year in music 2022
In a year that felt at times completely chaotic and at others eerily familiar, one thing is for certain: 2022 never allowed you to let your guard down. Around the world, people struggled to cope as they watched the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the stripping of abortion rights in the U.S., inflation rising across the globe and more. They also celebrated as new breakthroughs in energy and medicine provided potential answers to long-looming problems.
Similarly, the music industry experienced plenty of highs and lows throughout 2022. Artists like Taylor Swift, Drake, Glass Animals and Bad Bunny had record-breaking years on the charts, while stars like Kanye West saw their careers practically go up in smoke around them. Music synchs on television shows like Stranger Things and Euphoria saw record gains, Ticketmaster got placed under the microscope for a massive public meltdown, and TikTok extended its reign over the trends dominating the industry.
When it came to living as an LGBTQ person, 2022 was less than stellar — the continued rollback of LGBTQ protections and rights in the U.S. and elsewhere was a major story throughout the year. Whether it was anti-trans initiatives being promoted by government officials, the loss of LGBTQ life at the hands of another homophobic hate crime, or even the World Cup being hosted by a country that has criminalized sexuality, this year was marked by pain for queer and trans people everywhere.
So, what stories in the music industry offered some respite for the LGBTQ people in need of an escape in 2022? Billboard took a look back at the 10 biggest LGBTQ music stories of 2022 to round out the year:
It has been 10 years since Psy’s “Gangnam Style” became the first YouTube video to reach one billion views. In addition to pushing K-pop into the global stratosphere, the vibrant video (now with more than 4.6 billion views, as of Dec. 2022) kickstarted the video-streaming platform’s official Billion Views Club — which has grown to become a landmark achievement for artists and industry leaders alike.
Over 300 music videos have entered the club since its inception in 2012 and several have surpassed Psy’s history-making visual. Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee’s “Despacito” reigns as the most-viewed music video on YouTube, crossing 8 billion views just five years after its release. Also lapping Psy are Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” with 5.8 billion views, Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again” featuring Charlie Puth with 5.7 billion views, and Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” featuring Bruno Mars with 4.7 billion views, all as of Dec. 2022.
A number of superstar musical acts have had multiple videos surpass a billion views — including Justin Bieber, Adele, Bad Bunny and Taylor Swift. Colombian singer-songwriter J Balvin has entered the Billion Views Club 12 different times, making him the artist with the most videos in the coveted club.
In 2022 alone, more than 50 music videos earned their first billion views. While some musical acts made their triumphant return to the Billion Views Club, others earned their first entries ever. The Weeknd added his fifth video with a billion views thanks to “Save Your Tears,” less than two years after its premiere. On the other hand, Cyndi Lauper reached the milestone for the first time with “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” 39 years after its initial release (though it wasn’t uploaded to YouTube until 2009).
To celebrate a decade of billions, Billboard revisits all 51 music videos to enter YouTube’s Billion Views Club in 2022 below.
As 2022 draws to a close, Billboard Pride is taking a look back at some of the queer indie artists who saw their stars rise over the last 12 months. Below, U.K. genre-bender Lava La Rue breaks down their big year.
It’s the end of a busy trip to New York for Lava La Rue. The buzzy, much talked-about indie artist from West London has been in and out of studio sessions and supporting their partner’s gigs around the city, but as they log onto a Zoom call from a Brooklyn hotel room, they look mildly bummed.
“It’s super rainy and gross,” they say, swiveling their camera around to show a cloud-choked skyline just outside their window. “Normally I get this very cute view of everything corny, like the Empire State. Now, it’s just kind of looking like Gotham.” But La Rue acknowledges the weather pattern is just a transitional phase. “It’s been lovely all week, just not today,” they say with a shrug. “It’ll pass.”
La Rue would know what a transitional phase looks like, considering they’ve been actively in one for the last year — throughout 2022, La Rue underwent a shift that brought about a new sound, curated a new audience, and even found the singer a new home for their musical universe. “I think because I started in music fairly young, like in my late teens, some people have been like, “Wow, you’ve been around for quite a long time now,’” they say. “No, I literally feel like I was reborn this year. It feels like starting over almost.”
At the outset of their career in 2018, La Rue was known for their chilled-out, bedroom-rap releases, where the then-19-year-old would effortlessly let their bars flow about everything from cheating lovers to self-criticism on songs like “Widdit” and “F–ked it Up.” But as their career progressed, so did their sound — slick rap verses gave way to groovier, dreamier bedroom-pop tracks, until eventually the singer was in their “lo-fi bedroom” funk-pop era with the 2021 EP Butter-Fly.
La Rue is proud of the music they were able to make for the first three years of their career, especially given their limited access to the necessary tools to make projects like Butter-Fly. But the singer-songwriter quickly points out that their limitations in budget meant a limitation to their sound.
“Before, I had to compromise with the kind of music that I made, and when you have to compromise, you become a ‘lo-fi bedroom’ artist because that’s all you have access to,” they say. “I felt pretty boxed into that label … though I really don’t mind, I have nothing against the genre. It just felt really limiting in that approach — I wanted things to sound bigger and more cinematic.”
So, when it came time to craft their next project, it felt fitting to strip that label away with the title. Hi-Fidelity, La Rue’s third and most ambitious EP yet, saw the young artist plugging in — La Rue credits extended time in the studio to hone a cleaner, sharper sound as the key factor in the transformed sound of their latest project. Put simply, “This was the first time I was making music that sounds like the music I want to listen to,” they say.
Part of what makes Hi-Fidelity such a fascinating listen is that much like the rest of La Rue’s discography, it refuses to be pinned to a singular genre. The star’s signature buttery rap bars remain intact, while they also employ elements of funk, disco, pop-punk and R&B all throughout the EP’s five tracks.
La Rue is unsurprised that genre-fluidity has become a defining factor in what their audience looks for from their music. “There is so much cross-pollination of streaming and finding new music online,” they explain. “Now, a song will just have an inescapable viral moment, and you have people who would not normally listen to Steve Lacy suddenly listening to Steve Lacy. Or people who wouldn’t normally listen to pop-punk or Paramore — if one of their songs pops off on TikTok, suddenly they’re listening to a drill remix of a Paramore single.”
But the fluidity is also the point for La Rue — the 23-year-old artist doesn’t want to be labeled by any particular genre, and instead aims to have people search for music that sounds like Lava La Rue. “I think there’s a playlist on Spotify called ‘Planet Rave,’ and it literally just came from PinkPanthress doing a whole jungle/drum-and-bass revival. I started seeing people making music like PinkPanthress to be on that PinkPanthress-inspired playlist,” they explain. “That is the goal; I’ve always strived to have the level of artistry where what I do is recognizable as a person. Like, it is first and foremost Lava. So no matter what genre you apply it on, you recognize the voice and you recognize what I’m trying to say.”
Achieving an artistry on that level requires new audiences — and luckily for La Rue, they got just that this autumn. Following the release of their EP in July, La Rue joined fellow U.K. indie-rock darlings Wet Leg on their European tour, opening for 8 dates in November across the EU.
With a new, fuller sound, and a big spot on a hotly-anticipated tour, La Rue says they got to learn how to perform with a full band in real time while on the road with Wet Leg. “The live performance now is full-on showmanship — we’ve got an acoustic drum kit, big guitar solos, huge bass riffs, two synthesizers, I’m playing guitar as well,” they explain. “When I first did Glastonbury, it was me and a DJ, and I was singing my cute little songs and rapping and jumping into the moshpit, just me being an MC with the track backing me up. I really had to test my musicality when I couldn’t just hide behind the track.”
But the tour also worked for La Rue in a way they didn’t anticipate — it turns out that getting to perform music you’ve been working on for captive audiences of 4,000 people every few nights is excellent market research. “I almost wasn’t going to do the Wet Leg support tour, because in that time, I was supposed to be going into making my new project,” they say. “But seeing how it feels in a room of people has been so inspiring in the creative process for me. It’s changed the levels in my performance style, even in the way I’m recording things in the vocal booth now.”
When it comes to their new project, La Rue is ready for a full-on rebirth. After completing a two-EP deal with Marathon Artists in 2022, the singer says they’ve just signed on as the newest member of the Dirty Hit roster.
“Dirty Hit made so much sense to me — they’re based in West London, they’re an indie, and they’ve got a lot of artists who I grew up listening to and am obsessed with. It all just fit,” they say, a grin crossing their face. “If you look at the artists on their roster, they all lead with so much creativity, whether it’s The 1975 or Rina Sawayama. It’s also ambitious enough to say, ‘No, let’s make this pop off, too.’ It’s nice to feel like you can be ambitious, but still have creative control.”
So, with a new record deal under their belt and a debut album in the works, what comes next for La Rue? The answer, much like their sound, contains multitudes. “I literally feel like I’m at the beginning of my journey, and my whole goal is to just make everything bigger and brighter and more cinematic,” they explain. “It’s gonna be a whole world-building experience — there’s simply so much to be done.”
As 2022 draws to a close, Billboard Pride is taking a look back at some the queer indie artists who saw their stars rise over the last 12 months. Below, NYC rap veteran Cakes Da Killa breaks down his big year.
Last summer, multiple publications declared that “house music was back,” thanks to superstars like Beyoncé and Drake infusing their new music with its chunky synths and four-on-the-floor drum patterns. For Cakes Da Killa, however, the genre never went anywhere. When asked how aware he was of the “revival” taking place, he quips, “Not at all. Too drunk to pay attention.”
Cakes was also too busy, focusing on his own career this year — after almost a decade of underground success, the NYC rap vet used his 2022 to show the world his versatility and preeminent songwriting with Svengali. Released in October through his new label home Young Arts, the long-awaited second LP proved to be a turning point in Cakes’ career — and one he’s eager to keep building on.
But as the rapper tells Billboard over Zoom, Svengali had been in the works since 2018, and got shelved since the outset of the pandemic in 2020. “It didn’t seem like the time [to release it],” Cakes explains. “I knew I wanted to be a creative person through the pandemic, but I didn’t want to drop a full body of work, like an album, during that time. … But then it was a situation where I had been sitting on this project for four years — this s–t was coming out regardless.”
For Cakes (born Rashard Bradshaw), persevering through adverse release conditions had already been the story of his entire career. Coming up during “the SoundCloud generation,” as he calls it, Cakes gained steam across various internet platforms with the release of his Easy Bake Oven mixtape in 2011. Joining the likes of Mykki Blanco and Le1f, Cakes became a point of fascination for media figures around the U.S., as an openly gay rapper leading the way towards greater visibility.
It’s a theme that continued throughout Cakes’ career — no matter what independent label he signed with or what kind of sound he was making, his sexuality had become the inextricable focal point of his public image, which made attempts to seek out the attention of major labels more difficult. “When I was coming out as an artist, the label system was not prepared for queer artists, so there was no option in the first place — it was like, ‘You’re an independent artist because you’re weird,’” he says.
When the pandemic hit, Cakes had a decision to make — he had crafted a new album that would potentially help re-contextualize his artistic contribution to rap, but that album was also rife with sorrowful themes. Ultimately, the world “had enough of all of that,” he says.
Instead, Cakes unveiled his Muvaland mixtape series with producer Proper Villains as he left his home in New York to move to Atlanta. Released in two volumes throughout the pandemic via HE.SHE.THEY, the sweltering club project saw Cakes leaning into his house roots with wild abandon.
Gaining newfound attention thanks to his booming pandemic club single “Don Dada” and still refining the sound of Svengali with producer Sam Katz, Cakes started 2022 with a big change when he signed an album deal with TOKiMONSTA‘s label, Young Arts Records. By working with a label run by a fellow artist, Cakes says he could see the difference from his past label experiences clearly. “She has this different type of perspective on how to run things, which I appreciate — it’s very artist-focused,” he explains. “The record deal was signed because they genuinely loved what I was doing and what I was making.”
With a renewed outlook on his place in the industry, Cakes looked at his second album and decided, as he puts it “‘F–k it, let’s put it out.’” On Oct. 28, the world was introduced to the world of Svengali, a hypnotic, genre-fused project that saw Cakes take a sharp left turn with his sound — the elements of his hip-house roots remained intact, now bolstered by a darker ambient noise around it.
“Sonically, what me and Sam produced was something that combined a lot of the sounds I listen to on the day to day — that’s jazz, neo-soul, R&B and house music — and the product is something that is so deeply me,” he says. “Muvaland is this very sugar-coated, high fructose corn syrup project, while Svengali is much more grown and refined.”
Cakes’ efforts didn’t go unnoticed: Svengali quickly earned critical acclaim, with Pitchfork writing that the album “feels like a milestone he’s been working toward for years,” and calling Cakes ” a bandleader of the jazz era he reveres, putting on for the divas and icons of his time.” While the album didn’t gain any instant success on platforms like YouTube or TikTok, the rapper says he’s watched his streaming numbers steadily rise since the project’s release.
As the topic of internet virality comes up, Cakes quickly becomes uncomfortable. Yes, he has a TikTok account that he posts on sporadically, and yes, he acknowledges that, without platforms like SoundCloud or Tumblr, his career likely wouldn’t exist. But when it comes to the dominance of TikTok in the current music market, Cakes doesn’t feel great about what it means for artists.
“It’s just so performative, to me,” he says with a sigh. “Historically speaking, that performative thing kind of feels like minstrel shows to me, to be real. I don’t think everyone has that intention, nor do I think it’s the intention of the app. But the connotation that it has — leaning choreography and dancing to get people to like you — doesn’t sit well with me.”
Throughout the conversation, Cakes makes it clear that success will happen on his own terms, not because of a viral trend he capitalized on or a major label deal that got him more radio airplay. He’s hustled before, and he’s happy to hustle again. “I’ve always been a hard worker and somebody who was a go getter,” he explains. “But when the pandemic happened, that was like, ‘The time is now, do what you wanna do. And if you’re gonna do it, make a product that you’re completely in love with. If it’s fab, people will like it.’”
That doesn’t mean he can’t dream, though — Cakes hopes to see the songs off of his upcoming summer project on the Billboard dance charts soon. More importantly, he hopes that his artistic renaissance over the last year allows him to finally be seen as a once-in-a-generation artist.
“I’m just over here trying to cement myself as somebody bigger than the ‘queer rap’ label that the media has placed on me,” he explains. “I’m trying to be considered as a dope songwriter and artist first.”
As 2022 draws to a close, Billboard Pride is taking a look back at some the queer indie artists who saw their stars rise over the last 12 months. Below, pop singer Chappell Roan breaks down her big year.
When Chappell Roan markets herself as a “thrift store pop star,” she means that in its most literal sense. Even as she logs onto her Zoom account for an interview with Billboard, the 24-year-old singer is opening up a package she ordered online. “There is this girl on Etsy who makes rhinestoned disco cowgirl hats,” she says, tearing into the plastic wrapping in front of her. “So, I ordered one, because I’m going on tour and I have to start prep now for the outfits.”
As she finally opens the bag, she reveals a massive, disco ball-inspired cowboy hat covered in reflective panels and glittering gems. Roan’s jaw drops as she inspects it (“This is so sick,” she whispers), before looking slightly concerned as she dons the sparkling Stetson: “Ooh, that is heavy — I don’t think I can wear this on stage for long.”
Refining her tour outfits is just one small part of what Roan has been up to lately — the rising indie-pop singer-songwriter saw her hard work pay dividends in 2022. Releasing four singles throughout the year to increasing acclaim and growing her online following along the way, Roan is currently enjoying new heights of cultural recognition; her last single “Casual,” along with winding up on multiple “best of 2022” lists, boosted her profile online, with TikTok users quickly comparing pre-release teases of the track to Taylor Swift.
Looking back on her banner year, Roan acknowledges that it feels good to finally be recognized (“Last year I was working at a doughnut shop, so I’m doing great now,” she jokes), but she doesn’t feign shock at finally achieving a breakthrough. “It’s validating … but also not surprising to me,” she says, shrugging. “Like, yeah, I’ve been working my ass off for seven years! It’s about time!”
Back then, Roan was an aspiring singer-songwriter from Willard, Missouri who was simply trying to make it through high school while dreaming of a life in the music industry. After posting some of her music online, the singer traveled to New York City in 2015 for a set of showcases, where she ended up signing a deal with Atlantic Records.
Roan spent five years at Atlantic, workshopping her sound and releasing her debut EP School Nights in 2017. But after putting out what would go on to become her most successful song to date, the label decided to terminate their working relationship with the budding star, dropping Roan from their roster in 2020.
When asked about her time with Atlantic, Roan starts with diplomacy: “It was such an incredible learning experience for me, honestly.” Then, the singer gets real: “It was not great … I feel like once I was dropped, it lit such a fire and fury in me, I swear,” she recalls. “I learned that it’s just like, ‘Oh s–t, no one’s going to do anything for you — not your manager, not your label — if you don’t tell them what to do. No one can do this job for you.’ That’s when I started asking myself how much I could get away with.”
Fortunately for Roan, her time at the label did bear some significant fruit — it was at Atlantic that she first met her songwriting partner Dan Nigro, who has co-written each new release with the singer since her departure. Before he was writing generational breakup anthems for Olivia Rodrigo, the pop-rock auteur was working with Roan on her tracks, earning his first official credit with her for her queer-coded ode to stripping, “Pink Pony Club.”
Unencumbered by label expectations, the singer-songwriter finally began bringing her full creative vision to fruition in 2022. The first step, as she tells it, was nailing her presentation: Gone was an attempt at presenting a clean-cut facade, now replaced by a more effortless deconstruction of style. “Once I let go of trying to be this very well-managed, put-together pop girl, it felt like everything just fell into place,” Roan explains. “I leaned into the fact that my looks were tacky, and very obviously using fake diamonds and Gucci knockoffs. I leaned into my queerness for the first time. When I did that, the songs got easier to write, the shows got easier to design, and my aesthetic was finally there.”
While putting together a rapid-fire rollout schedule of singles throughout the year (including “Naked In Manhattan,” “My Kink Is Karma” and “Femininomenon”), Roan quickly began accruing a fiercely loyal following on TikTok. According to Roan, while she was promoting the release of “Naked in Manhattan” in January 2022, she gained over 30,000 followers in one month, with fans anxiously wondering when the song would come out.
Roan doesn’t see herself as a “TikTok artist” — not necessarily due to fears of pigeonholing, but rather out of a healthy dose of skepticism. “I go so back and forth with TikTok,” she says. “I gained a lot of speed at the beginning of the year with TikTok because I wasn’t busy; I had time to post twice a day, go live once a day, repeat. It doesn’t work when you’re busy.”
The singer knows that because she has, in fact, been busy — along with unveiling her new set of singles, Roan filled the latter half of her year with plenty of touring. After opening for Olivia Rodrigo in May at her San Francisco Sour Tour stop, Roan caught the attention of fellow queer singer-songwriter Fletcher, who offered Roan the opening spot on the second half of her Girl of My Dreams Tour. Embarking on 10 dates with Fletcher, Roan honed her live show in real time while her song “Casual” began to pick up steam online.
“I don’t even know what I discovered, besides the fact that this is incredibly hard,” Roan laughs, looking back on her time opening for Fletcher. “If I’ve learned anything, it’s that the live show is where the heartbeat of the project is. Luckily, it’s my favorite part of what I do — I like touring, but a lot of people hate it because it’s horrible and hard.”
The singer likes touring enough that she’s embarking on her own headlining tour in 2023. Spanning 20 dates through February and March, Roan will be traveling coast to coast with an ambitious performance goal — every show, she says, will be themed. “It’s already really hard to do that on an independent budget — but also coming up with that many different themes is insanely hard,” she says. “But, if the live show rocks, then everything else will trickle down.”
It’s also important to her to create a show worthy of the very queer fanbase she’s garnered — that means making tickets affordable (“College kids don’t have money!” she giggles), keeping her concert spaces safe, and donating $1 of every ticket sold to For the Gworls, a Black, trans-led organization dedicated to helping Black trans people pay for their rent and gender-affirming care. “If I can create a space where people can afford to come into a mostly queer space, and dress up and feel good and meet other queer people in a town where maybe there’s not a lot of other places to meet queer people — a.k.a. my hometown — then that is great,” she says. “That’s doing the world good.”
Her plan is working so far — streams for “Casual” are continuing to rise, approaching the 2 million mark before its second month out on DSPs. Meanwhile, the majority of dates for her headline tour have already sold out, with only a small number of tickets remaining at a few venues. “That’s actually crazy,” she says of her sold-out dates. “My numbers are not that big, comparatively, to other artists. So when things started selling out, it was like, ‘Oh, okay, this is pretty real. I did not know that I could sell out in a day.’”
Despite her building success, Roan is still trying to keep one foot firmly in reality — while being independent has its perks, she says, it’s also not sustainable for the kind of artist she wants to become. “I’m not perfectly fine with being indie, if I’m being honest,” she says. “I need money to hire more help, and I just can’t keep doing everything DIY. I cannot keep asking favors from my friends, it’s just not fair to everyone.”
But now, unlike when she was a 16-year-old signing her first record deal, Roan knows who she is and what she wants (opening for Miley Cyrus, for example, is on her to-do list). “I will not sign a deal unless it is the right deal for me, and it must be mutually beneficial,” she says. “I know that I can do it without a label, which gives me such empowerment to walk away there.”
She pauses, and smiles. “That’s the key, I think; this year has been empowering for me.”
For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard is counting down our staff picks for the top 10 pop stars of 2022 all this week. At No. 1, we remember the year in Bad Bunny — who made the jump from being the world’s greatest Latin pop star to simply the world’s greatest pop star.
In the summer of 2021, Billboard talked to Bad Bunny about him producing Tommy Torres’ new album, El Playlist de Anoche – his first run at producing an album outside the urbano realm. “Everything in life is a risk,” he said then. “I made this album because I wanted to do it and because it fulfilled me.” If there’s one that’s clear about the Puerto Rican chart-topping artist, it’s that any project he works on, he does it for those two reasons — which allows him to deliver genuine projects that connect with countless millions of fans across the globe.
Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2022:Introduction & Honorable Mentions | Rookie of the Year: Steve Lacy | Comeback of the Year: Sam Smith | No. 10: Nicki Minaj | No. 9: Future | No. 8: Jack Harlow | No. 7: Doja Cat | No. 6: Lizzo | No. 5: Drake | No. 4: Beyoncé | No. 3: Taylor Swift | No. 2: Harry Styles
Benito Antonio Ocasio Martínez, or in his own words, “Benito Martínez el más hijueputa (the biggest motherf–ker),” has proven to be a force to be reckoned with — and, in a matter of two years, has unsubtly transitioned from Latin star to global superstar, penetrating the mainstream in a way that no other Latin artist has. Just last year, Bad Bunny was No. 10 on our Greatest Pop Stars of 2021 list. This year, he’s unequivocally No. 1.
Statistically both Billboard’s Top Artist of the Year and (for a third consecutive year) Spotify’s most streamed artist globally, El Conejo Malo been on a wild ride since he made his grand return to the stage with El Último Tour del Mundo at the top of 2022, winding his way to the spring release of his blockbuster album Un Verano Sin Ti — which catapulted Bunny to unprecedented heights, on and off the charts.
By 2022, Bad Bunny’s success was already an anomaly. Between 2020 and 2021, he had released three consecutive Top Latin Albums-topping sets (YHLQMDLG, Las Que No Iban a Salir and El Último Tour del Mundo), had a WWE sting during a tag-team match against The Miz and John Morrison at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, and produced that album for Torres — which landed the veteran singer-songwriter his first top 10 entry on Top Latin Albums in nearly a decade. He’d also announced an ambitious tour for 2022, which would mark his grand return to live touring since the pandemic. “POR FIN!!! ESTÁN LISTOS??? (Finally! Are you all ready?),” he captioned the announcement on social media.
Boy, were they ready. After becoming the fastest-selling trek since 2018, with 480,000 tickets sold in less than a week, Bad Bunny finally kicked off his El Último Tour del Mundo stint in the U.S. in February, marking the start of a blockbuster year for the artist. With El Último Tour, Bunny embarked on his biggest stage tour yet, earning $116.8 million in North American arenas, according to figures reported to Billboard Boxscore. It then became the highest grossing Latin tour in Boxscore history, breaking local records in more than half of the markets where he played. (It’s worth noting that even before he began the U.S arena tour, in January, he announced an ambitious 29-date stadium tour that would kick off in the summer, following El Último Tour.)
It made sense that he’d tour again. When Bunny revealed plans for a second trek, he also announced he was releasing a new album. The new set would be a follow up to 2020’s El Último Tour del Mundo, which earned him his first No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, marking the first all-Spanish-language album to reach No. 1 in the then-64-year history of the all-genre chart. Could Bad Bunny best his last album? Probably, given his career-long upward trending. But no one was expecting that Un Verano Sin Ti, which was released in May, would rewrite records broken not just by a Latin artist, but by any artist in general.
Un Verano Sin Ti debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 (dated May 21), earning 274,000 equivalent album units in the U.S., according to Luminate. And with 356.66 million on-demand official streams for the set’s songs in its first week, the album registered the largest streaming week ever for a Latin music album. Verano – which spent 13 nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 – also placed 22 songs from the set on the May 21-dated Billboard Hot 100, the most in a week for a core Latin music artist and the most in a week performed all in Spanish.
There’s no one reason for the unprecedented success of this particular album, but there are many contributing factors. For one, Latin music market share has been on the rise for some five years now after “Despacito” opened the floodgates for a wave of Spanish-language songs to become global. And, for the first time ever, Latin music expected to reach billion dollars in revenues by year-end in the U.S., according to the RIAA. Its 23% increase is outpacing overall market growth.
Then there’s the obvious. Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti is packed with back-to-back hits that, sonically, all sound completely different (from dembow to mambo and alt-rock). He’s completely deviated from the traditional to innovate, pushing all popular music forward and expanding pop in a way few major artists are right now. There weren’t just one or two singles that were being pushed from Verano — rather, the entire album was being streamed on repeat. Everyone had a different answer when asked which song was their favorite from the set, because there’s a song that just about everyone can relate to – which helps explain why a stunning 11 of the tracks stuck on the Hot 100 for double-digit weeks.
Within a few months, Verano had grown into easily the biggest non-English-language album of the century — without Bunny having to record in English or do a major non-Latin collaboration – and in early August, he expanded his multi-platform stardom with his first major film role, as an assassin in the Brad Pitt-starring action-comedy Bullet Train. But despite being intended as a summer album, UVST’s dominance carried over to Fall — thanks to Bunny’s stadium tour, which kicked off with three sold-out performances at El Choli in his beloved Puerto Rico in July.
The U.S. leg officially opened in August, with shows that began very much on brand for the album: a seagull call filled the stadium; Bad Bunny appeared sitting on a beach chair with a neverita (cooler) next to him. His UVST vision literally came to life in every show. Later that month, his Yankee Stadium performance was beamed into the VMAs, with the superstar stealing the awards show without even attending. “I always knew that I could become a huge artist without changing my culture,” he said while accepting the artist of the year award — the first Latin act to win that category.
His second tour of 2022 doubled the gross of his prior record-breaking trek: The World’s Hottest Tour grossed $232.5 million and sold 944,000 tickets from just 21 shows in the U.S. The combination of El Ultimo Tour Del Mundo & World’s Hottest Tour landed him at the top of Billboard‘s annual Boxscore recaps. Moreover, Un Verano Sin Ti became the first non-English album to ever top the year-end Billboard 200 albums ranking, and tied Drake’s Views and Disney’s Frozen soundtrack for the most weeks at No. 1 on the chart in the last decade. In November, it also earned the first ever nomination for album of the year at the Grammys for an all-Spanish release, one of three nods Bad Bunny garnered for the 2023 ceremonies.
Bad Bunny wasn’t the only artist who dominated this year. There were Harry Styles and Taylor Swift, too, and many other stars who had stellar years with new album releases. But while those artists had years that felt momentous, Bunny’s was truly historic — capturing the zeitgeist not just of Latin music, but for all of global pop.
For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard is counting down our staff picks for the top 10 pop stars of 2022 all this week. At No. 2, we remember the year in Harry Styles — who had a 2022 for the ages, with one of the biggest albums, one of the biggest songs and one of the biggest tours of the year.
Coming into 2022, Harry Styles already ranked among the biggest pop stars in the world. He was fresh off a successful Love on Tour stint in support of his Billboard 200 chart-topping sophomore album, Fine Line, which got him three Grammy nominations and his first-ever win for best pop solo performance (for his first Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper, the breezy “Watermelon Sugar”). While the first two years of his 2020s were hard to top, it turned out to be only the beginning for Styles – who, over the course of 2022, completely let go of any shallow stereotypes surrounding a former boy band member and solidified his supremacy in the pop world.
Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2022:Introduction & Honorable Mentions | Rookie of the Year: Steve Lacy | Comeback of the Year: Sam Smith | No. 10: Nicki Minaj | No. 9: Future | No. 8: Jack Harlow | No. 7: Doja Cat | No. 6: Lizzo | No. 5: Drake | No. 4: Beyoncé | No. 3: Taylor Swift
Styles kept the wheels turning almost immediately into 2022. In March, he announced that his third studio album, Harry’s House, was on the way — and dropped his wildly popular lead single, “As It Was,” which quickly set the record for the most streamed track on Spotify in 24 hours among male artists and became his first single to debut atop the Hot 100. Beyond its streaming and charts feats, “As It Was” represented a new chapter for Styles, with intimate, wistful lyrics bursting over indie-pop synths. It introduced fans to a more mature side of the star, and brought in new listeners from all demographics who might not have given his music a chance before.
Styles was inescapable throughout the spring, due to “As It Was” dominating radio and TikTok, and his somewhat unexpected promotional campaign for the upcoming Harry’s House — including a Better Homes and Gardens cover. In April, the 28-year-old headlined Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, validating his superstar status in furry coats and sequins, with assistance from guest appearances by Shania Twain and Lizzo.
The singer, however, stayed true to his humble self throughout the wins. “Finally, it doesn’t feel like my life is over if this album isn’t a commercial success,” he told Better Homes and Gardens. “I just want to make stuff that is right, that is fun, in terms of the process, that I can be proud of for a long time, that my friends can be proud of, that my family can be proud of, that my kids will be proud of one day.”
He had reason to be proud when Harry’s House dropped on May 20, as the album separated itself from his two previous albums and won the hearts of critics with its experimental pop nature, from playing with bustling horn sections on “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” to groovy and hooky funk on “Late Night Talking” and vintage, Beatlesque guitar riffs on “Grapejuice.” The release was complete with a one-night-only celebratory show at UBS Arena in New York, where he performed the new album in its entirety. “Over the past however many years of my life, you’ve changed it over and over again,” he told the crowd at the show, maintaining his characteristic graciousness. “I’m so grateful for every single one of you here and every single one of you that’s not here. Thank you all so, so, so much.”
The hype leading up to the album’s release soon manifested into staggering numbers, as it spent two weeks atop the Billboard 200. In its debut week, the album earned a whopping 521,500 equivalent album units earned in the U.S., the largest week of 2022 for any album at the time. Even the vinyl edition of the album sold over 146,000 copies in the U.S. through May 22, according to initial reports to Luminate — breaking the modern-era record for the largest sales week for a vinyl album in the U.S. The album also went on to develop some more radio hits with songs like “Music for a Sushi Restaurant” and “Late Night Talking,” though nothing quite reached the same level as “As It Was,” which spent 15 nonconsecutive weeks at the Hot 100 summit and topped Billboard‘s 2022 Songs of the Summer chart.
And after all that, Styles still wasn’t done. While dominating the music world, the star dipped his toes into film, playing a gay police officer in My Policeman and co-starring with Florence Pugh in Don’t Worry Darling, directed by Styles’ then-girlfriend Olivia Wilde. The film’s promo was embroiled with backstage drama, starting with rumors about Shia LaBoeuf getting fired from (or quitting?) the lead role, and Wilde’s subsequent feud with Pugh amid the director’s romantic fling with Styles. The highly publicized promo tour was equally rife with controversy, including Pugh’s noticeable absence, and a much-analyzed moment in which Styles appeared to spit on his co-star, Chris Pine. The messiness seemed to be driving the film into a major disaster zone — but Don’t Worry Darling was a hit, topping the U.S. box office and earning a global total of $78 million, proving that there’s no such thing as bad publicity when it revolves around Styles.
Not surprisingly, Styles wrapped up 2022 even better than his already jaw-dropping 2021, with a whopping six Grammy nominations – including album, song and record of the year. The achievement marks a rare accomplishment from a former boy band member, as alums of male pop groups are rarely afforded that level of grown-up respect in the music industry. However, Styles separated himself not only from association from One Direction in 2022, but also from most of his hitmaking peers, making himself into simply one of the greatest male pop stars of his generation.
For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard is counting down our staff picks for the top 10 pop stars of 2022 all this week. At No. 3, we remember the year in Taylor Swift — who got started a little late in the calendar, but certainly didn’t need long to make up for lost time.
After back-to-back years of releasing two full-length projects, Taylor Swift began 2022 on a relatively low-key note – well, as low-key as things can ever be for a global superstar still at the peak of her powers, at least.
There was the out-of-nowhere feud with the frontman of Blur and Gorillaz (yes, Damon, she really writes her own music), the first of two college courses announced in her honor (one at NYU, the next at Texas), a nostalgic reunion with one of her musical besties (Ed Sheeran’s “The Joker & The Queen” remix) – and let’s not forget the Virginia Tech scientists who cemented their Swiftie status in April by naming a new species of millipede “Nannaria Swiftae.” In May, the singer/songwriter emerged to make her biggest public appearance of the year so far to give the NYU commencement address, urging the Class of 2022 to hold on to their enthusiasm, coolness be damned. “Never be ashamed of trying,” she said in the 20-minute pep talk. “Effortlessness is a myth.”
Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2022:Introduction & Honorable Mentions | Rookie of the Year: Steve Lacy | Comeback of the Year: Sam Smith | No. 10: Nicki Minaj | No. 9: Future | No. 8: Jack Harlow | No. 7: Doja Cat | No. 6: Lizzo | No. 5: Drake | No. 4: Beyoncé
Things started to pick up in the Swift cycle in the late spring/early summer, when the pop auteur continued to make strides in the film and TV worlds, including three new soundtrack moments: “This Love (Taylor’s Version)” was re-recorded for Netflix’s teen drama series The Summer I Turned Pretty, the woodsy “Carolina” was written specifically for the book-to-big-screen adaptation of Where the Crawdads Sing, and “Bad Blood (Taylor’s Version)” was brought out of the kennel for DC League of Super-Pets. She also kicked off a still-ongoing film-festival circuit, promoting her self-directed All Too Well: The Short Film at June’s Tribeca Film Festival.
So now that we’ve reviewed the first eight months of our reigning 2021 Greatest Pop Star, forget everything you just learned about Taylor’s 2022 — because the Swift Calendar Year didn’t truly begin until Aug. 28. That’s when she hit the MTV Video Music Awards – a stage where she’s made more than a few headlines over her 16-year career – to not only collect the evening’s highest honor, but also to announce that she had a brand-new album called Midnights coming in October. All year, fans had been speculating about which of her Big Machine releases she’d re-record next (all signs pointed to either 2010’s Speak Now or 2014’s 1989 as the likely contenders), never stopping to think that they might get a whole new album instead.
Thus began Swift’s master class in modern-day album promotion, during which she set out to hit every corner of the music-buying public. There were the TikTok song-title reveals that kicked off on Sept. 21; then Midnights lyrics popped up on billboards from New York to London to Sao Paolo, Brazil, starting Oct. 17; and on Oct. 18, she began unveiling five things “that kept me up at night and helped inspire the Midnights album” via Spotify, also in daily doses. But if you’re not on TikTok or Spotify and missed the global billboards, do you watch football? Because Swift’s final pre-release push was an album teaser that premiered during Thursday Night Football, hours ahead of the album’s arrival.
With all of these teasers and previews, there was one thing that wasn’t revealed ahead of midnight on Oct 21: any music. Despite almost two months of lead time, no lead singles or music videos were released — which only bolstered the intrigue surrounding the album. Would it be stripped-down and understated like her most recent original albums, 2020’s folklore and evermore? Would it channel the adrenaline-rush pop of the trio of projects before that, 2019’s Lover, 2017’s reputation and 2014’s 1989? Or would Swift be newly inspired by revisiting the young country songwriter behind 2008’s Fearless and 2012’s Red for her pair of 2021 re-recordings?
The answer was really all of the above. You could recognize bits and pieces from all of Swift’s eras throughout the project, with songs that are alternately dreamy (“Snow on the Beach” with Lana del Rey, “Sweet Nothing” written with boyfriend Joe Alwyn), dancey (the shiny “Anti-Hero” and “Bejeweled”), and razor-sharp (“Vigilante Shit”). A lot of the familiarity could be attributed to the omnipresence of Jack Antonoff, who’d worked with Swift since 1989 and was the lone co-producer credited on the 13 songs. In the headline for its review, The New York Times said Swift was “caught between yesterday and tomorrow” on the album, but it feels more apt to look at Midnights like a massive snowball that has all of Taylor’s previous albums rolled up inside it, while still glistening and new on the outside.
And to keep that snowball rolling, only three hours after the standard album’s release, Swift surprised fans with the expanded 20-song 3am Edition, this time teaming up with her other go-to producer, Aaron Dessner, for six of the seven songs. Fans who had already had time to listen to the 44-minute original at least four times since midnight were thrilled to have even more lyrics to decode and soundscapes to live in – including the buzziest bonus track “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve,” which fans speculated was about her brief relationship with John Mayer and their 13-year age gap. Five hours after that, Swifties had yet another new release to devour: The “Anti-Hero” video – the first of many Midnights Music Movies promised in the Thursday Night Football teaser – dropped at 8 a.m. ET on Oct. 21 and features the pop star attending her own funeral, with Mike Birbiglia, John Early and Mary Elizabeth Ellis playing her adult children. That wasn’t the only release-week music video either: On Oct. 24, the appropriately blingy clip for “Bejeweled” arrived, co-starring Laura Dern and Haim as the wicked stepmother and stepsisters in Swift’s very own Cinderella story.
While all of this is a lot, even by Swift’s overachieving standards, the full-court press paid off in spades when Midnights scored the largest week for any album since Adele’s 25 in 2015, moving 1.578 million equivalent album units in its debut frame, and the biggest sales week since Taylor’s own reputation in 2017, with 1.14 million in traditional album sales. The blockbuster easily conquered the Billboard 200, and over on the Billboard Hot 100, Swift became the first artist in history to hold all top 10 slots, led by the chart-topping “Anti-Hero”; in addition, all 20 songs from the project hit the tally.
In the month-plus since Midnights’ release, Swift has continued to fend off some pretty fierce competition on the chart, with the catchphrase-spawning “Anti-Hero” besting new music from both Rihanna and Drake to hold strong at No. 1 on the Hot 100 for six weeks – only falling to Mariah Carey’s perennial Christmas chart-topper this week. In the early frames, she got a sales boost from a series of “Anti-Hero” remixes, including one featuring Antonoff’s band Bleachers. (Drake seemingly took notice of his Republic labelmate’s aggressive strategy, covering up Swift’s No. 1 slot with emojis when he re-posted the Hot 100 top 10 the week that Her Loss, his joint album with 21 Savage, hit the chart.)
While this year has been another monumental one for Swift, 2023 is shaping up to be even more massive, with the Nov. 1 announcement of the Eras Tour, her first proper trek in nearly five years, which is setting out to encapsulate all the material she’s released in the past decade and a half. The overwhelming demand to be at one of Taylor’s 52 shows just about broke Ticketmaster (in both the immediate and long-term senses), which is currently being sued by disgruntled Swifties locked out of the ticket-buying process and was even taken to task by Swift herself. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them,” she said in an Instagram statement on Nov. 18. Following her crusades to get better pay for artists from Apple Music and grant ownership of master recordings to musicians, perhaps reforming Ticketmaster can be Swift’s next pet project.
In addition to her tour and whatever Taylor’s Versions that may await her, Swift has several major awards shows to attend next year too. After being the top winner at the 2022 American Music Awards, MTV EMAs and People’s Choice Awards – and being named songwriter-artist of the decade at the Nashville Songwriter Awards – Swift has a shot at winning her first Golden Globe in January (original song for “Carolina”) and could nab four more Grammys in February to add to her 11, including one Big Four possibility: song of the year for “All Too Well (10 Minute Version) (The Short Film).” Then there’s her new side hustle as a filmmaker: After getting a taste of directing with her music videos and All Too Well (The Short Film), Swift is set to make her directorial debut with an unnamed Searchlight Pictures production for which she wrote the original script.
Given Swift’s staggering accomplishments in 2022, it might be hard to believe that she doesn’t repeat as Billboard’s Greatest Pop Star this year — but the wildest part is just how much of her year was piled into these past few months. Looking at what’s on the horizon, it looks like she’s ready to snatch the crown right back in 2023. Remember what she told those college kids: “Never be ashamed of trying.”
For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard is counting down our staff picks for the top 10 pop stars of 2022 all this week. At No. 7, we remember the year in Doja Cat — who dominated pop radio and the charts all year without even releasing a new album.
Since breaking out with her viral hit “Mooo!” Doja Cat has made it evident that she’s not your average pop star. Armed with a penchant for defying genre confines – in addition to being a jane-of-all-trades vocalist, rapper and performer – the 27-year-old supernova continues to prove she’s in a lane all her own.
Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2022:Introduction & Honorable Mentions | Rookie of the Year: Steve Lacy | Comeback of the Year: Sam Smith | No. 10: Nicki Minaj | No. 9: Future | No. 8: Jack Harlow
The Cali native began the year by continuing to ride the wave of her successful third studio album, the double-platinum Planet Her. Months after the LP’s June 2021 release, songs like “Need to Know” and “You Right” still resonated with listeners, hanging around the Hot 100 well into the new year. The spritely pop-rap bop “Kiss Me More,” the project’s most successful single, nabbed Doja and featured artist SZA their first Grammy Award wins for best pop duo/group performance at the 2022 ceremony – a tear-jerking moment that conveyed the vulnerable side of the quirky figure.
But even before she grabbed her Grammy, it was exceedingly clear that Doja Cat was the name on everybody’s lips. From being the titular figure in songs by $NOT and A$AP Rocky and Central Cee, to Wale dubbing her “one of the best rappers out” after her stand-out Coachella performance, she received flowers from virtually all corners in 2022.
In February, Courtney Love tweeted that the experimental artist should “add rock goddess to [her] resume” after covering Hole’s “Celebrity Skin” for a Taco Bell Super Bowl commercial. Later on, Post Malone praised Doja for her “epic” feature on his Twelve Carat Toothache ditty, “I Like You (A Happier Song)” — which continued her commercial winning streak, hitting No. 3 on the Hot 100 and scoring a 2023 Grammy nod in the best pop duo/group performance category.
Betwixt her spirited cover and standout guest verse, Doja also released the solo single “Vegas” for Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis soundtrack. Interest in the Big Mama Thornton/Shonka Dukureh-interpolating song was slow to start, but in a similar fashion to her first Hot 100-topping single “Say So,” it found its crowd through TikTok virality and radio airplay. It eventually made the top 10 in October in its 19th week on the chart, and garnered a 2023 Grammy nom for best rap performance. (Additionally, the Planet Her singles “Woman” and “Get Into It (Yuh)” continued rising on the Hot 100 this year thanks to TikTok, with the Grammy-nominated “Woman” eventually peaking at No. 7 in May.)
Despite life and career accomplishments, burnout and fatigue are potential worries for any high-achieving, forward-facing individual. Amidst her accolades and growing acclaim, Doja Cat rocked the music world and fans alike by announcing via Twitter in March that she was “quitting music.” This came after being on the receiving end of online vitriol following a canceled headlining festival performance, and a few months after tweeting and deleting that she was overworking herself. However, a few months later, she admitted she wanted to focus on creating new music instead of “doing a bunch of other things.” While Doja didn’t retire from the music scene, she did become less visible, beginning with exiting her opening stint on The Weeknd’s After Hours tour due to tonsil surgery.
During her break from the spotlight, she began sporting a new bald ‘do and experimented with various eye-catching makeup looks, prompting many to speculate that her new style corresponded with new music. Concrete details surrounding her forthcoming era haven’t been pinned down; however, she’s offered various teases of the material, which she says toys with unchartered sounds and shifting trends. She notes that the project will be “mostly rap,” with one of her key inspirations being The Beastie Boys, though she also includes Death Grips and ‘90s German rave as additional sonic influences. (That said, there’s still the considerable chance that many of the hints about the next phase of Doja’s career are said with a wink, as it’s often difficult to discern her serious plans from her often-trolling behavior.)
“I don’t know if what I’m doing is going to be pop, but I want to keep that in mind for when I go into the studio,” she told Dazed in November. “The album will come and it’ll be its own moment on Earth.”
While some celebrity’s URL antics have yielded catastrophic effects on their careers IRL, Doja Cat’s commitment to embracing chaos and reveling in unpredictability has been crucial to her success thus far. The controversy she faced in mid-2020 regarding her past appearances in incel internet chat rooms threatened to derail her budding success, however, it proved to be just a bump in the road. As her mainstream popularity continued to build momentum, she’s ultimately proven that a star doesn’t have to be uber-polished to shine bright.
It also doesn’t hurt that Doja’s music has lasting power, thanks to her ability to keep fans and pop lovers on their toes. She ends 2022 with seven appearances on the Hot 100 this year, the most of any artist (tied with Bad Bunny), showcasing a variety of styles and sounds indicative of her versatility. She’s open about enjoying the ride she’s on as an artist and the learning process that comes with growing as a human. Doja Cat doesn’t have it all figured out, but pop music is much more exciting because of her place in it.
For this year’s update of our ongoing Greatest Pop Star by Year project, Billboard is counting down our staff picks for the top 10 pop stars of 2022 all this week. At No. 8, we remember the year in Jack Harlow — who built on the momentum of his previous couple years and made the leap to full-on pop stardom.
Jack Harlow possesses a disarming self-awareness of his charm, his moment, and his detractors. In his 2020 single “Rendezvous,” the Kentucky rapper unloads on the idea that he hadn’t earned his status: “Kills me when they act like this was overnight/ Like we didn’t do a tour in a tiny van.” The couplet documented life in the short time after the release of “What’s Poppin,” his breakout single that helped propel him into the mainstream consciousness. It basks in stark contrast to an epiphany buried in his “First Class” line, “They say, ‘You a superstar now,’ damn, I guess I am.” Two years after the release of his debut album, That’s What They All Say, Harlow is an undisputed commercial hip-hop force, dictating when and where lightning struck in 2022.
Billboard’s Greatest Pop Stars of 2022:Introduction & Honorable Mentions | Rookie of the Year: Steve Lacy | Comeback of the Year: Sam Smith | No. 10: Nicki Minaj | No. 9: Future
In January, Harlow captioned an Instagram post, “More inspired than I’ve ever been…never had a better pen…never felt truly understood until now….I knew I was a star but I finally got the evidence.” As this year unfolded, it became increasingly clear that the crux of Harlow’s star power isn’t how brightly he beams but his inclination to remain part of a constellation. He clocked his first career No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart in October 2021 alongside Lil Nas X for “Industry Baby,” simultaneously nominated for a Grammy and targeted by homophobes. Harlow promptly shot down any notion that he shouldn’t have aligned with an LGBTQ+ artist: Black members of the hip-hop community warmly welcomed him, a white rapper whose fan base is shouldered by Black women, so it was unsurprising to see him wear a Lil Nas X graphic tee to June’s BET Awards to protest his friend’s snub.
February netted Harlow a deal with New Balance, a start in the NBA Celebrity All-Star Game, and the release of “Nail Tech,” his first solo drop since That’s What They All Say. The ostentatious single earned praise from Kanye West, a childhood idol of Harlow’s, and found Harlow again venting about his inbetween position in the first verse, “I love music and stress ‘bout it,” and second, “I’m not on top of this s–t yet, but I’m that guy, though.” The single wasn’t as sticky as the quotable lyrics and TikTok tease promised, however. “Nail Tech” spent one week on the Hot 100 at No. 18, and it was something of a distant memory by the end of March.
Harlow was cast in the remake of White Men Can’t Jump, ambitiously tackling Woody Harrelson’s iconic 1992 role as his film-acting debut – but “First Class” will be remembered as his leading man turn. The TikTok snippet racked up 69.2 million views, the first rock in an avalanche that ended with “First Class” debuting at No. 1 on the Hot 100 chart dated April 23 with the biggest streaming week of the year (54.6 million total). The lavish earworm’s backbone is the sampling of Fergie’s 2007 No. 1 smash “Glamorous” featuring Ludacris. Harlow, as he told Jimmy Fallon while co-hosting The Tonight Show in October, went from wanting to perform “Fergalicious” for his fifth-grade talent show to performing “First Class” with Fergie to open August’s 2022 MTV VMAs, which he also co-hosted with LL Cool J and Nicki Minaj.
Suddenly, it felt as if Harlow had been around forever, but there were endearing reminders that the spotlight was new to him. To start May, he ended a red carpet interview with Emma Chamberlain at May’s Met Gala by awkwardly saying, “Love ya!” Come Home The Kids Miss You was given a lukewarm reception by critics struggling to put a finger on Harlow’s identity. Arguably, the 15-track sophomore offering serves as a transparent portrait of Harlow as he works through that very question.
Come Home made up for that by yielding three 2023 Grammys nominations: best melodic rap performance (“First Class”), best rap song (“Churchill Downs” featuring Drake) and best rap album. This album’s (or any album’s) quantifiable success is not Harlow’s end game, though: As he expressed in his Rolling Stone April cover story, which announced Come Home The Kids Miss You’s impending May 6 arrival, he’s in it to become the best. He even quit drinking to ensure unobstructed clarity as he traded his real estate on the fringes of the mainstream for inescapable fame. Hits didn’t come beyond “First Class” this album cycle, but Harlow bolstered his foundation for the long game.
The rapper also earned co-signs from his formative heroes, such as Justin Timberlake, Lil Wayne, and Pharrell and Drake, via guest appearances on the Come Home tracklist. In particular, Harlow has proved himself Drake’s heir apparent as rap’s resident flirt – an idea illustrated by adoring fans swarming him and Aubrey at the Kentucky Derby, where the “Churchill Downs” video was filmed. Harlow had his whole team in his Churchill Downs box, including his childhood best friend-turned-photographer Urban Wyatt, comedian Druski and sports journalist Taylor Rooks. The aura around “Churchill Downs” solidified him as a main character who doesn’t suffer from main character syndrome. All Harlow ever wanted was to be loved by Louisville and put Kentucky on the map, and it was never more reciprocal than on that May afternoon.
Harlow looked right at home on every stage he commanded through the back half of the year, tangibly executing his much-quoted “Industry Baby” bar, “I didn’t peak in high school, I’m still out here gettin’ cuter.” He didn’t miss a beat during a surprise performance of “First Class” at the 2022 Billboard Music Awards, and then his Generation Now boss DJ Drama welcomed him to the BET Awards stage to deliver “First Class” with Brandy (as well as Come Home deep cut “Poison” with Lil Wayne) in June. His headlining Come Home The Kids Miss You World Tour kicked off in July, upgrading to arenas from the more intimate 2021 Creme De La Creme Tour. Still, he wasn’t too busy to be there for his Louisville day-one EST Gee’s September single “Backstage Passes” and its Lyrical Lemonade video directed by Cole Bennett, who directed Harlow’s seminal 2020 “Whats Poppin” video.
Harlow’s mainstream glow-up hit its apex when he pulled double duty as host and musical guest on the Oct. 29 episode of Saturday Night Live. His magnetism radiated during a monologue aimed to again reclaim criticisms lobbed his way — comparing his signature curly hair and scraggly beard to Narnia’s Mr. Tumnus and joking about people who “have even gone as far as to accuse me of being white.” The vast exposure afforded him more opportunities to be transparent, and people couldn’t help falling in love with Harlow’s authenticity.
Harlow’s dad, Brian, “built houses with his hands,” and Harlow didn’t skip any steps in building his empire. En route to mastering his craft, he also mastered the art of manifestation: In January 2018, he played to an audience of seven in Madison, Wisconsin; next week, he’ll check off a bucket list item by playing Louisville’s KFC Yum! Center on Dec. 18. He named a Come Home track after Dua Lipa, telling The Breakfast Club he “admired her” then got her permission to release it over FaceTime. Seven months later, the Atlantic labelmates are reportedly romantically linked. Maybe Harlow doesn’t dictate how he captures the zeitgeist anymore – the final step of pop stardom initiation is to find your alleged love life in the tabloids, after all – but he’s never subscribed to outside noise.
The people rooting for the lovable underdog are complemented by the inevitable crowd watching for Harlow’s downfall. The relentless pursuit of power that Harlow detailed to Zane Lowe in May doesn’t figure to be his fatal flaw, because he thrives in sharing the wealth with his people — the day-ones, predecessors and peers. Harlow has always understood his place in hip-hop’s sprawling story, and if 2022 taught us anything, he won’t waste his turn with the pen.