The Number Ones: Travis Scott’s “Franchise” (Feat. Young Thug & M.I.A.)

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.

If a Travis Scott single debuts at #1 in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Strange things have happened to the pop charts in the past decade or so, and one of the strangest is the persistent run of vaporous, instantly forgotten Travis Scott singles that went straight to the top in 2019 and 2020, and then again in 2025. It's the weirdest thing. Travis Scott has actual hits, songs that my son cranks up on the car stereo when I'm driving him to school, but those songs are typically not the ones that he takes to #1.

"Sicko Mode," the first Scott song to reach #1, was a genuine hit, a song that I heard out in the world all the time. "Highest In The Room" was kind of a hit. If nothing else, it's got a whole lot of streams, and it's still part of Scott's live show. But "The Scotts," the Kid Cudi collab that Scott released in summer 2020, evaporated from the collective mind like a boring dream. The same thing happened to "Franchise," a song that simply does not exist today. Technically, it's the biggest chart hit that M.I.A. ever made, and how fucking weird is that?

So how? And why? What was this mysterious hold that Travis Scott held over the Hot 100? There are lots of answers, but none of them is all that satisfying. The best I can manage is that Travis Scott is less of an artist, more of a brand. People don't necessarily feel a powerful emotional connection to the human being born Jacques Bermon Webster II or to the art that he creates. But that art, if that word isn't already too much of a stretch, always takes a backseat to brand identity. Before that brand was sullied for reasons that we'll get into below, Scott managed to turn himself into a living symbol for a certain kind of luxurious, graphic-designed hedonism. This positioning did well for him. He gamed the pop charts by treating his single releases like limited-edition merch drops. He put something out, and a dedicated core of hypebeasts got on their computers and snapped it up. In a pandemic situation where people could not connect with each other physically, Scott brought that internet-shopping feeling, and apparently that was enough for some people. The rest of the world kept moving.

It's a little on-the-nose that Travis Scott, at the peak of his merch-selling powers, went straight to #1 with a song that's literally called "Franchise." Complex, a publication that's typically sympathetic to Travis Scott's general way of existence, might've put it best in their piece on the release of "Franchise": "This is corporate rap." Corporate rap has its charms, and by extension, so does "Franchise." But it's not exciting. "Franchise" is not exciting. It's not especially memorable, either.

Travis Scott's big professional achievement in 2020 wasn't making back-to-back #1 hits with "The Scotts" and "Franchise." It was making a deal with McDonald's. Right around the time that he released "Franchise," Scott got his own heavily promoted meal at McDonald's. It seems to just be a regular McDonald's value meal, but it was unveiled to great fanfare in fall 2020. In a TV ad, an animated action-figure version of Scott jumped around and talked about how we, the lucky public, could try the same exact order that Scott used to eat back in his Houston youth. In the process, Scott became the first celebrity to get his own McDonald's meal since Michael Jordan unveiled his McJordan Burger in 1992.

There was a weird amount of hype surrounding the Travis Scott McDonald's meal. People wrote articles about their quests to find this elusive meal, and fans expressed disappointment when they learned that the food didn't come with the action figure from the commercial. The company had to warn employees that customers might order the Travis Scott meal by blasting "Sicko Mode" at the drive-thru window rather than saying words. Scott showed up at a McDonald's, caused a near-riot, and presumably spread a lot of COVID. He also sold a line of McDonald's-branded merch, including a $90 body pillow designed to look like a McNugget. All of this was unbelievably stupid, but it accomplished the lucrative feat of turning a fast food order into a meme. Many, many celebrity-branded fast food meals followed, as did digitally marketed food-adjacent situations like the Grimace Shake. This internet-poisoned world is stupider now, but I don't know whether this Travis Scott McDonald's deal is a cause or merely a symptom of that.

Travis Scott promised that his McDonald's merch would come with a special surprise, and it turned out to be a chance to pre-order the "Franchise" single, already teased in that action-figure commercial, for 69 cents. I'm pretty sure that's cheaper than any item on the McDonald's menu, but I am not going to fact-check that. I have typed the word "McDonald's" too many times in this blog post already. Scott naturally turned the "Franchise" release into another kind of merch drop, selling the physical single as a few different CD variants. The song itself mattered less than the opportunity to keep the general media attention-storm roiling.

Travis Scott isn't really known for his wordplay, but check this out: "Franchise" is called "Franchise" because McDonald's is a franchise. It's also called "Franchise" because it's named after Dem Franchize Boyz, the Atlanta rap group who helped popularize the snap music sound in the '00s. On "Franchise," Scott keeps quoting Dem Franchize Boyz' 2004 breakout hit "White Tee." Three of the Franchize Boyz -- Pimpin', Jizzal Man, and the late Buddie -- all got songwriting credits on "Franchise." Parlae, the coolest-looking Franchize Boy, got left out, which is too bad. ("White Tee" peaked at #79. Dem Franchize Boyz' highest-charting single, 2006's "Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It" peaked at #7. It's a 7.)

Travis Scott co-produced "Franchise" with Chase Benjamin, a fellow Houston native who goes by the name Chase B. Chase is Scott's tour DJ, and he sometimes produces for Scott and for the artists on his Cactus Jack label. On "Franchise," Scott gives Chase a lyrical shoutout: "Me and Chase connected like we Siamese." I can think of a few things wrong with that line, but I'm glad Scott feels close to his friend. That's nice.

Scott and Chase got help producing "Franchise" from Teddy Walton, who comes from Memphis and who'd previously produced for artists like Kendrick Lamar, A$AP Rocky, and Bryson Tiller. Walton produced Goldlink, Brent Faiyaz, and Shy Glizzy's 2017 track "Crew," and I love that song. (It peaked at #45.) A lot of Walton-produced tracks were bigger than that, but that's my favorite one. The "Franchise" beat is pretty simple -- evil synth sounds, big drums, distorted bass rumbles. The snares hit with real force, and I like the little haunted melodies buried in the mix. The instrumental track is really nothing special, but it does what it's supposed to do.

Travis Scott never really bothered to write a "Franchise" hook beyond the one line from "White Tee," but he did bring in some collaborators. One of them was Young Thug, who's already been in this column for his verse on Camila Cabello's "Havana." Scott and Thug first worked together on tracks like "Mamacita" in 2014, the same year that I saw the two of them put in appearances, a few minutes apart, on the same SXSW stage. The combination always seemed a bit weird, since Thug is a genuine fashionable weirdo, whereas Scott mostly came off as a corporate pitchman playing a fashionable-weirdo role. Nevertheless, there's some real charge in the way Thug's high-pitched jabber bounces off of Scott's multi-tracked baritone on a whole lot of songs. In 2019, Scott and future Number Ones artist J. Cole guested on Thug's single "The London," which reached #12 and which was one of Thug's biggest hits at the time. Thug scored an even bigger pop success when he and Chris Brown reached #3 with the 2020 single "Go Crazy." (It's a 5.)

Thug started off as a bugged-out Atlanta trap outsider artist. He kept cranking out music as the rest of the rap world gradually absorbed his style, and he moved closer and closer to the center of the rap mainstream. At a certain point, you could pretty much bank on every big-name rap album having guest appearances from both Travis Scott and Young Thug. People were used to hearing them together. People were a little less used to hearing the two of them alongside M.I.A. That was a novelty. We have now reached the part of the column where we talk about M.I.A., a fascinating figure with a complicated backstory. She's not even on "Franchise" that much, and I don't want this thing to be a million words long, so I'm really just going through the highlights here. M.I.A. was never a rapper or a pop star, exactly. She was a culty critical fav who didn't really rap or sing and who had a few big moments of pop-star intersection. Let's get into it.

Mathangi Arulpragasam was born in London, but she spent much of her childhood in her parents' native Sri Lanka, where her father was active on the side of the oppressed Tamil minority during that country's civil war. (The Captain & Tennille's "Love Will Keep Us Together" was the #1 song in America when M.I.A. was born. In the UK, it was Johnny Nash's version of "Tears On My Pillow." You win this round, UK.) Because her father's political work, M.I.A.'s family was never safe, and they had to keep moving around. For a while, they lived in India. When M.I.A. was 11, they returned to London, and she learned English and started calling herself Maya.

Young M.I.A. became an intimidatingly cool kid, and she studied film at St. Martin's College. She made connections with people from big-deal Britpop bands like Elastica and Pulp. For a while, she was Elastica's touring videographer, and then she started making music of her own. That music drew on American rap and Jamaican dancehall, and it evolved into a pan-global cool-kid sound that took elements from relatively underground genres of dance and pop music from across the world. For a while, she dated and collaborated with Diplo, an American DJ with a similar taste profile. Her 2005 debut album Arular got tremendous critical raves when it came out in 2005. I loved it. I wrote at greater length about all of this stuff earlier this year, in a 20th-anniversary piece on Arular.

M.I.A. followed Arular with 2007's Kala, an even better album. When that one was about to come out, I interviewed M.I.A. for a Village Voice cover story. It was the only cover story I ever wrote for that paper. They were going to put my Lil Mama feature on the cover, but I strenuously objected. My thinking was that people were going to act like this was another new low for a flailing publication and that the noise would overwhelm both the story and possibly Lil Mama herself, and they should put some political shit on there instead. I think that's what they did. Anyway, Kala turned out to be the record that almost accidentally made M.I.A. mainstream-famous. On the single "Paper Planes," Diplo flipped a Clash sample, while M.I.A. deadpanned catchy threats about taking your money. The song was already hipster-popular, but when it showed up in the trailer for the movie Pineapple Express it became popular-popular and went all the way to #4. (It's a 10.)

"Paper Planes" was one of those ultimate-unifier songs, and its success made critics like me feel fucking awesome. In 2008, while the song was still huge, Kanye West sampled it for "Swagga Like Us," the T.I. posse cut that featured Kanye, Jay-Z, and Lil Wayne -- pretty much the Mount Rushmore of that moment's rap A-list. The song isn't good or anything, but it was almost as big as "Paper Planes." ("Swagga Like Us" peaked at #5. It's a 4.) At the 2009 Grammys, a hugely pregnant M.I.A. performed that song with all four of those rappers. Later that year, M.I.A. teamed up with Indian composer A.R. Rahman for "O… Saya," a song for the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack that got an Oscar nomination and reached #93 on the Hot 100 -- M.I.A.'s second and last charting single as lead artist.

M.I.A.'s third album, 2010's Maya, was a big fall-off, both critically and commercially, even though it had some joints. A Lynn Hirschberg New York Times profile made M.I.A. look like a truffle-fry-munching fake revolutionary, and M.I.A. responded by freaking out and posting Hirschberg's phone number on Twitter. As someone working in online music media, we loved that shit. That was posts for days. It didn't make M.I.A. seem that cool, though.

M.I.A. had her last pre-"Franchise" chart moment in 2012, when she and Nicki Minaj guested on Madonna's #10 hit "Give Me All Your Luvin'." (It's a 5.) M.I.A. and Nicki joined Madonna to perform that one as part of her Super Bowl Halftime Show, and M.I.A. kicked up another big shitstorm when she flipped off the camera. I didn't even notice her doing it, but the NFL sure did, and they hit her with gigantic lawsuit that eventually got settled.

M.I.A. kept making music after her moment passed, and some of it was really good. Her 2012 single "Bad Girls" was a total banger with an amazing video, but it didn't trouble the charts over here. In 2020, right around the same time that she appeared on "Franchise," M.I.A. came out as a loud anti-vaxxer, and that has led her to some weird choices. She buddied up to Alex Jones and hawked her new clothing line, which supposedly blocks 5G signals. She endorsed Donald Trump's 2024 campaign after her first choice, RFK Jr., dropped out. What can you even say? Don't have heroes. Way too often, they turn out to be chump-ass chumps.

Around the time that he released "Franchise," Travis Scott said that M.I.A. actually reached out to him to do something on her album, which never happened. But he thought she was one of the coolest people in the world, so he got her to do a verse on "Franchise." It definitely adds something. Lots of Scott's fans thought M.I.A.'s verse was ridiculous and stupid, and you could argue that it is. She definitely goes into nonsense nursery-rhyme mode: "Trippin' like I'm trigger-happy, saltfish, ackee ackee, golf buggy, Kawasaki, catch a fish, sushi maki." But that's basically what she always did, and she sounds as cool as she ever did. Anyway, everyone's "Franchise" lyrics are stupid. Young Thug says he's higher than the plane, he's where the Skypes be. Travis Scott rhymes "Utopia" with "Zootopia." I like the way the three voices on "Franchise" bounce off of each other, but none of them actually says anything.

Really, "Franchise" is not a song that needed to exist. There's no emotion, no hook, nothing. It's just a song that plays as an advertisement for itself. It sounds like something that would soundtrack a party scene in a movie where the producers didn't want to pay to license the song that would really be playing at that party. The people involved in "Franchise" all do their jobs, and they all have enough personality that they can give the track some juice just by being there. But it's not like they're doing their best work. It's a throwaway, but Scott could package a throwaway in such a way that it would debut at #1 before disappearing completely.

In the case of "Franchise," Scott sold it mostly through the video. He co-directed the clip with White Trash Tyler, a director who worked on Scott's Netflix documentary and a bunch of his videos. They shot some of the clip at Michael Jordan's mansion -- Scott's way, I guess, of paying tribute to the last celebrity to get his own McDonald's meal. It opens with old footage from The Last Dance, the great Jordan documentary that became a COVID-era sensation. Then we see Scott and his friends pulling up to the mansion in a fleet of candy-colored luxury vehicles. As it plays out, Scott combines cinematic reference points -- The Holy Mountain, Midsommar, Kendrick Lamar's "Humble" video -- with a fuckton of product placement. M.I.A. wears a suit covered in flowers, running with a herd of sheep through a field outside a castle. It all looks cool. None of it means anything. As commercials go, it's pretty good. But it's just a commercial.

That video debuted in IMAX theaters, during screenings of the Christopher Nolan movie Tenet. (Travis Scott also made the Tenet end-credits song "The Plan," which peaked at #74.) If you were one of the weirdos going out to the movies during peak COVID, you might've seen it. The video wasn't enough to keep "Franchise" in the higher reaches of the Hot 100, though. In its second week, the song fell all the way down to #25. "Franchise" has never appeared on a Travis Scott album, and he's only performed it live a handful of times. Some of those performances weren't really performances, either. Scott and his collaborators' Jimmy Kimmel performance, for instance, was basically just a second, less impressive "Franchise" music video.

Travis Scott kept appearing on a ton of other people's songs into 2021, and he announced the return of Astroworld, his Houston music festival. That fest was one of the first huge post-lockdown concerts, and it ended in disaster. When Scott came to the stage, the crowd surged forward, and the venue and promoters had no idea how to handle it. Ten people, all between nine and 27 years of age, were killed. Hundreds more were injured. Tons of people sued Scott. At the time, there was a lot of online chatter about how the whole show was really a Satanic ritual and Scott was trying to open the gates of hell. I don't really blame Scott for what happened. I don't think he could really see the chaos from the stage, and he wasn't in charge of on-the-ground crowd management. But it was still his show, and at least some of the responsibility sits on his shoulders. He clearly wanted to keep going with his career like nothing happened. The single that he released that day, the unfortunately titled "Escape Plan," was engineered to debut at #1 just like all the others, and I'm a little surprised to learn that it charted as high as #11. I haven't thought about that song since it came out.

For a while, Travis Scott was persona non grata. Festivals dropped him from their lineups, and brand deals stopped materializing. Scott made a ton of public non-apology apologies. He presumably couldn't accept any responsibility for legal reasons, but the whole thing was just gross. Scott went quiet for a little bit, and then he attempted a comeback with the 2023 album Utopia. It mostly worked. That album was a big deal, and a bunch of its songs were short-lived hits. Scott got the Weeknd and Bad Bunny to appear on a lead single literally titled "K-Pop," and that was clearly supposed to be a #1 hit, but it peaked at #7. The Drake collab "Meltdown" was big enough to reach #3. The song that I really heard in the wild a lot was "Fein," with future Number Ones artist Playboi Carti, and that one only got as high as #5. ("K-Pop" is a 4, "Meltdown" is a 6, and "Fein" is a 7.)

Today, the Travis Scott comeback is complete. I don't see him in commercials all the time anymore, but he's back to headlining festivals like it's no big deal. Last year, Scott appeared alongside future Number Ones artists Future, Metro Boomin, and Playboi Carti on Future and Metro's "Type Shit," and that song debuted at #2 behind a bigger Future/Metro song. (It's an 8.) Earlier this year, Travis Scott finally landed another of his amazing disappearing #1 hits. We'll see him in this column again. Really, all three artists who appear on "Franchise" have suffered one kind of public calamity or another since the single's release. Maybe the song is cursed. The Young Thug story might be even crazier than the Travis Scott one. We'll get to that when Thug appears in this column again.

GRADE: 4/10

BONUS BEATS: I don't really have much to work with here, do I? Since nobody else has done anything with "Franchise," here's the official remix that pretty much swaps out M.I.A.'s verse for one from future Number Ones artist Future:

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Buy it here like Zootopia.