Rock
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Maggie Rogers hits No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult Alternative Airplay chart for the fourth time as “Don’t Forget Me” rises to the top of the April 27-dated list. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news The song follows reigns for “Light On,” which led for three weeks in […]
Green Day’s “Dilemma” lifts to No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay chart dated April 27, marking the trio’s ninth leader and second in a row.
The Billie Joe Armstrong-led trio first led Mainstream Rock Airplay with “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” in 2005 and had last topped the list with “The American Dream Is Killing Me” for eight weeks beginning last November.
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“Dilemma” makes it three straight albums for Green Day topping Mainstream Rock Airplay with each set’s first two singles. “Bang Bang” and “Still Breathing” from 2016’s Revolution Radio started the current streak, followed by “Father of All…” and “Oh Yeah!” from 2020’s Father of All…, while “The American Dream Is Killing Me” and “Dilemma” are via Saviors, released in February.
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Concurrently, “Dilemma” dominates the all-rock-format, audience-based Rock & Alternative Airplay chart for a fourth week, racking up 7.9 million audience impressions April 12-18, up 4%, according to Luminate.
The song also ranks at its No. 2 high for a second week on Alternative Airplay; Green Day has so far notched 12 No. 1s on the chart.
Saviors, Green Day’s 14th studio album, debuted at No. 1 on the Top Rock & Alternative Albums chart dated Feb. 3 and has earned 106,000 equivalent album units to date.
“It definitely deals with mental health and addiction,” Armstrong told People about “Dilemma” earlier this year. “When I say, ‘I was sober, now I’m drunk again,’ that could be looked at two different ways. It could be someone going, ‘F-k, yeah. I was sober, now I’m drunk again,’ at a party, or it could be someone that’s fallen. That’s what it means to me, anyway.”
All Billboard charts dated April 27 will update on Billboard.com on Tuesday, April 23.
For part-time potheads, 4/20 is a holiday that comes but once a year. But for the steadfast stoner, you can celebrate 4:20 every day (twice a day is possible, but inadvisable).
Regardless of how deep your love for the leaf runs, everyone knows that marijuana and music are peas in a pod. We’ve previously rounded up 25 toking tunes, an editorial playlist that encompasses Cypress Hill, Afroman, Miley Cyrus, Bob Dylan, Peter Tosh, Wiz Khalifa and, of course, Snoop Dogg.
This list ain’t that. Looking at biggest Billboard Hot 100 hits of all time, we decided to round up the highest hits in the chart’s history. For purposes of this list, we’re casting a bloodshot eye toward songs with a title that includes “smoke,” “puff,” “high,” “stoned,” “burn,” “drug,” “toke,” “weed” or some variation. If the song’s title doesn’t tip to something along those lines, it’s out. (That means songs such as Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & #35” aren’t eligible; we’re sure he’ll get over it.)
We are also discounting songs where weed-adjacent words are in the song title but are clearly not referring to drugs or intoxication. For example: We include Sean Paul’s “We Be Burnin’” but not Usher’s “Burn.” “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” isn’t here because The Platters weren’t singing about hotboxing the dance floor, but “Smokin’ in the Boys Room” is eligible. Sure, most folks assume cigarettes are what Brownville Station and/or the Crüe were puffing at school, but we don’t know for sure, so we’re giving that one the benefit of the dank doubt.
Anyone who’s a fan of mind-altering substances should know that truth is subjective, man, and this list is no exception. While the selections – and the order in which they appear – are culled from the biggest hits in Hot 100 history (more on that below), editorial decisions were made on what to include on this list. Steve Winwood’s “Higher Love” isn’t here because it’s about a love that is above (i.e., better than) others; “I Want to Take You Higher” is eligible, however, because you can (and probably should) interpret “higher” as substance adjacent.
Also included: The many songs that refer to love as a drug, as well as songs that use “stoned” for a general sense of intoxication. If it’s about a mind-altering state brought about by romance, booze or whatever, it’s in.
Don’t like the criteria? Sounds like you need to chill out, catch a cool buzz and hit play on one (or all) of these songs and just follow the vibe where it takes you. Responsibly, of course.
This ranking is based on actual performance on the weekly Billboard Hot 100 chart. Songs are ranked based on an inverse point system, with weeks at No. 1 earning the greatest value and weeks at No. 100 earning the least. To ensure equitable representation of the biggest hits from each era, certain time frames were weighted to account for the difference between turnover rates from those years.
Afroman, “Because I Got High” (2000)
Travis Barker celebrated wife Kourtney Kardashian Barker’s 45th birthday on Thursday (April 18) by sharing some sweet (and one pretty salty) pics of his beloved, as well as one of the first glimpses of the couple’s adorable 5-month-old son, Rocky Thirteen Barker. Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news […]
On Thursday night (April 18), for the first time, a band not named U2 performed at the Las Vegas Sphere. Phish shares some traits with the Irish group – both are quartets with decades-long histories of concert production experimentation who remain major live draws – but the revered Vermont jam band still had something to […]
Following the experimental music journey that was 2020’s Gigaton, Pearl Jam returns to familiar, heavy turf on Dark Matter, the legendary Seattle rock band’s 12th studio album.
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Dropping at the stroke of midnight, Dark Matter (via Monkeywrench Records/Republic Records) spans 11 (mostly) burly numbers, including the previously-released midtempo cut “Wreckage” and the title track, which powered to No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock Airplay and Rock & Alternative Airplay Charts.
Grammy Award-winning producer Andrew Watt is back behind the desk on Dark Matter, built on foundations of blazing guitars and busy drumming, and which ought to be played “loud, like, really loud,” frontman Eddie Vedder told Alt 98.7.
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Pearl Jam was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, recognition of a mighty, three-decade-plus career that has yielded 12 top 10s on the Billboard 200 chart, including five leaders, and over 85 million albums shifted worldwide, according to reps.
The members of Pearl Jam—Vedder, Jeff Ament (bass), Stone Gossard (rhythm guitar), Mike McCready (lead guitar), and Matt Cameron (drums)—workshopped the album last year at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La Studios in Malibu. With Watt at the desk, the creative process found turbo-packs, and the record came together in three weeks.
Vedder, McCready, and Ament premiered the LP at a listening party in West Hollywood earlier this year, attended by a few hundred family, friends, industry professionals and media, the Associated Press reported at the time.
“You all get together as a group as we’ve been doing for 30-plus years and you say, ‘Let’s try it again,’” Vedder reportedly told guests from the stage as he introduced the record. “No hyperbole, I think this is our best work.”In support of the new LP, Vedder and CO. will embark on a world tour. Those Dark Matter World Tour 2024 dates will see the band visit nine countries and 25 cities, kicking off at May 4 at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, BC.
Stream Dark Matter in full below.
The music world lost a legend on Thursday morning (April 18) when Allman Brothers Band co-founder and singer-guitarist Dickey Betts died at 80 years old, following a battle with cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. “It is with profound sadness and heavy hearts that the Betts family announce the peaceful passing of Forrest Richard ‘Dickey’ Betts […]
Maybe more than any of their peers, The Allman Brothers Band were a group defined by eras, personalities and tragedies. Between the outfit’s 1969 self-titled debut and their last official studio album, 2003’s Hittin’ the Note, they released 12 studio albums and six officially released live albums, including the career-defining live set At Fillmore East […]
Michael Marcagi came to an agreement of sorts with his manager in late 2023. The folk-pop singer-songwriter had just finished a recording session in Woodstock, N.Y., and emerged with three songs he felt captured the signature sound he’d been crafting, inspired by Bruce Springsteen as well as artists like Jim Croce and John Prine.
Marcagi was eager to release one song as a single before the end of the year, while his manager, Alex Brahl, was hoping he would ramp up his presence on TikTok — and advocated for a regular quota of posts to increase exposure. “Five times a week, that was our ultimate deal,” recalls Brahl. “We were coming from zero, more or less.”
The two studied how other artists used the platform to their advantage, and within weeks, Marcagi released his solo debut single, the simmering, acoustic guitar-led “The Other Side,” and had developed a following on the platform. By January, that fandom helped power his breakout hit and follow-up single, the jangly and more uptempo “Scared To Start.”
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The following month, “Scared To Start” scored the artist his first Billboard Hot 100 entry, reaching a new No. 54 high on this week’s chart. The song — which appears on Marcagi’s debut EP American Romance — also entered the top 10 on Hot Alternative Songs and Hot Rock Songs charts and marked Marcagi’s return to Adult Alternative Airplay, which he previously graced in 2020 and 2021 with his former folk-rock band The Heavy Hours.
“I knew in the back of my head that I wanted to eventually write singer-songwriter music that was narrative-driven and just talk about what I felt, what I wanted to sing about,” says Marcagi, who mentions that The Heavy Hours amicably parted ways a few years ago. However, the role of frontman primed him for his solo career — particularly amid his viral takeoff. “I needed those couple years of playing shows and getting notches in my belt and learning the ropes,” he continues. “The music industry is weird. It’s a hard, kind of a lonely, intimidating place to be sometimes. I needed the time to get used to it.”
Kate Sweeney
Growing up in Cincinnati, Marcagi was drawn to the production of “simple folk songs and acoustic guitars,” while his midwestern upbringing inspired his lyrics. “I write a lot of songs from that feeling of being from a flyover state,” he says. (His brother and day-to-day manager, Andrew Marcagi, adds that their “blue collar roots, without a doubt, have shaped Michael’s lyrics and songwriting style.”)
Marcagi is well aware that folk-pop is enjoying a mainstream resurgence, propelled in part by new labelmate Zach Bryan as well as Noah Kahan, the latter of whom Marcagi is a major fan. “I think it’s so awesome he’s playing for stadiums of people that are screaming about Vermont,” he laughs. “This style of music is working right now and I’m super grateful that people connected with [‘Scared To Start’]. It has been this wild little rocket ship the past couple months.”
Brahl can trace the song’s takeoff all back to one particular TikTok clip in which Marcagi is playing guitar in a field of dead grass over the “Scared To Start” lyric “let’s lay in the dead grass, stare at the stars.” As Brahl recalls, after uploading the teaser on December 19, the team went out to lunch — and when they came back, the clip had 10,000 views. “I remember talking to Michael and being like, ‘What if we wake up tomorrow and it has 50,000?’,” he says. “It had 100,000, and it was this completely organic thing that just kept going and going.”
Kate Sweeney
In the days before the holiday break, Brahl sent the clip around to a handful of labels, and by Christmas Eve, Marcagi and his team selected Warner Records as his label home. He signed his deal the first week of January, and the following week, “Scared To Start” was released as his next single from American Romance, which arrived in early February. “One of the reasons we were so excited about Warner is that over the holidays we were getting on the phone with the digital team and planning. We were moving very, very quickly,” says Brahl. “We had momentum and I’ve seen it too many times where people don’t take advantage of that. We wanted to.”
“We were aggressive out of the gate in attacking the areas we knew would adopt the song with open arms,” says Will Morrow, Warner’s vp of viral marketing and digital development. Plus, as senior vp of digital marketing, Dalia Ganz, adds, the digital teams at Warner were quick to “leverage our deep relationship with TikTok to get increased visibility for the song on the platform,” noting that they are now focused on driving virality for “Scared To Start” across other shortform platforms like Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
With the hit’s success, Warner has another win and developing star on its roster, joining the likes of Teddy Swims and Benson Boone, who have each enjoyed top 5 Hot 100 hits in 2024. “Warner has emerged as a leader in the championing of this new generation of singer-songwriters and the return of guitars in pop music, and we identified Michael as a standout in that space,” says Warner CEO Aaron Bay-Schuck. “He had a collection of songs we loved and felt he really understood how to authentically market and promote himself online.” (Yet, Marcagi is the first to admit “TikTok is a weird, Wild West for me still.”)
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Recently, Marcagi returned to the same Woodstock studio to work on his debut full-length before heading out on tour. He’s currently abroad — with dates in the U.K., Ireland, Germany and elsewhere — and in May will kick off his 23-date U.S. trek in Denver. “It’s been very much like, ‘Quick, go!,’ but still mostly organic,” says Brahl, noting there has yet to be a major TV campaign or concerted radio push, nor any particular challenge TikTok users can opt into.
Even so, Marcagi’s friends send him a photo whenever “Scared To Start” does play on the radio — which he says is perhaps the most surreal part so far. “I remember driving my dad’s car and hearing Mumford and Sons and The Lumineers on the radio when I was in high school,” he recalls. “It’s a weird full circle moment to be like, ‘I can’t believe that out of all of the artists that are putting music out, they’re choosing to play my song.’ It’s really, really wild.”
Kate Sweeney
A version of this story will appear in the April 27, 2024, issue of Billboard.
Allman Brothers Band co-founder singer-guitarist Dickey Betts died on Thursday morning (April 18) at 80 following a battle with cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, according to Rolling Stone. His family also announced the death of the musician on his Instagram account.
“It is with profound sadness and heavy hearts that the Betts family announce the peaceful passing of Forrest Richard ‘Dickey’ Betts (December 12, 1943 – April 18, 2024) at the age of 80 years old. The legendary performer, songwriter, bandleader and family patriarch was at his home in Osprey, Florida, surrounded by his family. Dickey was larger than life, and his loss will be felt worldwide. At this difficult time, the family asks for prayers and respect for their privacy in the coming days. More information will be forthcoming at the appropriate time.”
An integral part of the Allman’s swampy, rambling Southern rock sound, Betts joined brothers Gregg and Duane Allman in 1969 in the group the siblings formed after splitting up their earlier band, the Allman Joys. Taking his place alongside drummers Butch Trucks, and Jaimoe and bassist Berry Oakley — Betts had played with Oakley in the band the Second Coming — Betts provided lead guitar as well as initially sharing vocals with Duane and Oakley before Gregg Allman stepped up to be the lead singer and primary songwriter.
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Though he did not have a songwriting credit on the band’s 1969 self-titled debut album — which featured a mix of blues covers and Allman originals such as “Black Hearted Woman,” “It’s Not My Cross to Bear” and the furious blues guitar workout “Whipping Post” — he did land a few songwriting nods on their 1970s follow-up, Idlewild South. Along with his buoyant, album-opening acoustic jam “Revival” Betts contributed a song that would become one of the band’s signature extended jam showpieces, the explosive, jazz-influenced 7-minute workout “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.”
In fact, on the band’s next album, the iconic 1971 live album At Fillmore East, fans who had not yet caught the group’s exploratory, expansive live show yet were treated to a nearly 13-minute version of “Reed” that showcased the jazz and Western swing influences Betts brought to the table. And, in keeping with their growing reputation as one of the most experimental, unpredictable American rock bands, that long walk was accompanied on side four by a furious, 22-minute “Whipping Post.”
As would be the case throughout the group’s half century run, drug use and tragedy struck just as things were heating up the Allmans, sending Duane and Oakley to rehab in 1971, just months before Duane, 24, was killed in a motorcycle accident; a despondent Oakley crashed his motorcycle into the side of a bus a year later and died just blocks from the site of Duane’s accident.
While 1972’s hybrid studio-live album Eat a Peach would become one of their signature releases thanks to such iconic blues covers as “One Way Out” and “Trouble No More,” Betts penned, and sang, what would be one of the Allman’s first, and only, top 10 Billboard Hot 100 single, the AM radio staple “Ramblin’ Man,” which to No. 2 on the chart.
Betts, born Forrest Richard Betts in West Palm Beach, Florida on Dec. 12, 1943, grew up listening to bluegrass and country music as a child and played in a number of rock band in his home state before being tapped to join the Allmans.
During his stint in the group he released a series of solo albums, beginning with 1974’s Highway Call, followed by 1977’s Dickey Betts & Great Southern (featuring a songwriting collab on “Bougainvillea” with actor Don Johnson) and, in 1979, Atlanta’s Burning Down, during the group’s first hiatus.
The Allmans came back in 1979 for the album Enlightened Rogues, but things went south again quickly and they called it quits once more in 1982. Betts continued to play shows and tour until 1989, when the group once again reformed with a new slide guitarist from Betts’ band, Warren Haynes. Three more Allman albums were released in the early 1990s, though Betts was not always on stage with the group when they toured later in the decade and he played his final show with the band in May 2000 at the Music Midtown Festival in Atlanta, after which he was fired for what the band dubbed “creative differences.”
The guitarist filed suit against his former bandmates and never performed with them again, though he continued to tour with his own band for several years. Betts suffered a stroke in August 2018.
See the Betts family statement and listen to some of Betts’ signature work below.
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