The 2020s File Feature
Popular
Popular — The Weeknd, Playboi Carti B auteur who has reinvented his persona across multiple album cycles and proven himself one of the most commercially dura…
01 The Story
Popular — The Weeknd, Playboi Carti & Madonna
Where Three Eras Collide
There's something almost genuinely surreal about a track that threads together three artists from completely different generations and aesthetic universes: a Toronto R&B auteur who has reinvented his persona across multiple album cycles and proven himself one of the most commercially durable acts of his era; a trap rapper whose entire mode of performance resists conventional melody and operates instead through texture and kinetic energy; and the undisputed queen of pop reinvention, whose career has outlasted every trend she has participated in and reshaped many of them. When Popular arrived in the summer of 2023 as part of the The Idol HBO series soundtrack, it carried the weight of all three legacies simultaneously, which was entirely the point.
The Idol Context
The Weeknd created The Idol alongside filmmaker Sam Levinson as an unflinching and deliberately provocative examination of the pop industry's darker currents: the extraction of talent, the economics of celebrity, the machinery that processes human beings into commercial product. The show attracted intense critical debate about its portrayal of the industry and its women, but its soundtrack existed as a genuine artistic document independent of those reception battles. Popular was positioned as an anthem within the show's narrative, seductive and slightly menacing, entirely self-aware about the price of celebrity and the appetite it requires. Madonna's presence was more than a prestige cameo; her four decades of navigating and repeatedly reshaping the entertainment industry gave the track's themes an autobiographical dimension that no younger artist could have supplied by any amount of performance craft. The casting was conceptually sound.
Chart Debut and Performance
Popular debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 43 on June 17, 2023, its opening week also its peak position. The song spent 19 weeks on the chart, a solid run for a soundtrack cut tied to a prestige television property with a complicated reception. The Hot 100 placement reflected the significant streaming and airplay interest the collaboration generated; the built-in audiences of all three artists converged in a way that pushed the track well into the chart's upper regions for a debut. That the peak came immediately rather than through a slow build speaks to the combined weight of the artists involved.
A Sonic Statement on Fame
The production on Popular operates in a lush, slightly disorienting pop-noir register that suits The Weeknd's post-After Hours aesthetic. The sonics are designed to feel intoxicating and just slightly off-kilter, offering glamour with a consistent undercurrent of dread. Madonna's vocal contributions carry a particular authority; her voice brings both irony and gravitas to material about celebrity's seductions and costs. Playboi Carti's section functions as a kind of productive static in the signal, his abstracted flows and rhythmic textures pulling against the smoother R&B grain of the rest of the track, mirroring something about the chaos underneath pop stardom's polished surface. The song works simultaneously as entertainment and as editorial commentary on the very industry producing it.
The Legacy of the Collaboration
Whatever its complicated reception alongside the show itself, Popular stands as one of the more genuinely unusual collaborations in recent pop history. Three artists with combined careers spanning four decades, each contributing something the others couldn't replicate, united around a conceptual premise rather than a commercial formula. The track demonstrated that prestige television could produce music with real artistic density rather than just promotional adjacency, and that when the artists involved are at this level of cultural weight, the result can outlive the show that generated it. The 95 million YouTube views it accumulated reflect an audience that found something genuinely compelling in that collision of worlds and returned to it repeatedly. Press play and let the glamour and the unease work on you in equal measure.
“Popular” — The Weeknd, Playboi Carti & Madonna's singular moment on the 2020s charts.
02 Song Meaning
What Popular Is Really About
Fame as Trap and Temptation
The thematic core of Popular is the relationship between desiring fame and being gradually consumed by it. The lyrics frame popularity as a devouring force rather than a simple reward; the narrator understands intellectually the cost of the spotlight but moves toward it anyway, pulled by something that reasoning alone cannot stop. This tension is entirely deliberate and directly connected to the broader themes of The Idol, which examined pop industry power structures with considerable specificity and darkness. The song functions as a thesis statement for that larger project, compressing its central argument into pop-anthem form and making it audible before the show's more complex narrative context.
Madonna's Lived Dimension
Madonna's involvement adds a layer of authentic lived experience to the song's themes that transforms their register entirely. She has spent four full decades inside exactly the machinery that Popular describes, and her presence signals that the song's critique comes from somewhere genuinely real rather than from a purely fictional or speculative vantage point. The convergence of a veteran who has survived the industry across every phase of its evolution and a narrator still actively being shaped and consumed by it gives the lyrical content a perspective that spans celebrity's complete arc. You hear the wisdom of someone who got out the other side alongside the hunger of someone still making their way through the middle of it.
Playboi Carti's Structural Role
Carti's section of the song operates as deliberate static in an otherwise coherent signal: his vocal style, built on abstracted flows and rhythmic texture rather than conventional melodic phrasing, pulls against the smoother R&B grain of the rest of the track. Thematically, this mirrors something truthful about what fame actually feels like when you get close enough to it: it stops making coherent linear sense. His presence functions less like a conventional feature and more like a structural choice about how the song should model a particular kind of disorientation.
Why the Summer of 2023 Was Ready for This
By 2023, conversations about the pop industry's exploitative tendencies had become entirely mainstream in ways they hadn't been in earlier decades. Social media had simultaneously democratized access to artists' lives and intensified scrutiny of industry power dynamics. Taylor Swift's conflict with her original label, the broader discourse around streaming economics and artist ownership, and a general cultural reckoning with how celebrity is constructed had made these issues part of ordinary pop fandom conversation. Popular arrived into that cultural moment with sound and subject matter that spoke directly to it, giving listeners a sophisticated entertainment vehicle for ideas they were already turning over. The debut at number 43 and the 19-week chart run placed it firmly within that wider discourse.
→ More from the 2020s File
View all 2020s hits →
Keep digging