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.
You don’t want to be the highest in the room. It’s a bad look. If you’re the only person in the room and you’re high, that’s fine. If you’re in the room with a bunch of people and everybody is the exact same amount high, that’s great. If you’re high and most of the people in the room are also high and you’ve got one sober friend who’s making fun of all of you, that can be a perfectly pleasant time, especially since the sober friend can then drive everyone else’s faded asses someplace or perhaps manage the details of ordering some food. But if you’re the highest? It’s terrible. You may be able to form perfectly cogent thoughts, but you can’t express them because every mechanism of expression gets way too fuzzed-out. Everyone else is sitting around judging you and clowning you, or if they’re not, you still feel like you are. You sit there like “everybody’s looking at me, they know, oh no.” It’s just no way to enjoy a buzz.
When I was 20, I spent a summer working at the Knitting Factory, a club in New York. One night, after everyone clocked out, a bunch of us were sitting around, and someone passed a joint full of something that was way stronger than what I was used to. I sank deep into the couch, and I felt like I was totally frozen. It fucking sucked. I felt like I was bringing everyone else down even though I basically just became furniture. I had to sit there for what felt like forever, mentally psyching myself up to get off that couch and somehow stumble to the subway and get back to my apartment. I don’t know how I did it, but I did it. The whole trip home — club to subway, subway to apartment — was a total blur, but it happened. When I got to work the next day, my boss was not happy — not because I’d gotten too high, but because I didn’t think to alert anyone when I was leaving. The poor guy had to look all over the club. If I’d passed out in a closet or under the stage, then I would’ve set off all the motion sensors in the building when I woke up. You don’t want to be like me in that situation. It was a mess.
Travis Scott’s song “Highest In The Room” isn’t about much of anything, but it really does capture how it feels to be the highest in the room. That’s the best and the worst thing about it. As a piece of psychedelic trap, “Highest In The Room” works really well. It floats and twists and bubbles, and its fluttery guitar loop and hi-fi whooshes sound great over headphones when you’re at least a little bit stoned. But in its hazy thump, I hear torpor and inertia and frustration — all the drawbacks that come from getting too high, especially when the potency of the high takes you by surprise. That means that “Highest In The Room” makes for a strange entry in this column, since that feeling isn’t the sort of thing that usually translates into pop music. “Highest In The Room” doesn’t feel like pop music. It feels like something to put on while you’re lying on the floor, watching your ceiling turn into geometric fractals. But “Highest In The Room” still debuted at #1, mostly because it came out during the brief window of time when Travis Scott had the pop-chart cheat codes all punched in.
Travis Scott released “Highest In The Room” as a one-off single about one year after his blockbuster Drake collaboration “Sicko Mode” finally became his first chart-topper. “Sicko Mode” didn’t sound like a #1 hit, either. It has no chorus and no real structure. It careens haphazardly from one beat to the next, smushing pieces of incomplete songs into strange new shapes. But “Sicko Mode” sounds like an event, its changes all emerging out of the digital murk with uncommon force. It was also a song with a Drake verse that came out during the year when Drake’s presence was nearly enough to guarantee hit status by itself. “Highest In The Room” doesn’t have any of that going for it. It’s just another Travis Scott song that explores the same hazy territory as almost every Travis Scott song. It happens to be a pretty good Travis Scott song, but that almost doesn’t matter.
“Highest In The Room” wasn’t part of some larger campaign, and it has never appeared on one of his albums. Usually, a big star will release a new song as a way to build to some other thing, but that wasn’t really the case with “Highest In The Room.” Instead, “Highest In The Room” was the bigger thing. Scott teased the track for months before releasing it, leaking little snippets until the final track felt like some kind of totemic mystery. Then he released it in elaborately packaged bundles, a single track available on cassette and CD and 7″. Scott spent years building up a fanbase that went crazy for artificially rare collectibles, whether it be signature sneakers or the action figure that appeared in his McDonald’s ads. Those people bought and streamed “Highest In The Room” enough that it spent a grand total of one week at #1, interrupting the reign of Lizzo’s “Truth Hurts” before plunging back down the chart.
At this point, Travis Scott has followed this exact playbook a bunch of times. “Sicko Mode” was a real hit, a song that felt like it became part of the cultural fabric in the months after its release. But the same thing hasn’t really happened with Scott’s other #1 hits. I don’t really know what I’m going to say about all these songs, other than I guess going into the usual biographical spiel about all the participants. I can’t really do that with “Highest In The Room,” a song with no guest vocalists. On the other hand, “Highest In The Room” is a real hit that only looks like a fake hit if you observe its arc on the Hot 100. The single is nine times platinum now. I hear it out every once in a while. It’s still part of Travis Scott’s live set. It’s not quite as ephemeral as it once seemed.
“Highest In The Room” started off as a high school kid’s guitar riff. The Swiss producer Ozan “Oz” Yildirim was one of the many producers who worked on Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode,” and he hadn’t made any tracks in a while when Scott texted him to ask for a new set of beats. At the time, Oz was working with a German teenager named Nik Dejan Frascona, known professionally as Nik D. (Oz and Nik D’s work will appear in this column again.) One day, Nik D used his iPhone to record himself playing an improvised guitar melody. He looped up his guitar track, added some eerie Theremin sounds, and sent it over to Oz. Oz liked it, so he added some booming trap drums. Oz and Nik D didn’t think too much about the beat after they finished it. Later on, Oz told Complex, “I never thought he was going to end up on this one because this is not a typical Travis beat.” But Oz still included the instrumental in the folder that he sent to Scott. Soon afterward, Oz and Nik D heard their beat in a Kylie Jenner Instagram ad.
Travis Scott started dating young cosmetics mogul Kylie Jenner in 2017, and their daughter Stormi was born in 2018. Jenner is the last thing that Scott mentions on “Sicko Mode”: “Baby mama cover Forbes, got these other bitches shook.” Sweet, right? In the aftermath of “Sicko Mode” and his Astroworld album, Travis Scott toured steadily and showed up on other people’s tracks constantly. In 2019, Scott appeared on songs from Young Thug, Future, Ed Sheeran, ScHoolboy Q, and James Blake. Scott teamed up with the Weeknd and future Number Ones artist SZA on “Power Is Power,” a track that had something to do with Game Of Thrones. (It peaked at #90.) Scott is also the least interesting thing about Post Malone’s song “Take What You Want.” That track got way more notice as an out-of-nowhere late-career hit for its other guest, 70-year-old Ozzy Osbourne. (“Take What You Want” peaked at #8. It’s a 7. Ozzy sounds awesome on that song. Ozzy Osbourne’s highest-charting single as lead artist is 1992’s “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” which peaked at #28. In 1989, Osbourne also reached #8 as Lita Ford’s duet partner on “Close My Eyes Forever.” That one is a 6.)
Travis Scott recorded “Highest In The Room” with the beat that Oz sent him, and then he went to his regular collaborator Mike Dean, a producer whose work has been in this column many times, to craft a gorgeously ethereal outro that really elevates the song. There’s a weird renaissance-faire grace to Nik D’s guitar loop, and it meshes nicely with the gluey blobs of sub-bass and the sci-fi whine of the Theremin. Scott sing-raps over that track in a deep baritone, letting his voice sink deep into the beat. He doesn’t really say much on the song, but the grain of his voice matches the instrumental track’s mood. Is Scott bragging about being higher than everyone else in the room? Probably, right? But he seems to put very little thought into his lyrics. The most memorable bits of Scott’s performance aren’t in the main vocal track. Instead, the stuff that sticks is the way Scott shouts out his echo-drenched catchphrases on the ad-libs — “It’s lit!” “Straight up!” — and the guttural hum that harmonizes with the guitar melody. Scott picked up that multi-tracked humming trick from his occasional collaborator Kid Cudi, a man who will appear in this column pretty soon.
Travis Scott’s music is almost never conceptual, and it’s almost always based on vibe. You aren’t supposed to think too much about anything that he says on the track. It’s the opposite approach of what Lizzo does on “Truth Hurts,” even though she does plenty of her own ad-libs and multi-tracked melodies. Lizzo pushes her brash personality up front and favors clean, sparse beats. Travis Scott, on the other hand, likes to murmur into the void, transforming himself into pure texture. His approach was much more in line with where rap was moving in 2019, and that’s still pretty much what most A-list rappers are doing these days. I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing or a bad one, but it really works when he hits the right groove. When Mike Dean’s “Highest In The Room” outro comes in — the dramatic pianos, the marching boots, the revved-up synth oscillation that sounds like the THX logo coming up on a movie screen — it can be weirdly beautiful.
I have to assume that Travis Scott made all his “Highest In The Room” lyrics up on the spot. They seem like they’re there to fill space, not to express much of anything. He still probably inadvertently said more than he might’ve wanted: “She saw my eyes, she know I’m gone/ I see some things that you might fear/ I’m doin’ a show, I’ll be back soon/ That ain’t what she wanna hear.” These are not the words of someone in a healthy relationship that’s built to last. Those lyrics first appeared in Kylie Jenner’s Instagram ad for some kind of makeup product called Kybrows. But when the song came out months later, the couple’s breakup was all over TMZ. (Scott and Jenner eventually got back together, had another kid, and then broke up again. She’s with Timothée Chalamet now, and they were all over the TV coverage of the Eastern Conference Finals a couple of weeks ago.)
Most of Travis Scott’s “Highest In The Room” lyrics are not halfway-accidental indications of his relationship’s tenuousness. Instead, they’re hazy rap boilerplate — a mind full of ideas, a block made of quesería, a fast car that zooms, a lady’s legs wrapped around Travis Scott’s beard. Travis Scott does not have a beard. He has never had a beard. That line doesn’t make any sense. I guess he needed something to rhyme with “fear” and “hear” and “here.” I have never once, in my life, made the instinctive scrunched-up damn face at a Travis Scott bar. You have to appreciate his sonic textures because his writing gives you nothing.
After that Kybrows ad, Travis Scott started playing 30-second snippets of “Highest In The Room” at his live shows. Some of those snippets featured a guest verse from the Atlanta rap star Lil Baby, but Baby’s verse wasn’t on the song when it finally comes out, which means that Baby still does not have a #1 hit. (Three tracks that feature Lil Baby — Drake’s “Wants And Needs” and “Girls Want Girls,” both from 2021, and Nicki Minaj’s “Do We Have A Problem?,” from 2022 — have peaked at #2. “Wants And Needs” is a 6, “Girls Want Girls” is a 3, and “Do We Have A Problem?” is a 5. Lil Baby’s highest-charting single as a lead artist, the stream-of-consciousness 2020 protest song “The Bigger Picture,” peaked at #3. It’s a 9.) Finally, Travis Scott released the “Highest In The Room” single and video in October 2019, and it was enough of an online sensation to debut at #1. The next week, the song slipped all the way down to #6, and then out of the top 10 entirely. This column is going to cover a whole lot of mirage-ass #1 hits that follow the same basic trajectory — leveraging a fanbase for a big chart debut without working too hard to involve the rest of the population, disappearing from the cultural memory immediately afterward.
A lot of those mirage hits don’t even have videos, but “Highest In The Room” has one that looks pretty expensive. Scott co-directed the clip with music video veteran Dave Meyers, and everything about it looks unpleasantly fake. It opens with the camera drifting inside Travis Scott’s mouth while he inhales smoke, which looks terrible. From there, it’s all surreal spectacle. Fishhooks stretch out Scott’s mouth while guys in suits and neon-colored ski masks yell at him. Scott is the only man walking through a neon-lit strip club, and the strippers start to feel like the CGI fly buzzing around his head. On a construction site, Scott shoots sparks from his eyes and gets into a video-game kung-fu battle with what appears to be an alien purple mannequin. All this stuff looks a lot cooler on paper than it feels in the video. The clip mostly works as a confession that Scott’s drug-induced hallucinations are about as interesting as the dream that a child really wants to tell you about in detail.
Soon after “Highest In The Room” had its #1 debut, Travis Scott released JackBoys, and EP-length compilation that showcased Scott and the other artists on his Cactus Jack label. He opened the JackBoys record with a “Highest In The Room” remix that finally added that Lil Baby verse back in, as well as one from the great Catalan pop star Rosalía. (Rosalía’s highest-charting Hot 100 hit is “Beso,” a 2023 collaboration with her then-fiancée Rauw Alejandro, which peaked at #52.) Early in 2020, “Highest In The Room” briefly returned to the top 10, largely because of that remix. A few months later, Scott and Rosalía reteamed for “TKN,” a one-off single that peaked at #66. Scott tried singing in Spanish on that one, and he hasn’t really attempted that again since.
“Highest In The Room” isn’t exactly a defining moment in Travis Scott’s career. It was a big hit but ultimately a minor entry in the man’s catalog. If someone used the Men In Black brain-zapper to erase all traces of the song from the world’s collective memory, I don’t think things would be too different. This column is heading into a Hot 100 period where this kind of thing becomes more and more common. The real big hits park themselves at #1 for months at a time, with brief single-week interruptions from forgettable tracks that play to the fanbases of big artists. It’s just the way things work now, and it doesn’t exactly do much to generate excitement about the pop charts. Maybe that’s just what happens when the monoculture is virtually extinct and the listening public is divided up into paper-thin demographic slices — when cult artists replace pop stars. “Highest In The Room” might not be a classic, but it’s at least a pretty good example of that kind of single-week blip. It’ll only go downhill from here.
GRADE: 6/10
BONUS BEATS: Here’s Christine And The Queens singing a very cool, mostly French version of “Highest In The Room” during the 2020 lockdown:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. This ain’t the molly, this the book.
