How Long Was See You Again Number 1
Why Is Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth's "See You Again" No. one?
Still from the video for "See You Again"
"Every picture in every cinema is about death," a wise human being once said. "Death sells."
Of course, Spinal Tap director Ian Faith was saying this almost an anthology with a none-more-blackness cover, featuring songs with titles like "Hell Hole." Simply as history has shown time and again, if yous combine death with a hopeful tune, music fans will flock to it in large numbers. Bring that elegiac tune to movie screens, and it'south a commercial juggernaut. (That Ian—he may not accept fussed over the divergence between inches and anxiety, merely when it came to selling records, the homo was a seer.)
Death and cinema are the key reasons "See You Again" by Wiz Khalifa featuring Charlie Puth is the No. 1 vocal on Billboard'south flagship Hot 100 chart. In add-on to spending a second week on acme here in America (a streak it's likely to extend), "See" is No. 1 in more than a dozen countries worldwide, mirroring the global blockbuster movie that birthed the song, Furious vii. Billion-dollar-generating movies don't always spawn world-conquering No. 1 hits. (Does anybody remember "I See You (Theme from Avatar)" by Leona Lewis?) But Khalifa's and Puth's maudlin piano-and-rap ballad is not only riding the Furious box-part wave. It's serving as a take-home souvenir of the movie'due south poignant goodbye to late histrion Paul Walker.
Walker, a co-lead in six of the seven Fast and Furious movies, is given a long sendoff at the shut of Furious seven. The Lifetime-channel-worthy sequence between Walker and costar Vin Diesel is captured, almost in toto, in the "See You Again" music video. One doesn't typically go to a muscle-car movie for a good cry, but a large reason Furious 7 is not just a blockbuster simply the biggest flick in the franchise to date is that ending: Diesel has compared the emotional finale, not without reason, to Titanic, and "Run across You Again" is its "My Center Will Go along"—a song direct connected to the film's heartrending denouement that the public, in plough, decides it must own.
That's certainly how the song became such a smash hither in America—Billboard reports that consumers got out ahead of radio programmers. The song started at the Hot 100'south everyman rung in late March, but immediately later Furious 7 hit U.S. screens in early April, "Run into" made a huge spring into the Top 10, fueled by digital downloads. After the movie had been in theaters more than a week, those sales virtually tripled—"Encounter" shifted near a half-meg downloads in a calendar week, the highest total for a song since Taylor Swift's "Blank Infinite" belatedly terminal year—and the April 6 premiere of the "See" music video generated an eye-popping 25 million weekly YouTube views. Those 2 data points alone fabricated the song's rise to the penthouse a foregone conclusion, fifty-fifty every bit the song was simply starting to generate airplay.
"Run into You Again" is now dominating multiple Billboard charts. None of the prior Fast and Furious movies generated a hit soundtrack album, but final week the Furious seven soundtrack topped the Billboard 200 album nautical chart, largely because of "See." Over on the Hot 100, "Meet" didn't just motor into the meridian slot—it auto-jumped from No. 10 to the top. With that out-of-nowhere move, Wiz and Puth became giant-killers: "Meet" ejected "Uptown Funk!" past Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars later on an epic chart-topping run, one that other hits this winter proved unable to overcome—singles by Hozier, Ed Sheeran, and Maroon five all stalled at No. 2.
(Seriously, for those wondering why this is my first "Why Is This Song No. one?" post since early January, it's because "Uptown Funk!" wound upwards sitting in Billboard's top slot for more than than three months. Before "See You Again" came barreling in, at that place was speculation that "Funk!" might outlast "Ane Sweet Day," Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men'south melisma-rific 1995–96 single that holds the all-time record with 16 weeks at No. 1. Instead, with xiv weeks on top, "Funk!" settles into a seven-mode tie for 2nd place in the register of Hot 100 history. I like "Uptown Funk!" simply homo—that'due south the concluding time I wish aloud for a song to "blanket every corner of the radio." Fourteen weeks was a little much, America.)
Given all of the above data points—the movie connection, the box part, the outpouring of emotion over the untimely death of Walker—you might think it doesn't matter what "See Y'all Once again" sounds like. Simply that sells the song short. What makes "See" a schlock tour de force—not a bully or even a very good song, just a showcase of craft—is the savvy style it takes the feeling surrounding a specific popular-civilization effect and expands it into all-purpose message about loss. With its lyrics nearly "family," its unsubtle allusions to an afterlife ("permit the light guide your way … I'll tell you lot all about it when I meet you again"), and the mournful tune from featured performer Puth—an ivory-tinkling, falsetto-singing hybrid of Ben Folds and Adam Levine—"Encounter You Over again" fulfills the basic man impulse to turn tragedy and loss into kitsch. It's the commemorative ix/xi golf ball or blackness-velvet Elvis painting of 2015 hits.
Hip-hop, in particular, has a decades-long history of mourning the dead, often movingly. As a cascade-i-out canticle led by a rapper, "See You Once again" has at least two obvious antecedents among prior U.South. nautical chart-toppers, both of them mid-'90s singles: "Tha Crossroads" past Cleveland rap troupe Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, and "I'll Exist Missing You" past Sean Combs aka Puff Daddy (every bit he was known then) with Faith Evans and 112. The former, an eight-week No. 1 in the bound of 1996, commemorated several of the Bones' fallen street comrades simply also NWA rapper Eazy-E, who signed the group to his Ruthless label before dying of AIDS in 1995. The latter, which spent eleven weeks—most all of summer 1997—atop the Hot 100, found Puffy riding a sample of the Police's "Every Breath You Accept" to commemorate his mentorship and friendship with the just-deceased Christopher Wallace, aka The Notorious B.I.G.
It's tempting to connect "See You lot Once more" to these dead-homies chestnuts. What they all have in common is a sweet, almost churchy approach to melody: the Bone Thugs rhyming in "Crossroads" almost how they "pray, every 24-hour interval, every day"; widow Religion Evans singing mournfully on "Missing," with a gospel ache, for her former hubby; the hymn-like pianoforte lines that anchor "Meet." But likewise the fact that Paul Walker, as a song honoree, makes a strange analog to Eazy-Eastward or Biggie (I'm having a hard time picturing anyone pouring out a 40-oz. for a genre-motion-picture show histrion), the electric current hit is also much less hip-hop-centric than its predecessors. "Crossroads" and "Missing" were both unabashedly corny and pop-friendly, but at their core they were well-nigh hip-hop's backstory—its culture, its beefs, its self-destructive impulses. "Meet You Again" is about decease in the abstract, and specifically, it'southward about the expiry of a celebrity. Amid mid-to-late '90s hits (a large menstruation for death on the Hot 100), "See" is much closer to Elton John's "Candle in the Wind 1997"—Diana, Princess of Wales, remains the ultimate glory angel—or the aforementioned 1998 blast "My Centre Will Go On" by Celine Dion, the quintessential mourn-you-till-I-join-you popular song.
Another reason "Meet You Over again" feels less tied to the lineage of hip-hop elegies is the aught-similar presence of its nominal lead performer, Wiz Khalifa. Requite the homo credit: Information technology's hard in the 2010s for a rapper, any rapper, to top the pop-and-dance-axial Hot 100, and in the last five years Khalifa has done it twice. Wiz beginning rang the bong with "Black and Yellow," a commemoration of his Pittsburgh hometown that spent a single week at No. 1 in February 2011 thanks to the Steelers reaching Super Basin XLV. Since and so, Khalifa has built a reputation equally the get-to stoner rapper and a solid career in hip-hop's second tier; he's scored a couple more Top ten hits and, last year, his offset No. i album, Blacc Hollywood.
At present, with "See You Once again," Wiz is the first rapper to front a Hot 100 chart-topper since Eminem did information technology with "The Monster" in belatedly 2013; and the kickoff rapper of color to exercise and so since Flo Rida scored a No. 1 with "Whistle" in summer 2012. The latter MC makes for a particularly apt comparing—in much of his oeuvre only specially on "Run into," Khalifa more closely resembles radio-rappers like Flo Rida (whom Jody Rosen memorably chosen "a huge hitmaker with no discernable charisma") or the pop-centric B.o.B. than, say, Kendrick Lamar or J. Cole. Khalifa'southward biggest hits tend to practice improve on the Hot 100 than on Billboard'southward R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart. And both of his ii pop chart-toppers have been propelled by massive cultural 10-factors—the Super Bowl with "Blackness and Xanthous," a smash movie with "See." He may not want to exist chosen a "stoner rapper" anymore, but Khalifa may accept to settle for the title of "event rapper."
Notwithstanding from the video for "See You Again"
Khalifa does get a few of the song's most memorable lines, including the refrain, "How could we not talk well-nigh family when family'due south all that we got?" and the flick-recalling "… now you gonna exist with me for the last ride." But Charlie Puth's piano-and-song segments are given a more than central showcase in the mix—his loftier-pitched "Oo-oo-OOH-oo-OOH" is arguably the song's virtually memorable claw—and serve equally the core of the its nautical chart-acquisition prowess. Indeed, in that location'due south already a rap-free mix of "See Y'all Again" that focuses on Puth's segments and excises Khalifa, not unlike the popular radio edit of 2013's "Holy Grail" that centered on guest vocaliser Justin Timberlake instead of Jay Z. Given recent radio tendencies, don't be surprised if the all-Puth version of "Run into" is the ane you hear months from now on developed-contemporary stations—more than six years after Jay Z'due south "Empire State of Mind" was a hit, I'k withal hearing the Alicia Keys–only mix in the staff of life alley.
This brings up the question of how long a shadow "See You Again" will have after 2015, when the public'due south warm fuzzies over Paul Walker fade and the first Walker-less movie—Fast eight, or Ocho Furious, or whatsoever it's called—is in theaters. The song may well spend months atop the Hot 100 this year, but that doesn't guarantee we'll be hearing this on the radio in 2019.
In and of themselves, expiry-related blockbuster songs have pocket-size lifespans. "Tha Crossroads" receives scant recurrent radio play, and "I'll Be Missing You," despite spending more weeks at No. i than "Every Breath You Accept," certainly hasn't had the latter'southward gargantuan footprint. Even Elton's Diana tribute—reportedly i of the two biggest-selling singles of all fourth dimension, after "White Christmas"—receives few spins today. On the other hand, we are still living in a "My Heart Will Get On" world; inside three notes of that opening can whistle, if you lot're not running screaming from the room, you are probably swooning with memories of Jack and Rose.
And then what is "See You Again," legacy-wise—a death song or a film song? Five years from now, if the sound of Charlie Puth'due south falsetto makes you picture show two cars diverging, Robert Frost–style, we'll accept to refine Ian Faith's theory: Death sells … but flick death is immortal.
Read more from Why Is This Song No. i?:
- "Uptown Funk" Is to R&B What "Smells Similar Teen Spirit" Was to Punk
- Taylor Swift May Never Exist This Popular Once more. Here'due south Why.
Source: https://slate.com/culture/2015/04/wiz-khalifa-and-charlie-puths-see-you-again-is-no-1-on-the-billboard-hot-100-chart-why-the-history-of-hip-hop-elegies.html