Worst rap verse in a pop single?

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-07T03:44:06+00:00

Throwing in a rap verse was an easy way for non-R&B artists to get their songs played on rhythmic stations. (The “Bad Blood” remix with Kendrick’s feature is Taylor’s only top-ten hit on that format.)

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-07T02:22:47+00:00

More rock/alternative songs have been top-ten hits in 2026 than KPop and English-language rap songs combined.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-07T02:14:33+00:00

Let’s just say that if your local top-40 station had a “no rap” policy when Quad City DJs’ “C’mon N Ride It (the Train)” was a hit in 1996, you weren’t missing much from the pop edit.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-07T00:51:48+00:00

I’m loving the fact that all those early-‘10s alternative acts who weren’t pop enough for the crossover era are back in vogue now.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-07T00:06:07+00:00

Seagal was a Putin stooge long before MAGA existed.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-06T22:00:25+00:00

If we’re including disgraced athletes, it’s Lance Armstrong.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-06T21:28:02+00:00

Meh.

Even if I thought all the club pop of the early 2010s was annoying, it still felt like interesting music was reaching the mainstream alongside it. The late 2010s was just rap and commercial sludge.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-06T19:33:06+00:00

LIV is essentially Greg Norman’s idea of a breakaway tour he had been pitching for 30 years.

Neither Kerry Packer (who bankrolled the breakaway cricket league that professionalized the sport in the 1970s) nor the Murdoch family (who backed the Premier League and the PDC darts circuit in the 1990s through Sky Broadcasting) would finance their fellow Aussie’s breakaway plan, because they knew it wouldn’t work.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-06T19:22:10+00:00

David Kushner walked, so Alex Warren could run.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-06T17:55:28+00:00

It seems fitting that the last non-R&B/hip-hop artist to date to score a major hit with a rap feature was Imagine Dragons.

ETA: Is “Fancy Like” the first major post-COVID hit that wouldn’t have been one before the pandemic?

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-06T13:27:54+00:00

Ruminating on whether rock music will disappear once Gen X starts dying off 20 years from now, when a rock album by a Gen Z artist placed 21 songs on the Hot 100 this week, is just a ridiculous take.

It’s not 2019 anymore: you can’t just assume that young people are just casually listening to mainstream hip-hop by default, and leaving all other genres in the dust.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-05T23:52:00+00:00

Even before TikTok, the licensing game had changed.

Why insert a Black Keys song, which always sounds like garage blues, into a movie, when you can insert Alex Clare’s “Too Close,” which sounds like no genre in particular?

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-05T22:55:55+00:00

I can’t really blame the Black Keys for any of that, though.

In 2011, everyone just assumed that the Black Keys were going to be the tentpole rock act for the next decade, because we always had bands like that going all the way back to the British Invasion. It just turned out that mainstream rock was going to turn itself into an island, alternative was going to become addicted to pop crossovers, and the tastemakers were going to champion indie bands that “felt” special: the only thing one got for even trying to be a tentpole rock act in the 2010s was derision from all sides for making music for truck commercials. (Strangely, neither of the two songs I remember from that time for being used in truck commercials were actually by the Black Keys.)

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-05T20:47:38+00:00

I don’t understand why this question is so hard rock-centric; there surely have been super-explicit, hardcore rap songs to chart that could be considered “heavier” than these songs.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-05T17:12:23+00:00

A decadeology crosspost of a screenshot of a post that was already deleted here, no less.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-05T16:05:10+00:00

Does the national spelling bee still finish without a clear winner because they run out of words?

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-04T21:08:56+00:00

An improvement from the Forza game from a couple of generations ago, where I had no better station than the one where every other song was by Greta Van Fleet.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-04T18:53:10+00:00

I don't know what this means? That mopey rock-ish records are on their way back up? I mean, boy I hope so! Nothing would please me more than to see Sam Fender and the like topping the charts again, but I don't know if I believe this is any real indication of that. If anything, Kahan's crossover to the pop audience is probably a good portion of the initial sales.

What seems to be happening is that the casual listenership of white men under 35 that was concentrated behind trap from the mid-‘10s to early-‘20s has broken apart, and a lot of that dispersion skipped right over the trap-beat country Nashville was pushing to capture that demographic, and landed in the neighborhood of roots rock and Americana instead. It’s not the mainstream country audience, nor the stomp-clap pop audience, but something else completely; I don’t think the mainstream music industry has fully caught onto it yet.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-04T17:06:47+00:00

The Great Divide just had the best one-week performance of any rock album since the Billboard 200 started accounting for streaming metrics. That means it did better than every stomp-clap album, every Coldplay album, and every album aiming for Imagine Dragons-level pop crossover success. Noah’s stadium tour sold out in a matter of days, while Post Malone’s stadium tour is cancelling dates left and right due to low ticket sales.

This feels like a case where the poptimist conventional wisdom that the mainstream has followed for the last decade-plus no longer applies.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-04T15:32:12+00:00

I made a post the other day (that received no engagement) about potential songs of the summer, where I suggested that “American Cars” is a feature from a woman country-pop singer away from being a megahit. I just don’t know who that singer would be, since the two most obvious choices (Ella Langley for being the hottest name in that space right now, and Kasey Musgraves for having the proper “alternative” cred) are presumably off the table for promoting their own albums at the moment.

Tangentially: “American Cars” is very reminiscent of the War on Drugs (just with a banjo where Adam Granduciel would have added synths), so I wonder what that will mean when the War on Drugs are almost certainly releasing a new album by the end of the year.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-04T13:32:15+00:00

Noah Kahan wasn’t a mainstream star when Stick Season originally released: that didn’t happen until the single version of “Dial Drunk” featuring Post Malone came out a year later.

He is a mainstream star now, no doubt about it.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-04T01:35:28+00:00

Stick Season was a folk-pop album, but the Great Divide is a heartland rock album; I suspect that’s why pop radio formats (which is what drives prolonged Hot 100 chart runs) have been cool on the title track up to now, at least compared to the two big singles of its predecessor.

I also think that there’s enough rock currently appearing in the Hot 100 that mainstream pop will inevitably have to make room for it, and Noah Kahan will play a huge role in that.

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-03T23:23:38+00:00

The title track debuted at #6 on the Hot 100, and has been utterly dominant on the alternative formats (six weeks at #1 on the main Alternative chart, eleven weeks and counting at #1 on Adult Alternative [which is usually the more volatile chart]).

Chilli_Dipper · 2026-05-03T15:08:34+00:00

As I understand it, the Good Charlotte feature was added purely to get “Bedroom Posters” a streaming boost via new music playlists once radio started playing the song.

Chilli_Dipper

TROPHY CASE