s their opening line: “Yah yah yah yah yah!” Typing it out doesn’t do it justice. Uzi says that in a high-pitched neener-neener voice, like a little kid who’s annoying you on purpose. That’s always been part of the Uzi proposition. They’re a little stinker, and their musical decisions obey no rules. Instead, they offer trollish pipsqueak charisma, and “Bad And Boujee” is the moment that it started working on me.
The first time I heard the song, I couldn’t stand Uzi’s verse. But hit songs have a way of working themselves into your heart. I heard “Bad And Boujee” a million times, and I probably knew every word to Uzi’s verse before I understood that I liked it. That verse is the dumbest kind of fun: “Ooh! Ooh! Now she wan’ fuck with my crew!” I don’t know what to tell you. That shithead-singsong style works on me now. I wish we had a Takeoff verse instead, but you review the song you have, not the song you want.
“Bad And Boujee” arrived just as Migos’ bosses at Quality Control were trying to break away from 300 Entertainment to move to mainline Atlantic instead. The effort was ultimately successful, but it was time-consuming and expensive, and they needed a win. “Bad And Boujee” was that win, and they knew it when they first heard it. Rap Capital has the story of the song’s rollout, an impressive series of marketing decisions. Quality Control posted “Bad And Boujee” to SoundCloud first to build buzz, and then they gave it a wide release on Labor Day weekend 2016. The rationale: Rap stations use DJ mixes on holiday weekends, and mix-show DJs are more likely than station managers to throw a brand-new song into rotation. The Migos members also hit the Atlanta strip-club circuit, promoting the track to club DJs and dancers — a time-honored method of breaking a song in the Atlanta rap world.
The “Bad And Boujee” video arrived in October, and it’s a classic. Directed by Migos associate Daps, the clip shows the rappers in their element, dressed impeccably and draped in gold while smoke billows all around them in seemingly-perpetual slow motion. When Lil Uzi Vert arrives, they’re popping wheelies on a four-wheeler in a Philly-style phalanx of dirtbikes, with future Number Ones artist Travis Scott lurking in the background. Uzi used to always talk about how much they loved Marilyn Manson, and they wore a Manson shirt in the “Bad And Boujee” video. This kicked off a chain of events that led to pre-cancellation Marilyn Manson performing at Travis Scott’s Astroworld festival — not the one where all those people died — and post-cancellation Marilyn Manson posing next to Kanye West at one of West’s stadium-sized Donda listening functions.
As “Bad And Boujee” made its way out into the world, one particular meme followed. On Twitter, people had fun with Offset’s “raindrop, drop-top” line.” As in: “Raindrop, drop-top, Hillary deleted 30,000 emails off her laptop.” Or: “Raindrop, drop-top, there’s 38 cds of kids bop.” Most of those tweets are hard to find now, but there’s a helpful Buzzfeed list immortalizing a bunch of them. Those tweets didn’t help pad out the “Bad And Boujee” chart numbers the way the Mannequin Challenge videos did for “Black Beatles,” but they showed that the song was in the cultural conversation, and they increased its reach. In the days ahead, you’d have a much easier time reaching #1 if someone could make a meme out of your song.
RAIN DROP
DROP TOPThis trend really needs to STOP STOP.
— Hayes Grier (@HayesGrier) December 27, 2016
In December, the Migos went to Nigeria, and they performed “Bad And Boujee” in a packed venue in Lagos, with the whole crowd shouting along with every word. Migos’ DJ filmed and posted that moment, and I watched that thing so many times — not for any journalistic or critical reason but just because it always made me happy. It still does.
After Christmas, “Bad And Boujee” sprinted to the top of the Hot 100, finally dislodging “Black Beatles” and showing that Atlanta street-rap’s pop-chart takeover was pretty much complete. Before “Bad And Boujee” officially reached #1, but after it locked up the position, Donald Glover shouted out the song in a very visible context. Glover created and starred in Atlanta, a surrealist sitcom set within the Atlanta rap universe, and he cast the Migos as exaggerated versions of their already-exaggerated rap personas on an early episode. The show was a huge critical hit, and Glover won Best Comedy Series at the Golden Globes. In his acceptance speech, Glover said, “I really wanna thank the Migos, not for being in the show but for making ‘Bad And Boujee.’ Like, that’s the best song ever.” Once the Migos got that unexpected endorsement, bigger offers started rolling in. (In his Childish Gambino alter-ego, Donald Glover will eventually appear in this column.)
In the months that followed, Southern rappers like Future and Kodak Black would send uncompromising tracks into the top 10. Lil Uzi Vert was one of the immediate beneficiaries. They recorded “XO Tour Llif3” while on the road as the Weeknd’s opening act, and they posted it without ceremony as a loose track on SoundCloud. With its eerie music-box melody and its crushingly memorable hook — “Push me to the edge/ All my friends are dead” — the song gained its own steam and eventually went all the way to #7. (It’s an 8.)
The Migos released Culture, their second proper album, in January 2017, and it’s really good. Eventually, Culture went platinum, and “Bad And Boujee” went quadruple platinum. Offset started dating Cardi B, who was already getting famous as a kind of human meme-generator and who would soon find her way to full-on pop stardom. (She’ll be in this column a bunch of times.) Soon enough, Cardi and Offset got married and had a few kids, including a daughter named Kulture. They divorced earlier this year. The Migos followed “Bad And Boujee” with “T-Shirt,” a mesmerizing track that has one of my all-time favorite music videos. It peaked at #19.
For a while, the Migos were inescapable. They recorded so much music. They said yes to corny things — commercials, Katy Perry guest verses. A year after Culture, they released Culture II, a 24-song double album that lasted 106 minutes. This felt like a transparent effort to flood the streaming charts with subpar product — ironic, since they were coming from a company called Quality Control. It added to a sense of Migos oversaturation, and it’s one of the reasons that I now feel like I didn’t always properly appreciate them. In any case, some of those Culture II songs really popped, and a few of them became hits. As far as I know, “MotorSport” is the only song ever to feature both Cardi B and her seemingly permanent arch-enemy Nicki Minaj, another future Number Ones artist. That one peaked at #6. (It’s an 8.) Migos also made it to #10 with the Drake collab “Walk It Talk It” and to #8 with the deeply funky Pharrell production “Stir Fry.” (“Walk It Talk It” is an 8, and “Stir Fry” is a 9.)
The flood continued. All three Migos released solo albums, sometimes in collaboration with other rappers or producers. Offset scored a surprise solo hit when “Ric Flair Drip,” a song that he and Metro Boomin released in 2018, made it to #13. (Quavo will appear in this column pretty soon as a guest-rapper, without the other Migos.) 2021’s Culture III, another overlong monstrosity, didn’t have any big hits. In 2022, Migos broke up dramatically, with Quavo and Takeoff severing all ties from Offset. Salacious rumors were cited as the reason for the split, but I don’t think the group members ever confirmed them. That fall, Quavo and Takeoff, under the name Unc & Phew, released the duo album Only Built For Infinity Links, and they made it to #55 with the pretty-great single “Hotel Lobby.”
A few weeks after the release of Only Built For Infinity Links, Quavo and Takeoff were hanging out with a big group of people late one night in Houston, outside of a bowling alley. This was not a place where rich and famous rappers should’ve found themselves. A fight broke out, and Takeoff, who seemed like he didn’t even have anything to do with the fight, was shot to death. According to police, he probably wasn’t the intended target. One man is now awaiting trial on murder charges. Takeoff was 28. I never watched the death-scene video that TMZ posted, but I saw descriptions of the video on Twitter, and those things will be stuck in my head for the rest of my life. This was a random and avoidable tragedy, and I get sad again all over whenever I think about it. Quavo and Offset got back together at the BET Awards for a Takeoff tribute performance, but they’ve said that they’ll never attempt to revive the Migos — not because of any lingering animosity but because Takeoff was the glue of the group. Without him, there’s no point.
Lil Uzi Vert has maintained their rap stardom, the kind where every album release is an event and where they can play any rap festival in the direct-support slot, if not as headliner. A bunch of tracks from Uzi’s 2020 album Eternal Atake made the top 10. The biggest of them, the rave-adjacent “Futsal Shuffle 2020,” peaked at #5. (It’s a 7.) Uzi’s wild-eyed 2022 club track “Just Wanna Rock” went viral, eventually peaking at #10 in 2023. (It’s a 9.)
While enjoying all this success, Uzi was always visible. In 2022, for instance, Uzi announced that they were using they/them pronouns, and they also had a hugely expensive pink diamond implanted in their forehead. (They’ve since removed it.) Not everything that Uzi does is cute. In 2021, Uzi was charged with punching and pointing a gun at their ex-girlfriend. After a plea deal, they got three years of probation — one of many fucked-up instances of domestic violence among rap stars in recent years.
Just a week and a half ago, Lil Uzi Vert released their new album Eternal Atake 2. It’s pretty bad, and we’ll find out how the singles are doing when today’s Billboard charts come out. Uzi and the surviving Migos are still active and prominent, and there’s always a chance that they’ll be in this column again. For now, “Bad And Boujee” was the greatest moment of collective glory for virtually everyone involved, and it set the tone for a new chart climate in which rap music doesn’t even have to engage with pop to work as pop — often to be more popular than pop. We’ll see many more examples in future columns.
GRADE: 10/10
BONUS BEATS: In 2017, someone at the LA radio station Power 106 had the brilliant idea to get the Migos to read the children’s book Llama Llama Red Pajama in Migos flow. The Migos were game, and resulting footage makes for one of the rare celebrity engagement-bait videos that’s way more charming than cringey. The clip also works as a nice example of how the Migos flow operated, especially when all three rappers were on the same page. Here’s the Migos reading Llama Llama Red Pajama over the “Bad And Boujee” beat:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now on paperback via Hachette Books. Raindrop. Drop-top. Buy it from your favorite online book shop.
