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.
Miles Morales’ grand screen entrance is a perfect little piece of cinema. When the great comics writer Brian Michael Bendis introduced Morales in 2011, the character represented a new twist on the Spider-Man archetype. Morales, like Peter Parker before him, gains his spider-powers as an awkward, lovable teenage kid. But Morales lives in a world where Peter Parker has already lived and died heroically, so he spends his whole superhero life in the shadow of his predecessor, trying to live up to a self-sacrificing legacy. Morales is a lot like Parker, but the two characters have important differences, too. Bendis made Morales half Black and half Puerto Rican, and that background informs everything about him, even when race isn’t an overt theme. Bendis partially based Morales on former Number Ones artist Childish Gambino. Donald Glover, the Childish Gambino guy, voiced Morales’ character on the first few episodes of Ultimate Spider-Man, a cartoon series that Disney started airing in 2017. These days, Miles Morales and Peter Parker sit right next to each other in the pop-cultural firmament, and that has a lot to do with the way the Morales character arrives onscreen in the extremely fun 2018 film Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse.
There had never been a movie quite like Into The Spider-Verse before. Directors Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman combine CGI and hand-drawn animation into a dizzy collage, creating an overwhelming sensory experience and evoking an unstable world. There’s always tons to look at onscreen; even the opening studio logos threaten to dissolve into hyperactive digital static. In the first few moments, Peter Parker’s Spider-Man, this time voiced by Chris Pine, introduces himself through the hyperactive riffing that people would’ve already known from past Spider-movies — the nerdy and self-referential humor that the character uses to mask his own terror and inadequacy. But once Parker reminds us that we know who he is, the camera cuts to a teenage kid in his Brooklyn bedroom, idly sketching possible graffiti tags while singing along to words that he can’t quite understand. The first time you see him, you feel like you know this kid, and you probably like him.
You need to like Miles Morales. The movie’s buy-in requires it. Into The Spider-Verse is the first big-budget superhero movie to actively engage with the idea of the multiverse — the idea of infinite realities in simultaneous motion, with porous borders and slight or major variations. That’s some heady quantum-physics shit, and it has the potential to turn any story into a blur where nothing matters and consequences don’t exist. Maybe you die in one reality but live a long, healthy life in another. If that’s the case, did you really die? Does it matter if you die? Comic books introduced multiversal storytelling decades ago, largely as a way of managing their unsustainably complicated backstories. But the multiverse thing makes stories more muddled, not less. Since Into The Spider-Verse, multiversal storytelling has invaded superhero movies, and it’s been disastrous. Mostly, it’s been a cheap way to bring back actors who played past incarnations of beloved characters, but you can only press that button so many times before it loses its juice. For a story like that to work, you need a character who can ground the constantly refracting story and make sure its emotions land. That’s Miles Morales.
In Into The Spider-Verse, Morales gains his spider-powers in time to see his world’s Peter Parker die, and he tries to run around and save people while his reality fritzes and breaks down. Soon, a bunch of other Spider-Men from other realities come into the picture, and that offers opportunities for silly hijinks that identify themselves as silly hijinks. But at the center of it all, there’s this Brooklyn kid, joking and panicking and getting himself into nightmarishly embarrassing social situations. He’s always trying to do the right thing, but he can’t always tell what that is. We watch as this kid learns about power, responsibility, cooperation, and his own worth — the stuff that was always supposed to be right at the heart of the Spider-Man story, from the very beginning. When we first meet this kid, he’s attempting to sing a song that millions of other kids would later attempt to sing. Swae Lee and Post Malone’s “Sunflower” might’ve started out as a fictional earworm, but it turned into the real thing as the world watched Miles Morales try to sing along.
If you’ve been reading this column, you’ve already encountered Swae Lee and Post Malone. Swae Lee, along with his older brother Slim Jxmmi, is one half of Rae Sremmurd, whose 2016 Gucci Mane collab “Black Beatles” proved to be such an important indicator of shifting pop-music winds that it became a chapter in my book. Post Malone has been in the column twice — for “Rockstar,” with 21 Savage, and for “Psycho,” with Ty Dolla $ign. Late in 2018, Post Malone was two albums into a huge career, and he’d already become a full-on pop star, a guy who consistently sat right behind Drake on the all-important streaming charts.
Before “Sunflower,” Swae Lee and Post Molone were plenty familiar with one another. Both of them were tatted-up, party-happy pop music chameleons who could rap but whose greatest skills were rooted in hazy, lonely melody. That made both of them perfect for a moment when trap drum programming and moodily melodic Drake-style vocals were becoming pan-genre unifiers for just about every strain of popular music. Swae and Post had already worked together once — on “Spoil My Night,” an album track from Post’s 2018 blockbuster Beerbongs & Bentleys. “Spoil My Night” is sad and playful in equal measure. Post might be the technical lead artist, but Swae’s easy-drifting tenor really dominates. Without being released as a single, “Spoil My Night” reached #15. The team of Swae and Post had bigger things ahead of them.
There aren’t too many stories about the creation of “Sunflower,” which isn’t that surprising. These days, pop stars try to combat leaks by staying secretive about their in-the-works collaborations, so the people involved probably have to sign a lot of NDAs. In 2019, a solo Swae Lee demo of “Sunflower” found its way onto the internet, which suggests that the track probably started out as a Swae solo joint. But Swae himself has never confirmed that, so we just don’t know. In October 2018, before “Sunflower” came out, Post Malone went on The Tonight Show and played a few seconds of “Sunflower,” introducing it as a song that he and Swae wrote together. Maybe Swae started it on his own and then brought it to Post, or maybe they came up with the track in the studio together and just had to do some refining before it was done. They haven’t said.
Ultimately, “Sunflower” has six credited writers — not that many, by late-’10s chart-pop standards. Post Malone and Swae Lee are among those writers. The team also includes Carl Rosen, a mysterious figure who’s also credited on Post’s first two chart-toppers, and Billy Walsh, a Boston native who got his start working with Alicia Keys, someone who’s been in this column a few times, in the mid-’10s. Walsh co-wrote “I Fall Apart,” the big viral ballad from Post’s 2016 debut Stoney, and he’s been one of Post’s regular collaborators since then. (“I Fall Apart” peaked at #16.) The other two writers on “Sunflower” are the producers. One is Carter Lang, a classically trained pianist and Chance The Rapper associate from Chicago who’s best-known for working with future Number Ones artist SZA. The other is Louis Bell, someone whose name keeps coming up in this column.
When “Sunflower” reached #1 in January 2019, it interrupted the two-week reign of Halsey’s “Without Me,” another Louis Bell production. Bell’s style — aqueous keyboards, ponderous 808 programming, melodic hooks that make sense coming from rappers — was basically the sound of pop music in the early streaming era. Lots of that moment’s big hits sounded a whole lot like each other, regardless of the race or gender or background or genre identification of the performer. That’s because those songs were often produced by Louis Bell, or by people who were trying to sound like Louis Bell. Bell came to prominence as Post Malone’s main collaborator, and he still occupies that position today. He’s also made a ton of hits with other artists. His sound tends to fade pleasantly into the background. It’s never bad, but it’s rarely exciting, either. For me, there’s a definite ceiling and a definite floor on Louis Bell tracks, and they aren’t all that far from each other. “Sunflower” is closer to the ceiling than the floor.
On “Sunflower,” Swae Lee and Post Malone both sing-rap about ill-defined romantic relationships, or maybe about the same ill-defined romantic relationship. In his opening verse, Swae describes an attractive girl who can’t get her shit together. He might like her because he can’t get his shit together, either: “Callin’ it quits now, baby, I’m a wreck/ Crash at my place, baby, you’re a wreck.” She screams in his face and poisons the vibe at a party, but he’s still drawn to her, so he shrugs and goes along with it: “She wanna ride me like a cruise, and I ain’t gonna lose.” When Post Malone comes in, he groans that he’s trying to leave her but that she doesn’t make it easy. He leaves her anyway, and he acts like the outcome was preordained: “I know you’re scared of the unknown/ You don’t wanna be alone/ I know I always come and go, but it’s out of my control.”
Swae and Post sing that this girl is the sunflower, and it’s not totally clear whether they mean that she’s pretty or that she’s depleting the soil around her. The track doesn’t have any resolution; it’s not specific enough to offer anything like that. Instead, “Sunflower” is all mushy vagueness. Swae and Post both swallow their syllables enough that you can’t always tell what they’re singing; that’s why Miles Morales has to mumble to sing along. They both drawl hard enough that they almost make the words “dust” and “you” rhyme. The music mirrors the narrators’ ambivalence, never bringing the relationship’s nature into focus or even committing to any particular musical style. Instead, the track sounds comfortable in its indecisiveness, blooping along in a warm and dreamy haze. That’s ultimately why “Sunflower” works. It never does anything to grab your attention, but it sounds nice.
There’s a moment in Into The Spider-Verse where Miles Morales can’t use his newfound powers properly unless he can convince his brain to relax, and he does that by soothingly mumble-singing a few bars of “Sunflower” to himself. That checks out. “Sunflower” exists in a gluey trance. The programmed drums don’t fall into the usual trap pattern. They’re carefully distorted just enough that they’ve got a little squelch on them, and they hesitate slightly, like a breakbeat that a rap producer from a previous generation might’ve found on some old jazz record. Keyboards twinkle and hum, and generous dollops of sub-bass add to the amniotic feeling. An acoustic guitar floats lazily by, but this isn’t the kind of song that calls out for the stripped-down voice-and-guitar presentation. Instead, the gooey atmosphere is part of the appeal, and that atmosphere comes from the way all the various bits of ear-candy melt into one another, like Skittles left on a hot dashboard.
That ear-candy is all there to support Swae Lee and Post Malone, whose voices complement each other nicely. Swae Lee has a pure choirboy tenor. He falls naturally into rap cadences on his “Sunflower” verses, but he never really sounds like he’s rapping. His parts sound most alive when he’s not even bothering with words, when he floats up into falsetto territory to let out a creamy “ooooh.” When Post Malone arrives halfway through the song, he’s got that same sweetness, but he’s way gruffer and throatier than Swae. Compared to Swae, Post already sounds a bit like the country guy he would later become. Both Swae and Post bring tons of tiny melodies to their verses, adjusting them subtly as the track unfolds. They both add little multi-tracked harmonies, becoming part of the song’s ear-candy. “Sunflower” is short, just two and a half minutes, and it doesn’t even have a bridge. But it never feels underwritten, mostly because there’s so much variation in the way Swae and especially Post deliver their parts. I really like the way that Post attacks the “scared of the unknown” bit, suddenly sounding much more heartbroken than he was a moment earlier.
But if “Sunflower” isn’t underwritten, it’s definitely slight. It’s a pretty little quasi-rap lullaby that doesn’t mean much or leave much impression. If you were in a position where you had to relax in a high-stress environment, you could maybe get there by singing “Sunflower” to yourself, just like Miles Morales. But there’s no visceral force to the track, no immediacy. Instead, it works as the kind of utilitarian chill music that populates so many Spotify playlists. You could hear “Sunflower” a hundred times without necessarily taking much notice of the track, and that’s just not the kind of pop music that I love. Even at its absolute best, I can’t get too passionate about those zoned-out background beats, which means that “Sunflower” tops out at “pretty good” for me. I probably enjoy the song more when it comes up in Into The Spider-Verse than when it comes up in my actual life.
“Sunflower” was ultimately the only hit on the Into The Spider-Verse soundtrack, which was compiled as a set of tracks that a kid like Miles Morales might want to hear. It’s mostly pop-leaning rap and rap-leaning pop, and it’s got stuff by people like Lil Wayne, Jaden Smith, and the late Juice WRLD, who died almost exactly one year after the movie came out. Future Number Ones artist Nicki Minaj is on there. So is Shaboozey, another artist who will appear in this column but who hadn’t landed on a signature sound at that point. Most of the songs on the soundtrack aren’t actually in the film. The only other single was “What’s Up Danger,” by relative unknowns Blackway and Black Caviar. That one never touched the Hot 100, even though my nephew couldn’t get through a 15-minute car ride without hearing it at least twice in summer 2019.
Into The Spider-Verse was a big hit, earning nearly $400 million globally against a $90 million budget. At the domestic box office, it was the year’s 15th-biggest hit — just behind Ralph Breaks The Internet on the year-end list, just ahead of the first Quiet Place. This was the moment of peak-superhero dominance, when anything Marvel meant guaranteed money, and Into The Spider-Verse represented a fresh and energetic take on that kind of storytelling. It won the Oscar for Best Animated Film, breaking Pixar’s stranglehold over that category. I think “Sunflower” should’ve gotten a look in Best Original Song, since it plays an effective role within the narrative, but that didn’t happen. (The song that did win that 2019 Oscar will appear in this column pretty soon.) The sequel Across The Spider-Verse came out in 2023 and made even more money; my son was so mad when it ended on a cliffhanger. I guess the cliffhanger won’t be resolved until 2027, since that’s when the third Spider-Verse picture is now slated to arrive.
The Spider-Verse phenomenon has something to do with the success of “Sunflower,” but the song quickly became big enough to take on a life of its own. The Into The Spider-Verse soundtrack debuted at #5 on the album chart, and it rose to #2 once “Sunflower” caught fire. It ultimately went triple platinum, mostly on the strength of that one song. “Sunflower” only had one week at #1, but it remained in the top 10 for 33 weeks, an astonishingly long run. The video has 2.6 billion views, even though it’s just a Spider-Verse montage that doesn’t feature Swae Lee or Post Malone, either in animated or live-action form. Last year, “Sunflower” became the first single ever to go double diamond. That seems absurd, but there it is. Just last night, Post Malone headlined the final day of Coachella, and he ended his set with a countrified take on “Sunflower.”
Post Malone – Sunflower (Live from Coachella 2025)pic.twitter.com/vxDZgs9u4g
— task (@ImRealTask) April 14, 2025
For whatever reason, “Sunflower” didn’t do much for Swae Lee’s solo career, even though it’s arguably more his song than Post Malone’s. Instead, Swae had a big run as the guest who worked as the engine on other artists’ songs. In 2017, Swae appeared on French Montana’s #3 hit “Unforgettable.” All that song’s most memorable parts belong to Swae, but it’s technically French’s song. (It’s a 5.) “Sunflower” came out after Rae Sremmurd’s too-ambitious 2018 triple album SR3MM, which had one solo album from Swae, one from Slim Jxmmi, and one from both brothers together. It stiffed, and none of the solo Swae songs did especially well. (His single “Guatemala” peaked at #84.) Swae’s biggest hit since “Sunflower” came when he guested alongside Khalid on pop-country singer Kane Brown’s 2020 song “Be Like That,” which sounds like trap Jimmy Buffett and peaked at #19. Rae Sremmurd are kind of a legacy party act now. They still get booked on festivals, but they don’t really make hits anymore, though that could change at any time.
Post Malone was steadily cranking out hits when “Sunflower” landed. While the single was still rising up the Hot 100, he dropped “Wow,” a fun rap novelty that peaked at #2, thanks in part to a viral video where a middle-aged guy did a choreographed dance to it. A few months later, Post teamed up with Young Thug, someone who’s been in this column once and who will be back again, for the emo-adjacent ballad “Goodbyes,” and that song reached #3. (“Wow” is an 8, and “Goodbyes” is a 7.)
“Goodbyes” came out as Post Malone was gearing up to release his third album Hollywood’s Bleeding. “Sunflower,” still bouncing around the chart’s upper reaches when the LP came out, appeared on the tracklist. Predictably enough, Hollywood’s Bleeding was huge. We’ll see Post Malone in this column again before long.
GRADE: 7/10
BONUS BEATS: Vampire Weekend put out their own single called “Sunflower,” a collaboration with future Number Ones artist Steve Lacy, in early 2019. They made light of the coincidence by covering the Swae Lee/Post Malone “Sunflower” during a 2019 visit to the BBC Live Lounge and working in the riff from their own “Sunflower.” Here’s Vampire Weekend’s expansively pretty take on the song:
(Still no Hot 100 hits for Vampire Weekend! Crazy!)
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Don’t get left in the dust; buy it here.
