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.
“My Favorite Things” isn’t exactly a grand, showstopping number when it arrives in The Sound Of Music. Instead, it’s a zippy little earworm intended to show our ex-nun hero Maria’s growing bond with the anarchic mob of Von Trapp kids that she now oversees. Maybe there’s just a touch of social commentary in there. Maria tells these kids that she just thinks about her favorite things — raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, etc. — whenever she wants to stop feeling down. That positive mental attitude is a wonderful thing, but it’s not enough to stop the growing threat of Nazi power in Austria. Even with Nazis in there, though, The Sound Of Music isn’t an especially stressful story. When Hitler annexes Austria, the Von Trapp family simply walks over the Alps to safety. Nobody dies. Nobody even comes close to dying. Maybe the story implies that those raindrops on roses had something to do with the happy ending.
The Sound Of Music was the last great Broadway triumph for the writing duo of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. The two of them wrote together for the first time when they were Columbia classmates in 1920, and then they reconnected years later to make a string of instantly familiar musicals: Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King And I. If you made it through your teenage years without having to witness at least one high-school production of a Rodgers and Hammerstein show, then you weren’t hanging out with enough theater kids. The Sound Of Music opened in 1959, and then Hammerstein died of stomach cancer nine months later.
Mary Martin played Broadway’s first Maria Von Trapp, which means that she sang the original version of “My Favorite Things.” The cast recording of The Sound Of Music was the biggest-selling album in America in 1960, so a lot of people heard it. But the version of “My Favorite Things” that most of us know is from the 1965 movie version of The Sound Of Music. That one had Julie Andrews, a year out from Mary Poppins, as Maria. The film was a blockbuster that played in theaters for more than four years, possibly saving 20th Century Fox Studios and eventually making enough money to replace Gone With The Wind as the highest-grossing film in Hollywood history to that point. (Julie Andrews’ only Hot 100 hit, 1964’s “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” peaked at #66.)
In 1960, just one year after The Sound Of Music debuted on Broadway, John Coltrane recorded his famous 14-minute instrumental version of “My Favorite Things,” using Rodgers and Hammerstein’s simple melody as a launching point. That turned “My Favorite Things” into a jazz standard. Nate Patrin once wrote a Stereogum column about the many jazz versions of “My Favorite Things” — Sarah Vaughan, Dave Brubeck, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, a very young Al Jarreau, plenty of others. The song resonated outside of jazz, too. Somehow, it entered the Christmas-music canon despite not being about Christmas at all. It’s been recorded by Herb Alpert’s Tijuana Brass, the Supremes, Kenny Rogers, Mary J. Blige, Me First And The Gimme Gimmes, countless others. In 2003, London group Big Brovaz had a #2 UK hit with “Favourite Things,” a flossy rap take on “My Favorite Things.” It wouldn’t be the last time someone attempted something like that.
Six decades after The Sound Of Music opened on Broadway, theater-kid pop star Ariana Grande scored a gigantic hit by using the tune from “My Favorite Things” to sing about buying her way out of sadness. Her take on the song ultimately isn’t that different from the original. “7 Rings” is a pure ode to consumer culture, but it’s not like raindrops on roses are proven to cure depression any more effectively than breakfast at Tiffany’s or bottles of bubbles. Grande has said that she and her friends wrote “7 Rings” after a shopping expedition that was intended to help her get over a dark period. Maybe “7 Rings,” like “My Favorite Things” before it, represents an ultimately deluded attempt to gloss over past problems, or to ignore the bigger societal ones that loom right in front of you.
The shopping expedition is the origin story for “7 Rings.” Shortly after the single’s release, Ariana Grande tweeted, “‘twas a pretty rough day in nyc. my friends took me to tiffany’s. we had too much champagne. i bought us all rings. 💍 it was very insane and funny. & on the way back to the stu njomza was like ‘bitch, this gotta be a song lol’. so we wrote it that afternoon.” Njomza is Njomza Vitia, one of the co-writers who worked on Grande’s previous smash “thank u, next.” She got one of the rings. So did Victoria Monét, Kayla Parx, and Kimberly “Kaydence” Krysiuk, three of the other “thank u, next” co-writers. I think it’s nice that Grande’s closest songwriting collaborators are also among her closest friends. (The other two rings went to Grande’s childhood besties Alexia Luria and Courtney Chipolone. Victoria Monét is now an R&B star, and her highest-charting single, 2023’s “On My Mama,” peaked at #33.)
In that tweet, Grande doesn’t say why she was having a “rough day,” but I can think of plenty of reasons. Around the time that she recorded “7 Rings,” Grande ended her engagement to Pete Davidson while mourning her ex Mac Miller. “thank u, next” is a song about moving past her exes and finding happiness in herself, but that’s not always the easiest thing to do. Maybe the shopping trip helped, and maybe it didn’t. I like the idea that the song came out of Grande’s friends trying to help cheer her up. The one time I ever went to a monster truck rally was in high school, when a bunch of my friends were trying to help one kid feel better after his girlfriend dumped him. Maybe the Tiffany spree was the pop-star version of that.
The team who worked on “7 Rings” is exactly the same as the one who made “thank u, next.” Grande co-wrote the track with Njomza, Monét, Parx, and Kaydence. She brought the song idea to the producers of “thank u, next” — longtime collaborator Tommy Brown and the duo known as Social House. Grande asked her producers to come up with something that sounded like “My Favorite Things,” and they worked up the straightforward interpolation that you hear on “7 Rings” — the “My Favorite Things” melody rendered in eerie plinky-plonk keyboard sounds over trap 808s. Grande and her co-writers are big fans of musicals and rap, and “7 Rings” is a pretty successful attempt to fuse those two things. The combination should be hopelessly awkward, but it works a whole fuck of a lot better than the last pop hit built on a Sound Of Music sample, former Number Ones artist Gwen Stefani’s genuinely ghastly 2006 track “Wind It Up.” (“Wind It Up” peaked at #6. It’s a 1.)
Victoria Monét and Kayla Parx weren’t actually on the Tiffany shopping trip. Grande surprised both of them with rings, and she also brought them the idea for the song. Grande and her co-writers had a great time in the studio coming up with the track and dancing to the end result. Monét told E! News that they all dropped their new rings into champagne glasses at one point — “just doing the most.” The track came together quickly, and the final version isn’t tremendously different from the demo that they recorded that day. The only thing that came later was the bridge, where Grande sings in a choppy but fluid speed-rap cadence.
Victoria Monét tells E! News that the original idea was to have a guest-rapper on “7 Rings,” but they came up with the idea to have Grande almost-rap it instead: “We wanted to do something that that felt more rhythmic because we were singing in the verses pretty melancholy. So when I went in, I just kind of wanted to give a juxtaposition to the other verses and also still be on theme and braggy and exciting and really inspired by the hip-hop-type ad-libs in the background and just more free. And so she heard it, she’s like ‘I’m cutting this. I love this.'” Monét, Parx, Njomza, and Kaydence all sang backup on “7 Rings,” and Parx credits Monét with the idea for the bridge. As the bridge came together, Parx was in Indonesia, and they all traded lines over group-chat and FaceTime. “7 Rings” was a group effort. It took eight people to write the song but those eight people were already functioning as a creative unit. It’s not that different from a band coming up with a song in the studio or the practice space.
Even with the giant global success of “7 Rings,” none of those writers ended up getting paid all that much. That’s because “7 Rings” has ten credited writers, and two of them are Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Rodgers and Hammerstein were obviously long-dead by the time Ariana Grande recorded “7 Rings,” or even by the time that Grande was born. (Rodgers died in 1979.) In 2009, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s estates sold the rights to their songs to Imagem, a Dutch music publisher that specializes in stage musicals. Concord, a bigger publisher, bought Imagem in 2017, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein songbook was the biggest part of that transaction.
When Grande’s reps brought the already-completed “7 Rings” to Concord for approval, the company drove a hard bargain: Grande could use that “My Favorite Things” melody, but only if Concord got 90% of the “7 Rings” songwriting royalties. (Grande still gets the regular amount of performance royalties, which is a different split.) Grande’s reps didn’t even bother to negotiate; they just agreed to those terms. It would be one thing if Rodgers and Hammerstein’s families were getting paid for “7 Rings.” Instead, those songwriting royalties are a corporate asset. That’s just the way things work these days. Corporations control everything, and maybe they’ll throw you a few scraps if you make them enough money. It’s not one of my favorite things.
Perhaps Ariana Grande’s people didn’t have a choice there. They wanted to make a deal quickly because Grande wanted to release “7 Rings” quickly. Grande had an enormous amount of success by surprise-releasing “thank u, next” as a one-off single. She talked about how she wanted to work more like a rapper — just dropping music when it felt right, rather than going through the rigamarole of a long album cycle, as pop stars are often expected to do. She teased “7 Rings” in the “thank u, next” video, playing a bit of the “My Favorite Things” melody and showing a license plate with the song’s title. Judging by this New York Times report on the “7 Rings” royalty situation, Grande’s team hadn’t negotiated those royalties when the video dropped. “7 Rings” can’t exist without the “My Favorite Things” melody; you’d pretty much have to scrap the song and start again. I guess Grande didn’t want to do that. She wanted to release “7 Rings” right away, and the song came out very soon after the negotiations were over. Maybe she should’ve figured out the royalties earlier, but it was probably smart to keep her momentum going.
In any case, “7 Rings” came out at the exact right moment. “thank u, next” was still high up on the Hot 100, and the world was evidently craving a rap-adajent, Broadway-referencing money-spending anthem from Grande. Given the whole backstory that I just laid out, I wish I could hear more of that post-heartbreak camaraderie on the completed track. “7 Rings” works less as a song about relying on your friends when you’re in a bad place, more as an ecstatic dive into the Scrooge McDuck money bank. Grande lovingly describes jewelry and fancy shoes and hair extensions like she’s a rapper, but the context is different. There are exceptions, but rappers usually use consumer goods as signifiers of their own up-from-nothing narratives and as a way to show their attachment to criminal culture, where you might as well blow all your money right away because you know it’s not safe in a bank account and you could be dead tomorrow anyway. Grande doesn’t come from that world. It’s a little silly to hear her bragging about her extensions — “You like my hair? Gee thanks, just bought it” — when she’s a white girl whose real hair probably wouldn’t look that different. (White girls buy hair extensions, too, but that was a common criticism when “7 Rings” blew up.)
Grande does sing about her friends on “7 Rings”: “Wearing a ring, but ain’t gon’ be no Mrs./ Bought matching diamonds for six of my bitches/ I’d rather spoil all my friends with my riches/ Think retail therapy my new addiction.” But the focus is less on spoiling her friends, more on all the shit that she can buy and you can’t. She literally sings that “happiness is the same price as red bottoms,” and the world would probably be a simpler place if that were true. If you think too hard about the message of “7 Rings,” the shit just gets depressing. The song works better if you let it work as aspirational absurdity. On the first verse, Grande sings, “Lashes and diamonds, ATM machines/ Buy myself all of my favorite things.” The implication there is that she buys herself ATM machines, which is pretty funny, as flexes go. If you owned an ATM machine, you’d just have to stock it with your own cash, right? That’s like Macaulay Culkin having a fully functional McDonald’s franchise in his mansion in the Richie Rich movie, or like Grande’s fellow theater-kid pop star Barbra Streisand having a hidden shopping mall underneath her house because she’s too rich to go to a real one. The impracticality is what makes it fun.
Maybe I’m thinking too much about the lyrics. As a pure musical construction, “7 Rings” is awfully sharp. It takes real finesse to make “My Favorite Things,” a song that does not exactly radiate swagger, work in a ’10s quasi-rap context. Tommy Brown and Social House’s production is relatively spacious and minimal. The opening bloops works as a bigger-budget version of ringtone-era snap music. The way Grande sings that familiar melody reminds me of dancehall deejays iterating on pop standards. When the drums drop in, Grande leaves that melody behind and locks into a stop-start flow, almost as if she’s panting: “My wrist? Stop watchin’. My neck? Is flossy.” That turns into a hypnotic chant about the freedom to buy any shit you want: “I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it.” Must be nice. Fuck, I’m thinking about the lyrics again.
It never sounds forced, the way Ariana Grande keeps toggling back and forth between that old Broadway melody and those almost-rap cadences. It should feel messy and glued-together, but she sells the transitions. When she sings the melody, she and her backup singers add multi-tracked hums, lending it a bit of a weightless Kid Cudi feeling. Those hums extend to the rap parts, which works to make the whole thing more cohesive. Grande’s ad-libs are catchy and silly, much like actual rap ad-libs. When she launches into the bridge, she’s shockingly smooth and effotless: “Shoot, go from the store to the booth/ Make it all back in one loop/ Gimme the loot/ Nevermind, I got the juice/ Nothing but net when we shoot.” It’s easy to imagine someone like Nicki Minaj coming in and handling that part, but the song flows better with Grande working as her own guest-rapper. People were used to hearing rapping and singing as the same thing by 2019. It didn’t even feel like a stretch.
Still, that doesn’t mean everyone was excited to hear Grande messing around with rap signifiers quite so freely. The New York rapper Princess Nokia angrily accused Grande of ripping off her 2017 track “Mine.” That’s a song specifically about hair extensions, and it’s got Nokia chanting, “It’s mine, I bought it,” so she might have a point. Other people heard echoes of other rap songs, like former Number Ones artist Soulja Boy’s 2010 single “Pretty Boy Swag,” which peaked at #34, or like 2 Chainz’ 2011 mixtape hit “Spend It.” The “7 Rings” hook really does sound like the “Spend It” hook, but 2 Chainz effectively granted Grande permission to use his flow when he rapped on a “7 Rings” remix. Later in 2019, Grande also sang the hook on “Rule The World,” a 2 Chainz single that peaked at #94. (2 Chainz’ highest-charting lead artist single is 2013’s “We Own It (Fast & Furious),” the soundtrack song that he recorded with Wiz Khalifa, which peaked at #16 even though I can’t remember ever hearing it once in my life. 2 Chainz also made it to #3 as a guest on Jason Derulo’s 2013 song “Talk Dirty.” That’s an 8.)
Ariana Grande made another goofy little cultural-appropriation snafu when “7 Rings” came out. She celebrated the single’s release by getting a tattoo on the palm of her hand — the Japanese characters for “7” and “ring.” But people quickly pointed out that those two kanji characters together don’t translate to “seven rings”; they mean “small charcoal grill.” She tried to go back and alter the meaning by adding more stuff to the tattoo, but then it became “small charcoal grill, finger [heart].” I doubt that anyone actually got mad about that; it’s too funny.
Grande released “7 Rings” in January 2019. The video arrived at the same time as the song, and it’s got Grande starring alongside the six friends who got those rings. (Director Hannah Lux Davis, who also did the “thank u, next” video, got an eighth ring.) The clip works a bit like a hyper-girly parody of all the rap videos where dudes stand around flexing shirtless and talking on money phones in McMansion kitchens, but I’m not sure it’s supposed to be a parody. Maybe it’s just a slight tweak on an established cliché.
“7 Rings” debuted at #1 and stayed there for a long time, with brief interruptions from a couple of smaller hits. The single dominated in every metric that Billboard measures — streaming, sales, radio play. I would feel a little guilty when it came in the car and I’d hear my daughter singing along. Maybe I was just a little more painfully conscious of pop-song messaging when she got old enough to become an active, invested fan. But the guilt wasn’t enough to get me to turn it off or to stop singing along myself. “7 Rings” is nobody’s idea of a masterpiece, but it felt good when it came on. You don’t have to be crazy rich to internalize the “I want it, I got it” bit. Sometimes, that chant would loop in my mind when I bought myself some Nerds Rope at the gas station. Luxury comes in many forms.
The success of “7 Rings” launched Ariana Grande’s thank u, next album, which came out in February, just six months after Grande’s previous LP Sweetener. thank u, next is a real top-shelf pop album, one of the best full-lengths that any A-lister has released in the past decade. I like most of thank u, next a lot better than “7 Rings,” and I like “7 Rings” pretty well. The week after the album came out, the “thank u, next” single surged to #3 on the Hot 100, which meant that Grande held the top three spots on her own. (I’ll mention the #2 song down below.)
After thank u, next came out, Ariana Grande headlined the last pre-pandemic Coachella and then went out on an arena tour. I took my daughter to see her that December. She was 10, and it was her first concert. We had a great time. The show was super-choreographed, and it was impressive to see Grande singing and dancing like that at the same time. I don’t think all the vocals were live, but enough of them were. There was a whole mini-set of Christmas songs, and I guess Grande and her dancers were throwing $100 Starbucks gift cards into the crowd, though we weren’t close enough to catch one. Grande ended that show with “7 Rings,” and it sounded good on arena speakers. I’ll probably always have a little extra affection for Grande because of that experience, the same way I do with Taylor Swift and Beach Bunny and Chappell Roan and all the other acts I’ve taken my kid to see since then.
Grande’s opening act at that show was Social House, the duo who co-produced “thank u, next” and “7 Rings.” In summer 2019, Grande guested on their single “Boyfriend,” and her presence was enough to turn that song into a #8 hit. (It’s a 6.) Maybe Grande didn’t buy rings for the Social House guys, but she did give them a big song. That was nice of her. It took Grande a long time to land her first #1 hit, but the twin successes of “thank u, next” and “7 Rings” were proof that she’d entered a new zone of pop-chart dominance. After all that time, Grande’s imperial era had arrived. She couldn’t miss. As the thank u, next album cycle wore down, Grande kept scoring hits just by showing up on one-off singles with other famous singers. We’ll see a lot more of her in this column.
GRADE: 7/10
BONUS BEATS: On Pop Smoke and Lil Tjay’s 2020 New York drill track “Mannequin,” producers 808Melo and CZR Beats sweetened the beat by sampling Ariana Grande’s “7 Rings” ad-libs. Here’s that song:
(Pop Smoke’s highest-charting single is the posthumous 2020 Lil Baby/DaBaby collab “For The Night,” which peaked at #8. It’s a 7. Lil Tjay’s highest-charting single is the 2021 6lack collab “Calling My Phone,” which peaked at #3. It’s a 4.)
THE NUMBER TWOS: Ariana Grande’s own “Break Up With Your Girlfriend, I’m Bored,” a hypnotically hazy and charmingly self-explanatory *NSYNC-interpolating seduction jam, peaked at #2 behind “7 Rings” the week after the thank u, next album came out. It’s a 9.
Post Malone’s “Wow,” the trunk-rumbling flex where he kinda-raps about mixing vodka with LaCroix and bumping Fall Out Boy, also peaked at #2 behind “7 Rings.” It’s an 8.
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Whoever said multiple copies of my book can’t solve your problems must’ve not had enough copies of my book to solve it. Buy yourself a bunch of copies here.
