Some Kind of Chart Superman: Soulja Boy Leads Hot 100, Calls All Comers Filthy Names

Ed. note: Chris “dennisobell” Molanphy, our resident chart guru, looks at the upward, downward, and lack of movement on the Billboard Hot 100 in the latest installment of “100 And Single”:

Are you sick of hearing Soulja Boy’s insidious little steel-drum beat leak out of cars rolling down your block? Hope not, because he isn’t going anywhere. “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” continues to rule Billboard‘s Hot 100, and it actually earns a bullet in its fifth week at No. 1. Which means it’s still growing in both airplay and sales–it’s radio’s most-played song for a second week, and it retakes the top spot in digital sales from Britney Spears’s faltering “Gimme More.” She and Kanye West are probably secretly wishing for the Bush Administration to re-institute the draft so that this kid gets shipped off when he finally turns 18.

Doubling Up, with a Side of Pain: The stasis in the top three belies the more interesting churn further down the chart. The top 10, in particular, sports a pair of hip-hop stars who are each credited on a pair of hits. Amazingly, neither one of them is T-Pain, but he does figure into this.

Timbaland’s diversification gambit pays off, as “Apologize,” his bid to expand into alt-pop balladry, overtakes his other top five hit, “The Way I Are.” The two singles off Shock Value are now back-to-back at Nos. 4 and 5. Love it or hate it, “Apologize” by all rights should be credited to “featured” act OneRepublic, the Colorado five-piece that wrote and first recorded the song before letting Timba remix it for his album; they’re preparing a different version for their forthcoming debut. With a massive boost of airplay this week, the sticky-sweet “Apologize” is emerging as the “Hey There Delilah” of the fall; at this rate, it’ll top the chart by Thanksgiving and be widely despised by everyone you know before Christmas.

The other top 10 denizen benefiting from radio love is Kanye West, who pairs his still-hot “Stronger” at No. 2 with the revived “Good Life,” which reverses last week’s fall and shoots eight spots to No. 10. As we predicted last week, airplay is just now kicking in on West’s second (third, if you count pre-release leak “Can’t Tell Me Nothing”) hit from Graduation. Actually, it’s more than kicking in: Billboard reports that “Good Life” saw “an increase of 25 million audience impressions, the largest of the year.” For those of you new to such industry gobbledygook, “impressions” is a measurement that (roughly) approximates a song’s radio listeners by multiplying plays on each station by the number of listeners for that station, as estimated by Arbitron ratings. And 25 million impressions is a big gain, as a No. 1 hit usually garners more than 100 million or, when it’s massive, 200 million impressions. Which means that “Good Life” in a single week garnered about one-eighth to one-fourth the airplay it’ll need if it’s destined to be a chart-topper.

The guy featured on Kanye’s newest Top 10 hit adds to his ridiculously successful year. Yup, T-Pain’s back, Vocodering his way through another rising hit and prolonging his improbable residency in the winner’s circle. With another of T’s featured spots moving toward the Top 10–Baby Bash’s “Cyclone,” up four places to No. 13–and Chris Brown’s own T-supported track, “Kiss Kiss,” leaping 20 spots into the Top 40, brace yourselves for a Painful holiday season.

We Say Let Ne-Yo Duet with Feist: Briefly, here’s some other stuff we saw coming last week. Justin Timberlake’s “Until the End of Time” picks up Beyoncé as a duet partner and perks up on the chart, moving 13 spaces into the Top 30. In fact, it’s a good week all ’round for boudoir duets, as Rihanna’s “Hate That I Love You,” featuring Ne-Yo, leaps into the Top 20 from No. 26–and for the first time all year, homegirl has a chart hit bigger than “Umbrella.” (In the time it’s taken that spring-and-summer smash to fall to No. 26, Rihanna’s been through a whole ‘nother hit, the already-gone “Shut Up and Drive,” which peaked at a surprisingly tepid No. 15.)

I know you folks with cool Adult Album Alternative stations in your nabes think it’s a smash, but Feist’s “1, 2, 3, 4” shows this week just how light on airplay and vulnerable to the vagaries of iTunes it is–it returns to almost exactly the same spot it was in two weeks ago (No. 27) after its rise to No. 8 last week. The culprit? A 48% decline in digital downloads. The song is still in iTunes’ Top 10, but with no major-market Top 40, adult-contemporary or alt-rock airplay to back it up, that sizable sales drop proves fatal. Time to pitch the song to Microsoft for a Zune ad?

Ingrid Who? The latest beneficiary of Feist’s TV-fueled, all-sales-no-airplay model is Ingrid Michaelson, a Staten Island-based (holla, Wu fans!) singer-songwriter whose “The Way I Am” shoots 43 places into the Top 40. Already a Top 10 iTunes track, Michaelson’s hey-Timbaland-at-least-I-understand-subject-verb-agreement tune got a triple-hit of TV love this month, from Grey’s Anatomy (ask the Fray how that show worked out for them), Last Call with Carson Daly and now an Old Navy commercial. No airplay to speak of yet, but if Old Navy keeps pumping that ad, digital sales should keep her afloat long enough for radio program directors to catch on.

Stuff to Watch: Next week, let us all light candles, hold hands and chant that, yea, the tyranny of Fergie will cease; the deathless “Big Girls Don’t Cry” falls a big-for-her four spots to No. 9 and could finally exit the Top 10 soon. As for the top of the chart, nobody’s going to stop Soulja Boy in the next seven days now that Britney has wilted. So the ladies to watch down the line are newbie Colbie Caillat, whose aptly titled “Bubbly” keeps creeping toward the top five; and relatively old lady Alicia Keys, who’s back in the top 10 for the first time in nearly three years with “No One.” The latter is catching on faster at R&B radio than Top 40, but if pop and A/C radio bring up the rear, and her iTunes sales keep growing (she’s up 23% this week), the mass-appeal Keys could be back on top pretty soon. In the meantime, watch “Apologize”–thanks to fast gains in both sales and airplay, that song’s most likely, near-term, to bring Soulja to a halt.

The top 20, with last week’s position and total weeks charted in parentheses: 1. Soulja Boy, “Crank That (Soulja Boy), Soulja Boy Tell’em” (LW No. 1, 13 weeks) 2. Kanye West, “Stronger” (LW No. 2, 11 weeks) 3. Britney Spears, “Gimme More” (LW No. 3, 5 weeks) 4. Timbaland feat. OneRepublic, “Apologize” (LW No. 6, 10 weeks) 5. Timbaland feat. Keri Hilson & D.O.E., “The Way I Are” (LW No. 4, 19 weeks) 6. J. Holiday, “Bed” (LW No. 7, 12 weeks) 7. Colbie Caillat, “Bubbly” (LW No. 10, 15 weeks) 8. Alicia Keys, “No One” (LW No. 12, 5 weeks) 9. Fergie, “Big Girls Don’t Cry” (LW No. 5, 25 weeks) 10. Kanye West feat. T-Pain, “Good Life” (LW No. 18, 4 weeks) 11. 50 Cent feat. Justin Timberlake & Timbaland, “Ayo Technology” (LW No. 13, 9 weeks) 12. Nickelback, “Rockstar” (LW No. 11, 35 weeks) 13. Baby Bash feat. T-Pain, “Cyclone” (LW No. 17, 11 weeks) 14. Pink, “Who Knew” (LW No. 14, 18 weeks) 15. matchbox twenty, “How Far We’ve Come” (LW No. 15, 6 weeks) 16. Keyshia Cole feat. Missy Elliott & Lil Kim, “Let It Go” (LW No. 9, 16 weeks) 17. Plies feat. T-Pain, “Shawty” (LW No. 16, 17 weeks) 18. Rihanna feat. Ne-Yo, “Hate That I Love You” (LW No. 26, 6 weeks) 19. Justin Timberlake, “LoveStoned” (LW No. 20, 14 weeks) 20. Plain White T’s, “Hey There Delilah” (LW No. 22, 28 weeks)