The 2020s File Feature
Be Like That
Be Like That: Kane Brown, Swae Lee, Khalid, and the Cross-Genre Chart Climb of 2020 "Be Like That" arrived in the summer of 2020 as one of the more improbabl…
01 The Story
Be Like That: Kane Brown, Swae Lee, Khalid, and the Cross-Genre Chart Climb of 2020
"Be Like That" arrived in the summer of 2020 as one of the more improbable chart successes of a year defined by disruption and uncertainty. Featuring three artists from demonstrably different musical traditions, the track wove together country, R&B, and pop sensibilities into a blend that found genuine commercial traction across multiple formats. The song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on July 25, 2020, at number 73, and spent a remarkable 21 weeks on the chart, eventually reaching its peak of number 19 during the week of November 7, 2020. The gradual ascent, taking more than three months to reach peak position, was characteristic of songs that built their audience through streaming accumulation rather than radio impact alone.
Kane Brown was born October 21, 1993, in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, and his biography encapsulates several of the tensions and transitions that define contemporary country music. Raised by a single mother who struggled with financial instability, Brown spent portions of his childhood in various parts of the South, absorbing musical influences that included hip-hop and R&B alongside country radio. He gained initial exposure through Facebook video posts of cover songs that went viral in 2015 and 2016, building an organic fanbase of more than one million social media followers before signing a major label deal. His racial identity, as a Black and multiracial artist in a historically white-dominated format, made his mainstream country success both commercially significant and culturally complex.
Swae Lee, born Khalif Malik Ibn Shamon Brown on July 7, 1993, in Inglewood, California, had risen to prominence as one half of the hip-hop duo Rae Sremmurd alongside his brother Slim Jxmmi. His melodic sensibility and falsetto-driven vocal approach made him one of the more distinctive voices in the post-trap landscape, and his solo collaborations with artists ranging across genres demonstrated his adaptability. Khalid, born Khalid Donnel Robinson on February 8, 2000, in Fort Stewart, Georgia, had emerged in 2017 with a sound that blended indie-pop, R&B, and youth-oriented emotional directness. By 2020, he was one of the most-recognized voices among younger music consumers and had already accumulated multiple chart hits and Grammy nominations.
The production of "Be Like That" was crafted to emphasize melodic continuity across the three vocalists' different stylistic registers. The track's arrangement draws on acoustic elements associated with country music, including strummed guitars and open sonic spaces, while incorporating the harmonic language and rhythmic patterns more typical of contemporary R&B and pop. The result is a production that resists easy genre categorization, a quality that was strategically valuable in an era when streaming algorithms could serve the song to listeners across multiple genre playlists simultaneously.
The song was originally released in an earlier version as a Kane Brown solo track and subsequently remixed with the featured artists for wider release. This pattern of solo release followed by a collaborative remix was a well-established commercial strategy by 2020, allowing the original version to establish a footprint while the more star-powered remix version generated additional interest and served different format requirements. The remix configuration with Swae Lee and Khalid was the version that achieved the significant chart performance.
"Be Like That" benefited significantly from its association with the video game EA Sports FIFA 21, which featured the track prominently on its official soundtrack. Video game soundtracks had become a meaningful promotional platform for pop and crossover music, reaching young, globally distributed audiences who were highly engaged with streaming platforms. The FIFA 21 placement provided the song with international exposure that amplified its streaming performance and extended its chart longevity beyond what domestic radio play alone would have generated.
The track accumulated over 121 million YouTube views, a number that reflects both its domestic success and its international reach, particularly in markets where FIFA is a cultural institution. The music video supported the song's emotional content with visuals that complemented its nostalgic, romantic tone, and its production quality matched the level of commercial ambition that the multi-artist collaboration represented.
On country-specific charts, the song performed as a crossover success story. Its acoustic elements and Kane Brown's recognizable voice gave country radio programmers sufficient reason to service it to country audiences, while its R&B and pop elements made it accessible to listeners who would not normally engage with country format programming. The track reached the top 20 on multiple Billboard country charts and was recognized by industry observers as evidence of country music's ongoing format evolution.
The timing of the song's chart run, spanning the summer and fall of 2020, coincided with the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic, which had fundamentally altered the music industry's promotional infrastructure. With live performance unavailable and traditional promotional tours impossible, artists relied more heavily on streaming performance, social media engagement, and algorithmic placement than at any previous point in the industry's history. "Be Like That" was ideally suited to this environment: its emotional content matched the mood of a period characterized by longing and disconnection, and its streaming-friendly production found its way into the listening habits of people spending more time at home than ever before.
Chart Context and Industry Significance
The 21-week Hot 100 run of "Be Like That" placed it among the year's more durable singles and demonstrated that multi-genre collaborations could sustain chart presence more effectively than purely format-specific releases. Kane Brown's continued crossover success with the track reinforced his position as one of country music's most commercially potent figures and one of its most significant artists in terms of the demographic evolution of the format's audience.
The peak position of number 19, achieved in the seventh week of November 2020, represented the highest Hot 100 peak of Kane Brown's career to that point. For Khalid, whose crossover presence had already been established through hits including "Young Dumb and Broke" and "Location," the track added another multi-format credential. For Swae Lee, it confirmed his ability to operate effectively across genre lines as a featured collaborator.
02 Song Meaning
Longing and Idealization: What "Be Like That" Says About How We Grieve Relationships
"Be Like That" by Kane Brown featuring Swae Lee and Khalid is fundamentally a song about the revisionary work that grief performs on memory. When a relationship ends, the mind does not simply store the experience as historical fact; it performs a continuous process of editing, selecting certain moments for preservation while blurring or discarding others. The resulting portrait of the lost person is never quite accurate, never quite the same as the actual person who existed. This gap between memory and reality, between who someone was and who we need them to have been, is the emotional terrain that "Be Like That" navigates with particular sensitivity.
The central image of the song involves observing someone else's love, seeing in another couple's relationship the qualities the speaker misses from a former one. This is a psychologically acute observation: one of the ways grief for a lost relationship manifests is through a heightened sensitivity to love in other people. Couples in public, gestures of affection, small domestic rituals of partnership become painful because they remind the observer of what is absent. The song transforms this painful psychological reality into a lyrical premise that is simultaneously specific and universal.
The collaborative vocal structure of the track serves the thematic content in a way that a solo performance could not. Three voices processing the same emotional territory from slightly different angles suggest the universality of the experience: this is not one person's idiosyncratic grief but a condition that multiple people recognize from their own lives. Kane Brown's country-inflected delivery, Swae Lee's falsetto-tinged melodic approach, and Khalid's indie-pop emotional directness each bring a different texture to the same emotional core, and the cumulative effect is one of broad validation.
The song's engagement with idealization is particularly thoughtful. The speaker does not simply mourn the actual relationship that ended; he mourns an imagined version of it, a version in which its best qualities were consistent and its worst were absent. This is the work of idealization: selecting from the available material those elements that best support the narrative of irreplaceable loss. The song does not explicitly critique this process, but its very structure, the comparison to another couple who are observed rather than known, implies that idealization is always occurring. The observer cannot know what that other relationship is actually like; he is projecting onto it the same qualities he projects onto his lost one.
The cultural context of 2020 adds an additional resonance to the song's themes of longing and disconnection. Released during a period of enforced separation and social isolation, the song's meditation on physical and emotional distance from people we love found an audience primed by circumstances to feel that distance with unusual acuity. The pandemic created conditions in which the ordinary availability of human connection was suspended, and music that addressed longing and absence found a heightened emotional receptivity in listeners separated from family, friends, and partners by public health requirements.
The cross-genre collaboration itself carries thematic meaning beyond simple commercial calculation. Kane Brown's presence as a Black country artist, Swae Lee's R&B heritage, and Khalid's pop-inflected emotional style all bring with them cultural associations and audience expectations. When these three voices converge on the same emotional territory, the implicit message is that the experience of longing and loss transcends the aesthetic categories in which it is most commonly expressed. Grief does not have a genre.
The acoustic elements of the production, the strummed guitars and the open sonic spaces associated with country music, connect the song to a tradition within that genre of straightforward emotional directness. Country music has historically been more willing than pop or R&B to engage with relationship grief in explicit, unadorned terms, without the protective irony or aesthetic distance that other genres sometimes employ. By grounding the track's production in country-adjacent sounds, the song invites a mode of listening that is less guarded and more directly engaged with the emotional content.
The video game context in which many listeners first encountered the song is not irrelevant to its meaning. Video games, particularly sports simulations like FIFA, are often associated with young men in their teens and early twenties, a demographic for whom the experiences of first love, first loss, and the gap between idealized romantic expectation and reality are particularly immediate. A song about longing for an idealized relationship found an audience at precisely the life stage when that longing is most formative.
Ultimately, "Be Like That" makes its most compelling argument in its restraint. It does not escalate into dramatic declaration or self-pity; it maintains a tone of wistful observation that matches the quiet, persistent quality of the grief it describes. The most honest thing about the song is that it does not promise resolution, does not suggest that the longing will end or the idealization will be corrected by a return to reality. It simply acknowledges that this is how the mind works when it has loved and lost, and that acknowledgment, delivered with craft and emotional intelligence, is enough to create a song that resonates across millions of listeners.
→ More from the 2020s File
View all 2020s hits →
Keep digging