Angel, Pt. 1

Five Artists, One Mission: "Angel, Pt. 1" and the Fast X Phenomenon

Franchise Music at the Highest Level

The Fast & Furious franchise has always understood that its soundtrack is not an afterthought but a constitutive part of the experience. The music carries emotional weight that the films themselves have built over two decades of racing cars, found families, and escalating action sequences. For Fast X, the tenth installment, the needle-drop logic reached a kind of apex: assemble an improbable coalition of artists whose individual fanbases collectively span the entire streaming landscape, and create something that could function as a stand-alone hit as much as a film promotional tool. The ambition of the concept matched the ambition of a franchise that had grown from a street racing story into a globe-spanning blockbuster machine. By the tenth film, the franchise had built enough goodwill and mythology that its soundtrack could operate as a cultural event in its own right.

An All-Star Roster

The collaboration at the center of Angel, Pt. 1 is genuinely improbable on paper: Kodak Black, NLE Choppa, Jimin of BTS, JVKE, and Muni Long occupy almost entirely non-overlapping corners of the music market. Trap music, K-pop, TikTok-native pop, and R&B: the combination shouldn't cohere, and yet the track manages to hold its shape, largely because the underlying theme of the franchise, loyalty, sacrifice, and chosen family, gives each performer a shared emotional context to inhabit. The song is stitched together more by feeling than by strict sonic logic, which is exactly how the best franchise soundtrack anthems have always worked. The shared emotional register, rather than any formal sonic consistency, is what makes the combination credible.

Chart Presence and Its Context

The Hot 100 data shows Angel, Pt. 1 debuting at number 65 on June 3, 2023 and making a second appearance at number 96 on July 1, 2023, for a total of 2 weeks on the chart. Those numbers are modest by the standards of a major studio film release, but the song's reach extends well beyond what the Hot 100 captures: 66 million YouTube views reflect a global audience drawn by the film's marketing, the BTS fanbase in particular, and the cumulative appeal of the assembled artists across multiple fan communities that had never previously been brought into the same room by the same piece of music.

Jimin's Global Footprint

Jimin's presence on the track deserves specific attention in any account of its commercial life. BTS and its members command one of the most mobilized and globally distributed fanbases in music history; any project carrying a member's name benefits from immediate, organized promotional activity that operates largely outside the traditional radio and playlist systems the Hot 100 was designed to measure. The result is a chart metric that substantially undercounts the actual scale of the audience in ways that standard analysis consistently misses. The YouTube view count is in this case the more honest measure of impact, reflecting an audience that spans dozens of countries and multiple linguistic communities all drawn by the same combination of names on a single track.

Franchise Soundtracks as Cultural Events

The broader story of Angel, Pt. 1 is really about how blockbuster franchise culture processes music in the streaming era. The song exists partly as a commercial instrument and partly as a genuine piece of collaborative artistry, and the tension between those two functions gives it an interesting place in the catalogs of all five contributors. For Muni Long in particular, whose 2022-2023 breakthrough had been one of R&B's more exciting developments, the appearance on a franchise soundtrack with this level of global distribution demonstrated a range of appeal that transcended any single market. The song carried her voice to ears that would not have found her through any other route. Press play and hear what happens when the franchise machine runs at full power.

“Angel, Pt. 1” — a singular moment on the 2020s charts.