Hoppin' off a plane to a Matchbox

Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts

10/01/25 : WHAM - Lil Baby

Well this confused me - I thought it was a Wham! album, so assumed it was a best-of and so I was all ready to ignore it. But "fortunately" a quick Goggle set me straight - I say "fortunately" because I don't have a great track record with artists whose name start with "Lil" with the only one I like being Lily Allen (there always has to be an exception). However, I have yet to visit a Lil Baby album so maybe he'll join Ms Allen on the "acceptable Lils" list (but I'm not expecting such a thing to come to pass).

Well - let me start by saying I definitely don't love it. It's the vocoder rap kinda thing I'm not a fan of and there are a load of n words and effing them bees. However, I do have to admit that there are signs of intelligence in the lyrics, which you can mostly make out and the general flow of the rap actually works pretty well for me. So there's no danger of me ever listening to it again, but I've suffered far worse from other Lils (and many other people).

We're at #12 in the charts this week with a new entry and the only other new entry is one I've already heard from Doechii (#91) - I'm expecting a lot more new entries next week as the year gets going properly. Giving us more evidence that things are a bit weird this week, we only have to look at #1 which is Elton John's best-of, on its 374th week on the chart (going back to '17) but its first week at the top. The rest of the top five is Sabrina, SZA (109 weeks on the chart, but peaked at #2), Ed Sheeran's live offering and The Weeknd (205 weeks, also peaking at #2) and the only other album in the top ten that hasn't made it to the top is Fleetwood Mac's best-of (#10 - 321 weeks, peaking at #5). 

Last week I said that Benson would be at #45 and I was a bit off because he's at #31 - I struggle to imagine Lil Baby holding too much attention, so let's guess at #65 for him. One more thing to discuss about the chart this week is that when I thought I was going to have to skip over this, the next album for consideration was Taylor Swift (#36) and if I've skipped over her again, we've have been all the way down to #53 to listen to Bruno Mars - at some point Xmas or New Year is going to have us waaaay down the chart.

Wikipedia has quite a lot on the album, but there's remarkably little content. It tells us that WHAM stands for Who Hard As Me (which is not something I feel the need to investigate further) and lists all the guest artists, but the only ones I recognise are Travis Scott and 21 Savage. The critics were nice enough about it - well I think they were because they said "his trap-leaning sonic thirst has rarely been so unremittingly effective". Except for NME who said it was "nothing to write home about". Commercially, it's done well enough globally, but somewhat surprisingly done best here.

"Customers also listened to" Kodak Black, Bossman Dlow, Youngboy Never Broke Again and NLE Choppa - ah yes, that lot. I'm certainly not going to describe myself as a Lil Baby convert, but this was a lot better than I was expecting.

03/01/25 - Fine, wiithout being great
17/01/25 - Not bad at all