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.
“For the record, I knew Khaled when that boy was spinnin’ records.” That’s a tossed off Lil Wayne line from his verse on “I’m The One,” the first and only #1 hit that has ever been branded with DJ Khaled’s name. Wayne’s line is supposed to be a low-stakes flex, and it does work that way. It’s an acknowledgment of all the years that Wayne and Khaled have known each other. The two of them met in the early ’90s, when Khaled was a New Orleans record-store employee and Wayne was among the local rap scene’s aspiring child stars. More than two decades later, they had a chart-topping hit together. That’s a fairytale. It’s the sort of thing that you should brag about. But the line raises more questions than it answers. If DJ Khaled doesn’t spin records, then what does he do? There are many answers to that question, but none of them satisfy.
Despite his name, DJ Khaled does not spin records. He hasn’t spun records in a long time. Khaled doesn’t rap, either. He doesn’t dance. He’s acted in a few movies, but he’s usually just played a cranked-up version of his already cranked-up everyday self. Khaled produces records sometimes, but he doesn’t do that as often as you might expect. Instead, Khaled mostly shouts echo-drenched, motivational catchphrases — sometimes on social media, sometimes in commercials, and sometimes on the A-list rap posse cuts that he’s built around himself. He’s a mover, a shaker, a connector, a human brand activation. Khaled’s skillset isn’t the kind of thing that would ordinarily allow someone to make a #1 hit, but rules do not apply to DJ Khaled. His existence doesn’t make any linear sense, but he continues to thrive regardless.
Consider this: DJ Khaled is effectively the worst part of every DJ Khaled song. He’s an irritant, a megaphone bellowing out rich-guy twaddle, a thing that must be endured. But Khaled has also shown unholy gifts for networking and timing. He attaches himself to rappers at the moment that those rappers become big names, and he allows their magnificence to reflect back on himself. As a result, Khaled has had his name on more bangers than anyone could’ve possibly imagined. One of those bangers is “I’m The One,” a song that has absolutely no right to be as good as it is. Even though I can’t confidently tell you what DJ Khaled actually does, I must concede that he’s been pretty effective at it for a long time.
The obvious reason that “I’m The One” succeeded is its well-chosen roster of big-name guests, most of whom will be familiar to anyone who’s been reading this column for a while, or to anyone who was paying any attention to pop and rap in the ’10s. But we’ll get to all these guys. DJ Khaled doesn’t do much on DJ Khaled’s only #1 hit, but that #1 hit would not exist without DJ Khaled. Since he’s the credited artist on this sleek little monstrosity, it’s only right that we attempt to figure out who this person is.
His government name is Khaled Mohammed Khaled. Khaled was in the new Bad Boys movie earlier this year — Martin Lawrence runs him over with a van, and then someone explodes a molotov cocktail on him — and he’s listed as Khaled “DJ Khaled” Khaled in the opening credits. That’s a lot of Khaleds. Khaled is the son of two Palestinian immigrants, and in the past year or so, lots of people have been pissed off that Khaled hasn’t made a public stand against Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians. That’s the problem with living your life as a human brand activation. You don’t get to have an honest opinion about anything, even genocide.
Khaled grew up in New Orleans and fell in love with rap as a young man. (When Khaled was born, KC & The Sunshine Band’s “That’s The Way (I Like It)” was the #1 song in America. He’s way older than you might think.) Khaled worked at a couple of local record stores as a teenager, and he got to know a bunch of Southern rap stars and reggae artists, especially once he started DJ’ing at soundclashes. That led to Khaled playing records on a pirate radio station and then a job offer at a legit radio station. In 1998, Khaled moved to Miami to co-host 2 Live Crew leader Luke’s show on WEDR. (For this column, I’m going to take a break from my usual practice of mentioning the chart peaks of the different musicians who I mention, since I’m going to mention a lot of musicians in this one, and since it’s already going to be way too convoluted. Just this once, though: Luke and 2 Live Crew’s highest-charting single is 1990’s “Banned In The USA,” which peaked at #20.)
Sometime in there, DJ Khaled started dabbling in production. He landed his first credit in 1999, making the beat for “Connected,” a track from the Miami group First Platoon. A year later, he produced a track for the former No Limit rapper Fiend. For the most part, though, Khaled was better known as a radio personality than as a producer. He was a bit of a man about town, too. He’s got a very brief cameo, for instance, in the ultra-low-budget 2002 Jamaican movie Shottas, and rappers still reference that film all the time. For a little while, Khaled was calling himself DJ Arab Attack, but he stopped doing that after 9/11, for obvious reasons.
Khaled wasn’t really known outside Miami until he linked up with New York star Fat Joe and his Terror Squad crew. He produced a couple of tracks on Terror Squad’s 2002 album True Story, and he apparently spun records at Terror Squad live shows for a little while. You can see him leaning back in the video for Terror Squad’s chart-topper “Lean Back.” Khaled used that connection to score a deal with Koch Records, one of the big independent labels of that moment, and he released his debut LP Listennn… The Album in 2006. It’s basically a compilation, with tons of posse cuts and Khaled bellowing out the catchphrases that he’d already started to coin. (The album is named for one of Khaled’s catchphrases. He’d yell the word “listen” in a really grating, overbearing way. He doesn’t really do that one anymore.)
Back in the early ’00s, you’d get occasional compilations like Listennn. Labels wanted to figure out a way to sell an official version of the street mixtapes that were selling on rap’s grey market, and big names like Funkmaster Flex and DJ Clue would sometimes release their own curated compilations. That trend was on the wane by 2006, but Khaled already had plenty of connections, and the album had a weird sense of energy to it. I really liked the lead single “Holla At Me,” which had Lil Wayne, Paul Wall, Fat Joe, Rick Ross, and Pitbull all going in over an Afrika Bambaataa sample. Independently released posse cuts like “Holla At Me” didn’t cross over very often in 2006, but “Holla At Me” made it onto the Hot 100, peaking at #59.
After Listennn, DJ Khaled released a new album almost every year. Those albums were invariably jammed with triumphal guest-verses, and they didn’t have any particular identity beyond that, other than a vaguely maximal Miami synth-rap sound. Those albums were generally pretty awful if you tried to listen to them all at once, but a song or two would usually land hard. Khaled’s 2007 sophomore album We The Best had “I’m So Hood,” which had Florida all-stars Trick Daddy, Rick Ross, and Plies, as well as a T-Pain hook when every song with a T-Pain hook was an automatic hit. That song went all the way to #19. From where I was sitting, though, the real anthem from that LP was “We Takin’ Over,” another posse cut that ended with a famously fire-breathing Lil Wayne verse — one of the many great moments from Wayne’s imperial era. (“We Takin’ Over” peaked at #28.)
People made a lot of jokes about DJ Khaled back then, and the jokes haven’t really changed over the years. He adds nothing. He just shouts a lot. Nobody needs him around. If I remember right, Khaled was supposed to host Lil Wayne’s masterful 2007 double mixtape Da Drought 3, but it leaked before he could yell all over it. I was so happy about that. Da Drought 3 is a classic mixtape, and it would’ve been maybe 12% less listenable if Khaled got his hands on it. But even with all the jokes, Khaled became a bit of an institution. Everyone in rap showed up for his compilations, and rising stars like Drake got big looks when Khaled treated them as big deals.
Khaled kept making hits, too — or, at the very least, having his name attached to hits. The 2010 posse cut “All I Do Is Win” was another beneficiary of the T-Pain effect. It peaked at #24, and it’s since become a big song for movie editors putting together montages of people feeling like all they do is win. In 2011, Khaled jumped from Koch Records to Universal, and he scored his first top-10 hit. The Lil Wayne/Rick Ross/Drake team-up “I’m On One” had all three of those guys at the perfect moment, trading verses over a moody and drizzly beat, and it brought out the best in all of them. That song made it to #10. (It’s a 10.)
In the mid-’10s, DJ Khaled had a couple of important things going for him. One of them was his continued association with Drake, which meant that he remained a pop-chart presence. Khaled’s 2016 song “For Free,” for instance, is basically a Drake solo song that evidently didn’t fit on Drake’s Views album but still made it to #13. More importantly, Khaled became a social-media star. The personalized internet gave Khaled a more efficient way to disseminate his catchphrases, and he continually went viral for dumb shit like the time that he got lost on a jet ski and documented the whole experience on Snapchat. I don’t know if Khaled really had fans, but it felt like he was always there. The conditions were right for Khaled to fuck around and score a major hit, if he could get the right people involved. In 2017, he got the right people involved.
DJ Khaled treats every interview as a vehicle for motivational platitudes, and he’s a little vague on how “I’m The One” came about. (It’s annoying and confusing that Khaled has big hits called “I’m On One” and “I’m The One,” but I guess that construction works for him.) Khaled’s credited co-producer on “I’m The One” is Nicholas Balding, the El Cerrito, California musician known professionally as Nic Nac; he’d already worked on a few Chris Brown hits. Nic Nac mostly made the beat, but Khaled switched up some of the drums, so they both got production credit. “I’m The One” also has 10 credited songwriters, including Khaled and Nic Nac. There were plenty of cooks in that kitchen.
For a song with that many songwriters, “I’m The One” is seriously clean and streamlined. It’s got a bouncy, unhurried beat with lots of winding synth-hooks. There’s a bit of the tropical-house sound in the bloopy-bloop keyboards and the ultra-filtered backing vocals, but the track owes a lot more to dancehall, a sound that was foundational both to the trop-house trend and to Khaled’s own career. The instrumental track sounds like summer. It sounds like the wind in your hair when you’re driving to the beach. It’s a sleek little backdrop for a group of stars to act like stars, and Khaled really found himself a group of stars.
Justin Bieber was the coup. Bieber was coming off the tremendous success of his 2015 album Purpose, which spun off three chart-toppers and which reinvented Bieber as something other than a kiddie idol. In 2017, Bieber was in the habit of teaming up with dance entities — BloodPop, Major Lazer, DJ Snake — for one-off singles, which all turned out to be major hits. One of the songs with a Bieber guest-vocal became way bigger than anything else that he’d ever done; we’ll get to that one very soon. But Bieber also loved hanging out with rappers, and he thought of himself as an R&B singer. I have to imagine that he welcomed the reflected cool that would come from singing the hook on a blockbuster posse cut, and the presence of Bieber made “I’m The One” feel like a bigger deal than it would’ve been if it had Chris Brown or Trey Songz on the hook.
Khaled and Bieber were friendly before they made “I’m The One” together, and Khaled was waiting for the right opportunity to ask Bieber for a collaboration. Right after Khaled bought a mansion in Beverly Hills, he got an invitation to hang with Bieber. Khaled told Billboard, “I hung up, jumped in the Rolls and brought a PA just to make sure I presented it right.” Bieber listened to the song in Khaled’s car, and he agreed to sing on the track, but only after Khaled played field hockey with him. Khaled: “I took the beating for the song.”
The three rappers who appear on “I’m On One” were all pretty inescapable media figures in that moment. Quavo was coming off the success of the Migos’ “Bad And Boujee.” As the most visible Migo, Quavo was also in the midst of recording a bunch of guest verses on pop hits like Liam Payne’s “Strip That Down” and Post Malone’s “Congratulations.” (“Strip That Down” peaked at #10. It’s a 5. “Congratulations” peaked at #8. It’s a 7. Post Malone will make his first appearance in this column soon.) When the Migos flew to LA to perform on Kimmel, Khaled booked some time at Westlake Studios, where Michael Jackson made Thriller. He says Quavo knocked out his verse in five minutes, which tracks.
Khaled’s old friend Lil Wayne was an established legend by 2017, but he was going through a rough stretch. Wayne got himself into a long, protracted, heavily publicized legal struggle with Birdman, his Cash Money label boss and onetime father figure. He’d been trying to release his album Tha Carter V for years, but it kept sitting on the shelf, gathering dust. Wayne was a constant presence on the guest-rapper circuit, but he hadn’t been part of a #1 hit since rapping on Jay Sean’s “Down” almost eight years earlier, and he was thinking about walking away from the game. But when Wayne appeared on “I’m The One,” it didn’t come off as Khaled doing his friend a favor. It was just like: Well, it’s a DJ Khaled song, so of course there’s a Lil Wayne guest verse.
Justin Bieber, Quavo, and Lil Wayne have all appeared in this column before, but this is the first and presumably only time that the subject of Chance The Rapper will come up, so it’s time for another mini-biography. For a very brief window of time, Chance seemed like a defining figure — a rare rapper with industry love, critical respect, and widespread popular appeal. Earlier this year, Vulture coined the term Obamacore — an almost upsettingly precise label for the hopeful and cloying sincerity that swept across popular culture during the Obama years. Even if you haven’t encountered the term, you know exactly what it describes: Parks & Recreation, Hamilton, Notorious RBG bobbleheads. Chance The Rapper was the most Obamacore artist in rap history, and his fall-off was sharp and steep.
Chancelor Johnathan Bennett’s Obama connection goes beyond general vibes. Chance grew up middle class on Chicago’s South Side, and his parents both worked in the Chicago Democratic Party establishment. (When Chance was born, Snow’s “Informer” was the #1 song in America.) Chance’s father was one of Obama’s aides during his short time in the Senate, and he worked for the Department Of Labor during Obama’s presidency. As a kid, Chance took part in rap exercises at Harold Washington Library, and he recorded his 2012 debut mixtape 10 Day while serving a ten-day suspension from Jones College Prep High School for smoking weed on campus. On that tape and on his 2013 breakout Acid Rap, Chance delivered his lines in frantic, tumbling bursts. He had a high, scratchy voice and a gift for loping melody, and he favored warm, jazzy beats. Almost immediately, his rise seemed inevitable.
I fell hard for Chance The Rapper. He sounded like what he was — a smart, starry-eyed kid who grew up on Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar. He rapped about the struggle to do good in the world, and he brought a playful silliness that I really liked. Chance also had tons of ambition. He said yes to every conceivable media opportunity, and he avoided the major-label system, opting to build an audience with free-download mixtapes even when tons of money was sitting on the table for him. Chance’s mixtapes seemed like windows into a whole world of sharp Chicago kids, and they were full of appearances from aesthetically aligned young artists: Vic Mensa, Noname, Jamila Woods, Saba, BJ The Chicago Kid, Joey Purp, Towkio. In 2015, I watched Chance play an ebullient set headlining the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. I’d been to a bunch of Pitchfork fests before that, and it was truly striking to see a crowd full of Chicago kids — Chicago kids who probably hadn’t been to a Pitchfork fest before — coming together to celebrate their fellow Chicago kid.
Around the time that he released his 2016 mixtape Coloring Book, Chance The Rapper attained total media omnipresence. He was all over Kanye West’s album The Life Of Pablo, including a head-turning verse on the opening track “Ultralight Beam.” (That one peaked at #67.) He hosted SNL. He was a constant guest on daytime and late-night talk shows; Stephen Colbert and Ellen DeGeneres both loved him. At the 2017 Grammys, Chance performed with a gospel choir and won Best New Artist, beating Kelsea Ballerini, Maren Morris, Anderson .Paak, and the Chainsmokers. At some point, Chance got his own Ben & Jerry’s flavor — which, to be fair, is a very good Ben & Jerry’s flavor.
Chance’s particular form of success wasn’t the kind that translated to chart numbers, but he wasn’t a total stranger to the chart. In 2013, Chance made his first Hot 100 appearance when he rapped a guest-verse on Justin Bieber’s song “Confident,” which peaked at #41. (Bieber also guested on Chance’s Coloring Book track “Juke Jam.” All the participants on “I’m The One” were connected to one another in tons of ways that I’m not going to map out here.) The big single from Coloring Book was “No Problem,” which featured Lil Wayne and 2 Chainz; it peaked at #43.
As much as I liked those early Chance mixtapes, I have felt absolutely zero desire to go back and revisit them in the years since. I don’t even know if that’s Chance’s fault. Some things are just irreversibly tied to their cultural moments. Chance The Rapper might just be my generation’s version of Arrested Development — the early-’90s Atlanta group, not the early-’00s god-level TV series. Chance was a phenomenon that finds instant critical adoration and then ages like guacamole at a picnic on a 99-degree day. The conditions were right for a Chance The Rapper backlash, and that backlash definitely arrived, but Chance slid onto “I’m The One” right before it hit.
Once DJ Khaled assembled his cast of characters for “I’m The One,” there wasn’t much left to do. The song is an absolute trifle — a sunny flirtation jam where everyone tries to out-charm everyone else. I like it, and I hate the fact that I like it. I should see right through this stuff. I should look at all these millionaires cynically kicking pickup lines over a thin little synth-beat, and I should make the mouth-fart noise and roll my eyes. This is how most critics treat just about everything that DJ Khaled does, and I understand that reaction completely. But I am dangerously susceptible to big-star charisma, and there is so much big-star charisma to be found on “I’m The One.”
The different voices on “I’m The One” all work some variation on the same theme: They’re rich and successful and they love you and you love them. On the hook, Justin Bieber floats calmly and effortlessly: “I know you sick of all those other imitators/ Don’t let the only real one intimidate ya.” He also does something that vaguely resembles yodeling. Quavo, on easy-breezy autopilot, goes into robotized singsong to describe someone who stayed with him through criminal misadventures and who deserves to rise to fame and riches with him.
Chance is a little sillier, but he talks about the same stuff. He proclaims that he’s the only guy who will pull your hair and hold the door for you, and he evokes a certain young-and-broke lifestyle in a couple of lines: “She don’t got no bedframe, she don’t got no tables/ We just watchin’ Netflix, she ain’t got no cable.” This was back when it still seemed vaguely bummy to not have cable. Now, I’m not sure I know anyone who has cable and who does not also have grandchildren.
On “I’m The One,” most of the pleasure isn’t in what these guys are saying; it’s hearing these voices, all familiar but all different, happily flexing together. Of the three rappers, Lil Wayne is the most joyously unencumbered. He’s absolutely effortless, finding a melody and then interrupting it with his little interjections: “Oh my god,” “lord forgive me.” But Wayne is the only one who’s not talking about puppydog crush stuff. Instead, he lightly fumes about some girl who fucks up his high, who texts him all day, and who has some self-destructive tendencies: “When she on that molly, she a zombie/ She think we Clyde and Bonnie, but it’s more like Whitney/Bobby.” But Wayne still sounds blissfully unbothered when he moonwalks over that beat. He’s just flexing on his exes. Then the beat drops again, and Bieber goes into a full-on dancehall cadence to insist a few more times that he is the one for you.
All four guest vocalists get songwriter credits on “I’m The One,” as do DJ Khaled and Nic Nac. Bieber’s regular collaborator Jason “Poo Bear” Boyd gets a credit. So do Bobby Brackins, David “Davidior” Park, and Ray “August 08” Jacobs, all music-business types with long resumes and lots of collaborations to their credit. We don’t necessarily know who did what on the song, but there are enough little melodic hooks buried in the track that I could imagine how that many people would be involved in putting it together. Songs like this must keep accounting firms at publishing houses busy. The royalty breakdown must’ve been complicated.
Before its release, “I’m The One” got a full-court promo push. All the artists involved teased the song on social media. The track came out a few months after the birth of DJ Khaled’s son Asahd, and Khaled made Asahd into a kind of mascot for the song, putting his image on the cover art and all over the marketing materials. When Khaled’s album Thankful came out later that year, Khaled had Asahd credited as executive producer, claiming that he’d know he was on the right track with his music when Asahd would laugh or throw up or otherwise react. I don’t know about all that, but he’s a cute kid. At the time, I wrote, “As I understand it, [Asahd] acts as a sort of readymade inspirational mascot. But then, ‘readymade inspirational mascot’ is also basically Khaled’s own job description. That means DJ Khaled now has his own DJ Khaled, and DJ Khaled’s DJ Khaled is a tiny baby.” That’s the kind of scintillating insight you can only find on Stereogum dot com.
At the beginning of the Eif Rivera-directed “I’m The One” video, we see Asahd sitting in a baby’s version of a director’s chair, smiling cute-baby smiles. Khaled, looking contemplative outside a gigantic mansion, calls up Chance and tells him to call the other guys on the song with some big news: “We gon’ celebrate life, success, and our blessings.” If someone invited me out to celebrate life, success, and our blessings, I would probably say that I’m busy that day. If it was someone with DJ Khaled’s house, though, I might reconsider. Anyway, just as Khaled says that, a hot lady with big boobs rides up on horseback. That’s the general vibe here.
The “I’m The One” video generally nails the song’s tone. We get conspicuous product placement for liquor, headphones, and vape pens. We get rappers happily mugging in hedge mazes and enjoying each other’s company. We get shots of an impossibly fancy swimming pool with big concrete stepping stones that must render it unswimmable. Justin Bieber, the only white guy on the song, is also the only one confident enough to be out there in no shirt and no shoes, and he looks great.
There is no artistic merit to “I’m The One.” Artistic merit is beside the point. The song is pure content, a mindless soundtrack for summer nights outside. But man, it’s some good content. It sounds lighter than air, and its insistent melodies worm their way into my head and stay there. I remember playing “I’m The One” while driving out to see The Fate Of The Furious, maybe the last good Fast & Furious movie, in the theater. (That’s the one with Charlize Theron and the nuclear submarine.) It was the perfect song to play while going to see The Fate Of The Furious in the theater, and it’s become a vacation standby for me and my family since then. Rap posse cuts aren’t necessarily supposed to be pleasant, but this one is.
“I’m The One” debuted at #1, largely thanks to streaming, and it didn’t get a second week on top. But the song lingered. It’s not a fake hit. It’s platinum nine times over, and its video has 1.8 billion views as I write this. Khaled followed “I’m The One” up with another big hit, getting Rihanna and Bryson Tiller to sing on the Santana-sampling “Wild Thoughts.” That one peaked at #2 and went platinum six times. (It’s a 7.) Khaled’s album Grateful went double platinum despite being almost entirely unlistenable. The man was winning.
A year after “I’m The One,” almost everyone from that song got back together. Justin Bieber, Quavo, and Chance The Rapper all appeared on Khaled’s single “No Brainer,” but that one was nowhere near as good as “I’m The One,” and it didn’t have anywhere near the impact. (“No Brainer” peaked at #5. It’s a 3.) A year after that, Khaled got publicly pissy when Tyler, The Creator’s Igor beat his album Father Of Asahd to #1 after Billboard disqualified some of Khaled’s scammy chart-manipulation tactics. It was pretty funny.
Khaled notched a few more hits after “No Brainer,” largely thanks to his continued association with Drake. In 2020, Khaled released “Popstar,” which is basically a solo Drake track and which reached #3, thanks in part to a video where Bieber lip-syncs Drake’s parts. (It’s a 7.) “Greece,” another solo Drake track released under Khaled’s name, made it to #8. (It’s a 5.) In 2022, Khaled’s Drake/Lil Baby song “Staying Alive” peaked at #5. (It’s a 4.) Now that Drake’s spell is seemingly broken, it’s not entirely clear how Khaled will continue to make hits. As a chart figure, he succeeded by corralling rap’s A-listers to make big event-songs. At a time when rap’s A-list barely exists and the few remaining superstars all seem to hate each other, it’s hard to imagine how Khaled can keep that streak going. Then again, it’s hard to imagine how he got as far as he did, but he still did it.
The year after “I’m The One,” Lil Wayne was finally able to release his long-awaited Tha Carter V. The album was a big success that sent a bunch of tracks into the top 10. The biggest of them, the Kendrick Lamar collaboration “Mona Lisa,” peaked at #2. (It’s an 8.) Wayne’s status as a beloved rap elder is secure. He won’t get to do the Super Bowl Halftime Show in his hometown, but that shouldn’t affect his stature. Quavo made more hits with the Migos, and he came out with a few solo records, but none of his solo-artist stuff has made much impact since “I’m The One.” Right now, he’s in the midst of a vaguely countrified reboot, and I don’t know, it might be working. Earlier this year, he made it to #33 with the weird but effective Lana Del Rey duet “Tough.” I don’t hate “Georgia Ways,” his ridiculous new song with Luke Bryan and Teddy Swims.
But Chance? Whoof. Chance The Rapper is cooked. It’s rough out here. In 2019, Chance released his first proper major-label album, The Big Day, and there has not been a second one. The hate-avalanche for The Big Day was immediate and overwhelming, and most of us instantly dismissed it as the “ooh, I love my wiiiife” album. (The Big Day is a concept album about Chance’s wedding, which took place right before the album came out; he and his wife separated this year.) To be clear: The Big Day is, at best, a deeply mediocre record. It was still pretty shocking how quickly the world turned on Chance. But I was part of that, so I can’t shame anyone else. Nobody wanted that shit. The dream was over. (The biggest Hot 100 hit from The Big Day was “Hot Shower” and that one made it to #58 largely because of a guest-verse from DaBaby, who was on fire at the time and who will eventually appear in this column.)
Chance is still a gifted rapper, and he could always come back. He’s had a lot of loose tracks since 2019, and some of them have been pretty decent. He also appeared on Justin Bieber’s 2020 single “Holy,” which peaked at #3. (It’s a 6.) But Chance’s public profile has been comedically cursed. The same year that he appeared on “Holy,” for instance, Chance hosted a rebooted version of Punk’d on Quibi, and I don’t have to tell you how that went. He’s not the one. Sorry.
Justin Bieber, on the other hand, will be in this column many more times. We’ll see him again soon.
GRADE: 7/10
BONUS BEATS: Here Tobe Nwigwe, the Houston rapper who consistently makes artfully designed videos, rapping over the “I’m The One” beat in 2017:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Looking for the book, well bitch, you looking at the book. Buy it here.
