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.
No. Fuck this shit. I will not accept it. I refuse.
Sorry. I’m coming in too hot. This song doesn’t deserve all that. Plenty of talented people worked on Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber’s chart-topping duet “Stuck With U.” I don’t think that any of them had malice in their hearts. The song was released to raise money for first responders’ families during some of the darkest days of COVID, when nurses were routinely working endless shifts, traumatizing themselves while trying to find beds for all the dying people who they couldn’t save. So the song’s cause was good. Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber have both made a lot of music that I enjoy. “Stuck With U” itself is unmemorable but inoffensive fluff — a phoned-in pastiche of old-timey slow-dance balladry. It never hurt anyone.
But when I hear “Stuck With U” today, five years, later, my soul fills with despair. Some of that is because “Stuck With U” could never be anything other than disposable product. It’s manipulative dreck, made to be consumed and then forgotten. The two stars who recorded the track posted a bunch of things about how proud they were of the song and how its #1 debut was definitely not cynical chart manipulation at work, and then they promptly forgot all about the track, never performing it live or including it on any albums. The song, like so many COVID-era superstar event singles, immediately plunged down the Hot 100 after debuting on top, and then nobody ever thought about it again. That’s not new. This column has already looked at plenty of songs that followed that exact same trajectory, and it’ll look at plenty more in the future. That’s boring and unfun, but it’s not necessarily the sort of thing that should induce despair.
I think the reason I hate “Stuck With U” so much, the reason that I reject the song on a near-cellular level, is that it brings me back to an unbelievably bleak time — bleak for me, bleak for you, bleak for society as a whole. It’s a song for Zoom meetings and cotton swabs jammed up your nose and the intense, paranoid feeling of trying to maneuver through Kroger aisles without coming within six feet of anyone else, feeling vaguely panicked whenever you see someone’s nose poking up out of their mask. “Stuck With U” positions itself as a song for that moment. In a way, it does what pop music is supposed to do, interpreting the larger societal mood and finding some romance in it. But I don’t find any romance in that time. I remember it only with a dim pulse of anxiety and resentment. I hate it.
Here’s what “Stuck With U” makes me think of: It makes me think of my kids struggling through remote classroom bullshit, so bored that they stopped even trying to participate — just letting their teachers drone on while staring at their bedroom walls. It makes me think of my daughter picking up her elementary school diploma in a drive-through graduation ceremony, my wife holding in tears when we saw all the teachers lined up with their masks on, waving little flags and trying to broadcast cheer. It makes my think of my parents throwing themselves a 50th-anniversary party on Zoom, right before my dad went into hospice care. This song brings up a lot of bad shit that I hadn’t allowed myself to viscerally consider, really, since it happened. Again: None of that is the fault of the song. But pop music is a time machine, and this one let me off in the wrong fucking time.
Wow, I’m in a terrible mood now. Maybe you are, too. This was not my intent. It’s just where this column leads me sometimes. Let’s pull out of the spiral and talk about some music bullshit. In 2020, Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber were both wildly, extremely popular, Grande especially. Both of them have been in this column a bunch of times. Grande was coming off of the wild success of Sweetener and thank u, next, the two albums that she released a few months apart, and the arena tour that she launched behind both. Her songs “thank u, next” and “7 Rings” both debuted at #1 in 2018 and 2019, respectively.
Later in 2019, Grande guested on “Boyfriend,” a song from her production collaborators Social House, and it peaked at #8. (It’s a 6.) She also got together with past and future Number Ones artist Miley Cyrus and with Lana Del Rey, who really should’ve considered herself too cool for this kind of thing, to sing “Don’t Call Me Angel,” the theme song for the rebooted Charlie’s Angels movie that nobody remembers. “Don’t Call Me Angel” peaked at #13 — a pretty good number for either of the other two singers but not for Grande. It didn’t matter. She could afford a movie-theme flop at that moment. I took my daughter to see Grande live shortly after that single’s release — my kid’s first concert — and “Don’t Call Me Angel” was on the pre-show playlist that was piped into the arena. Nobody was even pretending that Grande would sing that song live.
Justin Bieber was probably a couple of years removed from peak pop dominance, but he still routinely racked up big chart numbers. The last time that Bieber was in this column was for the “Despacito” remix in 2017. Bieber made a bunch of hits that year, and then he disappeared from the public eye for a little bit. He made his grand return in 2019, when he made a surprise guest appearance during his friend Ariana Grande’s headlining set at Coachella. Grande and Bieber were both white pop/R&B singers who started out as teen idols and who were managed by big-deal power-player Scooter Braun, so they were always a natural pairing. Back in 2015, Grande appeared on a remix of Bieber’s hit “What Do You Mean?” The two singers operated under the same corporate umbrella, and it just made business sense to pair them up whenever possible. If anything, they showed some real restraint by not just teaming up to sing duets all the damn time.
After that Coachella appearance, Justin Bieber picked his hitmaking streak back up again. A few months later, he and Ed Sheeran released the duet “I Don’t Care,” which got stuck behind “Old Town Road” at #2. (It’s a 6.) Later that year, he turned up on a version of “10,000 Hours,” a hit from Dan + Shay, a country duo who Scooter Braun managed, and that song reached #4. (It’s a 4.) Bieber’s album Changes came out in February 2020, just before the pandemic hit. Lead single “Yummy,” a real piece of shit, famously got stuck at #2 behind Roddy Ricch’s “The Box.” (It’s a 3.) Another Changes single, the Quavo collab “Intentions,” reached #5. (It’s a 6.)
Naturally, “Stuck With U” did not start with Ariana Grande or Justin Bieber. Instead, the track is the product of a Zoom songwriting session that happened in April 2020, when the pandemic was new. The most famous person on that Zoom call was probably Gian Stone, a producer who has been in this column for working on Maroon 5’s “Girls Like You.” Another producer on that call was Freddy Wexler — like Stone, a New York native who’d been a behind-the-scenes music-business functionary for years. (Stone and Wexler also worked together on “Be Kind,” a Marshmello/Halsey collab that peaked at #29 in 2020.)
You didn’t think that was it, did you? No. This Zoom call was crowded. It also included Whitney Phillips and Skyler Stonestreet, two songwriters with a bunch of credits on tracks that I don’t remember ever hearing. Shortly after “Stuck With U” came out, Gian Stone and Whitney Phillips did an ASCAP Zoom interview about the process behind a song like that one. I just watched the whole half-hour interview, and I don’t feel great about that decision. Phillips mentions that they had “Tiger King on in the background” during the session, and that period-specific detail might plunge me into another dark spiral. Let’s just move on.
This session was the first time that the four songwriters tried writing together on Zoom, and they were still getting used to the idea. Stone came in with a few chord progressions in mind, but none of his collaborators liked them. Then Phillips said that they should do what Stone describes as “some kinda 6/8 feelgood slow-dance vibe.” Stone picked up a guitar and played something on the spot, and everyone else liked it. Stone recorded his guitar part on his laptop, and he figured that he’d replace it, but he never did. It’s what’s on the song.
The songwriters’ idea was to make “a quarantine song.” Freddy Wexler came up with the idea of “Stuck With U” as a title, and the others helped brainstorm it. They wanted it to be a love song that could address the moment and also transcend it, and they failed. “Stuck With U” did not transcend lockdown. I can see what they were going for, though. None of the lyrics on “Stuck With U” are necessarily about COVID. Instead, it’s a song about two people who are drawn together and who can’t quit each other.
Ariana Grande sings that she’s the type to leave someone quickly but that she’s surprised to find that she doesn’t want to leave: “Lock the door and throw out the key/ Can’t fight this no more, it’s just you and me.” Later on, she and Justin Bieber sing that they would want to be together even in the apocalypse: “If you told me that the world’s endin’/ Ain’t no other way that I can spend it.” It comes off almost grim and fatalistic, as if they’re just convincing themselves to accept that this is how things must be. They’re fated to be together, even if that wasn’t in the plan, and they don’t sound that excited about it. I imagine that a lot of couples found themselves in similar situations early in lockdown and that lots of those couples didn’t make it.
In the ASCAP interview, Gian Stone mentions Motown as a point of comparison. Even at their most anonymous, the songs from the Motown hit factory had a lot more personality than “Stuck With U,” but you can get what he means. The writers wanted a singer with the power to really sing the song, so they recorded a demo and brought it to Ariana Grande’s representatives. Grande liked the song enough that she recorded it that night. Maybe she just needed something to do. Grande cut her own vocals at home and earned herself a producer credit, and then she suggested to the writers that the track should be a duet with a male singer. She sent it to Justin Bieber, and he recorded it quickly, too. About a month after the initial writing session, the song was out in the world. After its release, the writers still seemed dumbfounded. All of them were used to songs taking forever, if they ever even came out. “Stuck With U” was the exception to every rule.
Somewhere along the way, Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande both picked up songwriting credits on “Stuck With U.” Scooter Braun is also credited as a writer on the track, and I have a hard time with that one. I don’t know how these credits get figured out, but it sure feels like Braun just decided to award himself one. He certainly wasn’t in on the songwriting Zoom session. The song couldn’t have happened without him, since both of the stars were his management clients, but that’s not the same thing as writing. Or maybe it is. Maybe “Stuck With U” only resonated because it had these two big stars on it. Maybe negotiating the release of a duet like that is an act of creation, an act that’s arguably more important than the actual writing of this flimsy little nothing of a song. Braun’s credit feels gross, though. At least for me, it puts the whole enterprise in a weird light.
By 2020, Scooter Braun was famous for more than just being the guy who discovered baby Justin Bieber on YouTube. In 2019, Braun’s company Ithaca Holdings bought Big Machine, the Nashville label that signed baby Taylor Swift. That acquisition effectively made Braun the owner of the master recordings for most of Taylor Swift’s discography, and Swift was big mad. She announced that she would re-record all of her old albums as a way to gain ownership over them, and she went through with it. That project will figure into future editions of this column. A few months ago, Swift succeeded in buying back her masters, reportedly for nearly half a billion dollars. Braun did not come off very well in that whole saga. Maybe “Stuck With U” was, in part, image rehab for him. The single was released as a benefit for First Responders Children’s Foundation, a charity that hands out grants and scholarships to the kids of first responders. Braun’s SB Projects company oversaw all the donations. Maybe I shouldn’t be cynical about that. Maybe it’s just a pure net good. Maybe “Stuck With U” earned tons of money for kids who needed it. I hope that happened. That would be nice.
Anyway, “Stuck With U” sounds bad. The retro-soul production is tinny and cutesy and unexceptional. I can’t remember the melody even when I’m still listening to that melody. Ariana Grande sings the motherfuck out of it, but she can’t sell it enough to make it sound like a real song. Bieber definitely can’t. Neither of them are throwback singers, and neither of them fits quite right on this throwback song. Even when he and Grande sing runs together, there is zero chemistry involved. I don’t know that they could’ve done better if they’d actually recorded in the studio while staring deeply into each other’s eyes, but they show absolutely zero chemistry on the track. It sounds like something recorded over Zoom, which is the whole problem. It’s a distant simulacrum of connection — a shadow, a mockery.
The “Stuck With U” video is all phone and webcam images of people dancing and mugging and generally performing the act of being happy that they’re all at home together. Lots of people were doing that at the time. It’s a nice impulse, to show everyone bravely smiling through a rough time together. It hits a little different when you’re looking at the insides of rich people’s mansions, reminding yourself that you are probably not stuck inside a place that’s quite so luxurious. The infamous Gal Gadot “Imagine” video worked in much the same way. Lots of regular people are in the “Stuck With U” clip, but tons of famous people make cameos, too. And there’s a lot of footage of Justin and Hailey Bieber, newly married, in what appears to be a palatial estate. I didn’t really want to see that then, and I don’t really want to see that now. Ariana Grande has the good sense to limit her footage to her bedroom and her chihuahua. Her boyfriend at the time, the real estate agent Dalton Gomez, makes an appearance at the end. It’s the moment that those two went public as a couple. Later on, they got married and then divorced.
“Stuck With U” happened to come out on the same week that the previously incarcerated New York rapper Tekashi 6ix9ine released “Gooba,” his comeback single after returning home from jail. 6ix9ine was getting a lot of attention back then, and he really wanted to get a #1 hit out of it. All week, “Gooba” did bigger streaming numbers than “Stuck With U.” But “Stuck With U” sold more than 100,000 downloads, and it moved more physical units, especially after Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande signed autographs on a bunch of copies. When the numbers came out at the end of the week, “Stuck With U” was at #1, and “Gooba” was at #3. (“Gooba” is a 4.) 6ix9ine was not happy about it.
In an Instagram video posted as chart totals came out, Tekashi 6ix9ine said, “Literally, they’re manipulating the charts now.” He said that the Billboard charts are a lie, that it’s possible to buy a #1 hit. He claimed that Bieber and Grande’s teams bought 30,000 downloads of “Stuck With U” on six credit cards, reporting all those sales at the last possible second. Grande and Bieber both put out statements about how they scored the #1 spot fair and square, and Braun claimed that they reported all the singles sales at the last minute because he and his company always report singles sales at the last second: “This is called strategy and always has been our policy.” Billboard itself confirmed that the “Stuck With U” numbers were on the up-and-up, saying that it wouldn’t count all those downloads on a few credit cards. And anyway, 6ix9ine got his own #1 hit soon afterwards; we’ll see him in this column before long.
I didn’t really find any good guys or bad guys in that dispute, though I guess I’d rather see the charity song reach #1 than the shithead rapper’s nyah-nyah track. Both of those songs are pretty bad, and neither of them stuck around. One week after release, both “Stuck With U” and “Gooba” fell out of the top 10 entirely. (“Gooba” had a slightly stronger hold; it fell to #11, “Stuck With U” to #13.) These guys were fighting over nothing. Both of those songs might as well not exist today. It’s one thing when a nothing song snags the #1 spot for a single week. It’s another when people get mad over which nothing song snags the #1 spot for a single week. The whole dispute somehow makes this moment even more crushingly oppressive. Like: Who cares about any of this bullshit? Is pop music even good? It is, but that’s the type of shit that can shake a man’s faith.
The “Stuck With U” single ultimately went double platinum and evaporated from the collective memory entirely. (“Gooba” went platinum just once.) A few months later, Justin Bieber kicked off his next album rollout by teaming with Chance The Rapper, his collaborator on DJ Khaled’s chart-topper “I’m The One,” on “Holy,” a single that peaked at #3. (It’s a 6.) Bieber also washed former Number Ones artist Shawn Mendes on Mendes’ #8 hit “Monster.” (It’s a 5.) In a world where ultra-famous pop stars can reach #1 seemingly at will, Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande continued to do just fine for themselves. Both of them will be back in this column soon.
GRADE: 2/10
BONUS BEATS: I genuinely have nothing for this song. Who the fuck is going to cover “Stuck With U,” or put the song in a movie? Nobody. That’s who. Instead, let’s go to a Justin Bieber/Ariana Grande moment further in the past. Here’s a 2015 performance where Bieber surprised the crowd at a Grande show in Los Angeles and the two of them sang Bieber’s single “As Long As You Love Me” together:
(“As Long As You Love Me” peaked at #6. It’s a 3.)
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. I got all you need here tonight. My guy Chris DeVille’s book Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History Of The Indie Rock Explosion is out tomorrow, so cop that, too.
