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.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A rising star scores an out-of-nowhere surprise hit. Maybe that song wasn’t even supposed to be a single. Maybe it suddenly takes off thanks to a TikTok dance challenge. Then a much more established star takes advantage of the situation, jumping on a remix of that song and supercharging its numbers. The song in question zooms high enough to reach #1 for a single week, and then the world moves on. This has happened before, and it will happen again. This column has covered songs that follow the basic contours of that narrative. In the case of Doja Cat and Nicki Minaj’s “Say So,” this column has covered a song that follows the exact contours of that narrative. The narrative itself isn’t terribly exciting. You can always see the music-business gears grinding behind it, and inspiration rarely comes into the equation. Every once in a while, though, that narrative can result in an actual great song. That’s what happened with “Savage.”
The specifics of the narrative matter. In this case, the rising star is Megan Thee Stallion, an actual star who is still making good on the promise of her early mixtapes. The established star is Beyoncé, the single greatest pop artist of her generation. Megan and Beyoncé have never come across as music-business cogs whose pop singles carry the weight of obligation. They are outsized personalities who come from the same city, and I get the sense that they actually like each other as musicians and as human beings. The timing matters, too. The “Say So” and “Savage” remixes actually came out within a couple of days of one another, and the two tracks fought for chart positioning, but only one of them felt like a true event. Beyoncé is not the type of artist who can’t wait to show up on a remix with whatever new rapper is making noise. She is mysterious, and she is selective. If you hear her trading bars with a new rapper, that moment is a coronation. When I got the alert about a new “Savage” remix with Beyoncé on it, I probably said the phrase “oh shit” out loud.
The “oh shit” reaction is always fun, but it only lasts so long. For me, the “Savage” remix has outlasted that initial buzz many times over. It has outlasted its context — the endless COVID moment when every new distraction seemed to entertain the world for a couple of hours before disappearing from the collective imagination forever. Megan Thee Stallion, still in the process of getting famous when “Savage” dropped, has certainly outlasted that moment. Both Megan and Beyoncé have done bigger and better things since the “Savage” remix, but I still have a great deal of affection for the moment when they joined forces. That’s partly because I like them, but it’s also partly because the “Savage” remix is a great example of the form — a new version of a bubbling song that builds on the bones of the original, making it sound bigger without sacrificing the energy that made it exciting in the first place. With most superstar remixes, the original version of the track remains the definitive one, at least after the week that the song gets its chart bump. Here, that’s not the case. The “Savage” that I think of first is the “Savage” with Beyoncé — mostly because the “Savage” with Beyoncé is just that good.
When the “Savage” remix happened, Megan Thee Stallion had only been famous for a couple of years. She’d never quite cracked the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100, but it was already clear that she was a star. She had presence. You could hear echoes of past rap generations, especially past Houston rap generations, in her delivery, but she never sounded like she was imitating anyone else. Megan’s appeal was obvious right away. She’s a tough, sexy Houston girl who raps about sex and dominance with absolute confidence and the kind of technical dexterity that most of her male peers couldn’t approach. She has sass and attitude and charisma and skills. Her potential was obvious. She just needed the right song, and “Savage” was the right song.
Megan Thee Stallion is a second-generation rapper. That makes a difference. Megan Jovon Ruth Pete was actually born in San Antonio, but she grew up in Houston. (When Megan was born, the #1 song in America was TLC’s “Creep.”) Megan’s father spent the first eight years of her life in prison, and he passed away when she was in ninth grade. I don’t know why he was locked up or how he died, and it’s not my business. Her mother Holly Thomas worked as a debt collector, and she also rapped under the name Holly-Wood. Apparently, she tried to launch a label of her own at some point, and she had a loose connection to DJ Screw, the king of the Houston rap underground in the late ’90s. I’ve never found any of Holly-Wood’s music online, so she didn’t get far as a rapper, but it still made a big impression on young Megan. Megan grew up immersed in the music. You can tell.
Megan started rapping in high school. She called herself a stallion because she’s tall with a big butt. I don’t know why she went with “Thee” instead of “The,” but I like it. It means she’s spiritually aligned with a few generations of garage rock bands. When Megan’s mother heard her rapping, she was impressed, but she was also a little taken aback at how sexual her daughter’s lyrics were. Megan had to remind Holly that she’d been playing that music around her for her whole life. Holly insisted that Megan go to college and that she not try to turn rap into a career until after her 21st birthday, and Megan went along with it. She went off to study health administration, first at Prairie View A&M and then at Texas Southern. (She was still in college when “Savage” reached #1, and she graduated a year later.) While she was at school, she appeared in cypher videos with other aspiring rappers, and she was immediately way more compelling than all the dudes around her. It’s frankly unfair, like seeing high school footage of LeBron James or something.
In 2016, Megan Thee Stallion turned 21 and went pro. Her mother didn’t just give her blessing to Megan’s rap career; she became Megan’s coach and manager, pushing her to become more precise and focused. That went against the prevailing rap trends of the moment. Mainstream rap was moving toward fractured, Auto-Tuned melodies and slurry, half-swallowed intonations. Megan zagged against that, enunciating hard and finding a rigorous pocket on hard, simple beats. To aging fans like me, she felt like a breath of fresh air, though she never carried herself as a ’90s revivalist.
Megan self-released her debut single “Like A Stallion,” and she went on to post a couple of mixtapes on SoundCloud. In 2017, she signed with a local indie label called 1501 Certified Entertainment. The former Tampa Bay Rays player Carl Crawford founded 1501, and it was run by T. Farris, who’d been part of the inner circle at Swisha House, one of the big ’00s Houston rap labels. (I remember him from former Number Ones artist Paul Wall’s verse on the Houston rap anthem “Still Tippin’“: “T. Farris took me to the lot/ He wrote a check and bought a drop.” “Still Tippin'” peaked at #60.) Megan would come to regret this deal, thought she would keep Farris with her.
1501 Certified Entertainment released Megan Thee Stallion’s 2017 mixtape Make It Hot and then brought her to 300 Entertainment, the label that a bunch of rap industry veterans launched in 2012. In 2018, Megan released her Tina Snow mixtape, which was the moment that I jumped on board. Megan’s buzz was getting louder and louder then. She presented herself as a star, and her music was fun enough to justify that noise. Megan first reached the Hot 100 early in 2019, when her Tina Snow track “Big Ole Freak” peaked at #65. You couldn’t really ask for a better Megan Thee Stallion introduction than “Big Ole Freak.”
More hits followed. Megan and fellow rising star DaBaby were both in the XXL Freshman class in 2019, and both of them went crazy in the cypher that they taped for that cover. Around the same time, Megan released her Fever mixtape, and she teamed up with DaBaby on “Cash Shit,” a song that reached #36. Megan and DaBaby were both fast, freaky, technical rap beasts, and they seemed to be made for each other until they didn’t. That was a fun moment for both rappers, anyway. (DaBaby will appear in this column soon.) Soon after that, she teamed up with past and future Number Ones artists Nicki Minaj and Ty Dolla $ign to release a one-off single called “Hot Girl Summer,” named for Megan’s catchphrase. The song wasn’t as good as I’d hoped it would be, and Megan and Nicki did not remain allies for long. (The Megan/Nicki feud will eventually have implications for this column.) Though “Hot Girl Summer” didn’t work as well as it should’ve, it still reached #11.
But while Megan Thee Stallion’s career was taking off, she went through an extremely turbulent personal period. Megan’s mother died of a brain tumor in March 2019. The same month, her grandmother also passed away. Somewhere in there, Megan signed a management deal with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation company, and T. Farris left 1501 Certified Entertainment to join the Roc. In the process, Megan learned that 1501 was taking a much bigger piece of her paychecks than it should. The label supposedly refused to renegotiate, so Megan sued. The resulting legal battle went on for years, and it barred Megan from releasing new music in the months after “Hot Girl Summer.” In March 2020, as soon as she was legally allowed, Megan released her EP Suga. She had more turbulence ahead of her, but that’s a story for a different column.
When the Suga EP came out, Megan Thee Stallion got the rising-star treatment, doing late-night talk-show performances and magazine interviews. The first proper single from the EP was “B.I.T.C.H.,” a perfectly solid track built on a 2Pac sample. It did pretty well, reaching #31. But that song wasn’t the one that took Megan to the next level. Instead, the song that made the difference for her was “Savage,” a simple flex of a track with a hypnotically simple hook. “Savage” wasn’t a single, and Megan never even made a video for the song. Instead, “Savage” took off because a TikTok user named Keara Wilson came up with a dance that went along with the track. Once again, the TikTok challenge made all the difference. That’s become a recurring theme in this column.
Megan recorded “Savage” with J. White Did It, the producer who has already been in this column for his work on Cardi B’s “Bodak Yellow” and “I Like It.” Despite J. White’s hitmaking pedigree, nobody was expecting much from “Savage.” According to the song’s engineer, Megan came up with her raps in an hour, as White was still putting the finishing touches on the beat. Somewhere in there, the Dallas-born rapper Bobby Sessions got a songwriting credit on “Savage,” though I’m not sure what he contributed.
“Savage” itself is just a good rap song. J. White’s beat is tough and propulsive, and it never gets in the way. There’s no attention-grabbing sample or melody. Instead, there are lots of sharp little bits and pieces — the piano riff, the percussive sonar bings and kicks and handclaps, the echoey moan, the mattress-spring creaks, the tiny melodic synth wobble — that all come in at the exact right moments. You might not notice all those musical elements unless you’re listening close, but they all feel right. Megan starts rapping before the beat even drops, and she’s casually commanding in the way that she usually is. The part that really lands is the hook, where Megan slows down enough to list off her seemingly contradictory qualities with effortless panache: “I’m a savage/ Classy, bougie, ratchet/ Sassy, moody, nasty/ Acting stupid, what’s happening?/ What’s happening?” That’s the part that Keara Wilson had so much fun acting out in her TikTok dance. (People were really into describing themselves as savage right around then. Another song with “Savage” in the title will appear in this column soon.)
Nobody knew that Beyoncé was going to be on a “Savage” remix until Beyoncé was on a “Savage” remix. Even producer J. White Did It didn’t know about the remix until about an hour before it came out. There wasn’t really any warning. Megan Thee Stallion and Beyoncé met at a New Year’s party just before the pandemic, and there were photos of them crammed into a photo booth together, but that was the extent of it. I remember the all-out rush to post the “Savage” remix on this website immediately after it showed up on the internet, one of those moments when every music blogger goes into the frantic speed-typing tunnel-vision zone. The pairing made perfect sense. Megan Thee Stallion and Beyoncé are both from Houston. They’re from different generations, and Beyoncé was on Star Search with the hip-hop rappin’ Girls Tyme before Megan was born, but they both carry themselves with a certain regal glamor. You could imagine them being friends. It’s ridiculous to look at two famous people who you will never meet and imagine that they’re friends, like you’re a little child and they’re some toys, but that’s how I imagined them.
In 2020, Beyoncé wasn’t really playing the pop-star game anymore. She hadn’t had a #1 hit as lead artist since “Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)” in 2008, when Megan Thee Stallion was 13 years old. Beyoncé’s two previous albums were intended and taken as full-length artistic statements, which meant that she was arguably the most famous critics’ darling in history. Beyoncé wasn’t generally showing up on remixes with random artists, and when she did, it was a big deal. A remix with Beyoncé vocals was enough to push Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect” to #1 in 2017. It would be hard to imagine too many songs more different from one another than “Perfect” and “Savage,” but Beyoncé made sense on both.
Beyoncé raps on “Savage.” This wasn’t exactly a new thing. Beyoncé has been singing with rap cadences and syncopation since at least the late ’90s. On her later records, her singing can edge all the way over into rapping, and she’s really good at it. To rap convincingly, you need rhythm and confidence, and Beyoncé has superhuman levels of both. She also has writers. At this stage of Beyoncé’s career, pretty much every song has a million co-writers, and it’s kind of fun to pick through the tracks and imagine you can figure out who worked on which parts. On the “Savage” remix, the list of writers grows to include Beyoncé’s husband, former Number Ones artist Jay-Z. The-Dream, Starrah, and Pardison Fontaine also have writing credits on the “Savage” remix, and all of them have been in here as songwriters and/or producers. (Fontaine is Cardi B’s usual co-writer, and he dated Megan Thee Stallion for a while.) The Philadelphia-born rapper and occasional pop songwriter Derrick Milano has a writing credit, too. But even with all these coaches putting in their assistance, Beyoncé never sounds like anybody else on the “Savage” remix. She just sounds like Beyoncé.
The “Savage” remix is a real remix. Beyoncé doesn’t just have a verse clumsily ProTooled into the original song. Instead, the song rearranges itself around her presence, and then she and Megan Thee Stallion trade off bars mid-verse. Megan has new lines on there, too, and you can hear her saying them with the confidence of someone who has just gotten Beyoncé to appear on a remix of her TikTok hit. I love the bit where she’s like, “Like Beyoncé, like me!” Megan’s brash precision sounds even stronger when you put it right next to Beyoncé’s breathy murmur. They feed each other.
There’s a moment on the “Savage” remix where Beyoncé just reels off circa-2020 pop-culture bullshit at a dizzy pace: “Hips tick-tock when I dance/ On that Demon Time, she might start a OnlyFans.” That should be cringey as hell. Beyoncé was a 38-year-old billionaire mom; she was not going to start a damn OnlyFans. Those lines anchor the track firmly in the moment of its creation. There are no COVID references on “Savage,” thankfully, but it’s still one of those songs that was dated at the moment that it came out, even if TikTok and OnlyFans are still with us. I still kind of like it, though. It’s like if you saw Tom Waits talking about “Damn, Daniel!” It’s goofy, but it’s endearing. I don’t know. Maybe I just like it because I like Beyoncé.
If Beyoncé is just on “Savage” to talk about memes and her butt, then she’s really just embracing the spirit of the song. I like how her delivery builds and builds, starting out as this sleepy half-whisper and ratcheting up to the verse where she can’t restrain herself from going into gospel-charged melisma mode, as if she’s just finally reached the point where she can’t hold it in. All throughout, she adds little backup harmonies that help elevate the track, too. Her starpower makes a big difference on the track, but so do all her actual musical embellishments. It’s practically the best-case scenario for one of these big-star remixes.
The “Savage” remix arrived as an out-of-nowhere surprise, and Megan Thee Stallion and Beyoncé never even made a video for it. Like the song that it replaced at #1, the “Savage” remix was a fundraiser. Its proceeds went to Bread Of Life, a charity that was doing COVID-relief stuff specifically in Houston. I think it’s cool that the song never really announced itself as a charity song but still raised a bunch of money for people in a specific place. It’s possible to do stuff like that without making a big self-aggrandizing show of it.
The “Savage” remix actually debuted at #2 behind Doja Cat’s “Say So” remix with Nicki Minaj — two songs basically occupying the same space at the same time. But unlike all the 2020 hits that debuted at #1 and then fell straight down the charts, the “Savage” remix lingered, and it climbed to #1 two weeks after its release. At least compared to most of the songs around it, “Savage” had legs. Today, both the original “Savage” and the remix have hundreds of millions of plays on Spotify, and the single is quintuple platinum.
For Beyoncé, that “Savage” remix was just a one-off. Nothing else in her career really sounds like it. A few months later, she released her “Black Parade” single as an add-on to the Lion King companion-piece album that she released a year earlier, and it peaked at #37. In 2021, Beyoncé contributed a pretty forgettable ballad called “Be Alive” to the soundtrack of King Richard. It didn’t chart, but it got an Oscar nomination. At the half-remote 2022 Oscars, Beyoncé sent in a remotely taped performance of that song, and that’s obviously the only King Richard-related thing that that anyone remembers from that year’s Oscars.
At the socially distanced 2021 Grammys, Megan Thee Stallion and Beyoncé won Best Rap Song for the “Savage,” and Beyoncé surprised everyone by actually showing up to accept it. Megan looked way more shocked to see Beyoncé there than she did to win the award in the first place, and she gushed tearfully about being a little kid who wanted to be “the rap Beyoncé.” It was very cute, and I hope that Beyoncé did not feel like the Cryptkeeper in that moment. Later on, Megan and Beyoncé performed the “Savage” remix together in Beyoncé’s concert movie Renaissance, with both of them wearing, like, lingerie military fatigues and Beyoncé perched on the roof of a contraption that I guess I’ll have to call a lowrider tank. That was a fun moment. Megan was visibly and audibly delighted. Someone needs to put the Renaissance movie on streaming already.
Megan followed “Savage” by flipping an Eazy-E classic on “Girls In The Hood,” which peaked at #28. Within a few months, Megan had another song that made an even bigger impact than “Savage.” We’ll see both Megan Thee Stallion and Beyoncé in this column again.
GRADE: 9/10
BONUS BEATS: Dumb Money, the 2023 motion picture about the GameStop stock situation, ends with a montage set to “Savage,” and it’s got Anthony Ramos, Myha’la, and Talia Ryder all doing the TikTok dance. Here it is:
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. If you wanna see some real book, baby, here’s your chance.
