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.
The reign of terror lasted for 11 years, and we can never be entirely sure that it has conclusively ended. Over those 11 years, the cursed entity known as Maroon 5 would occasionally surge forward out of nowhere, capturing the #1 spot on the Hot 100 and holding it for way too long. Thanks to sheer radio dominance, Maroon 5 — nominally a band, though it effectively became one man’s wan studio-pop project soon enough — would set up camp at the #1 spot with another work of immediately-forgotten filler, blocking a bunch of more-interesting songs from ever appearing in this column. Presumably, there were Maroon 5 fans out there, and maybe there still are. Someone had to buy all those iTunes downloads and arena-tour tickets, even if the actual songs are fated to disappear from my brain the moment I stop hearing them. But for those 11 years, Maroon 5 stood, at least in my head, as the oppressive mean, the default-setting pop music that takes up chart real-estate when there just isn’t a subversive force that’s powerful enough to dislodge it.
Maroon 5 made hits before 2007, when they finally ascended to #1 with “Makes Me Wonder,” a song that I could not sing you if you had a gun to my head. They made sleek adult-contempo pop-soul, and they did very well with it. But they became an increasingly bigger Hot 100 presence when their music turned glossier and more computerized, and when the group essentially just became the solo project for hunky frontguy Adam Levine, who I guess was nice enough to let his old friends stick around and continue operate under the Maroon 5 name. From 2011’s “Moves Like Jagger” onward, Maroon 5 were essentially just the brand umbrella for Voice coach Levine’s endeavors with the moment’s biggest pop producers. His bandmates occasionally snagged co-writer credits, but their presence was ornamental.
Is it really a reign of terror if Maroon 5 only ever had four songs that went to #1? I think it is. Up until this column reached “Makes Me Wonder,” I never had to think too hard about Maroon 5, even though my time as a professional music critics overlaps completely with Maroon 5’s endless run of hits. They were merely a slight irritant that didn’t play a big part in my life. They were a successful pop act, but they weren’t the type of successful pop act that demanded my attention in any way. So I completely missed Maroon 5’s transition into not-a-real-band bandness until I had to chronicle it in this column. That means I missed all the music-business machinations that led to a song like “Girls Like You” — at least for now, Maroon 5’s final chart=topper — becoming the gigantic hit that it was.
When you’re making a pop song, you have to read the metaphorical room and figure out what people want at that moment. For more than a decade, Maroon 5 proved how good they were at the mysterious art of pandering. Levine and his faceless friends surfed the zeitgeist, picking up little bits and pieces of popular textures and presentation trends without alienating whatever fanbase they already had. That whole time, they were arguably building up to the “Girls Like You” video, one of the smartest mass-pander attempts I’ve ever seen. “Girls Like You” was out for nearly a year before the song blew up, mostly thanks to that video and the stapled-on guest verse from Cardi B, a pop-culture figure who was having a tremendous moment. They really did need a girl like her.
In the beginning, “Girls Like You” was one more piece of reasonably-pleasant piffle from Red Pill Blues, another Maroon 5 album that I was happy to ignore. The album title was supposed to be a Matrix allusion, and when the group announced it, Adam Levine had to give all sorts of statements about how they didn’t realize that QAnon types had adapted the whole “red pill” thing to represent some ideas that Maroon 5 did not want to convey. I guess nobody told them, in the entire run-up to the record’s release, that they should maybe think of another name. As with all latter-day Maroon 5 records, it’s mostly Adam Levine working with the big-deal producers and songwriters of that moment, with only occasional input from his bandmates. Red Pill Blues also has a ton of tracks with rap and R&B stars. Lead single “Don’t Wanna Know,” for instance, had a guest verse from Kendrick Lamar, someone who has been in this column a couple of times and who will eventually return. Blessedly, Kendrick is now past the point of having to do Maroon 5 guest-verses. (“Don’t Wanna Know” peaked at #6. It’s a 5.)
After “Don’t Wanna Know,” Maroon 5 released two more singles with big-name featured guests. “Cold” had Future, an artist who will eventually appear in this column, and it peaked at #16. “What Lovers Do” had SZA, another future Number Ones subject, and that one reached #9. (It’s a 6.) At first, “Girls Like You” didn’t have any hitmaker guests. According to The New York Times, the track started off as a demo from Starrah, the big-deal songwriter who’s already been in this column for working on Camila Cabello’s “Havana.” Charles Aaron, one of my all-time favorite music critics, wrote that Starrah began the track by writing about “her own feelings for a female friend,” and I think “Girls Like You” would’ve been a lot more interesting if it stayed that way. It would’ve worked better for the female-uplift message that got put onto the song, too. In Adam Levine’s hands, the song turns into more of a generic bad-boy lament, not a meditation on the overlaps between same-sex friendship and attraction. But this is pop music, so that’s not what we got. Instead, Starrah’s “Girls Like You” demo went to three producers who tweaked and streamlined the track, turning it into something else.
Cirkut, the Canadian-born producer who got his start as a Max Martin/Dr. Luke understudy, has already been in this column a bunch of times, and he’ll be back a bunch more times; he’s one of those relatively invisible hitmaker types who’s had a hand in way more huge pop songs than anyone would’ve guessed. Cirkut is one of the producers behind “Girls Like You.” Another is Jason Evigan, the son of BJ And The Bear/My Two Dads star Greg. Jason Evigan got his start as one of the many writers on “Talk Dirty,” the 2013 2 Chainz collab from past and future Number Ones artist Jason DeRulo, before working with people like Fifth Harmony, Demi Lovato, and Pitbull. (“Talk Dirty” peaked at #3. It’s an 8.) The third “Girls Like You” producer was Gian Stone, a New York native who was really just starting out and whose work will appear in this column again. Cirkut and Evigan are credited as the producers of “Girls Like You,” and all three of them have writing credit.
You might’ve noticed that nobody in Maroon 5 was remotely involved in the creation of “Girls Like You” up to this point. Eventually, the producers must’ve submitted the track to Adam Levine, and he changed enough that he also got writing credit. The “Girls Like You” video opens on a tight close-up of Maroon 5 guitarist James Valentine playing the main “Girls Like You” riff; you can hear the fingers squeaking on the acoustic strings and everything. It’s a nice little reminder that Maroon 5 are supposed to be a band, before Valentine and all the other non-Adam Levine members fade into a background blur. But Valentine didn’t actually play on “Girls Like You,” and neither did an of the band’s other non-Levine members. Instead, the credits list Levine, Cirkut, and Evigan playing most of the instruments. Once again, Maroon 5 passed off a full-on assembly-line studio creation as the work of a band, and that video moment is just a misdirect. I don’t know why I should be annoyed by that kind of thing; it’s simply the music business doing what the music business does. But when we’re dealing with a solo artist masquerading as a band, it feels extra-tacky for some reason.
My own irrelevant process-related misgivings aside, I generally think that “Girls Like You” is one of the strongest big songs ever to bear the Maroon 5 name. That’s not a huge endorsement, since I am generally immune to virtually anything that Adam Levine sings. You could show me the name of an apparently-huge Maroon 5 chart hit — “Sugar,” let’s say — and I would just look at you blankly. I known that the song exists, but I can think of absolutely zero times that I interacted with it in any way, and I damn sure don’t remember how it goes. “Girls Like You” has that same instant-evaporation quality, but it’s low-key satisfying enough that the song sticks with me just a little bit more.
The melodic construction is impeccable, obviously. “Girls Like You” kicks off with that little riff and with Levine cooing that it’s been tw-twenty-fooour hours but he needs moooore hours with you. Quietly, Levine and his collaborators add on layer after layer of pillowy keyboard, as the sleek little melody unfolds with unhurried confidence. Levine’s turbo-squeak can be extremely fucking irritating when he’s trying to do energetic, uptempo stuff, but he doesn’t get into that kind of trouble on “Girls Like You.” Instead, he sits in the song’s pocket, never reaching for any big notes and letting all that electronic twinkle wash over him.
Sometimes, the massed “Girls Like You” backing vocals shoot for gaudy gospel-choir effects. I don’t like that. Also, Levine sometimes goes for the Ariana Grande singing-in-cursive thing. I had no idea that he was asking you to “roll that Backwoods, babe” until I read the song lyrics, which is good, because that’s not something that Levine would ever believably say. There is no way that Adam Levine smokes blunts. If he smokes anything, it’s a futuristic vape cartridge that looks like a Star Trek phaser, but not on purpose. That Backwoods line is pure Starrah, and I wish she could’ve been the one to sing it. Still, the song mostly holds itself back from the full-on cheese-catharsis that’s usually Levine’s go-to move.
On “Girls Like You,” Adam Levine continues to push his usual sexy-asshole character. The chorus is all about the eternal attraction between girls like you and guys like him, as if he’s a dangerous bad boy and not a show-business professional with some tattoos. His narrator has been in a fight with the girl like you, but they’ve figured things out, and they’re now luxuriating in the glow of implied make-up sex. On the bridge, he says that it’s 6:45 and he’s barely alive, and they might break up later on, but he knows enough to not get behind the wheel. It’s a little funny that the “Girls Like You” video presents the song as a vehicle for empowerment when the song itself is more concerned with self-destructive relationship dynamics, but that’s what a good PR campaign can do.
When “Girls Like You” became a single, part of the PR campaign was getting Cardi B to rap on it. Cardi, still new to the public, was in the middle of a tremendous hitmaking run, and she’d already been to #1 with “Bodak Yellow” and “I Like It.” If anyone still needed proof that Cardi could function in a full-on pop context, then “Girls Like You” was it. Later on, Adam Levine said, “I told Cardi, ‘I want you to put something down that shows your fierceness as a woman and say it however you want.’ I knew she was going to murder this verse and bring the song to a whole new place. She was vital. I begged her to do it.” I really hate the idea of Levine saying the phrase “your fierceness as a woman” out loud, but that’s really what Cardi did.
This column has already dealt with tons of songs that only reached #1 after some big star jumped on a remix, adding a verse that brought more attention but didn’t add anything else. This isn’t one of those situations. I’d never heard “Girls Like You” before Cardi jumped on the track, since I’m not the type to sit around listening to Maroon 5 deep cuts unless I have to. But when I hear the original “Girls Like You” now, the song feels woefully incomplete. Cardi’s voice cuts through everything around her, giving the track a bracing dose of energy and personality right when it needs exactly that. She doesn’t really vary her approach when she’s rapping on head-slap mixtape tracks and crossover pop features, and I love that about her. With Cardi on board, “Girls Like You” becomes something more than a song about a stereotypical jerk’s redemption in the eyes of a woman. Even if you can’t imagine Levine and Cardi delivering their lyrics to each other — and I absolutely cannot — it still turns into a song about two messed-up and self-destructive people who make each other happy, despite everything.
Cardi’s verse is short, but it says everything that it needs to say. She mentions her time as a stripper as if it’s a crucial point of her personality and not a trivial fun fact. Her narrator knows she’s got something that all those other nice-enough girls don’t have, the appeal of beautiful chaos: “You don’t want a girl like me, I’m too crazy/ But every other girl you meet is fugazi.” (That’s “fugazi” in the Donnie Brasco sense, not the DC punk sense.) In her brief appearance, Cardi evokes the sparks that can happen when two people are fucked-up in just the right way, and even her dirty-talk is fun: “I play with this kitty like you play with your guitar.” That’s how guitars work, right? For me, Cardi’s presence is enough to take “Girls Like You” out of the “don’t hate” category and into “kind of like, sometimes.”
But that Cardi verse was only part of the “Girls Like You” promo-push. The big thing was the video. Much like Drake with “Nice For What” a few months earlier, “Girls Like You” reduces its male star to a supporting role, letting the camera delight in the presence of tons of famous ladies instead. Wedding Crashers director David Dobkin made the “Girls Like You” clip, and it marked his return to the music-video world after decades doing feature films. (Early in his career, Dobkin did early 2Pac videos like “I Get Around.”) It took a long time to plan and film the “Girls Like You” video, but Dobkin and his technicians make it look like a seamless single-take shot, with the camera spinning around as all these celebrity ladies show up alongside Levine.
Early in the “Girls Like You” video, the camera zooms in on Adam Levine and then spins around him. But who’s that dancing back-to-back with Levine? Well, it’s Camila Cabello, just a little while after she made her own #1 hit with “Havana.” Then it’s Phoebe Robinson, from 2 Dope Queens, the podcast that turned into a TV show. (Robinson was just on Celebrity Jeopardy a few weeks ago. Shout out to the homie Mina Kimes, who is not in the “Girls Like You” video; I’m rooting for her to take all the other Celebrity Jeopardy contestants to the cleaners.) Then it’s Aly Raisman, the Olympic gymnast who helped blow the whistle on all the sexual abuse that gymnasts faced at the hands of Dr. Larry Nassar. And then — oh, yikes, Sarah Silverman.
Today, the “Girls Like You” video is such a funny time capsule. It’s done with a certain sleek precision — this parade of actors and singers and comedians and athletes and activists and YouTuber types. The corporate-male-feminism thing is firmly out of fashion now, and plenty of the women who appear in the clip have faded into obscurity. Others are just plain pariahs now. I don’t know about you, but I now associate a couple of those faces with virulent Zionism rather than with any of the work that they’ve done. One of them is Gal Gadot; back in 2018, the image of her singing didn’t evoke derisive guffaws. There’s also an Ellen DeGeneres jump-scare, and we’re clearly supposed to feel a wave of affection when she pops up. Times have changed.
That’s the problem with elevating people to hero status. Some of the people who stand as figures of uplift turn out to be absolute dickheads. I still admire Ilhan Omar, one of the women dancing in the “Girls Like You” video. It’s a bit of a surprise when she shows up, since so many of America’s most powerful political forces have worked so hard to make her radioactive. But she’s human. She could fuck up, too. The women in the “Girls Like You” video come from different races and backgrounds and fields of accomplishment, but they’re all generally pretty and camera-ready, and we’re supposed to be impressed and happy to see them. Some of them are wearing T-shirts with vague political slogans, which marks the whole thing as a relic of that hashtag-resistance era.
In its moment, the “Girls Like You” video was effective. Plenty of the women in the clip are household names, including past Number Ones artists like Jennifer Lopez and Mary J. Blige. Little baby Millie Bobby Brown is in there, dressed like Da Brat for some reason. So is Beanie Feldstein, after Lady Bird but before Booksmart. Eventually, the parade of famous women pushes Adam Levine offscreen, effectively turning “Girls Like You” into something that it never could be when it was just a song. That kind of girl-power pop-feminism hasn’t remade the world, but this was a moment when people really thought it might. It feels so far away now.
The “Girls Like You” video ends with Adam Levine standing with his wife, the Namibian-born supermodel Behati Prinsloo, and their baby daughter. That bit hits different now, too. A few years after “Girls Like You,” Levine got called out for having an affair with another model, and she leaked the DMs of him saying stuff like “I may need to see the booty.” (Levine denied the affair but couldn’t deny the DMs.) The story went mega-viral, mostly because the DMs are funny. Levine and Prinsloo are still together, and they have another kid now, but it’s harder to do the standing-in-solidarity thing with your family when the whole world now knows that you’re the “I may need to see the booty” guy.
The “Girls Like You” video did crazy numbers, becoming the most-watched clip of 2018. The video is what pushed “Girls Like You” to #1, but radio is what kept it there. “Girls Like You” spent 16 weeks at #1 on the Billboard Radio Songs chart, and an absolutely ridiculous 36 weeks at #1 on Adult Contemporary. That’s, what, nine months of “Girls Like You” dominating waiting rooms and other terrible workplaces? America’s receptionists deserve so much better. The single went diamond in 2021, and it’s probably the main reason that the Red Pill Blues album went platinum.
Shortly after “Girls Like You” hit, Maroon 5 played the 2019 Super Bowl Halftime Show, and they fucking sucked. That show was rough. Cardi B did not take part, since she was among the many Black artists who boycotted the NFL over the way that Colin Kaepernick was treated. Instead, Maroon 5 played “Girls Like You” with a marching-band drumline and a gospel choir, and it’s not the kind of song that demands those things. Maroon 5 did get former Number Ones artist Big Boi and future Number Ones artist Travis Scott to join them, and it looked awkward as hell whenever Adam Levine was next to either of those guys. Levine also sounded like cat barf, blowing notes all over the damn place. This was the last Halftime Show before Jay-Z’s Roc Nation company took over as producer. It’s pretty fucked up when an entity as powerful as the NFL buys its way back to respectability by paying an already-rich rapper to cosign their efforts without actually changing anything, but at least it’s made for better Halftime Shows than that.
As of right now, “Girls Like You” is Maroon 5’s final #1 hit. A year later, they released “Memories,” a relatively low-key single that tried to make a pop song out of Pachelbel’s “Canon In D Major.” That song reached #2, and it eventually ended up on Maroon 5’s 2021 album Jordi. (It’s a 4.) None of the other Jordi singles made it to the top 10, and the album marked the first time that Maroon 5 stalled out at gold. Right now, they’re in the Vegas-residency phase of their career. It’s always possible that Maroon 5 could score a major comeback hit, but that doesn’t seem to be where things are heading. For now, at least, the reign of terror is over. Maybe we should all agree never to speak Adam Levine’s name, like he’s Lord Voldemort.
Cardi B, on the other hand, will be in this column again. When we see her again, it’ll be for something a whole lot more exciting than “Girls Like You.”
GRADE: 6/10
BONUS BEATS: Here’s a string-quartet version of “Girls Like You” soundtracking a scene from the first episode of Bridgerton, from 2020:
THE NUMBER TWOS: The late Juice WRLD’s heavy-hearted angry-ex zone-out “Lucid Dreams,” which turns a Sting sample into an emo-rap arena singalong, peaked at #2 behind “Girls Like You.” It’s an 8.
Lil Wayne and Kendrick Lamar’s verbose, multi-part back-and-forth story-song “Mona Lisa” also peaked at #2 behind “Girls Like You,” and it’s another 8.
THE 10S: Lil Baby and Gunna’s shiver-bounce speed-rap double-team “Drip Too Hard” peaked at #3 behind “Girls Like You.” I know they hating on me, but I don’t read comments. Just kidding. I always read comments. I spend too much time reading comments. Anyway, it’s a 10.
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. You need a book like this, nana yeh. Buy it here.
