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Welcome! This is the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show and I’m your host, Christopher Verdesi. Every week on Chartcrush, we dive deep into a year in Pop music and count down the top ten songs according to our recap of the weekly Pop charts published at the time in Billboard, the music industry’s top trade mag and chart authority. This week on Chartcrush we’re counting down 2018, the year Billboard threw the full weight of the Hot100 behind on-demand streaming on platforms like Spotify, Apple and Amazon.

2017 was the real pivot year though: the first double-digit percent year-over-year revenue increase for the music biz in 20 years after the mp3 filesharing apocalypse in the ’00s, and when Hip-Hop/R&B officially became music’s top genre, according to Nielsen, the ratings people in charge of collecting the data for Billboard‘s charts since 1991. But Billboard‘s update of its Hot100 calculus in ’18 sealed the deal. Seven of the songs in our top 10 songs, by or featuring Rappers, up from three in ’17.

Hip-Hop, already the biggest streaming genre thanks to its outsized popularity among Millennials, aged 22 to 37 in 2018 comprising the vast majority of streaming’s user base. So as streaming eclipsed other formats, Hip-Hop eclipsed other genres.

But for the first time, with streaming, Hip-Hop’s mixtape scene was getting counted: the proving ground where new and established artists put out remixes, mashups and other non-album material for the street. In 2006, the RIAA had estimated 30 to 50 million mixtape CDs a year changing hands, just before the feds started raiding shops and CD mills to shut it down and the whole thing migrated to blogs on the Web. Those also got busted eventually, but it all flew completely under Nielsen and Billboard‘s radar, along with the tens of billions (with a “b”) of mp3s in all genres downloaded with peer-to-peer filesharing apps, until the streaming era.

But events were also driving Hip-Hop’s resurgence. The shooting of Michael Brown by a White cop in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 ignited a debate about racial profiling that’d been smoldering since President Obama’s White House beer summit in ’09 with a White cop who’d arrested a Black Harvard Professor trying to break in to his own home. Then in ’13, Black Teen Trayvon Martin, shot during a struggle with a neighborhood watch coordinator in Florida who was later found to have been acting appropriately in self-defense, as was the cop in the Brown shooting.

But those and other stories combined to form one of the most pervasive media narratives of the ’10s: racial tensions and profiling, and a supposed epidemic of unarmed Black men being shot by police. Which the numbers and circumstances don’t bear out: 18 a year on average 2016 to ’19, most in struggles for the cop’s gun. But the narrative pushed by, as Elon Musk called mainstream news in 2023, the “five editors-in-chief of major publications,” still wielding their power pre-Covid-19 pandemic to manage and shape public perceptions “at scale,” with “attitudes, interpretations and conclusions already built in,” as one Media Literacy Resource Guide described narrative-driven coverage.

That definitely boosted Hip-Hop in pop culture and gave Rappers plenty of new things to say. Nearly one in four Hip-Hop #1s in ’17 and ’18 were political according to one study, the most since the ’90s, and thanks to streaming, many of those also topped the Hot100.

And race wasn’t the only issue, especially after Donald Trump took office as the 45th president. That was also in 2017, but by ’18, Trump’s first full year in office, the overwhelmingly anti-Trump media was busily stitching together similarly elaborate and potent narratives about feminism, guns, climate change, illegal immigration and of course Trump’s supposed collusion with Russia to tamper with the 2016 election.

#10 Camila Cabello featuring Young Thug – Havana

On immigration, the issue was Trump’s proposed wall along the Southern border, so what better to drum up sympathy for illegal immigrants from south of the border than a #1 hit for a record 16 weeks sung entirely in español? That was Luis Fonzi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” in 2017 which actually didn’t hit #1 until a remix version dropped by Justin Bieber from north of the border in Canada, with most of the lyrics sung in English.

But the top beneficiary of the Latin explosion in 2018, the year we’re counting down on this week’s Chartcrush, was the solo breakthrough from Cuban-American Singer Camila Cabello, teaming up with American Rapper Young Thug on our #10 hit, “Havana.”

The first-ever Diamond-certified single by a Latin Female, the Salsa-inspired “Havana,” #10 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2018: Camila Cabello’s solo breakthrough after a pair of hits in ’15 and ’16 as the standout member of the Teen Girl Group Fifth Harmony, then teaming up with Rapper/Alt Rocker Machine Gun Kelly to sing the chorus on the #4 hit “Bad Things” in 2017.

She scored another #1 in 2019, her duet with Shawn Mendes on “Señorita,” but didn’t make the top 20 again despite her 2022 album Familia getting to #10 on the album chart.

#9 Drake – In My Feelings

At #9, the first of three Rappers each with two songs in our 2018 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown. 43 of the 52 weeks in 2018 had a Rap song or a song with a Rap at #1. This Rapper snagged record-setting 21 of those weeks with his two #1’s, the second of which on the calendar was #1 from late July to late September and inspired a guy on Instagram called Shiggy to post a video of himself dancing to it in the street, which New York Giants Wide Receiver Odell Beckham, Jr. copied and the viral “Kiki Challenge” was off and running.

At some point it evolved into hopping out of your moving vehicle to dance, filming yourself through the open door, and the National Transportation Safety Board had to issue an official statement about that: cut it out! It’s Drake at #9,”In My Feelings.”

Drake and Kendrick Lamar gave music its the five biggest streaming weeks ever up to that point in 2017: Lamar’s album Damn, which won the Pulitzer Prize for music, and Drake’s More Life, a mixtape, broke the record for the most streams its debut week: 384.8 million. So Drake was red hot coming into 2018, and the week his album Scorpion hit platforms, July 14, all 25 of its songs made the Hot100 and there was a noticeable dip, with every other song on the charts dropping five to ten positions to make room.

“Nice for What” was #1 that week, but then “In My Feelings,” which we just heard at #9, debuted at #1 the following week and stayed on top for the next ten, and Billboard named it “Song of the Summer.”

#8 Juice WRLD – Lucid Dreams (Forget Me)

Drake wasn’t the only Rapper who was in his feelings, though. 2018 was the year Emo Rap broke through into the top 10 from its Soundcloud origins mid-decade: a merger of Hip-Hop and the introspective, confessional lyrics and attitudes of ’00s Emo Rock.

Lil Uzi Vert, not exclusively an Emo Rapper, but he followed up his feature on The Migos’ #1 “Bad and Boujee” in ’17 with the genre’s first major hit, “XO Tour Llif3,” which opened up the charts for Emo Rap’s first two big stars, Lil Peep and XXXTentacion, but by the middle of ’18, Peep was dead from an OD in ’17 and X, shot by armed robbers, so the Emo Rapper at #8 was the last man standing in 2018’s fastest growing genre on Spotify, and the song was Emo Rap’s biggest hit, in the top 10 for 25 weeks. It’s Juice WRLD’s “Lucid Dreams.”

Juice WRLD’s “Lucid Dreams” at #8 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2018. Juice got to enjoy his fame a little longer than Lil Peep and XXXTentacion but at the end of 2019 at age 21, he OD’d swallowing a handful of opiate pills so cops wouldn’t find them on his airplane.

Emo Rap, the most depressing genre ever to top the Pop charts, so “Emo Rapper,” it turned out, was a highly lethal profession. Loneliness, anxiety, drugs and alcohol, nihilism, suicide, heartbreak, self-medication: just a partial list of core themes.

OD deaths among 15-24 year-olds in America were up a breathtaking 48% 2019 to ’20 according to government figures: by far the largest one-year increase ever.

Kiddos with no perspective, marinating in a media matrix pushing apocalyptic narratives about school shootings, income inequality, racism, Donald Trump and Russia conspiring to steal the election… climate change. Especially climate change! Young Congresswoman and Instagram personality Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared that “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change” in early 2019. And then in ’20, the Covid-19 pandemic.

Emo Rap was many kids’ soundtrack to all that, its rise and appeal as much a symptom of exaggerated media narratives as the alarming OD and suicide stats, but in giving voice to the feelings and validating the self-destructive responses and behaviors, the music fueled a vicious cycle.

“Lucid Dreams” re-entered the Hot100 for two weeks when the news of Juice WRLD’s death hit, but labels had already signed the second wave of Emo Rap stars, 24kGoldn and The Kid Laroi, both of whom scored even bigger hits in the genre in the early ’20s.

#7 Bebe Rexha featuring Florida Georgia Line – Meant to Be

Well at #7 is a change of pace: the biggest hit of all time on the Country charts, #1 there for an incredible 50 weeks: almost the entire year, but the lead artist wasn’t even a Country Singer!

Born in Brooklyn, raised in Staten Island, she was a second-gen Albanian-American whose first coup was writing the hook of Rapper Eminem’s 2013 hit “The Monster.” She didn’t get to sing it on the record, Rihanna did, but less than two years later the world heard her on another of her co-writes, White Rapper G-Eazy’s “Me, Myself & I,” and in ’17 she accepted an invite to write a song with the Duo who Billboard ranked the #4 top Country act of the ’10s decade, and this was the result. No wonder Rolling Stone called her a “Pop chameleon.” At #7 it’s Bebe Rexha featuring Florida Georgia Line, “Meant to Be.”

“Meant to Be,” Bebe Rexha featuring Florida Georgia Line, #7 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown of 2018’s biggest Pop hits.

“Bro-Country,” the genre that crossed over from the Country charts in the ’10s and Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise” and its #4 Pop remix in ’12 and ’13 set the template, with approaches borrowed from Rock, Hip-Hop and even EDM. Sam Hunt’s “Body Like a Back Road,” the biggest recent Bro-County hit heading into ’18.

Bebe Rexha struggled on the charts for a few years after “Meant to Be,” but was back in the top 10 in 2023 as the Singer and Co-Writer on veteran French EDM Producer David Guetta’s hit “I’m Good (Blue).” “Pop chameleon” indeed!

#6 Cardi B, Bad Bunny & J Balvin – I Like It

So at the end of 2017 Billboard kinda made a big deal over their year-end top ten not having any songs with Female lead artists, but that was only because “Bodak Yellow,” the breakout hit by the Rapper with the #6 hit on our 2018 countdown was only in the middle of its chart run November 25, the end of Billboard‘s 2017 chart year to make that press deadline for their year-end issue. But with 15 weeks yet to go, counting the song’s full chart run in the year it saw most of its chart action, “Bodak” was really 2017’s #6 song, not #24 where Billboard had it.

But still, they had a point: 2017 was pretty Male-dominated. ’18, less so, and that had a lot to do with our Female Rapper having an even bigger second year. And she was pregnant through much of it, which was another thing to keep fans engaged on socials all Spring and Summer as the songs from her debut album Invasion of Privacy, all twelve of them besides “Bodak,” bounced around the Hot100. This was the biggest. At #6 it’s Cardi B, teamed with Puerto Rican Rapper Bad Bunny and Colombian Singer J Balvin, “I Like It.”

“I Like It,” Cardi B, another song in Spanish in the top ten on the year after “Despacito” was the #2 song of 2017, legacy media pounding their border wall and illegal immigration narratives hard, so songs in Spanish were super-relevant.

The feminist #metoo narrative, also ubiquitous as Cardi B emerged to break the near monopoly of Males at the top of the charts. Donald Trump’s vulgar comments about women on the infamous Access Hollywood tape from 2005; 87 women accusing Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein in 2017; then Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in ’18. In the Senate confirmation hearings, Christine Blasey Ford claiming he assaulted her in college.

So a new take-no-crap, in-your-face Female Rapper against that backdrop? Perfect! Cardi B, the first Female Rapper to hit #1 since White Australian Iggy Azalea in ’14, who was quickly canceled for her culture vulturing “blaccent” and history of questionable Tweets. And after Cardi B, here came Megan Thee Stallion and Doja Cat in the top 10 in ’20 and ’21.

#5 Post Malone – Better Now

OK, so now we’ve heard a song apiece from two of the three Rappers with two hits in our 2018 Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown, Drake and Cardi B. At numbers 5 and 4 we have a two-fer from the third: both songs back-to-back in our ranking.

At the beginning of 2016, “White Iverson” off his first album Stoney had gotten to #14 and caused a bit of a stir, but nothing else connected for over a year, until the fifth single from Stoney, “Congratulations” started its slow, seven month climb up the charts to #8. By then, his second album Beerbongs and Bentleys was nearly done, and with pent up demand on streaming platforms, its lead single debuted at #2. We’re gonna hear that one which was on the charts from late ’17 into ’18 next, but first at #5, the last hit off Beerbongs and Bentleys from nearly year later. It’s Post Malone’s “Better Now.”

“Better Now” had the highest debut, #7, of all the 15 Post Malone tracks that charted the week Beerbongs and Bentleys hit streaming services, Billboard‘s issue dated May 12. The three other tracks on that album had already charted as advance singles, and Billboard has one of those, “Psycho,” as its #6 year-end song of 2018.

We have “Better Now” instead, with “Psycho” at #12, for the same reason that Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow” is our #6 song of 2017 despite missing the year-end top ten in Billboard: they didn’t count its full chart run, and here at Chartcrush, we count every song’s full chart run. “Better Now” stayed on the Hot100 all the way ’til May of 2019: tied for the second most total weeks on the chart of all 2018 hits with 52, and all but one of those was in the Top40.

#4 Post Malone – rockstar

But Malone’s biggest hit of the year was our song at #4 on our 2018 Chartcrush countdown, the lead advance single from Beerbongs and Bentleys that debuted at #2 in October of ’17, months before the album’s release. And someone at the label, or maybe Malone himself, came up with a brilliant way to juice it on the charts: a looped video on YouTube with only the chorus, but in the description, links to hear the full song on streaming platforms, and here’s the jig: both views and streams were factored for the charts, so it’s double the clicks! Clever, huh? At #4, the whole song, not a loop: Post Malone with Rapper 21 Savage, “rockstar.”

Post Malone’s “rockstar” at #4 on our Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown for 2018, featuring Rapper 21 Savage, whose own chart breakthrough “Bank Account” peaked at #12 two months before “rockstar.”

Now, critics didn’t much like Postie. Spin called him “a doofy longhaired White guy” in a “Worst Songs of the Year” feature that included “rockstar,” and a 2022 New Yorker assessment had the headline “Post Malone’s Languid Songs of Self-Loathing.” In a year when Emo Rap killed on streaming platforms, though, maybe that’s a ringing endorsement, right? But Post Malone didn’t need critics to like him; he was back with even bigger hits in ’19 and ’20 off his next album Hollywood’s Bleeding.

#3 Ed Sheeran – Perfect

Next up at #3, the big 2018 hit by the highest grossing concert act of the year: 99 shows, a cool $429 million. Not bad. He also had the #1 song of 2017, so here he is coming pretty close to repeating. No artist in our Chartcrush rankings has done that since Bing Crosby in 1944 and ’45!

It’s the fourth single off his 2017 album Divide, just the mathematical symbol on the cover, but an appropriate title given the media posture in the late ’10s that I’ve been talking about, and all the toxic narratives. At #3, Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect.”

“Perfect,” English Singer-Songwriter Ed Sheeran, the #3 song of 2018 a year after scoring the biggest hit of 2017 with “Shape of You.” There were two Duet remix versions of “Perfect,” one with Beyonce and the other with Italian Tenor Andrea Bocelli helping propel it to #1 for five weeks, then six more at #2 behind Camila Cabello’s “Havana.”

As big as he was in the U.S., Ed Sheeran was arguably even bigger than The Beatles in his native U.K. After his album Divide dropped, he broke a record set in 1953 by occupying all five of the top chart positions on the U.K. chart. The Beatles did that in the U.S. in 1964, but not in the U.K.

#2 Drake – God’s Plan

At #2, the second song in our Chartcrush 2018 Top Ten Countdown by the Rapper whose “In My Feelings” we heard back at #9 sparked the year’s big social media meme in late Summer, the Kiki Challenge. This one was earlier, the lead single from his first proper studio album in two years, Scorpion, but first released on a two-song EP a month before he even announced that he was working on a new album, and five months before the album actually dropped.

The label budgeted a million bucks to make a video, and he gave nearly all of it to the needy and charities in Miami in cash and oversized checks and filmed himself doing so. And that was the video. It nevertheless won Video of the Year at the BET Awards.

One parody had late night host Jimmy Kimmel’s sidekick Guillermo spreading around $100 in singles in a Dollar Store. Here again, Drake with “God’s Plan.”

Drake, contemplating his fame and fate on “God’s Plan,” #2 here on the Chartcrush Top Ten Countdown Show, 2018 edition. The first of three #1s from his Scorpion album. “Nice for What” was next when it debuted at #1 in late April and replaced “God’s Plan” at the top; then “In My Feelings” replaced that in July and combined, the three songs gave Drake 29 weeks at #1 in 2018, breaking Usher’s record of 28 in ’04. He also had the #2 song four of those weeks.

Billboard has him as the year’s top Hot100 artist, which surprised no one, but on simple chart points, not counting featured appearances, only lead artist billings, Post Malone actually comes out #1.

#1 Maroon 5 featuring Cardi B – Girls like You

Billboard also had “God’s Plan” as their #1 Hot100 song of the year. But again, Billboard‘s year-end rankings can’t factor full chart runs, only weeks within their “chart years” imposed by the press deadlines for the year-end issues with their chart recaps.

Our #1 is the song that replaced “God’s Plan” atop the weekly Hot100, and stayed there for the next seven weeks through most of the Fall. But then it stayed on the chart all the way ’til June of 2019, seven months past Billboard‘s cut-off for the 2018 chart year, so Billboard ranked it #10 for 2018 and #22 for 2019. But when you factor all the weeks together, it beats “God’s Plan” by a pretty comfortable margin despite having four fewer weeks at #1.

No 2018 song had more weeks in the top10: 33 of its total 52 weeks on the chart, making it 2018’s #1 song: Maroon 5 and Cardi B’s “Girls like You.”

Cardi B’s simmering beef with Nicki Minaj coming to blows in September may’ve helped juice “Girls like You” to #1. She’d become the first Black Female Rapper since Lauryn Hill in the ’90 to score a #1 solo hit and did it with her debut single. The closest Nicki had gotten, “Anaconda,” #2 in 2014 behind Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off.”

Now Maroon 5: 15-year chart veterans still going strong in 2018. “Girls like You,” their fourth career #1 and #1 on our Chartcrush Countdown of 2018’s biggest hits.

Front man Adam Levine, the star judge/coach on NBC’s top-rated singing competition reality show The Voice since 2011, and in the ’10s, many of Maroon 5’s biggest hits, including “Girls like You,” collaborations with “it” Rappers: Wiz Khalifa in 2012 (“Payphone”), Nicki Minaj in ’15 (the remix of “Sugar”), Kendrick Lamar in ’16 (“Don’t Wanna Know”) and Future in ’17 with “Cold.”

Bonus

And that’s our top 10. Again, we factor songs’ full runs, which gets the year-straddling hits “Lucid Dreams” and “Better Now” that missed Billboard‘s year-end top 10 because of their necessary year-splitting into our Chartcrush top 10. But those coming in bumps two out from Billboard‘s top ten, so to be thorough, let’s have a look at those.

#13 Zedd, Maren Morris and Grey – The Middle

At #8 Billboard had the hit by Russian-born German EDM Producer Zedd teamed with Country Singer Maren Morris and American EDM Duo Grey, “The Middle.”

“The Middle” was also Billboard‘s #1 year-end Hot Dance/Electronic song having set a new record with 33 weeks at #1 on that chart. It notches in at #13 on our Chartcrush Hot100 ranking.

#12 Post Malone – Psycho

And the other song from Billboard‘s year-end top 10 that got shuffled out of our Chartcrush top 10 by those year-straddlers coming in: their #5 song of the year: the third single from Post Malone’s Beerbongs and Bentleys, “Psycho.”

Post Malone’s “Psycho” is #12 on our Chartcrush 2018 ranking; I mentioned it earlier in our Postie twofer at numbers 5 and 4 in the countdown when we heard “Better Now” and “rockstar.”

Well it’s been fun but we’re gonna have to wrap up our 2018 edition of Chartcrush! I’ve been your host, Christopher Verdesi, and if you like what you heard and want more, please please please, head over to our website, chartcrush.com, where you’ll a full transcript and a link to the podcast version on Spotify, plus badass extras like our full top 100 chart and interactive line graph of the actual chart runs of the songs we heard this hour. We do that for every year, ’40s to the present, and it’s all on the website, again, chartcrush.com.

Thanks for listening and be sure and tune in again this time next week, same station, for another year, and another edition of Chartcrush.

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