Still, Polo and Bankz didn’t stop their extracurricular collaborations. That hit established Polo’s singable flow, but over more traditional, radio-friendly trap beats. By the time the album arrived in June 2019, Polo had already scored a serious pop and rap radio hit, “ Pop Out” featuring Lil Tjay (No. 11 Hot 100, No. 7 R&B/HH Airplay). In December 2018, the pair dropped an acoustic mini-version of Polo G’s future studio track “ Battle Cry” on YouTube that went viral and set up his major-label debut Die a Legend. Three decades after LL Cool J knocked ’em out rustic-style on MTV Unplugged, the very phrase “acoustic hip-hop” no longer seems like a novelty or an oxymoron. Bankz’s delicately plucked style was ideal for the moody era of trap and SoundCloud rap, but he was equally at home jamming behind old-school rappity-rap dudes like Fat Joe. Bankz then spent the next five years becoming the uke-playing Zelig figure of hip-hop- shredding with scores of rappers, from Choppa to Chance the Rapper, and doing for his instrument what the self-proclaimed “hip-hop violinist” Miri Ben-Ari had done for the fiddle a decade earlier. On his very first day as a ukuleleist, he shot a video of himself playing a Snoop Dogg song, posted it online, and got an approving repost from Snoop himself. Sometime in the mid-’10s, while living at a friend’s house, Bankz picked up a ukulele lying in the garage and found he had a knack for it. Bankz was a childhood violinist and high school heavy metal guitarist before he settled on the instrument that’s made him famous. It’s played by Swiss-born, San Francisco–based Einer Bankz, a multi-instrumentalist and rap superfan. That uke is pivotal to “Rapstar’s” origin story. Send me updates about Slate special offers. But Polo doubles down on the approach: It doesn’t get much gentler than a ukulele. Polo replicates DaBaby’s whole syncopated-singing-over-acoustic-plucking trip. It’s the closest thing to a template for Polo G’s “Rapstar” (at last, someone finally changed the R genre in the title). DaBaby and Ricch’s “Rockstar,” Billboard’s official 2020 Song of Summer, was the most bewitching of the bunch, built out of a moody guitar arpeggio gentle enough for a country record. Malone’s and DaBaby’s chart-toppers were especially downbeat, pairing a seemingly party-hearty title with morose melodies and burnt-out lyrics. And even if we toss out Nickelback’s straight-up rock song, the other three hits are essentially brooding trap-pop songs, each more sing-songy than the last. These last two “Rockstar”s were No. 1 hits in 20, respectively. Hang on … yet another song about a “Rstar”? Haven’t we been here before-like, really recently? There have been no less than four Top 10 hits in the past 15 years about wanting to be a “Rockstar”-from Nickelback, the Shop Boyz (they wanted to “Party Like” one), Post Malone featuring 21 Savage and, just last year, DaBaby featuring Roddy Ricch. In January 1972, after the episode aired, NBC was flooded with so many requests for the nonexistent record, “ If You Leave Me Tonight I’ll Cry,” that the song was completed by its moonlighting songwriters and recorded and released by Wallace, becoming his only country No. 1 hit eight months later. It was just a snippet of a track, penned expressly by the show’s script editor and music director to play on repeat from a haunted jukebox. An even better example of transforming a fragment into a hit came two years later: Jerry Wallace, a pop-turned-country singer, was hired by the showrunners for TV’s Night Gallery, an early-’70s supernatural-tales series from Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, to record a piece of a faux country record. 4, 1970) as far back as 1968, and that fans heard Page playing the riff onstage before it became a fully written song on 1969’s Led Zeppelin II (thanks to the addition of some raunchy lyrics that Robert Plant nicked from bluesman Willie Dixon). Zep bassist John Paul Jones has claimed that the band’s guitar god Jimmy Page had the immortal riff for their biggest-ever pop hit ( No. Imagine if TikTok had existed in the late ’60s: Maybe Led Zeppelin’s “ Whole Lotta Love” would’ve been a hit sooner.
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