Riffiter

Sticky is the loudest thing on CHROMAKOPIA and the most fun. GloRilla, Sexyy Red and Lil Wayne each get a turn, and Tyler lets them run the room instead of crowding them out. The beat is mostly drums and chanting, made for a stadium, so it made sense to hear it this week over Barcelona playing El Clásico with his GOLF logo on the chest. Lil Wayne's verse is the one I keep going back to. It isn't the deepest song on the album, that is still Like Him, but it is the one that gets people moving.

Bad and Boujee is built on very little. Metro Boomin's beat barely moves, the hook leaves space around every line, and the song opens on "Raindrop, drop top," which by December 2016 was all over every timeline. That emptiness is the trick: one line could work as a joke and a chorus at the same time. Lil Uzi Vert's verse is the loosest thing on it and the most fun. At almost six minutes it runs long, and the last stretch adds nothing the first two minutes didn't already say. The chart story is funny now. Billboard counted it to No. 1 three days before Donald Glover called it the best song ever.

Hey There Delilah never tries to be big. One acoustic guitar, a voice that sounds recorded in a bedroom, and a chorus that is mostly a sigh. The backstory makes it stranger and better: Tom Higgenson barely knew Delilah DiCrescenzo when he wrote it, so the long-distance romance is a daydream about a girl he met in Chicago one summer. You can hear that. The lines about Times Square and paying the bills with a guitar are about him, not her. Some of it is corny, and the "what you do to me" hook goes round a few times too many, but the first verse still hits the way it did in 2007.

Reasonable Doubt sounds like a guy who already knows how the story ends. Jay-Z was 26, putting it out on his own label in 1996, and he raps about money like it's a chess problem, not a fantasy. Can't Knock the Hustle opens with Mary J. Blige over a beat that never raises its voice, and the album holds that temperature the whole way. Dead Presidents II and Feelin' It are the peaks for me. A couple of the skits have not aged well, and the middle sags for a few tracks. Thirty years later he called it the first step on the road to the Super Bowl halftime stage. Played again this week, the confiden

Black Beatles barely moves, and that is the point. Mike Will's beat drifts, Swae Lee floats over it, and the hook says "me and Paul McCartney related" like a dare. On November 10, 2016 McCartney took it, frozen by his piano with the song playing. A class in Jacksonville had started the Mannequin Challenge two weeks earlier, and a song sitting at No. 16 went to No. 1 and ended Closer's 12 weeks on top. Slim Jxmmi's verse is the weak spot, more filler than punch, and Gucci Mane sounds half awake in a way that somehow fits. Ten years on, it still sounds like standing still on purpose.