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.
Cardi B could’ve gone out like Desiigner, or Mims. When New York rappers arrive with out-of-nowhere crossover smashes, they usually don’t go on to long and prosperous careers. Cardi’s ascent — stripper to Instagram influencer to reality-TV star to chart-topping rapper — was already an improbable story. When “Bodak Yellow” went supernova, it could’ve easily overshadowed everything else that Cardi would ever do. But that wasn’t going to happen. Cardi was a star, and she was going to make sure that the world knew it. Very quickly, the world found out.
In the time after “Bodak Yellow,” Cardi B went on a run. She rapped exciting, attitudinal guest-verses on a bunch of other people’s songs — Migos’ “Motorsport,” G-Eazy’s “No Limit,” Bruno Mars’ “Finesse” — and turned those songs into hits. Her own “Bodak Yellow” follow-up, the 21 Savage collab “Bartier Cardi,” peaked at #14. Other than “Finesse,” these were hard-ass rap songs, not brazen crossover attempts, but they crossed over anyway. More importantly, Cardi became an irresistible force in public life. Her whirlwind romance with Migos member Offset made her a gossip-column fixture, and she was charming enough to make the most of her mainstream-media hits. I liked when she co-hosted The Tonight Show and told John Mulaney that he looked like the Pet Shop Boys.
When you’re a big-deal rapper and a media industry unto yourself, you’re already most of the way to pop stardom. Cardi’s bosses at Atlantic Records didn’t give her debut album the perfunctory rollout that so many viral rappers get. Instead, those execs got deep into the weeds while helping Cardi craft her LP. They worked especially hard on a big, brassy Latin-rap anthem, figuring that they could have a song-of-the-summer contender if they played their cards just right. That kind of too-many-cooks label meddling can really smother a new rapper, giving off flop-sweat effort rather than smooth assurance. But Cardi’s voice was too loud to be smothered, and anyway these particular label execs had the right instincts. You can see all the hit-by-numbers calculation at work on “I Like It,” Cardi’s second chart-topper, but the song caught all the right waves and roped in a couple of other ascendant stars. This time, the effort paid off.
Really, everything went exactly right with Cardi B’s debut album. She released Invasion Of Privacy in April 2018, just as her hype crested, and it turned out to be a great rap record. At a moment when other A-list rap stars shot for hazy, vibey, melodic streaming bait, Cardi went with the ’00s everything-to-everyone approach. She played around with tons of different styles — Meek Mill-esque motivational talk, sleek Mustard-produced Cali rap, Atlanta trap, introspective relationship songs with R&B choruses. She brought in of-the-moment guest stars — the Migos, Chance The Rapper, YG, Kehlani, future Number Ones artist SZA. And her cartoonish tough-girl honk cut straight through all those different styles, proving as flexible as it was nasty and funny. I loved that album. Still do.
A week before Invasion Of Privacy came out, Cardi released “Be Careful,” a real-talk song about being nervous to put her effort and vulnerability into a new relationship. The track was built on a sample of the Lauryn Hill classic “Ex-Factor,” and by incredible coincidence, it came out one week before Drake’s “Nice For What,” which sampled the exact same song, albeit in different ways. “Nice For What” turned out to be a giant smash, and that probably stopped “Be Careful” from doing everything that it could’ve done otherwise. But Cardi couldn’t be shoved aside that easily. The night after Invasion Of Privacy came out, she performed “Be Careful” on Saturday Night Live, and she revealed some big news via dramatic zoom-out: She was pregnant with Offset’s kid. “Be Careful” never got as big as “Nice For What,” but the same week that the Drake song debuted at #1, “Be Careful” peaked at #11. The charts were big enough for two “Ex-Factor” samples.
The day that Invasion Of Privacy came out, I went to Turnstile’s Time & Space record-release gig in Washington, DC; it remains one of the best live shows I’ve seen this century. I was playing Invasion Of Privacy loud on the way to that show, and when I got there, all the bands’ merch tables also had the Cardi album playing. I love those moments, when some rapper comes along and conquers a moment so completely that their music makes every other experience feel just a little more heightened. Invasion Of Privacy easily debuted at #1, moving about 250,000 album-equivalent units in its first week. When the LP arrived, lots of people noticed its goofy-fun Latin-crossover song and wondered why that one wasn’t a single yet. But then that song became a single, and it gathered steam into the summer, until it turned Cardi into the first female rapper ever to score a second #1 pop hit.
After “I Like It” reached #1 in 2018, Billboard ran an oral history of the track. In that article, it quickly becomes apparent that the song was a pet project for Atlantic Records CEO Craig Kallman. Kallman, a New York native, started out as a DJ in the ’80s. Then he founded the influential indie Big Beat before moving over to Atlantic. He dabbled in production while working as a record exec, but it wasn’t something that he did very often. Kallman correctly figured that Cardi had the potential to be huge, and he wanted to do everything in his power to make sure that happened. Cardi is half Dominican, and Kallman thought she needed a record that drew attention to that side of her heritage. Cardi is ultimately a pretty traditional New York rapper, but she was down to give it a try.
One night, an excited Kallman invited Cardi collaborator J. White Did It to his house. White produced “Bodak Yellow” and most of Cardi’s early tracks, and Kallman wanted to impress upon him the idea of a Latin record. Kallman has a famously huge record collection, and he played White a bunch of tracks that he thought might make good samples. White was going on no sleep, and he was dozing off in Kallman’s studio. But when he heard Pete Rodriguez’s boogaloo classic “I Like It Like That,” he woke right up.
Really, Kallman didn’t have to get his fingers too dusty to find that record. “I Like It Like That” is a New York perennial, a song that’s practically in your bloodstream if you’ve ever lived in the city. The whole boogaloo genre is definitive New York music — a salsa-R&B hybrid that came out of the city’s Puerto Rican communities in the ’60s. Tony Pabon and Manny Rodriguez wrote the track for the bandleader Pete Rodriguez in 1967. The song never reached the Hot 100, but it stayed in New York radio rotation for decades. Director Darnell Martin used the song’s title for I Like It Like That, a ’90s movie about young Puerto Ricans in the Bronx. For that film’s soundtrack, a team of Latin music giants like Tito Puente, Ray Barretto, and Sheila E. got together to record a new version of the song. The one-off supergroup known as the Blackout Allstars released “I Like It” in 1994, and it initially went nowhere. But after the track appeared in a Burger King commercial a couple of years later, it became a slow-burn crossover hit, peaking at #25 in 1997. When I first moved to New York in 2000, I heard the song so often that I assumed it was a brand-new record.
Craig Kallman played the original “I Like It Like That” for J. White Did It, and the two of them immediately started working to flip that sample and make a track out of it. Cardi recorded a verse, and Kallman sent the track over the Atlantic A&R director Edgar Machuca. Machuca thought that the song could benefit from the presence of J Balvin and Bad Bunny, two Spanish-language artists whose careers were exploding in that moment. He was friendly with both of them, and he reached out and secured verses from both. That means it’s time for some of the guest-rapper capsule bios that we see so often in this column.
J Balvin started out first, so let’s start out with him. José Álvaro Osorio Balvín grew up well-off in Medellin, Colombia. (When Balvin was born, USA For Africa’s “We Are The World” was the #1 song in America. I can’t figure out what was at #1 in Colombia.) Balvin was a rock fan as a kid, but he got into reggaeton when he heard former Number Ones artist Daddy Yankee. For a while, Balvin moved to the US, working odd jobs in New York and Miami. Then he returned to Colombia, studied business in college, and started making music. His early tracks did their best to imitate Puerto Rican reggaeton, but he eventually developed a laid-back, confident style of his own. Balvin’s 2012 single “Yo Te Lo Dije” became a huge hit in Colombia, and it earned him a major-label deal.
Starting in 2013, Balvin cranked out a series of singles that did big numbers on the Billboard Latin chart. He crossed over to the Hot 100 for the first time in 2015, when his song “Ginza” peaked at #84. Whenever an American star wanted to release a Spanish-language remix, Balvin made himself available to rap a guest verse. He was one of the biggest names in reggaeton when “Despacito” became a runaway Hot 100 smash, and he scored the biggest hit of the post-“Despacito” moment. In 2017, Balvin and the French dance producer Willie William released the amped-up banger “Mi Gente.” In 2018, that song reached #19 — a huge peak for a Spanish-language track, even if it wasn’t quite at that “Despacito” level. Then Beyoncé jumped on a “Mi Gente” remix, released to raise money for hurricane relief, and the song surged to #3. (The Beyoncé version of “Mi Gente” is a 9, but it’s not as good as the original.)
In retrospect, it’s probably safe to say that J Balvin was at his absolute peak when he appeared on “I Like It.” Within the Latin music world, Balvin’s mercenary hit-chasing started to get on people’s nerves after a while. He’s still a big name, but I get the impression that people don’t think he’s cool anymore. He hasn’t had another hit anywhere near as big as “Mi Gente” or “I Like It.” Bad Bunny is another story. That guy was really just starting out when he dropped in on “I Like It.” Today, he’s basically the biggest pop star in the world, give or take a Taylor Swift. But despite getting close multiple times, he hasn’t been back to #1 in the US since “I Like It.” At least for now, this is the only time that this column will touch on Bad Bunny’s work, so let’s make it count.
Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio comes from the coastal Puerto Rican town of Vega Baja. (When Bad Bunny was born, the #1 song in America was Céline Dion’s “The Power Of Love.”) He grew up in a close-knit working-class family, and he sang in a church choir as a kid. After failing almost every class in his first semester of college, Bad Bunny dropped out and got a job bagging groceries at a supermarket. In his spare time, he made tracks with his DJ friend Ormani Pérez and posted them on SoundCloud. Very quickly, those tracks started to go viral. Noah Assad, founder of the Puerto Rican label Rimas Entertainment, signed Bad Bunny and became his manager. (For whatever, reason, Assad has a writing credit on “I Like It.”)
At first, Bad Bunny didn’t really make reggaeton. His music belonged to the subgenre known as Latin trap, a Puerto Rican variation on Southern rap. Over those familiar trap 808s and hi-hats, Bad Bunny rapped and sang in a slithery, commanding baritone. In his videos, he dressed in flowing fabrics and loud patterns, and he sometimes wore makeup or nail polish. His charisma was obvious from jump. He recorded a bunch of early tracks with Latin trap peers like Farruko and Ozuna, and early singles like “Soy Peor” did crazy YouTube numbers. A few years after he dropped out of college, Bad Bunny was a viral star.
Bad Bunny teamed up with J Balvin for the first time when he guested on Balvin’s 2017 Latin-chart hit “Si Tu Novio Te Deja Sola.” Immediately, those two had a easy chemistry together. That same year, Bad Bunny reached the Hot 100 for the first time when he guested on “Mayores,” a Spanish-language track from the Mexican-American singer Becky G. It peaked at #74. (Becky G’s highest-charting single, the 2022 Karol G collab “Mamiii,” peaked at #15.) Soon afterward, Bad Bunny charted as a lead artist, reaching #75 with the Farruko collab “Krippy Kush.” (Farruko’s highest-charting single, 2021’s “Pepas,” peaked at #25.)
Bad Bunny wasn’t crossover-level famous when he recorded his “I Like It” verse, but Cardi couldn’t wait to tell her cousins that she had a song with J Balvin and Bad Bunny. Even with those verses secured, though, Craig Kallman didn’t think that “I Like It” was ready for release. As Cardi B’s album deadline loomed, Kallman flew J. White to Los Angeles and had him obsessively rework the track. A&R director Edgar Machuca worked on the beat, too. While pregnant, Cardi B reworked her verse and her hook, getting help from her regular co-writer Pardison Fontaine. Kallman still wasn’t satisfied with the track, so he sent it over to the star Puerto Rican beatmaker Marco “Tainy” Fernández, the biggest producer in all of reggaeton. Tainy added some drums and got co-producer and co-writer credit. (As lead artist, Tainy’s highest-charting single is “Summer Of Love,” his 2021 collab with future Number Ones artist Shawn Mendes; it peaked at #48. Notably, even with Tainy’s contributions, “I Like It” isn’t a reggaeton track.)
Craig Kallman still wasn’t satisfied with “I Like It” after Tainy worked on it, so he sent the track to the Scottish-born producer Vince “Invincible” Watson. Invincible added horns, drums, and acoustic bass. He basically reworked the track enough to take the sample out entirely, using studio musicians to replay “I Like It Like That” instead. He worked in references to another Pete Rodriguez boogaloo track, “Oh That’s Nice.” Finally, after months of work, Craig Kallman decided that the song was ready. By that point, it had 16 credited co-writers. Director Eif Rivera got the six-months-pregnant Cardi together with J Balvin and Bad Bunny to shoot a video in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood. When the Invasion Of Privacy album came out, “I Like It” debuted at #8. The label kept pushing the song, and the song kept gaining steam, until it finally got its week on top right around the Fourth Of July. Back then, I thought maybe it was significant that two mostly Spanish-language songs went to #1 during the first two summers of Donald Trump’s first presidency. That was pretty naïve of me, but at least both of the tracks are good.
All this fucking history and I haven’t really talked about whether I like “I Like It” as a song yet. Well, I do. I like it. All that meticulous-obsessive label tinkering should’ve been enough to completely drain the track of any immediacy, but “I Like It” has too much bounce for that. The sample really works, and Craig Kallman and his collaborators understood how to build the track — when to let the sample breathe, when to add a bunch of instruments, when to give the rappers space attack the beat. Cardi deserves a lot of the credit, too. Her verse is just fun. She talks her shit on “I Like It,” just as she did on “Bodak Yellow,” but the main emotion that she conveys is exuberance, not defiance. Mostly, she lists of the things that she likes: Dollars, diamonds, stunning, shining, million-dollar deals — where’s her pen? Bitch, she’s signing.
I know nothing about Balenciaga shoes, but when Cardi says that she likes the ones that look like socks, I can at least get an image in my head. That’s Cardi’s appeal at work — the neighborhood chick who suddenly comes to fortune and fame, who can look at luxury goods and be like, “Oh, that’s cool, that looks like what I used to buy in five-packs from the dollar store.” At the same time, Cardi finds way to rep her Blood ties on “I Like It,” even throwing up the sign in the video, without scaring anyone. As the track gains steam, so does Cardi’s delivery, and she switches over to a slick little double-time while still yelling at us that she’s about her coins like Mario and that she runs this shit like cardio. I just like her, you know? She’s fun to have around.
Bad Bunny and J Balvin both rap their “I Like It” verses in Spanish with little dashes of English, which means that this is a funny kind of Anglo-Spanish crossover. The original “I Like It Like That” was all English. As my guy Chris Molanphy pointed out in his Slate column at the time, Cardi and friends got the song to blow up bigger on American radio by making it more Spanish. I never bothered to look up the English translations of those Spanish verses until working on this column. I speak absolutely no Spanish, but I got the basic idea anyway: These are cool guys talking about being cool. I was not wrong.
Both Bad Bunny and J Balvin shout out pro wrestlers in their “I Like It” verses — Eddie Guerrero for Bad Bunny, Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka for Balvin. Bad Bunny hollers at women from five different countries and namechecks Latin music legends Bobby Valentin and Charytín. Balvin brags about “Mi Gente” playing everywhere, claims to have the sugar like Celia Cruz, and talks about pa-pa-paparazzi chasing him like he’s Lady Gaga. Both of them float effortlessly over the track, but I especially like the way Bad Bunny cruises into his deep-voiced entrance. They both come off effortless, and that goes a lot way toward preventing the song itself from feeling like a forced, label-mandated radio concession. I don’t think “I Like It” has the same immediacy as something like “Bodak Yellow,” but it works great as a fun, lightweight summer jam.
“I Like It” did not end up ruling the summer of 2018 — it was Drake’s year — but the track still made an impression. The “I Like It” single went diamond. The video racked up 1.5 billion views. Invasion Of Privacy went quadruple platinum and won the Grammy for Best Rap Album. Cardi was only the second woman to win that award, and the first who got it as a solo artist. (Previously, Lauryn Hill took home Best Rap Album as a Fugee. Just last month, Doechii became the third woman to win it.) Invasion Of Privacy was a huge success, and then Cardi never followed it up. She keeps promising a second album, and she keeps not delivering. It’s been seven years now, and there is no Cardi B sophomore LP. I don’t know what’s going on there.
Instead of making another album, Cardi cranked out a series of one-off singles, and some of those singles hit big. I think that’s fun. She’s a singles-only artist now, and every new track feels like an event, even if the impact of those events has diminished a bit. The string of stand-alone singles started before 2018 was over. Cardi reached #28 with one last Invasion Of Privacy single, the Kehlani track “Ring,” and then she dropped “Money,” a fun bit of shit-talk that peaked at #13. In 2019, Cardi reunited with her “Finesse” collaborator Bruno Mars on the #3 hit “Please Me.” (It’s a 7.) Since those two apparently hate releasing full-lengths, “Please Me” still hasn’t appeared on anyone’s album. Eventually, Cardi’s one-off singles got even bigger. We’ll see her in this column again. She also kept guesting on other people’s songs and making those songs bigger, and we’ll see her in that role much sooner.
Cardi could always return to the Latin-rap crossover style after the success of “I Like It,” but she hasn’t done much of that. The most prominent example might be “Taki Taki,” the 2018 DJ Snake track where Cardi guested alongside Ozuna and future Number Ones artist Selena Gomez. (“Taki Taki” peaked at #11. I like that song.) Mostly, though, Cardi has been making straight-up rap music, and she’s done very well with it. Cardi’s run has been big, but the real story after “I Like It” has been the meteoric rise of Bad Bunny, who’s become a chart mainstay even without returning to #1 on the Hot 100.
Bad Bunny didn’t even have an album out when he appeared on “I Like It.” A few months later, he released his full-length debut X 100pre. That album’s single “Mía” was a big deal because it had Drake singing in Spanish. (“Mía” peaked at #5. It’s a 7.) A year later, Bad Bunny and J Balvin surprise-released a pretty fun collaborative album called Oasis, and lead single “Qué Pretendes” peaked at #65. In 2020, Bad Bunny and Balvin performed their parts from “I Like It” at Jennifer Lopez and Shakira’s Super Bowl Halftime Show, which Cardi boycotted over the Colin Kaepernick thing. Bad Bunny really leveled up during the pandemic. He released two albums in 2020, and both of them were big. None of the singles from YHLQMDLG were huge American chart hits, but the LP still debuted at #2. He followed that one up with El Último Tour del Mundo, which debuted on top and which had “Dákiti,” a pulsing all-Spanish Jhay Cortez collab that reached #5. (It’s an 8.)
Bad Bunny didn’t release an album in 2021, but he still made it to #10 with the stray single “Yonaguni.” (It’s a 7.) In 2022, he dropped Un Verano Sin Ti, which might as well be the Spanish-language Thriller. Un Verano Sin Ti was huge all over the world. In the US, it sent four singles into the Hot 100. In terms of chart numbers, the biggest of those hits is “Moscow Mule,” which peaked at #4. For me, though, the album’s real anthem is the #5 hit “Tití Me Preguntó.” That song goes. (“Moscow Mule” is a 6. “Tití Me Preguntó” is a 9, but you could probably convince me to bump it up to the full 10.)
Since Un Verano Sin Ti, Bad Bunny has been a full-on stadium act and a great mainstream celebrity. He wears stardom extremely well. He’s used every opportunity to talk about Puerto Rican pride while protesting against what he doesn’t like in the Puerto Rican government. In a genre that wasn’t exactly known for accepting LGBTQ people, he’s spoken out in solidarity. He’s indulged his lifelong love of pro wrestling by jumping into the ring and doing shockingly well for himself; his 2023 San Juan street fight against Damien Priest was a fucking banger. He’s been in a couple of movies, and his charisma translates just fine. He comes across well in English-language interviews, even if he’s still getting comfortable speaking the language. For three consecutive years starting in 2020, Bad Bunny was Spotify’s most-streamed artist in the world.
Over the years, Bad Bunny has explored tons of different genres, and he seems perfectly at home in all of them. Since Un Verano Sin Ti, he’s come out with two more albums, and he’s landed high up on the Hot 100 many times. Just a couple of months ago, he released the new LP Debí Tirar Más Fotos, and he reached #2 with lead single “DtMF.” (It’s a 6.) I have every confidence that Bad Bunny will score another #1 hit sooner rather than later. It just hasn’t happened yet. Maybe he should try calling up Cardi B.
GRADE: 8/10
BONUS BEATS: Speaking of pro wrestling: Here’s former WWE Champion Big Dave Bautista, the Animal, cutting a rug to “I Like It” in the 2020 motion picture My Spy:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Bad book, make you nervous. But it here.
