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.
Are you depressed yet? I’m depressed. I’m depressed and bored just thinking about this depressing, boring moment in the history of both popular music and everything else. You know who else is both depressed and bored? Drake. Drake sounds depressed and bored even when he’s calling out dance instructions. Drake sounded depressed and bored long before the COVID-19 pandemic turned a particularly stressed-out version of depressed boredom into the default setting for vast swaths of the global population. Maybe that means that Drake was especially well-suited to thrive during lockdown. Maybe he was uniquely qualified to channel everyone else’s bored depression. But this is pop music. You might be able to hear the artist’s depression, as long as they make that depression sound urgent. But you certainly aren’t supposed to hear the artist’s boredom. Nobody told Drake.
The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” was the first song to reach #1 during the pandemic, but that song doesn’t sound like the pandemic. In retrospect, that’s a great achievement. “Blinding Lights” has transcended its context and become a cultural staple, and only a great pop song could’ve transcended that moment. “Toosie Slide,” from the Weeknd’s old frienemy Drake, was the second song to reach #1 during the pandemic, and it’s not a great pop song. It’s the furthest thing from a great pop song. It’s a lazy, cynical commercial ploy, an uninspired song meant to soundtrack an uninspired dance. It did not transcend its moment, and I resent having to think about it today. You probably resent being presented with an article about “Toosie Slide,” too. It’s OK. We’ll get through it together. It’s fun to hate on Drake, so let’s all hate on Drake together.
Drake is such a fucking dickhead. I have never met the man, but I feel confident in saying that anyway. At his best, Drake is a savvy, entertaining dickhead. When I put on some of my favorite Drake songs — “0 To 100,” say, or “Back To Back” — I can access my own inner dickhead and have a good time. Drake’s dickhead swagger is a key part of his appeal. But there’s nothing worse than an uninspired dickhead. Drake has been stuck in uninspired-dickhead mode for, conservatively, most of the last five years, and that’s me being nice. “Toosie Slide” is a song that only an uninspired dickhead would make.
You can see the calculation at work. Calculation is the only thing you can see. It’s the only reason for this song to exist at all. Drake capped off a triumphantly dominant summer 2018 with the surprise success of “In My Feelings,” a song that wasn’t supposed to be a smash. “In My Feelings” mostly took off because it became the soundtrack for a viral dance craze at a moment when viral dance crazes were ascendant. Drake didn’t engineer that viral dance craze. It just happened. In the song’s video, Drake played around with the idea that the dance’s success was a nightmare for him, even as he gave an extended cameo to Shiggy, the Vine comedian who made up the dance craze.
The “In My Feelings” dance was like the “Blinding Lights” dance — an organic phenomenon that popped up when people heard a song that they liked and made up a dance to that song. “Toosie Slide” was something else. “Toosie Slide” was Drake attempting to impose a dance craze from above. Drake attempted to recreate his previous surprise dance-craze success, and he got a #1 hit out of it, but it’s not the type of thing that earns any nostalgic attachment. Nobody wants to Toosie Slide again like they did last summer.
Toosie is a real guy. Confoundingly, he is not the same real guy as Toosii, the North Carolina sing-rapper who scored a vaguely Drake-esque hit in 2023. (Toosii’s one hit “Favorite Song,” which is not my favorite song, peaked at #5. It’s a 4.) Toosie with an E, a young man from Atlanta, became a viral star and an influencer in high school, when he started posting his dance videos online. (He tells GQ that his childhood nickname comes from the Watusi tribe, which itself inspired an early-’60s dance craze.) As a teenager, Toosie went out on Drake and Future’s Summer Sixteen tour — partly as a dance performer, partly as a sort of movement consultant for future Number Ones artist Future. A few years later, Drake sent Toosie a DM. He had the basic bones of a song, just a beat and a hook, and he wanted to know if Toosie could come up with a dance to go along with it.
In an Instagram Live video in 2020, Drake said that he didn’t have the idea for a dance when he first came up with the “Toosie Slide” hook. Instead, his dance-instruction chorus — “left foot up, right foot slide” — was supposed to be a reference to Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk: “I didn’t know it was gonna be a dance song like that.” I call bullshit. Drake specifically enlisted Toosie to make it a dance song, and it’s genuinely funny that Drake, who brags about being able to dance like Michael Jackson on “Toosie Slide,” needed an influencer’s help to come up with the goofy little dance that he does in the “Toosie Slide” video. Actually, he needed help from four influencers.
When Toosie got the DM from Drake, he was hanging with fellow viral dance types Hiii Key, Ayo, and Teo. (All those guys also make music, and Ayo & Teo’s song “Rolex” reached #20 in 2017.) The four influencers worked together to come up with a dance: “Everybody was contributing little moves, and slowly but surely, we started piecing it together.” Again, I don’t see how it took four people to come up with this dance, but there you have it. Drake liked the dance so much that he used “Toosie Slide” as the name of both the dance and its associated song. Toosie says he was “in shock” when Drake told him that, but it’s also an example of Drake capitalizing on someone else’s momentum, something that he’s never been shy about doing.
But you know what? Fine. The whole teeming economy of young viral dance phenoms is not even a tiny bit interesting to me, but it’s nice that those guys are all out there having fun and making money. I guess it’s also nice that one of them got to have a Drake hit named after him, which presumably led to lots of financial opportunities. But dance songs are supposed to have energy. That’s the case even with bad dance songs, like Ayo & Teo’s “Rolex.” These are tracks that you might not want to hear outside of a viral-dance situation but that carry the enthusiasm of bodies moving. “Toosie Slide” does not have that. It doesn’t really have anything. It’s marketing, not music.
OZ made the beat. The Turkish-Swiss producer Ozan “OZ” Yildirim has already been in this column for his work on Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode” and “Highest In The Room.” He’s about as successful as a rap producer can be without ever developing anything like a signature sound or a brand name. Drake rapped on “Sicko Mode,” though OZ didn’t produce the part he was on. In 2019, OZ co-produced “Omertà,” a Drake track that reached #35 and never appeared on any of his albums. Early in 2020, OZ also co-produced Future’s Drake collaboration “Life Is Good,” which peaked at #2. (It’s a 5. A couple of other Future/Drake collabs will eventually appear in this column.) OZ was tapped into the glassy, downbeat trap sound that Drake was running into the ground.
On “Toosie Slide,” OZ is the only credited producer. That’s kind of a rare thing. Most of Drake’s big singles have a bunch of credited producers. Someone will make the skeleton of the beat, and then lots of other people will work it over, adding their own little tweaks. It’s fun to think what Drake might be able to do if he stopped messing around with that process, if he committed himself to locking in with a beatmaker who he knew and understood. But that’s not what he does on “Toosie Slide.” Instead, OZ’s “Toosie Slide” instrumental could easily be one of Drake’s beats by committee. It’s pure functional autopilot shit — hissing hi-hats, thumping kicks, wobbling keyboard melody. It’s not bad, but it’s not special either. Drake takes that beat, and he does a whole lot of not-special stuff with it.
“Toosie Slide” is not a song about dancing. Maybe that could be something. Instead, it’s Drake just talking about the same shit that he always talks about. He’s got so many opps he’s mistaking opps for other opps. Two thousand girls wanna tie the knot with him. He’s got a Nike crossbody with a piece in it. He can’t describe all the pressure he puts on himself. He could dance like Michael Jackson or give you thug passion, though I don’t get any thug or any passion from his delivery. Instead, Drake sleepily sing-raps the whole song, never showing the slightest flicker of energy or even interest. He expresses nothing. Drake’s melodies are always pleasant, but when he coasts on pure smoothness, he doesn’t get far. When Drake doesn’t give a shit about what he’s doing, you can tell, and he has almost never given less of a shit than he does on “Toosie Slide.”
There’s nothing to “Toosie Slide.” Drake can’t sell the song by himself because there’s nothing to sell. It drifts past as pure vapor, a vague and sticky irritation that leaves very little residue, like sugar-water mist. I can’t imagine Drake thought he’d come up with another world-beater when he made “Toosie Slide,” but he needed to feed the content machine, or at least he felt like he did. That’s where the dance comes in. The “Toosie Slide” dance, the invention of those four influencers, is the type of thing that requires absolutely zero dancing ability. It’s a foot up, a slide, a foot up, a slide, maybe a couple of beats where you kind of wave your hands to the side while crouching down slightly. Drake says he’s got a dance but it’s really on some street shit, and then he does a couple of clumsy hokey-pokey-ass moves. He sounds like the world’s least enthusiastic square-dance instructor.
The song is just an excuse for the dance, and the dance is just an excuse for the video. The video is fucking depressing. That’s where the COVID thing comes in. Drake released “Toosie Slide” in April 2020, a few weeks after the world shut down. Five days before release, he got Toosie and his friends to post a snippet of the track, with them doing the dance. For all I know, the song wasn’t even done yet. Those snippets and dance videos did what they were supposed to do, and they foreshadowed the release of the video where a masked-up Drake does the Toosie Slide in his lavishly appointed Toronto mansion, known as the Embassy. (That same edifice later appeared on the cover art of a single that we’ll discuss in a future column.) Again, you can see the calculation at work. “Toosie Slide” is one more depressing entry into the canon of pandemic art — Drake’s version of a Zoom SNL sketch or an Instagram video of someone playing an acoustic cover song in their living room. But Drake is Drake, so his house doesn’t look like a house. It looks like a mall for rich people, or a hotel lobby. It looks like a sad place to live. Inside its walls, he comes off like a hostage offering proof of life.
When the “Toosie Slide” video came out, it felt a bit like the entire enterprise, song and dance, was an elaborate excuse for Drake to show off all his stuff — the awards in cases, the Andy Warhol painting of Chairman Mao, the grand piano, the bomber jacket that apparently cost tens of thousands of dollars. The entire pandemic felt like Drake’s opportunity to give his own little tragic MTV Cribs episode, which made the whole thing so much more obnoxious. Drake’s ostentatious displays were already part of his persona. The “Toosie Slide” video isn’t exactly framed as a statement about how we’re all in this together, so it wasn’t quite as abjectly humiliating as the Gal Gadot “Imagine” video, perhaps the most infamous cultural artifact of that moment. Instead, it’s just dimly aggravating in the way that so many Drake-related things are dimly aggravating.
In his giant gleaming mansion, Drake wears a mask and gloves. We never see him without the mask, so it could always be a Mandalorian situation where he gets some stuntman to do all the actual physical movements, though I don’t know why he would. There are no stunts in the video. It’s just Drake wandering around his estate, hitting his lazy and desultory dance steps in the most pro forma manner. The best TikTok dance videos are explosions of movement and expression, as if the people onscreen can’t stand to keep this dance inside themselves. “Toosie Slide” is the opposite of that. It’s Drake quarter-heartedly shuffling his way through some bullshit that he knows is bullshit while claiming that he can dance like Michael Jackson. At the end of it, he goes outside, and you can barely see him, since he’s in all black at night. But then he hits a button on his phone, and an expensive fireworks display shoots off — just one rich guy, all alone, attempting to display a glittering monument to his own magnificence.
The first time I saw the “Toosie Slide” video, I knew it was going to be huge, and I was pissed off about it. Drake was already a dominant figure, and this was him at his most mercenary, throwing out some half-finished bullshit that showed nothing but contempt for its intended audience. The song was instantly huge, at least enough to temporarily interrupt the #1 reign of “Blinding Lights.” But “Toosie Slide” faded quickly. It wasn’t quite the same as the mirage-style #1 hits that we’ll unfortunately cover so many times in the weeks ahead. “Toosie Slide” stuck around in the top 10 for 10 full weeks. But it hasn’t lingered since then. It’s just a depressing relic that fully embodied its bored, anhedonic moment. You can have a hit with a song like “Toosie Slide,” but most people don’t form an emotional attachment to songs like that. I think that’s part of the reason that Kendrick Lamar was able to mop Drake up a few years later. Drake had the hits, so he thought he was operating from a position of strength, but Kendrick had emotional attachment. Anyway, that’s a story for another column.
“Toosie Slide” turned out out to be the lead single of Dark Lane Demo Tapes, one of those Drake albums that he takes pains to market as something other than a Drake album. Officially, I guess Dark Lane Demo Tapes is a mixtape. Drake claimed that it was a collection of songs that had already leaked, put out there as a treat to all the fans that were really fiending for more downbeat, energy-free Drake raps. On that tape, Drake half-heartedly chases a few trends — SoundCloud rap, UK drill, lo-fi R&B. The album came out in May, and other than “Toosie Slide,” only one track reached the top 10: “Pain 1993,” a collaboration with the insurgent Atlanta firestarter Playboi Carti that smothers Carti’s anarchic weirdo verve in Drake’s usual moody soup. (“Pain 1993” peaked at #7. It’s a 5. Playboi Carti will eventually appear in this column.)
Dark Lane Demo Tapes was supposed to be the appetizer to Certified Lover Boy, the album that Drake planned to release later in the year. He followed the tape with “Only You Freestyle,” a collaboration with the UK rapper Headie One where Drake goes heavy on weird accents. That one didn’t chart in the US, but it wasn’t for us. It was for the UK, and it went top-10 over there. Drake’s next big blockbuster attempt was “Laugh Now Cry Later” in August. That song was Drake in conqueror mode. It has a guest verse from currently-incarcerated Chicago star Lil Durk and a fancy video shot at Nike headquarters, with cameos from people like Marshawn Lynch and Kevin Durant. “Laugh Now Cry Later” was another smash, but it didn’t go all the way, peaking at #2. (It’s a 6. Lil Durk’s highest-charting lead-artist single is the 2023 J. Cole collab “All My Life,” which also peaked at #2. That song has aged in sad and weird ways, but it’s still a 7.)
As big as “Laugh Now Cry Later” was, it never became the monster that Drake must have needed it to be. Certified Lover Boy kept getting pushed back, and Drake kept putting out stray tracks that were supposed to lead up to the album release. One of those tracks will appear in this column pretty soon. Much like that song, “Toosie Slide” is a hit that has left virtually no cultural trace. “Toosie Slide” was a lockdown throwaway, and it deserves to be remembered that way if it’s remembered at all.
At the first wedding I attended after lockdown, my first real chance to experience the kind of communal catharsis that pop music is built to facilitate, “Blinding Lights” went off. “Toosie Slide” did not. The DJ did not play “Toosie Slide.” Even though “Toosie Slide” is ostensibly built for dancing, it would’ve been DJ malpractice to play “Toosie Slide.” Nobody had to worry about that happening. By the time people were gathering in groups again, “Toosie Slide” was already forgotten.
GRADE: 2/10
BONUS BEATS: Here’s Sir Anthony Hopkins doing the Toosie Slide:
@anthonyhopkins #Drake I’m late to the party… but better late than never. @oficialstallone @arnoldschnitzel #toosieslidechallenge original sound – Anthony Hopkins
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. It go right foot up, left foot buy. What? If Drake doesn’t have to try, then I don’t have to try.
