The Number Ones: Drake’s “Way 2 Sexy” (Feat. Future & Young Thug)

In The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Alternative Number Ones on Mondays. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.

One week in April 1964, the Beatles pulled off an unthinkable pop feat: They held the top five spots on the Hot 100 all by themselves. This was the supernova flash of the Beatles' arrival, a time when some estimates claimed that 60% of the singles sold in the United States were Beatles songs. Even so, certain things had to fall into place to allow the Beatles to dominate like that.

The previous year, when Beatlemania first swept Europe, Capitol Records, the American division of the Beatles' label EMI, refused to release their records in the US. As a result, their manager Brian Epstein licensed a few Beatles records to American indies, and they didn't really sell at first. But once Capitol finally gave in and gave the Beatles a huge marketing push, those other labels were able to push their own Beatles singles. Capitol would've doubtless preferred to roll out those Beatles singles one at a time, but the feeding frenzy was on. That week, the Beatles' five singles all competed with one another, but all of them were bigger than anything else out there.

For 57 years, the Beatles' record stood unchallenged. Nobody else could possibly hold down the Hot 100's entire top five. If I remember right, the general assumption was that the Beatles' record would stand forever. Over time, though, Billboard changed its chart rules for the Hot 100. Album tracks could chart. Streaming figured in. So did YouTube views. Suddenly, it became possible to consider a future in which a single superstar could release a much-anticipated album and dominate the Hot 100 in the way the Beatles had once done. In September 2021, Drake dropped Certified Lover Boy, the album he'd been hyping up for months, and he did what only the Beatles had done before him. He did them one better, actually. That week, nine of the top 10 songs on the Hot 100 came from Drake.

Now: 2021 Drake was not as big as the 1964 Beatles. 2021 Drake was extremely big, but his popularity didn't indicate a tidal shift in popular culture or anything. He was just the guy who took advantage of the shifting rules and who successfully made himself the only show in town, at least for one week. But Drake always had that Beatles record in his sights. He wanted to dominate. He wanted to own the entire top five at once. This was important to him.

In 2019, Drake guested on his former adversary Meek Mill's single "Going Bad" and made a big claim: "I got more slaps than the Beatles, boy." ("Going Bad" peaked at #6. It's a 7.) A few months later, Drake landed his 30th top-10 hit, breaking another Beatles record, and he celebrated by getting the picture of the band crossing the street on the Abbey Road album cover tattooed on his arm. Two years after that, Drake opened Certified Lover Boy with "Champagne Party," a long and self-important song that kinda-sorta sampled the Beatles' "Michelle." (It's really a sample of a sample of a cover of "Michelle," but nevermind. The Beatles never released "Michelle" as a single in the US, so it never touched the Hot 100. The week that Drake conquered the top five, "Champagne Party" sat at #4. It's a 5.)

Thanks to the way that streaming has affected the Hot 100, it's now commonplace for a single artist to hold the entire top five. It happens all the time. In fact, the last person to pull it off was Drake, just last month. This was after Drake got absolutely rinsed in a rap mega-feud that future editions of this column will recount in great detail. People thought Drake was done. Drake was not done. Drake might never be done. It took him a while to build himself back up again, and he's probably still not back at the 2021 level, but he continues to do extremely well for himself. Get used to seeing his name in this column, since we're not anywhere near the end of his run yet — not in this column and possibly not in real life, either.

In any case, there are no Beatles references on the Drake song that topped the Hot 100 in the week that Drake first held the whole top five. Instead, the Drake song at #1 that historic week was a mega-powers team-up with two other huge rap stars, and it paid tribute to another important British pop group from a previous era: Right Said Fred.

It must be so easy to be one of the bald guys from Right Said Fred. Actually, that's apparently not true. In 2021, just a couple of weeks before "Way 2 Sexy" came out, Right Said Fred member Richard Fairbrass was reportedly hospitalized with COVID-19. The COVID vaccine was widely available by then, but Fairbrass refused to get the shot. Instead, he went to anti-lockdown protests. After getting out of the hospital, he continued to insist that the vaccine was a gigantic scam, and he and his brother and bandmate Fred have have apparently slid further into the deranged conspiracy-theorist zone. There are too many obvious jokes about this sad development — Far Right Said Fred, "too sexy for this jab," etc. — but let's just keep it moving.

It should be so easy to be one of the bald guys in Right Said Fred. Their goofy novelty song "I'm Too Sexy" became a giant novelty hit in 1991. A couple of their later singles were big in the UK hits, Right Said Fred were definitive one-hit wonders over here, which means that they didn't have to do all the work that it takes to maintain a pop career. Instead, they could just live on the royalties from "I'm Too Sexy," and those royalties must be heavy, since people keep sampling or interpolating the damn song. In 2017, Taylor Swift reached #1 with "Look What You Made Me Do," which apparently mimicked Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy" cadence enough that she gave those guys songwriting credits. Four years after that, Drake outright sampled "I'm Too Sexy" on yet another #1 hit.

"Way 2 Sexy" didn't start off with Drake but with Drake's regular collaborator Future, another vastly influential figure. In fact, the Right Said Fred sample was apparently Future's idea. Future has come up in this column many times, but "Way 2 Sexy" was his first actual #1 hit. That distinction was a long time coming. By the time Future finally scored a chart-topper, he'd appeared on a genuinely astonishing 125 Hot 100 hits. This is our first chance to cover Future, so it's time to get into the extremely abridged version of his story. (Don't worry, I'm not going to name all 125 previous hits.)

Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn grew up in Atlanta's Zone 6 neighborhood. (When Future was born, Lionel Richie's "All Night Long (All Night)" was the #1 song in America.) Future was raised by a single mother in a tough neighborhood, but he had a great family connection to the music world. His older cousin was the late Rico Wade, a member of Organized Noize, one of the greatest production teams ever assembled. (They've been in this column a few times.) The Dungeon Family, the wildly creative crew of artists like Outkast and the Goodie Mob who orbited Organized Noize, got their name from Wade's mom's basement, where Organized Noize built their studio. Future was literally family with the Dungeon Family. Soon enough, he literally became part of the Dungeon Family, too.

Organized Noize had their greatest success in the late '90s and early '00s, when Future was still a kid. When he first started rapping, Future went by the name Meathead, and I kind of wish he would've kept it. Young Future was part of Da Connect, a young rap group that Rico Wade mentored, which meant that he was a peripheral Dungeon Family member around the time that the Dungeon Family was breaking apart. Da Connect recorded one album called Dungeon Family 2nd Generation in 2003, and it included a solo Future track called "Belly Of Da Beast," but it never got a proper commercial release. Future did, however, get a songwriter credit on "Blueberry Yum Yum," a 2004 Organized Noize-produced track from Ludacris, an artist who's been in this column a few times.

When Future came to prominence years later, his music sounded nothing like what he'd made in his Meathead days. Instead, he became the master of the Auto-Tuned sing-rap croak, a hazy but emotive style that emerged from the wake of T-Pain's hitmaking run and Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak. Future had once been a straight-up Southern rapper, and his approach evolved into the zooted-out chanted melodies that made him famous. Still, I love that Future has that direct connection to the Dungeon Family, and I hear a lot of their swampy funk in his bluesy, guttural style.

Future doesn't often talk about the time between Da Connect and his reemergence as an Atlanta street-rap star. Given the connections between Atlanta's rap scene and the city's criminal underworld, there's probably a reason for that. Sometime around 2010, Future signed with Atlanta rapper Rocko's A1 label and released 1000, his first mixtape. (Rocko's highest-charting single is the 2013 Future/Rick Ross collab "U.O.E.N.O.," which peaked at #20 and then became notorious for a rapey Ross line.) In 2011, Future first landed on the Hot 100 when he slurred the hook on fellow Georgia rapper YC's single "Racks," which peaked at #42. That same year, Future released his own breakout single "Tony Montana," which just missed the Hot 100. Drake jumped on a "Tony Montana" remix, which started a long and sometimes-contentious relationship between those guys that continues to this day.

Future's big breakout happened during an explosive moment for Atlanta trap, when artists like Waka Flocka Flame and former Number Ones artist Gucci Mane were running wild. Future's sound was blurry and melodic, seductive and dangerous in equal measure. This Auto-Tune thing was relatively new and controversial. Future didn't just use it to chirp out nagging melodies. Instead, he burrowed deep into it, using that program's warping effect to build a sense of mystery around himself. He was a magnetic and slightly aloof force, and he recorded all the time, cranking out five mixtapes, including a full-length Gucci collab, in 2011 alone. That same year, he signed to Epic and appeared on the cover of The FADER.

In 2012, Future released his Astronaut Status mixtape and his proper debut album Pluto, two hypnotic full-lengths that absolutely hooked me. Those two titles hint at a certain space theme, and I guess Future's name does, too. It speaks to the unique feeling of free-floating haze that Future conjures. Since he came into the game, a million rappers have toyed with Auto-Tuned melodies, but few of them seem to exist within the flow of the music the way that Future does. There's effectively no difference between his singing and rapping. At his best, he lurches emotively through a soup of winding synths and 808 drums, rasping and howling his digitized blues before launching into sudden syncopated jags of verbiage. His seemingly improvised lyrics were often about drugs — selling them, the way his Atlanta peers all did, but also using them. That's how he became an avatar for a certain kind kind of hedonistic, psychedelic glamor.

Pluto marked Future's arrival as a prospective pop star, not just a regional mixtape figure. The album went platinum, and four of its singles reached the Hot 100 — none higher than the gasping love song "Turn On The Lights," which peaked at #50. In 2013, Future got engaged to former Number Ones artist Ciara, and the two of them collaborated on her #22 hit "Body Party." The couple had a baby literally named Future, but then they went through an ugly breakup that continued to reverberate and get uglier in the years ahead, even after Ciara married her current husband Russell Wilson.

During that stretch of time, Future became a rap fixture, showing up on about a million other people's songs and usually outshining them. "Bugatti," a #33 hit in 2013, technically belongs to DJ Khaled's protege Ace Hood, but that's really Future's song. It practically started riots when I saw Future perform it at SXSW that year. Future first made the top 10 around the same time, when he and Drake both appeared on Lil Wayne's "Love Me," a song that peaked at #9 and then went diamond. (It's an 8.)

In 2014, Future played around with less aqueous sounds on Honest, the sophomore album that was supposed to elevate him to superstar status. It didn't really work out that way. Honest is a solid album with some great songs, and it had a few minor hits, but it did not represent the way forward for Future. (The highest-charting single from Honest, the Pharrell/Pusha T collab "Move That Dope," peaked at #46. I love that song, but Future is practically a supporting player on his own track.)

Instead, Future reacted to the Ciara breakup by going dark, reinventing himself as a Xanax-numb supervillain on three mixtapes that collectively make up one of the greatest runs in rap history. Monster, Beast Mode, and 56 Nights came out in a six-month period across 2014 and 2015, and they captured a man on a self-destructive spree, drowning his pain in any substance he could find. Those tapes radiated danger and despair, but they also worked as party music if that was how you wanted to hear them. They had hits, too. "Fuck Up Some Commas," from Monster, eventually got a proper commercial release and peaked at #55. It's a generational song.

Future followed that mixtape run with DS2, my favorite album of 2015. Its biggest hit was "Where Ya At," a springy and addictive Drake collab that peaked at #28. Later that year, Drake and Future released What A Time To Be Alive, a collaborative mixtape that the two of them recorded together during a locked-in six-day session in Atlanta. Its anthemic mixtape track "Jumpman" reached #12 — Future's biggest hit as lead artist at the time. In 2016, Drake and Future headed out together on the Summer Sixteen tour, which was billed as a co-headliner but which was really Drake's show. The two made a strange kind of sense together, even though their styles and backgrounds were wildly different.

Future inspired a great many imitators during his golden run. The first time that I heard Desiigner's "Panda," I assumed it was Future. That's an extreme example, but Future's pilled-out melodic sensibility shifted rap's status quo. Everyone, Drake included, came to sound at least a little bit like Future. Young Thug, someone who has been in this column a couple of times, is an ultra-influential stylist in his own right, but he clearly learned a ton from Future, too. Thug and Future exchanged subtle disses a few times, but then they got past their issues and joined forces for the 2017 collaborative album Super Slimey. ("No Cap," its highest-charting track, peaked at #62.)

Future kept recording at a furious pace. In addition to Super Slimey, he put out collaborative projects with the late Juice WRLD and with former Number Ones artist Lil Uzi Vert. Diminishing returns quickly set in. Future ultimately didn't have much more to say. Soon enough, his music sounded less like it was about depression, more like it was just kind of depressing. But sometimes, Future could ride some uncanny current to make an immortal song. That's what he did on "Mask Off," the 2017 incantation that went viral and reached #5. For a while, I assumed that would be the biggest hit of Future's career. (It's a 10.)

I was wrong. Early in 2020, Future and Drake teamed up for "Life Is Good," a forgettable song that got a big rollout and debuted at #2 behind Roddy Ricch's "The Box," another hit that couldn't possibly exist without Future's influence. ("Life Is Good" is a 5.) A few months later, Drake, Future, and Young Thug all teamed up for the first time on "D4L," a song from Drake's Dark Lane Demo Tapes that never got a single push and still reached #19. Soon after that, Drake started teasing his big-deal album Certified Lover Boy. He shaved a stupid little heart into his hairline as part of the rollout. Just before the LP finally came out in September 2021, billboards appeared in the hometowns of all the album's guests, announcing that such-and-such would be on CLB. In Atlanta, one billboard trumpted that Future, Thug, Lil Baby, and 21 Savage were all on the record.

"Way 2 Sexy" was presented to the world as Drake's song, but he was actually the last of the three rappers who jumped on. It started off as a beat from Bryan "TM88" Simmons, an Atlanta trap producer with a deep discography, and from TM88's frequent collaborator Lesidney Ragland, known professionally as TooMuch. TM88 got his start with the Atlanta production collective 808 Mafia, and he was making beats for Future as far back as 2013 and for Drake as far back as 2015. TM88 co-produced Lil Uzi Vert's "XO Tour Llif3," a #7 hit in 2017, and he's probably still best-known for that song. (It's an 8.)

After "Way 2 Sexy" came out, TM88 told Billboard how the song came to be. TM88 and TooDope put the beat together during a session when they were banging out a lot of music, and then Future hit him up on Instagram, saying "Man, I’m going crazy right now. I need some beats," or words to that effect. TM88 arrived at the studio where Future was working, and he estimates that the two of them made "15 to 20 songs" in that one night alone. That's pretty typical for Atlanta rap, where a late-night recording session can lead to an album's worth of material when everybody's in the right zone.

That night, the "Way 2 Sexy" beat was the first one that TM88 pulled up, and Future started chanting his version of the Right Said Fred hook over it. He said he was too sexy for this syrup, your girl, this world, etc. TM88 says that Future told him to put the Right Said Fred sample at the beginning of the song: "I didn't hear it that night on the beat. Mind you, I heard it the next time I pulled up to the studio, and I was surprised. It was Future's idea to use the sample. He's a wizard, bro."

I don't hear the "I'm Too Sexy" sample on "Way 2 Sexy" as wizardry, but maybe it felt that way in the middle of a late-night recording session. The sample did make "Way 2 Sexy" stand out in the middle of an album as long and low-energy as Certified Lover Boy, though. TM88 and TooDope's beat was already a springy, energetic version of the regular Atlanta trap model, its 808 hits and floaty synth-bloops hitting with a tiny bit more bounce. Future's version of the Right Said Fred hook is a meaningless string of clichés, but at least he's having fun. On his verse, Future singsong-mutters about money and drugs and girls, hitting a hypnotic cadence but only coming up with one memorable flex ("did a 360 windmill when I left the scene").

That night, after Future recorded his part over TM88's beat, Young Thug pulled up to the recording studio and laid down his own verse. Much like Future, Thug says nothing of any substance on "Way 2 Sexy." (His most memorable lyric is probably "molest me.") Much like Future, Thug still uses the song as a stylistic showcase, rapping his verse in a garbled, rushed lilt. He keeps his tone soft and chiffon, almost whispering, doing birdlike chirps as ad-libs. Even more than Future, Thug always sounded like he was drifting off somewhere in space, disregarding all physical laws and repeating sounds that came to him in dreams. Thug's verse isn't anywhere near his best work, but I think he taps deepest into the song's core.

Drake jumped on "Way 2 Sexy" at some unspecified later date and then took the song for his own album; TM88 says that was probably Future's plan the whole time. I really don't like Drake's opening verse. He sounds like he's really stuck on autopilot, and he can't cruise on the same weirdo charisma as his two collaborators. Also, he just sounds like an asshole: "You a turnt up little thotty, ain't no wife about it/ I'ma fuck her friends and send her back to metro housing." I like the bit where Drake brags that he almost swallowed a $60,000 diamond when it popped off his grill, and I like how he snaps to attention mid-verse. But Drake's general fuckboy toxicity was getting really, really old by the time "Way 2 Sexy" came out. Even after reaching his mid-thirties and becoming a dad, Drake seemed mired in a permanent state of arrested development. All three guys on "Way 2 Sexy" are on total autopilot, but Drake's version of autopilot is way less cool than the other two.

I still liked "Way 2 Sexy" when it first came out, if only because it interrupted the punishing grandeur of Certified Lover Boy. Drake was in the too-big-to-fail stage of his superstardom. He didn't seem to have any more ideas, and "Way 2 Sexy" jumped out because it at least brought some level of playfulness. Drake doubled down on that impression with the song's video. For that clip, veteran rap director Dave Meyers put Drake in over-the-top goofy scenarios. Drake winks at the camera while working out in a gym full of hot women. He struts down the Coney Island beach with a fake pot belly and gray in his hair. He dresses up as Rambo, firing off a machine gun while CGI shit blows up around him. The only genuinely funny part happens when Drake, Future, Thug, and NBA champ Kawhi Leonard reenact a Boyz II Men video in the middle of a desert, with Leonard looking confused as to why he's there. Like a lot of Drake videos, the whole thing was clear meme-bait. I guess it worked well enough. It wasn't boring, anyway.

Certified Lover Boy came out just as people got vaccinated and the world started to open up again, and its release felt like a real event. At the time, Drake was in the middle of a bitchy but unserious public feud with mid-spiral Kanye West, someone who has been in this column many times and who will make a surprising return. For a minute, Certified Lover Boy and West's Donda were scheduled to come out on the same day. Instead, Donda arrived a week earlier and enjoyed the biggest opening week of any album in 2021 to that point. A few days later, CLB came out and crushed Donda, almost tripling its first-week tally and racking up the biggest sales/streaming week of any album since Taylor Swift's Folklore one year earlier.

Drake sucked up all the attention in the room with stunts like the Damien Hirst-designed Certified Lover Boy cover art with the pregnant-lady emojis. The album ultimately went triple platinum and kept his hit-streak going. "Way 2 Sexy" interrupted the #1 reign of the Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber's "Stay," and it lingered in the top 10 for a couple of months. But I don't think of "Way 2 Sexy" as a defining song of that summer or anything. In fact, of all the CLB tracks that debuted in the top 10, the only song that actually rose in later weeks was my favorite song on the record: "Knife Talk," Drake's whispery and menacing team-up with 21 Savage and Memphis underground legend Project Pat. ("Knife Talk" peaked at #4. It's a 9. Drake and 21 Savage will appear together in this column.)

This column is already long as hell, and Drake and Future will both appear in later editions, both separately and together. So I'm not going to get into what the two of them did after "Way 2 Sexy," except to note that the phrase "certified lover boy" hits different now after another rapper used it as a punchline setup in a Drake diss that'll appear in a future column. But this is probably our last time checking in with Young Thug, a man whose career path took some dramatic forks. Shortly after "Way 2 Sexy," Thug released Punk, an album with a bunch of big-name collaborations that debuted at #1. (Its biggest hit, the Drake/Travis Scott collab "Bubbly," peaked at #20.) Early in 2022, Thug and Future both appeared on "Pushin P," a #7 hit from Thug's protege Gunna. (It's an 8.) Thug and Gunna appeared to be a tight creative unit that would stay on top for a long time. That's not what happened.

In May 2022, police arrested Young Thug, Gunna, and 26 alleged associates on RICO gang charges. Fulton County DA Fani Willis claimed that YSL, Thug's label and rap crew, was really a dangerous street gang that was supported by Thug's music career. She sought to admit things like song lyrics and Instagram posts as evidence. Thug and his co-defendants were denied bond. After about six months, Gunna took a plea deal. He didn't incriminate anyone else in his testimony, but Thug and many of his Atlanta rap peers ostracized Gunna, who has had to deal with snitching accusations ever since. Gunna, still signed to Thug's label, has carried on with a quietly successful career anyway. (Gunna's two highest-charting singles, the 2018 Lil Baby collab "Drip Too Hard" and the 2023 solo track "FukUMean," both peaked at #4. "Drip Too Hard" is a 10, and "FukUMean" is a 9.)

Young Thug, on the other hand, remained locked up for the next two and a half years. His case stretched out endlessly, becoming the longest criminal trial in Georgia history. While he was incarcerated, Thug dropped the cobbled-together 2023 album Business Is Business and reached #19 with the Drake collab "Oh U Went." In 2024, Thug was finally released from jail after he accepted an onerous set of probation stipulations — he can't return to Atlanta for 10 years, for instance — and agreed to a guilty plea with time served.

At the beginning of last year, Thug made his big return alongside Lil Baby and Future on "Dum, Dumb And Dumber," a pretty good song that peaked at #16. Months after that, Thug finally released the comeback album UY Scuti, and I thought it had no spark at all. Thug sounded depleted and distracted, which is both understandable and disappointing. Its release was overshadowed by a bunch of leaked phone calls from jail, in which Thug talked a lot of shit about many of his rap-star peers. ("Ninja," the highest-charting track on UY Scuti, peaked at #15. Weird fucking song. Uncomfortable.)

Young Thug's career is in a strange place now. Rap itself is in a strange place. A few big stars, Drake among them, can make noisy hits on sheer force of will, but even those stars don't seem as unimpeachable as they did a few years ago. Thug has had bigger problems than the twists and turns of popular taste. I hope he deals with them, and I hope he makes great music again, though I have a hard time imagining what form that could take. In any case, Thug is an active recording artist once again. Maybe he'll even return to this column one day. But maybe not. Maybe he's too sexy for that.

GRADE: 5/10

BONUS BEATS: I don't know much about Adin Ross, a manosphere influencer type who apparently got famous streaming video games online, and I don't really want to know more than I do. He accidentally helped get his friend Andrew Tate arrested for trying to flee Romania while Tate was facing rape and human trafficking charges? He had Donald Trump on his stream and gifted him a Tesla? He and Drake keep promoting a sketchy gambling site together? Jeez. This guy sucks. I'm going to stop reading about him right now. But I'm light on "Way 2 Sexy" Bonus Beat options, and the best of them unfortunately involves Ross. I guess Ross used to have rappers freestyle on his stream. In 2021, Cordae appeared on that stream and put on a fucking clinic over the "Way 2 Sexy" beat. He just went nuts on this thing. Here's the video:

(Cordae's highest-charting single, the posthumous 2023 Juice WRLD collab "Doomsday," peaked at #58.)

The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. You're not too sexy to buy it.