In The Quantity Ones, I’m reviewing each single #1 single within the historical past of the Billboard Scorching 100, beginning with the chart’s starting, in 1958, and dealing my method up into the current.
For the reason that second that his profession started, Eminem has talked a lot shit about pop stars. Considered one of Em’s favourite targets is Britney Spears, so it’s a bit eye-opening to contemplate simply how a lot he has in frequent along with her. Take into account: Two photogenic blonde white youngsters of modest means, each of whom have troubled relationships with their dad and mom, come blasting out of flyover nation in 1999, teaming up with visionary producers and conquering TRL. Each of them turn into cultural phenoms who promote thousands and thousands upon thousands and thousands of CDs and who star in hit motion pictures particularly conceived as automobiles for his or her star personas. Each of them come to signify the harmful energy of pop stars, and each of them trigger ethical panics just by present.
After they’re at their peak, each of those blonde youngsters rating #1 hits, although you’d anticipate each of them to high the Scorching 100 far more typically. Each stars exist on the heart of perpetual media circuses, and the eye shortly turns poisonous. Each stars take care of failed marriages, custody battles, dependancy, rehab. Ultimately, each stars come out of their private crises with #1 hits within the late ’00s. Each string collectively sequence of late-career chart-toppers once they’re long gone their artistic primes. Each duet with Rihanna. Eminem and Britney Spears are principally the identical individual, however at the least late-period Britney gave us some fairly good songs. Late-period Eminem gave us “Crack A Bottle,” one of many worst chart-toppers in Billboard historical past.
Eminem unintentionally invented the time period stan. The second music on 2000’s The Marshall Mathers LP is “Stan,” a gripping and fucked-up psychodrama a couple of disturbed fan whose Eminem obsession leads him to murder-suicide. It’s a vital doc from a star who’s unsettled by his personal overwhelming fame and with the individuals who get method too invested in his work. “Stan” wasn’t an enormous hit within the US; the music solely made it to #51 on the Scorching 100. However The Marshall Mathers LP offered 58 kajillion copies, and “Stan” entered the cultural lexicon.
The one that actually turned stan right into a lowercase noun is Nas. A yr and a half after The Marshall Mathers LP, Nas used “stan” as shorthand on “Ether,” his enraged and demonic clap-back to the Jay-Z diss observe “Takeover”: “You a fan, a pretend, a phony, a pussy, a stan.” Inside a number of years, rap heads have been utilizing “stan” conversationally, as a approach to describe deluded and overly invested followers. The time period finally crossed over to all corners of pop music, and it misplaced its derogatory implication.
We’re now in an odd actuality the place followers proudly adapt the time period stan to explain themselves. Over the previous 20 years, pop music has misplaced its cultural centrality, the monoculture has sputtered and died, radio has misplaced its energy, and stans have used the web to arrange. At this level, on-line stan armies are the primary driving driving forces on the Billboard Scorching 100. A star who has sufficient stans can launch a bullshit music that leaves no cultural impression and nonetheless debuts at #1, because of the coordinated efforts of that artists’s stans. Possibly it’s acceptable that Eminem, the man who got here up with “Stan” within the first place, was one of many unique beneficiaries of this pop-chart sea change. Too dangerous the music in query, the one which Eminem’s stans pushed to #1, sucks shit.
“Crack A Bottle” wasn’t the primary horrible Eminem music, but it surely does discover wild, psychedelic new methods to be horrible. It’s really unusual that “Crack A Bottle” is simply Em’s second chart-topper, particularly when you think about that his first was “Lose Your self,” a totemic work for anybody who was paying the slightest consideration to in style music or tradition within the early ’00s. “Lose Your self” was Eminem at his artistic and business peak. After three vastly profitable albums that catalyzed tons of dialog about rap and race and hate and anger, Eminem starred in his personal self-mythologizing film after which sailed to #1 along with his personal Oscar-winning motivational Rocky theme. After that, issues received rocky.
Eminem stayed culturally current by releasing an album along with his D12 crew and by shepherding the profession of ascendant celebrity 50 Cent. However Em’s first actual assertion after 8 Mile was 2004’s Encore, an album recorded by way of a fog of pain-pill dependancy. The pressured hijinks of lead single “Simply Lose It” have been consultant of the issue. Em was attempting to dwell as much as the transgressive enjoyable of his older music, and he was failing spectacularly. (“Simply Lose It” peaked at #6. It’s a 4.) Encore nonetheless offered a ton of copies, but it surely didn’t do wherever close to in addition to Em’s earlier albums. Em adopted that album with a 2005 greatest-hits assortment referred to as Curtain Name, and its bonus tracks gave him a pair extra top-10 hits. (The larger of these singles, the Nate Dogg collab “Shake That,” peaked at #6. It’s a 5.)
In 2005, Eminem cancelled the European leg of his Anger Administration tour to go to rehab. Over the following few years, Eminem’s private life was a catastrophe. He remarried after which instantly re-divorced his ex-wife, and he continued to wrestle with drugs. Proof, Em’s finest buddy and D12 bandmate, was killed in a gunfight at a Detroit pool corridor in 2006. Em, despondent, went into seclusion. He didn’t cease recording fully, however his appearances turned much less frequent. In 2006, Em rapped a feverishly off-putting guest-verse on Akon’s #2 hit “Smack That.” (That music is a 3.) A yr later, Em launched the compilation The Re-Up, and he received to #12 with “You Don’t Know,” a posse minimize with 50 Cent, Lloyd Banks, and his protege Cashis.
Eminem secured his place in pop and rap historical past along with his first three albums, and he now not needed to fear about individuals taking him severely. However he was struggling. These mid-’00s information reveal an artist who’d fallen out of affection with the sport and who was shedding contact with the explanation why individuals cherished him within the first place. Eminem was leaning tougher into his technical rap mastery and his nasal honk of a voice, however he’d misplaced the foolish, malevolent glee that animated his early music. When Eminem went quiet for a number of years, he didn’t rediscover that high quality. If something, he turn into much more distant — a prisoner to his personal stylistic tics.
In 2008, Eminem began planting the seeds for what would turn into his comeback album. He locked again in with outdated mentor Dr. Dre, who produced or co-produced each observe on the exhausting and overlong 2009 album Relapse. Relapse was the primary album that Eminem ever recorded sober, although he later claimed that the opiates have been nonetheless in his system when he was placing the file collectively. It’s a stunningly ugly and punishing piece of labor, an infinite barrage of overworked punchlines and violent fantasies. However Eminem had been gone for a very long time, and there was a lot of pent-up demand for his return. That return took the type of “Crack A Bottle.”
I can perceive the pondering behind “Crack A Bottle.” Eminem’s two collaborators have been going by way of their very own issues once they popped up on the observe. Dr. Dre hadn’t launched an album since his 1999 blockbuster 2001. Dre had gotten along with Interscope boss Jimmy Iovine to discovered Beats Electronics in 2006, and he’d began promoting his Beats By Dre headphones in 2008. As for his music, although, Dre was centered on Detox, the supposed masterpiece that consumed most of his consideration for years. Dre stored promising the discharge of Detox after which pushing it again. The album finally took on a popularity as rap’s Chinese language Democracy, however Chinese language Democracy really got here out. Detox by no means did.
Dre’s golden contact as a producer was fading, too. Dre was nonetheless producing hits within the ’00s, however most of these hits have been tied to 50 Cent and his G-Unit crew. When 50’s business prospects pale, so did Dre’s. 50 had already alienated a lot of his public earlier than he made the fateful mistake of choosing a release-date combat with Kanye West. 50’s Curtis misplaced the much-hyped gross sales battle to Kanye’s Commencement. Curtis nonetheless offered lots of first-week copies, however no one preferred it, which compounded 50’s humiliation.
By the point of “Crack A Bottle,” 50 was lowered to beefing with Rick Ross, attempting to capitalize on Ross’ previous as a jail guard and distinction that with Ross’ larger-than-life drug-kingpin picture. 50 had made his title by bullying his rap friends, however one thing humorous occurred with the Rick Ross beef. No person cared that Ross had made up his backstory. Folks nonetheless preferred the music, and 50’s makes an attempt to stretch the feud out got here off as determined flailing.
When Eminem reunited with Dre and 50 on “Crack A Bottle,” he clearly needed to evoke the not-too-distant days when the three of them completely owned the pop charts, when that one XXL cowl appeared like an announcement of empirical dominance. Even in a diminished kind, it nonetheless meant one thing to listen to this trio again collectively. A reunion single felt like an occasion. However the model of “Crack A Bottle” with all three stars wasn’t the primary one which the world heard. As an alternative, a leaked early model of “Crack A Bottle” popped up on a 2008 mixtape. The one voice on that leak was Eminem himself. He rapped two verses of his personal, in addition to one other that was clearly a information vocal for the Dr. Dre verse that he’d written. (Em had ghostwritten for Dre loads of instances earlier than. Famously, Dre virtually by no means wrote his personal raps. Relying on who you ask, he won’t have executed all of his personal manufacturing, both.)
In response to that leak, Eminem rushed out a business model of “Crack A Bottle” with the Dr. Dre and 50 Cent verses added on. “Crack A Bottle” appeared on iTunes in February 2009, greater than three months earlier than Em launched Rehab. Interscope claimed that “Crack A Bottle” wasn’t really the album’s lead single, and the observe by no means even received a video. Nonetheless, the only offered greater than 400,000 copies in its first week — at the moment, essentially the most {that a} authorized obtain had ever offered in seven days. That was sufficient to push “Crack A Bottle” to #1 with out a lot assist from radio — a testomony to the ability of stans. However “Crack A Bottle” didn’t cling round lengthy. Inside a month, it was out of the highest 10 fully.
Right here’s the factor about “Crack A Bottle”: It’s fucking abysmal. It’s the worst. It doesn’t even have the purity of the Relapse idea, the haze of serial-killer imagery, working for it. Eminem opens “Crack A Bottle” by taking part in boxing announcer, crowing about himself and his “file of 17 rapes, 400 assaults, and 4 murders.” Fairly cool, buddy. However Eminem doesn’t even go into violent overdrive on “Crack A Bottle.” As an alternative, the music is Em’s excuse to play silly phrase video games and to inform girls how lucky they’re once they’re allowed to fuck him.
Eminem’s “Crack A Bottle” hook is likely one of the most viscerally disagreeable sounds that can ever seem on this column. Em delivers the entire thing in a neenering playground-bully singsong that makes me virtually bodily unwell. He begins that hook out by addressing some fortunate woman: “Crack a bottle! Let your physique waddle! Don’t act like a sloppy mannequin! You simply hit the lotto!” Fairly quickly, Em and his mates are making ready for an orgy: “The place’s the rubbers? Who’s received the rubbers? I seen that there’s so a lot of ’em and there’s actually not that many people!” From a sure perspective, that is garden-variety rap hedonism, however Eminem writes all of it with a charmless verbosity that basically illuminates simply how a lot craft and pleasure there’s in, say, a throwaway Ja Rule observe. A throwaway Ja Rule observe is dangerous, but it surely’s nowhere close to this dangerous.
Em’s verse is even worse than his hook. It’s so muddled, so syntactically tortured. Em calls himself “Mr. Elephant Tusk,” which I suppose is a reference to his ivory pores and skin, and he rhymes it with “repair your musk.” He arms out a few invites that aren’t very engaging: “Kiss my butt, lick fromunda cheese from beneath my nuts.” He says that when he spits the verse, the shit will get worse than Worcestershire sauce — correct sufficient. He rhymes “therefore the sign” with “again on you hoes,” which sounds much more awkward than it seems on paper. Em simply yammers all his syllables, cluttering them collectively artlessly and gracelessly, like we’re imagined to be impressed at what number of phrases he can say. Within the years forward, Em would virtually flip that jumbled vocab-test shit right into a aggressive sport, however he virtually sleepwalks by way of it on “Crack A Bottle.” I can’t actually complain about Em’s verse being brief, lest I get into dangerous meals/small parts complaints, but it surely’s about as autopilot as he’s ever been.
Dr. Dre isn’t a lot assist. Dre is the only real credited producer on “Crack A Bottle,” although the music additionally credit writers Mark Batson, Dawaun Parker, Jean Renard, and Trevor Lawrence, Jr. — all of whom must be ashamed. Dre’s beat is constructed on a pattern of “Mais Dans La Lumière,” a French-language chanson that the Israeli singer Mike Brant launched in 1970. Brant is a favourite of rap producers, and “Mais Dans La Lumière” was successful throughout the French-speaking world. (Brant died by suicide 5 years after its launch.) It’s a cool music, swollen and orchestral, however Dre’s beat doesn’t actually seize its sweep.
Dre pairs his Mike Brant pattern with the often-sampled breakbeat from the intro to “The Rainmaker,” a observe that the fifth Dimension launched in 1971. (The fifth Dimension have been on this column a few instances. “The Rainmaker” didn’t chart as a result of it by no means got here out as a single within the US.) The mix doesn’t actually work. Dre’s beat is sterile and ungainly, and it’s received not one of the glossy and predatory high quality of the tracks that he was producing a number of years earlier. That is the time when Dre was attempting to make Detox, when he was caught inside his personal head. You possibly can inform.
Dre’s verse on “Crack A Bottle” is deeply forgettable. Eminem, writing for Dre, retains most of his worst tendencies in examine. Dre’s nonetheless received that awesomely booming, authoritative rap voice, however he doesn’t actually say something cool. He’s simply speaking about ladies and lowriders and Los Angeles, and Em can’t restrain himself from doing goofy shit like rhyming “Maaco” with “Waco.” The chemistry that Eminem and Dre confirmed on tracks like “Responsible Conscience” and “Forgot About Dre” is simply gone.
We don’t get a lot of the outdated Eminem/50 Cent “Patiently Ready” chemistry, both. 50’s verse is the very best factor about “Crack A Bottle,” and his lazy, assured singsong is sufficient to persuade me that he’s the one who ought to’ve been writing and singing the hook. However that is nonetheless 50 Cent on whole autopilot, and 50 was out of juice at this level. We’d seen an excessive amount of of him, and he didn’t sound cool anymore. You possibly can solely get away with being on autopilot if individuals nonetheless assume you’re cool.
“Crack A Bottle” feels like ass, and it’s one of many worst examples of event-rap torpor — massive stars anticipating massive reactions simply because all of them present up on a observe collectively. It may be gross to listen to individuals cruising on previous glories, however there’s one thing a lot grosser occurring on “Crack A Bottle.” The music’s lyrics suggest a bleak-ass worldview. Loads of rap songs speak about girls as commodities, and a few rappers get away with it by way of exuberance or creativity or normal coolness. “Crack A Bottle” doesn’t have any of these issues, and its issues are compounded as a result of Eminem sounds actively irritated on the drunk and scorching ladies that he desires to fuck. They need to be glad! They shouldn’t be loud! They’ve been granted entry to a well-known rapper! They simply received the lotto! “Crack A Bottle” offers off completely no sense of pleasure, romance, human connection. It’s a music about meaningless intercourse from somebody who doesn’t even sound like he enjoys meaningless intercourse. It’s so miserable.
Eminem really did fee a “Crack A Bottle” video, however he, Dre, and 50 didn’t hassle to seem in it. As an alternative, director Syndrome made a clip the place a disturbed unhoused woman’s 40-ounce malt liquor bottle opens up right into a dilapidated fantastical condominium constructing. All three rappers get their very own themed rooms. Eminem’s condominium is all clichéd horror-movie imagery, whereas Dre will get normal West Coast rap stuff and 50 will get a garden-variety nightclub the place ladies make out with one another. That video leaked, but it surely went unreleased till final yr, when Eminem took it out of the vault and threw it up on his YouTube web page. He ought to’ve left the video within the vault. It fucking sucks.
Eminem included “Crack A Bottle” on Relapse, however he buried it close to the top of the album when it got here out a number of months later. Relapse is likely to be Eminem’s worst full-length, but it surely was nonetheless a giant deal when it got here out. So far as I may inform, its principal viewers was the youngsters who have been too younger to recollect when Eminem was good. Of their early shock-rap days, the younger Odd Future rappers appeared to say Relapse rather a lot. The album finally went triple platinum, and “We Made You,” which Eminem insisted was the precise correct single, peaked at #9. (It’s a 1.)
Later in 2009, Eminem padded out his complete comeback narrative by showing alongside former Quantity Ones artists Kanye West and Lil Wayne on “Without end,” the triumphal posse minimize from ascendant star Drake. Eminem’s “Without end” verse was dizzily quick and complex. Throughout the music, it labored higher than the rest that Eminem was doing on his personal. (“Without end” peaked at #8. It’s a 6. Drake will seem on this column an entire lot of instances.)
Inside a yr, Eminem was already apologizing for Relapse. On a music that’ll finally seem on this column, Em rapped, “Let’s be sincere, that final Relapse CD was ehhhh.” (I’d say that ehhhh is a beneficiant evaluation.) However the album did deliver Eminem again to the highlight, and he went on a vastly profitable run. We’ll see far more of Eminem on this column. We is not going to, nonetheless, see any extra of Dr. Dre or 50 Cent.
Dre continued to vow the discharge of Detox, and he even made it to #4 with “I Want A Physician,” a 2011 observe with Eminem and Skylar Gray that was imagined to function that album’s massive single. (It’s a 3.) In 2015, Dre lastly introduced that Detox would by no means come out. As an alternative, he launched Compton, a brand new album that was tied in with the discharge of the N.W.A biopic Straight Outta Compton. I preferred Compton when it got here out, but it surely didn’t depart a lot of an impression, and I haven’t listened to it in years. The one Compton observe that even made the Scorching 100 was “Medication Man,” which featured Eminem and which peaked at #40. Dre hasn’t been again on the Scorching 100 since.
At this level, it’s most likely protected to imagine that Dr. Dre is retired from making music, or that music will simply be an idle pastime if he ever returns. In 2014, Dre and Jimmy Iovine offered Beats to Apple for $3.4 billion, which made Dre unfathomably wealthy. The Straight Outta Compton film was a shock blockbuster, and the group went into the Rock & Roll Corridor Of Fame quickly afterwards. Dre’s Aftermath label signed Kendrick Lamar and Anderson .Paak, two artists who will finally seem on this column. Final yr, Dre led an all-star group of collaborators, together with Eminem and 50 Cent, in a reasonably nice Tremendous Bowl Halftime Present. The person’s legacy is protected. I ponder if he even remembers making “Crack A Bottle.”
50 Cent adopted Curtis along with his 2009 album Earlier than I Self Destruct, which flopped laborious. Its greatest single, the Ne-Yo collab “Child By Me,” peaked at #28. 50 scored his final actual hit in 2010, when he rapped on the R&B singer Jeremih’s #4 single “Down On Me.” (It’s a 7.) As lead artist, 50 hasn’t been on the Scorching 100 since 2012. That’s when he received Eminem and Adam Levine to seem on his music “My Life,” which solely made it to #27 and which by no means even appeared on an album.
50’s solely album since Earlier than I Self Destruct is 2014’s Animal Ambition, one other absolute brick that disappeared with out a hint. 50 was doing lots of appearing in these years, and he amassed some of the busted filmographies I’ve ever seen. Aside from Den Of Thieves and a cameo in Popstar: Don’t Cease By no means Stopping, I’m unsure 50 has ever even been in an excellent film. However 50 modified his story up when he co-created and starred within the crime present Energy, a cult-hit Starz sequence that ran a bunch of seasons and received some spinoffs. Now, 50 is firmly within the nostalgia zone. In 2020, 50 acted as government producer for the late rapper Pop Smoke’s posthumous album Shoot For The Stars, Intention For The Moon, and he guested on Pop’s single “The Woo,” which peaked at #11.
Proper now, 50 Cent is preparing have fun the twentieth anniversary of his blockbuster debut Get Wealthy Or Die Tryin’ with an area tour that’s received Busta Rhymes and Jeremih as its openers. Eminem, Dr. Dre, and 50 Cent are all doing extraordinarily effectively as of late. They’re all rap legends, and so they all landed on their toes. Good for them. They deserve to achieve success. However they’re nonetheless collectively accountable for one of many shittiest hits in historical past.
GRADE: 1/10
