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.
I am a simple man, and I like it when New York rappers yell really loud all the time. I have always been this way. Run-DMC? Onyx? MOP? These are my guys. I love them all. The 1998 arrival of DMX was a major moment in my life. I have spent countless hours of my life watching battle rappers like Murda Mook and DNA bellow intricate threats of gun violence and extremely personal insults directly into each other’s faces. I love that shit. So when I first encountered Tekashi 6ix9ine, I was intrigued. Here, we had a Brooklyn rapper with crazy hair, crazy face tattoos, and crazy numbers of guys throwing up gang signs in his videos. He did nothing but scream like his life depended on it. He caught my attention because attention was exactly what he wanted. How do you get attention? You scream. You also do all the other shit that Tekashi 6ix9ine was doing.
There is a certain energy that comes from screamy, violent New York rap music that I just don’t find anywhere else. The best New York screamers vent all kinds of pent-up rage and frustration and adrenaline-charged recklessness into their music. For a minute there, I thought maybe that’s what 6ix9ine was doing. Perhaps, I thought, we were about to witness a whole new generation of wild knucklehead music. It wasn’t meant to be. 6ix9ine, I quickly learned, was much more interested in the “wild knucklehead” part of things, way less in the “music” aspect. His true artistic medium was social-media incitement. 6ix9ine was an internet kid with an outlandish fashion sense, and he built himself a name on the SoundCloud rap underground. But he got famous when he aligned himself with an extremely dangerous gang, and he seemed to have no idea what that would entail. He wasn’t just some kid who was in over his head, though. He was an active participant in a whole lot of bad shit. The world reacted to him with revulsion, and he steered right into it.
6ix9ine made himself the center of attention by putting himself in all kinds of violent and fucked-up situations — fights and shootings and endless social-media back-and-forths with any other rap-world celebrity who was willing to get down in the mud with him. He lived his life like he wanted to die, and his street associates reportedly robbed him blind. He made music, but the music was secondary to the ongoing soap opera of this freaky-looking kid being as obnoxious and self-destructive as he possibly could on the largest stages that he could find. It couldn’t last. It didn’t last.
After an extremely turbulent run in the public eye that barely lasted a year, 6ix9ine got arrested in a federal sweep of the gang that he made such a huge part of his persona. He had only just broken away from them, and he was looking at decades in prison for the things that he’d done with these people who he didn’t like anymore. 6ix9ine responded to that conundrum by doing the unthinkable: He snitched. He turned state’s evidence against his former comrades, and he skated out of prison after a shockingly short stay. This was the final taboo within rap culture, where snitching is about the lowest thing that a person can do. It might be considered even worse than child molestation, and 6ix9ine had some version of that on his resume, too.
Seen in retrospect, the lurid details of Tekashi 6ix9ine’s career read as a parody of rap-life excess. The excess overshadows the actual music that he made, which was inessential almost by design. When 6ix9ine was running wild, I was writing a weekly rap column, and I kept trying to figure out how I should address his antics. Ultimately, I just skipped it. I might’ve even written a whole column and then scrapped it. Any exploration into his career would involve way too many ongoing sensationalistic stories, and the guy seemed like he could be murdered by the time I published anything, so I never really wrote about him at length. He never did get shot. Instead, he just faded away from public consciousness about as quickly as he arrived. He’s still out there making music now, but nobody cares anymore. I’m sure 6ix9ine hates that, but he’s still alive. That’s something.
Shortly after he came home from prison, Tekashi 6ix9ine leveraged all of his attention and connections, as well as any other means at his disposal, and somehow scored himself a #1 hit. The numbers were fishy and possibly fraudulent, and the song didn’t make any larger cultural impact. 6ix9ine and Nicki Minaj released “Trollz” at the last possible moment when his freakshow appeal could combine with her brand identity to propel a nothing of a song to the top of the Billboard Hot 100. The scheme worked, and now I have to write about 6ix9ine anyway. Fine. This column is my vehicle to write about the history of popular music, and 6ix9ine is now part of that. Also, this fucking guy managed to make me not like New York scream-rap, and now I have to take it out on him. There are rules.
If you managed to avoid following Tekashi 6ix9ine’s disturbing and chaotic blip of a career in real time, then buckle up. You are in for some shit. If you did keep half an eye on all that stuff when it was happening, then you might want to buckle up, too. I had forgotten about half the stuff that 6ix9ine said and did, and it felt very weird to remind myself. I honestly cannot believe that the 6ix9ine saga actually happened in real life — that it wasn’t just some AI-generated fever-dream tabloid myth about youth out of control.
Daniel Hernandez, the son of a Mexican mother and a Puerto Rican father, grew up in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick, which was quickly gentrifying by the time that he got famous. (Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby” was the #1 song in America when 6ix9ine was born.) 6ix9ine’s mother worked in factories and cleaned houses, and his father, who had serious drug problems, was not in the picture. 6ix9ine had a close relationship with his stepfather, who was murdered when 6ix9ine was 13. From there, young Tekashi went into a depressed funk. He dropped out of school in eighth grade and worked a series of menial jobs, delivering food and bussing tables. I know at least one person who used to buy sandwiches from him at the Bushwick bodega where he worked.
Tekashi 6ix9ine wasn’t a street kid. He worked regular jobs, and those jobs took up almost all of his time. But he still picked a lot of fights with acquaintances on Instagram. Later on, he often made friends with the people who he’d tried to fight. 6ix9ine didn’t have any particular interest in music, but he wanted to get famous. He started rapping after customers at his bodega said that he looked cool and suggested that he try it. This is more common than you might expect. Lots of rappers essentially had to be recruited. Within the genre, personal magnetism is just as important as technical skill. You can learn how to rap, but you can’t learn that charisma. Tekashi 6ix9ine had a very particular type of charisma. Before he was famous, photographers would take street-style pictures of him, and they would sometimes go viral.
He started calling himself “Tekashi” because he loved anime and “6ix9ine” for way more obvious reasons. At some point, 6ix9ine started getting the “69” number tattooed all over his face and body, and he started hanging out with similarly outrageous underground rappers like ZillaKami. His debut song “69” came out in 2014, and it went around the internet a little bit. 6ix9ine was doing everything in his power to go viral, and that impulse seems to be why he posted videos of himself at a drug house, clowning for the camera while someone else had sex with a 13-year-old girl. 6ix9ine was 18 years old at the time, and he insisted that he didn’t know how young the girl was. But even if that’s true, it’s still some disgusting shit. 6ix9ine was an absolute fucking scumbag before the world ever heard of him. That part needs to be established. He’s not a dumb kid who got involved with dangerous people. He’s someone who actively sought depravity, thinking it would make him look cool on the internet. There are too many such cases.
The NYPD arrested 6ix9ine for his role in that sex tape. He went to Rikers Island for a few months and avoided prison time and the sex-offender registry by pleading guilty to “use of a child in a sexual performance.” He got probation and community service. His conviction was public knowledge, and he continued to insist that the whole situation wasn’t really his fault. 6ix9ine became a teenage father in 2015, and he later admitted to physically abusing his daughter’s mother. He kept rapping, and he gradually built a bit of a rep on the exploding SoundCloud-rap underground. Weirdly, he developed a big following in Eastern Europe, releasing tracks through a Slovak label called FCK THEM. The videos for 6ix9ine’s collaborations with Slovak SoundCloud rappers are fascinating artifacts.
One person who started paying attention to 6ix9ine was Elliott Grainge, whose father is of Universal Music boss Lucian, the most powerful person in the entire music business today. In his early twenties, Elliott Grainge started his own label 10K Projects, and he started signing SoundCloud rappers. Grainge signed the Ohio rapper Trippie Redd, who invited 6ix9ine to California to guest on his 2017 track “Poles 1469.” (Trippie Redd’s higheest-charting single, the 2021 Playboi Carti collab “Miss The Rage,” peaked at #11.) Trippie was a rising star when he collaborated with 6ix9ne, and “Poles 1469” peaked just outside the Hot 100 and went gold. 6ix9ine cut a memorable figure in the “Poles 1469” video, and labels started trying to sign him. He signed to 10K because Grainge offered him full creative control, which meant that Grainge couldn’t stop 6ix9ine from the career pivot that he had in mind.
“Poles 1469” got 6ix9ine some extra attention back home, and he loved that attention. Later on, he told The New York Times that he made an intentional move away from the SoundCloud underground: “I was killing the European market. But when you’re a kid from New York, you don’t want to be the kid that is only being played in Slovakia. I want to go outside in New York and hear my music. I want to go to the club and hear my music blasting through those speakers.” He figured that the best way to blow up locally was through gang affiliation. This was just a few years after Brooklyn teenager Bobby Shmurda scored an out-of-nowhere viral hit with his quasi-drill freestyle “Hot N***a” and then almost immediately went to prison for years as police charged Shmurda and his GS9 crew with a host of gang offenses. (“Hot N***a” peaked at #6 in 2014. It’s a 9. I told you how I feel about shouty New York rap.) That doesn’t seem like the best career model to follow, but it’s the one that 6ix9ine used.
Soon after the release of “Poles 1469,” 6ix9ine got ahold of a beat that producer Pi’erre Bourne sent to Trippie Redd. Trippie later claimed that 6ix9ine stole the beat from him, while 6ix9ine said Trippie gave it to him as a gift. By the time that he recorded over that beat, 6ix9ine had fallen out with Trippie, and Trippie was probably the lyrical target of “Gummo,” the song that uses the Bourne track. (Bourne did not sign off on the release of “Gummo,” and he wasn’t happy about it.) When he shot the “Gummo” video, 6ix9ine convinced a bunch of local gang members to appear, brandishing guns and gang signs on camera. That was the video that put 6ix9ine on my radar. It was what had me thinking scream-heavy New York rap might be on its way back. It’s a hard song. It’s not a great song, but it’s a hard song.
The “Gummo” video changed 6ix9ine’s life in all sorts of ways. Nobody could ignore that clip. It was too visually striking. Part of the fascination was the idea that this flamboyant figure, with his rainbow hair and his genuinely absurd tattoos, could be right at home with these gangsters who didn’t share his sartorial inclinations. It became a viral sensation, eventually peaking at #12 and going double platinum. While shooting the video, 6ix9ine met Kifano “Shotti” Jordan, a leader of the Nine Trey Gangsters, a Blood-affiliated New York gang. Shotti became 6ix9ine’s unofficial manager, and 6ix9ine gleefully jumped into his new role as a gang figurehead, screaming the word “Treyway” constantly on record.
Tekashi 6ix9ine worked himself into a shoot. That’s the best way I can describe it. He started walking around like he was some untouchable, universally feared underworld kingpin when he was really just a means for Shotti and his friends to make more money. He got in fights all over the country, usually on camera. He stoked feuds, not just with Trippie Redd and other former associates but also with street rappers like Chief Keef, YG, and Casanova. 6ix9ine was present for multiple shootings. Some of the shootings involved rival rappers and their entourages, and some of those were on camera. Later on, 6ix9ine testified that he paid a Nine Trey member $20,000 to shoot at Chief Keef. The guy actually did shoot at Keef, but he missed. (Chief Keef’s highest-charting lead-artist single is “Love Sosa,” which peaked at #56 in 2013. He’s a featured guest on former Number Ones artist Lil Uzi Vert’s “Bean (Kobe),” which reached #19 in 2020.)
6ix9ine was constantly getting arrested, but he continued to make music, though it wasn’t exactly his primary focus. His mixtape Day69 came out in February 2018 and debuted at #4 on the album chart. It had appearances from big-name rappers like Fetty Wap, Offset, and Tory Lanez. A bunch of its tracks reached the Hot 100, though none blew up bigger than “Gummo.” As 6ix9ine kept his face all over the internet by stoking speculation about his feuds and criminal misadventures, more and more big stars wanted to work with him. In June 2018, he teamed up with Nicki Minaj, one of rap’s biggest names, for “Fefe,” a genuinely boring song with a cartoonishly colorful video. Thanks to the power of sheer attention, “Fefe” debuted at #3. (It’s a 3.)
On the day that “Fefe” came out, members of the Nine Trey Gangsters kidnapped 6ix9ine at gunpoint. They pistol-whipped him, beat him, and robbed him. He later claimed that he only escaped because he jumped out of a moving car. The arrests were piling up, too. In October, 6ix9ine had three different court dates for three different cases in the same week. When he avoided jail time on one of those cases, he went out to a sentencing-victory dinner, and gunfire broke out between Nine Trey associates and record-exec bodyguards. Shotti was charged in connection with that shooting. Soon after that, there was another shooting at a video shoot for “Mama,” 6ix9ine’s song with Nicki Minaj and Kanye West, both of whom were present around the time that the bullets went flying. That video never got made, and “Mama” peaked at #43.
It’s telling that 6ix9ine got Nicki Minaj and Kanye West to appear on the same song and even to arrive at a video shoot where someone might get shot. He even got Bobby Shumrda to rap over the phone from prison on “Stoopid,” a song that peaked at #25. 6ix9ine’s proper debut album Dummy Boy came out on Black Friday 2018 and debuted at #2, eventually going platinum. 6ix9ine’s notoriety, at least for the moment, was good for business. 6ix9ine’s music wasn’t getting any better during this stretch. He was still shouting all the time, but he started attempting half-sung pop choruses, sometimes in Spanish. His public life was a roiling ball of chaos, but his music was pedestrian and uninspired. He kept getting attention by talking shit about rivals on every song. Attention was the only thing keeping him afloat.
People hated 6ix9ine. He’d basically admitted to making child porn, and he took clear joy in being a loud, violent asshole. Hate brings attention, and 6ix9ine trolled with the same bullying glee as any right-wing influencer you might care to name. Did you ever see Out For Justice, the Steven Seagal movie? It’s good. You’d like it. Steven Seagal is a Brooklyn cop who has to stop a crack-addicted mad-dog mobster who’s on a murder bender. This guy, the villain, has decided that he doesn’t care if he dies, so he’s settling all scores, smoking as much crack and avenging as many grudges as possible in the short time that he has left. What I’m saying is that Tekashi 6ix9ine had William Forsythe in Out For Justice vibes. People knew he wasn’t going to be around for long, and enough of them were morbidly fascinated enough to keep watching. This was right around the time I started to wonder if I needed to keep writing a weekly rap column. I felt professionally obligated to keep tabs on 6ix9ine, and I wasn’t happy about that. Shit bummed me out.
Before the Dummy Boy album even came out, things came to a head. While promoting the record release, 6ix9ine said that he’d split from the Nine Trey Gangsters. Soon afterward, he was arrested in a federal gang sweep and charged with racketeering and firearms. Later on, 6ix9ine claims that the FBI actually arrested him to keep him alive in that moment. He’d told them that he was ready to snitch, and they knew he’d get killed if they didn’t hurry up and arrest the entire gang. The man was kidnapped, beaten, and robbed by the people who were supposed to have his back, and you can’t really maintain your loyalties after that. 6ix9ine later insisted that he knew what he was getting into when he aligned himself with the Nine Trey Gangsters. I don’t think he understood the way gangs work. People are victims of their own gangs all the time. 6ix9ine was not immune.
6ix9ine was locked up for all of 2019. In September, he testified against his former comrades. This was a big deal. Reportedly, there was some conversation about putting him into the witness protection program, which is pretty funny. When you’ve got the number “69” tattooed literally all over your face, you can’t just say that you’re John Johnson and get a job at an Arby’s in Duluth. His testimony helped prosecutors get long prison sentences for a bunch of people, and they commended him for being so helpful. If he hadn’t testified, 6ix9ine was looking at decades in prison. Instead, he got two years, much of which he’d already served. He didn’t even serve all of that. In March 2020, 6ix9ine asked for early release, since his asthma made him more vulnerable to COVID. He got it — home confinement, with permission to shoot music videos in this house. A week later, 6ix9ine was back in Brooklyn, under house arrest. Soon, he was recording again.
A month after his release, 6ix9ine dropped his comeback single “Gooba.” He filmed a colorful video full of dancing girls, showing off his ankle monitor for the camera. Within rap, 6ix9ine was a total pariah for telling on his onetime friends. Other rappers talked shit about him him relentlessly, and he fired back at them. It was so weird to see him just return to rap like nothing happened. He still had an audience, even after everything. “Gooba” debuted at #3. (It’s a 4.)
6ix9ine was incensed. He’d lost a chart battle to Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber’s benefit duet “Stuck With U,” and he accused his competition of paying for their streams and sales, buying themselves the #1 spot. Grande, Bieber, their manager Scooter Braun, and Billboard all put out statements denying any wrongdoing and saying that they won the #1 spot fair and square. On Instagram, 6ix9ine posted a picture of some credit cards, vowing that he’d be #1 next time. That’s exactly what happened.
The most interesting thing about “Trollz,” beyond the fact that an artist as widely despised as 6ix9ine could have a #1 song in the first place, is Nicki Minaj’s involvement. Nicki had made those two songs with 6ix9ine before his time in jail, and she’d complained that MTV wouldn’t allow her to perform with him at the VMAs. But if there was ever a time to jump ship on 6ix9ine, it would’ve been after he turned state’s evidence. That’s not what Nicki did.
One of the rappers who called 6ix9ine out for snitching was Meek Mill, Nicki’s ex-boyfriend. Maybe she saw that as an opportunity to talk some shit to Meek. But I think it’s more likely that Nicki consciously decided to turn heel. She’d been one of the most widely beloved rappers of the previous decade, but maybe she thought she was slipping. Cardi B was threatening her spot, and Nicki and Cardi did not get along. (They still don’t.) Nicki still had her army of super-mean online stans, and she knew that she got a lot of attention for being hard and petty. Maybe she decided that this other colorful character from New York was a kindred spirit, or maybe she knew that the combined forces of the Barbz and the noise around 6ix9ine would be enough to guarantee another #1 hit, just a few weeks after she finally got there for appearing on Doja Cat’s “Say So” remix.
The least interesting thing about “Trollz” is the song itself. The song barely even registers as a song. It’s just a reason for people to pay more attention to 6ix9ine and Nicki Minaj. The beat comes from Jeremiah Raisen, known professionally as Sadpony. We’ve seen Sadpony in this column before because he and his brother Justin accused Lizzo of ripping them off after coming up with some of “Truth Hurts” in a writing session with them. Sadpony was mostly known for working with his brother on records from alt-pop artists like Sky Ferriera, Charli XCX, and Kelela. He’s credited for co-producing “Trollz” alongside Jahnei Clarke, a New York producer who worked on “Gooba” and who has very few other credits. 6ix9ine’s videographer Andrew “TrifeDrew” Green also has a writing credit on the song. The beat has some nicely eerie-floaty synth sounds, welded to standard trap drum programming. It’s not bad or anything, but it’s not special, either.
6ix9ine’s rapping on “Trollz” is bad. When he had the world’s eyes on him, 6ix9ine could’ve said something. He could’ve described what it was like to be at the middle of an endless firestorm or how it felt to be hated for testifying against the guys who lived off of him. Instead, he just gloats: “I know you don’t like me! You wanna fight me! You don’t want no problems at your party, don’t invite me!” (I wasn’t planning to.) Everybody else is just chasing him for clout, but he’s got Forgiatos on the truck, and he’ll make her friends fuck. Someone with 6ix9ine’s history should not rap about making anyone fuck, but I suppose that’s the point. On the chorus, he singsongs half-asleep bullshit about throwing racks and throwing ass, and he sounds like he’s just killing time. He barely even screams. I kind of like how he says “vroom vroom G5, vroom vroom we high,” but then the fucks it all up by throwing in another “vroom” that doesn’t fit the meter at all. He just sounds tired, which makes sense. His life must’ve been tiring.
There are no great 6ix9ine songs, but there are some that get the job done. A track like the “Gummo” follow-up “Kooda,” which peaked at #50, gets over on sheer ignorant headslap energy. That’s music for revving yourself into a berserker rage, or maybe for finishing a set of curls when your arms already hurt really bad. Even if you can’t stand the general vibe of the person who made that song, you might be able to get some use out of it. That’s my experience, anyway. But the 6ix9ine of “Trollz” brings none of that visceral abandon. What’s the point of 6ix9ine if he’s not making music that makes you want to punt a fire hydrant into the sky?
Nicki Minaj, at least, has a sense of purpose on “Trollz.” She takes the title just as literally as 6ix9ine does, but I think it means something else to her. To Nicki, the transgressive act is merely showing up on a song with this guy and talking some shit. Nicki is in pure autopilot mode on “Trollz,” bringing back her old tricks — stretching out syllables way past the logical point, over-enunciating words to the point where it sounds patronizing, switching voices suddenly — but she does it with no vigor or excitement. It still comes out sounding fine. Even at her worst, Nicki Minaj knows how to rap. Her verse is way longer that 6ix9ine’s, so it almost feels like she took it upon herself to save the song. That effort isn’t successful, but it prevents “Trollz” from sliding into full-on car-crash territory. Maybe that’s a bad thing. Maybe “Trollz” would be more interesting if it was a full-on car crash. As it is, it’s just a boring rap song from two aggravating people.
In September 2020, 6ix9ine did his first post-jail interview with Joe Coscarelli at The New York Times, and Joe straight-up told him that “Trollz” sucks: “‘Trollz’ is also just not that good compared to ‘Gummo,’ ‘Kooda.'” 6ix9ine’s response: “‘Trollz’ is a #1 record. Why is ‘Gummo’ and ‘Kooda’ not? ‘Cause money!” So “Trollz” went to #1 because money. Coscarelli asked 6ix9ine about inflating his streaming numbers with bots and weird marketing tactics, and 6ix9ine said, “I’ll say the same thing I said to Billboard: Who doesn’t? Everybody inflates their numbers. Ev-er-y-bod-y.” That’s probably true. That’s probably especially true now. Chart manipulation is the kind of thing that pop superstars aren’t supposed to discuss in public, since they’re all playing the same game. 6ix9ine was playing a different game, so he talked about it. “Trollz” debuted at #1, so he won. But he had to really try to win.
The mere fact that Nicki Minaj is on “Trollz” is a marketing feat unto itself. The song only exists to give the two rappers a chance to grandstand together; the frisson of the established superstar and the viral pariah teaming up is its only real selling point. They made a hyper-colorful video for the track, filming it the place where 6ix9ine was under house arrest and projecting an aggressive cartoon-porn sensibility, right down to the pasties on Nicki’s boobs. There was also an alternate version of “Trollz” with different verses, to drive the streams up. They sold a ton of merch-bundled singles and 69-cent iTunes downloads, and Nicki claimed that 20% of proceeds would go to the Bail Out Fund, making this possibly the least convincing example in history of an artist trying to use charity for public approval. They spent whatever money they had to spend on fake streams. In the short term, it worked. 6ix9ine got his week at #1, and now I have to write this column about him.
In its second week, “Trollz” fell down the Hot 100 faster than any song in history, plummeting all the way down to #34. Even that would be more impressive if the very next song in this column didn’t break its record. Now, that kind of shit happens all the time. A song debuts at #1 through some strange combination of fan loyalty and dumpster-fire appeal, and then it disappears forever. That’s what happened here. 6ix9ine never made another real hit. His album TattleTales came out in September 2020, and it flopped. The Spanish-language follow-up single “Yaya” peaked at #99. Two more 6ix9ine singles have charted since then. “Zaza” peaked at #90 in 2021, and “Giné” peaked at #83 in 2022.
True to form, 6ix9ine’s biggest moment after “Trollz” wasn’t a song. It was a 2023 incident where three guys jumped him in an LA Fitness gym in Miami and then posted the video online. (At the end of the video, the guy taping it says, “I’m a fan, bro.”) Those guys got arrested, and 6ix9ine sued the gym for failing to protect him. I don’t know what happened with that lawsuit. For a while, 6ix9ine was dating the Dominican dembow artist Yailin La Más Viral and making reggaeton. At different points in their relationship, both 6ix9ine and Yailin were arrested for domestic violence.
6ix9ine is still putting out music, and his YouTube videos still get millions of views, but that’s chump change compared to what he used to put up. His moment ended quietly. Maybe that’s the weirdest thing about the whole story. 6ix9ine seemed to actively court death, pissing the world off on purpose, but he didn’t go out in a Tony Montana hail of bullets. He just kind of stopped mattering. It’s the best thing that realistically could’ve happened. He’s still shouting, but nobody’s listening now.
Nicki Minaj didn’t stop mattering, though. In 2021, Nicki linked up with Lil Baby for the one-off single “Do We Have A Problem?,” and it peaked at #2. (It’s a 5.) Not long after that, Nicki made another #1 hit, this time with no collaborator. We’ll see her in this column again.
GRADE: 3/10
BONUS BEATS: I wish this Without Music version of the “Trollz” video was funnier, that it wasn’t just someone making “duh” noises for a minute and a half. But I’m low on options here, so it’ll have to do:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. I know you don’t like me. You wanna fight me. Don’t do that. Buy my book instead.
