So Tonight We're Gonna Party Like It's 1999 🥂🍾
For the first time since 1990, there isn't a single hip-hop song in the Billboard Hot 100's top 40. The headline sounds dramatic, almost unprecedented—and it is, by the numbers. But before we start writing think pieces about hip-hop's cultural decline, we should probably ask what actually happened here.
The culprit isn't a sudden shift in taste. It's a rule change.
Kendrick Lamar and SZA's Luther had spent 46 weeks on the chart, including 13 weeks at number one. In its final appearance, it sat at number 38—still firmly in the top 40. Then it simply vanished. Not because people stopped listening, but because Billboard's new recurrent rule removed it. Songs that have been charting for extended periods and fall below a certain position are now automatically dropped from the top 40.
This raises an obvious question that the reporting hasn't addressed: if these rules had always existed, would hip-hop ever have had the chart dominance it enjoyed over the past three decades?
Think about how hip-hop songs often chart. They can have incredible longevity, maintaining steady streams and radio play for months or even years. Drake's God's Plan spent 11 weeks at number one in 2018, but it hung around the charts for much longer. Lil Nas X's Old Town Road became a cultural phenomenon partly because it wouldn't leave the charts. Would these songs have been stripped of their moment under today's methodology?
What we're seeing might not reflect actual listening habits at all. Several rap tracks are sitting just outside the top 40 right now—YoungBoy Never Broke Again's Shot Callin at 43, BigXthaPlug and Ella Langley's Hell At Night at 50. Are we really supposed to believe there's a clean cultural divide between position 39 and position 43?
The methodology matters because the narrative matters. When headlines declare, "no hip-hop in the top 40," it creates a story about relevance and cultural power. But if the measuring stick changed mid-game, what are we actually measuring?
It's worth asking who benefits from these adjustments. Chart positions influence everything from playlist placements to licensing deals to venue bookings. They shape what we hear in public spaces and what algorithms recommend to us. If songs with longevity—a particular strength of hip-hop—are now systematically removed, we're not just changing how we count popularity. We're changing which kinds of popularity count.
Maybe this really is just an anomaly, a weird moment created by the collision of chart rules and release timing. Maybe next week three rap songs will crack the top 20. But maybe we should be asking harder questions about what these charts claim to represent, and whether the new rules measure popularity or simply create the appearance of rotation.
