In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music.
Barry Weiss was confused. Or he says he was confused, anyway. Weiss is a big deal in the music business. He had a legendary run at Jive, signing plenty of big, important rappers in the ’80s and ’90s before bringing in all the big stars of the Y2K teen-pop boom: the Backstreet Boys, *NSYNC, Britney Spears. In 2020, Weiss was running a Sony imprint that’s just called Records — he spells it in all-caps, but I’m not doing that — and this rapper who he’d signed brought him a song that wasn’t rap. Weiss was like, “Guys, this is, like, a rock record.”
24kGoldn, the sorta-kinda rapper who’d just made that sorta-kinda rock record, had to set Weiss straight: “Kids don’t think that way!” That’s how Barry Weiss told the story to The New York Times, anyway. I wonder if it really went down like that. Barry Weiss — who, I guess I have to point out, is a completely different person from Bari Weiss — is a print-the-legend guy. He loves to tell stories. I interviewed Weiss for a Too Short feature a couple of years ago, and I had a blast talking to him. I could’ve listened to his stories all day long. But Weiss is a salesman, too. His stories have angles.
When Weiss told the Times about 24kGoldn, his angle was that he wanted the paper of record’s readers to know that this kid was a superstar, an instinctive hit machine who understood young America’s listening habits better than even the most seasoned industry pros. In that same article, Weiss compared Goldn to Will Smith, another artist who he signed to Jive. Weiss said, “I wanted to put the whole company behind this kid.” But when that article came out, 24kGoldn’s big song “Mood” was already falling down the Hot 100, and he still hasn’t made another hit since then. Neither has Iann Dior, the other guy on the song. “Mood” was a one-off.
One-hit wonders still happen. They exist. It’s probably a little harder to become a one-hit wonder in this day and age, but you can still do it if the conditions all line up just right. In an era of rampant online stan armies, it seems like big pop stars stay famous for way longer than they logically should. Onetime teen sensations like Justin Bieber used to disappear long before their 25th birthdays, and now they’re dodging paparazzi for their entire lives. Bieber continues to make hits at least in part because his existence gives his songs a context. A new Justin Bieber song isn’t just a song you might hear on the radio; it’s the latest chapter in the long, serialized Justin Bieber story. But when a song exists with practically no context, its makers might as well vanish the moment that the general public gets sick of their song. 24kGoldn doesn’t have a fan army. He’s just a guy you might remember.
When 24kGoldn told Barry Weiss that kids don’t think that way, he wasn’t wrong, and he knew it because he was one of those kids. “Mood” is a goofy little trifle of a song, but it truly doesn’t fit within any genre or category. It’s got trap drum patterns and a sprightly little guitar riff. The two vocalists, like the other members of their tiny rap micro-generation, don’t exactly rap. Instead, they deliver their shitty-boyfriend lyrics in nasal singsong whines that basically emulate mid-’00s pop-punk and emo — another world with way too many lyrics about being a shitty boyfriend. Sometimes, a song loses its momentum because it doesn’t fit into any clear category. “Mood” did the opposite, gaining steam as a TikTok hit before crossing over into tons of different radio formats. Pop stations, rap stations, alternative rock stations, adult contemporary stations — all of them played “Mood.” And then none of them stuck with 24kGoldn.
You might be wondering: Why the fuck does this guy call himself 24kGoldn? How are you even supposed to pronounce that? I don’t have any answers for you. I can tell you that his real name is Golden Landis Von Jones, which is obviously a much cooler and more memorable moniker than “24kGoldn.” But Goldn comes from the tail end of the SoundCloud-rap boom, when young artists almost signaled their generational alignment by giving themselves names that look like the random strings of letters and numbers that websites give you when you need to come up with a new password. It’s just what they did. If you can’t look at their names without getting annoyed, then they probably weren’t making music for you anyway, and I say that as one of the people who couldn’t look at their names without getting annoyed.
24kGoldn and his friend Iann Dior weren’t the first rappers to come up with annoyingly stylized names, and they wouldn’t be the last. (Dior spells his name in all lowercase, but I’m not doing that.) They also weren’t the first to blur the line between singsong rap cadences and snotty emo whines. They were part of a wave. They weren’t even a big part of that wave. They took obvious inspiration from more established stars like Lil Uzi Vert and the late Juice WRLD. Goldn and Dior had their big hit after emo-rap groundbreakers Juice WRLD, Lil Peep, and former Number Ones artist XXXTentacion all died extremely young, so maybe those absences gave these two guys room to succeed. Or maybe “Mood” blew up the way it did because those guys sanded down the edges from their predecessors’ SoundCloud-rap styles, making something airy and weightless that could thrive without context. Maybe they were at the right place at the right time, when the SoundCloud era ended and the TikTok era really got going.
Golden Landis Von Jones was just 19 when he made his one big hit. (When he was born, the #1 song in America was Creed’s “With Arms Wide Open.”) Goldn grew up in San Francisco’s Lakeview neighborhood. He’s the son of a Black man and a white Jewish woman, just like Drake and Doja Cat. Both of Goldn’s parents worked as models before he was born, though they later found working-class jobs in the service industry. As a kid, Goldn also did some modeling and some acting in commercials. He didn’t want to do that as a career, though. He didn’t want to become a musician, either. Instead, he wanted to become a hedge fund manager.
That was the plan, anyway. I wonder if his heart was in it. Goldn started making music when he was still in high school. In 2017, a year before graduation, he posted his first music video, for an unremarkable SoundCloud-rap track called “Trapper’s Anthem.” After high school, 24kGoldn went to USC, studying finance on scholarship. During his freshman year, he released “Valentino,” a swaggering singsong track that went viral on TikTok and then racked up huge Spotify numbers. Eventually, “Valentino” went double platinum and even cracked the Hot 100, peaking at #92. Other than “Mood,” it’s still the only Hot 100 hit of the young man’s career.
“Valentino” is the song that convinced Barry Weiss to sign 24kGoldn. Weiss had a deal with Columbia, which meant that Goldn became a major-label artist. He dropped out of college and released an EP called Dropped Outta College, which went gold. He started working with Omer Fedi, an Israeli producer the same age as Goldn whose work will appear in this column a bunch of times. Fedi, the son of a drummer, moved to LA with his dad as a teenager, and he found his way into the circle surrounding Machine Gun Kelly, a white party-rapper who transitioned fully into the pop-punk realm when he started working with Blink-182’s Travis Barker. (Machine Gun Kelly’s highest-charting single, the 2016 Camila Cabello collab “Bad Things,” peaked at #4. It’s a 5.) In the early pandemic, Fedi was part of the crew that would get together with MGK and cover alt-rock songs on livestreams. In March 2020, Fedi and 24kGoldn recorded “City Of Angels,” the song that supposedly confused Barry Weiss. It really is more like a rock song.
“City Of Angels” didn’t quite make the Hot 100, but it came close — #3 on the Bubbling Under chart. More importantly, it got a decent amount of rock airplay, thus establishing Goldn as someone who could comfortably ignore genre boundaries. Iann Dior was another artist like that. Dior, born Michael Ian Olmo in Puerto Rico, is just a year older than 24kGoldn, and he has a similar sensibility. (Wheb Dior was born, Cher’s “Believe” was the #1 song in America.) Dior and his family moved to Corpus Christi, Texas when he was a kid. He went to high school there, then found a job as a UPS driver. (He didn’t get mad. UPS was hiring.) When UPS fired Dior, he moved into a local recording studio and started posting songs on SoundCloud.
Iann Dior’s career took off very quickly. He only started posting SoundCloud tracks in 2019, and he almost immediately was found by Internet Money, a label that’s also a kind of new-jack producers’ collective. By the end of the year, he released a debut album that’s literally called Industry Plant. None of his songs made the Hot 100 — he’s still only ever gotten there as a featured artist on “Mood” — but singles like “Emotions” and the Trippie Redd collab “Gone Girl” eventually went platinum. Those songs, like the ones that 24kGoldn started releasing in 2020, take obvious inspiration from Juice WRLD, riding the line between SoundCloud-rap and radio-ready pop-punk.
24kGoldn and Iann Dior moved in the same circles, making music with guys like Omer Fedi, Machine Gun Kelly, and Yungblud. Goldn and Dior shared the same management. One day in the early pandemic, Goldn and Dior were sitting around together at Dior’s house, playing Call Of Duty. Nearby, Omer Fedi was working on music with the Keegan Bach, a Kalamazoo-born producer who goes by the professional name KBeaZy. While Fedi played a guitar riff, Goldn started absentmindedly singing a tune that came into his head, and that turned out to be the hook for “Mood.” The producers convinced him that he needed to record it right away. Later on, Goldn told Complex, “It’s really crazy because I wasn’t even trying to make music that day.”
On “Mood,” Goldn and Dior sing about girls who get too clingy and emotional. Their girlfriends, we learn, are always in a mood, fuckin’ round, actin’ brand new, even though the men in their lives ain’t tryin’ to tell them what to do. The vocal melody is catchy and memorable in ways that grew oppressive when the song turned into a monster hit. It sounds fully off-the-cuff — the kind of absentminded hook that could only pop into your head if pop-punk was just floating through the air during your childhood. Later on, Goldn told The New York Times that he absorbed his pop-punk influences unconsciously: “Whether I was aware of it or not, that type of stuff was really shaping my childhood. When those styles started getting popularized by artists like Carti and Uzi, it hit my generation in places that we didn’t know we could be hit before.”
I guess they also absorbed all the tropes of dudes in emo bands whining about their girlfriends. From a certain perspective, “Mood” is one long whine session. Iann Dior: “I could never get attached/ When I start to feel, I unattach/ Somehow, I always end up feelin’ bad/ Baby, I am not your dad.” 24kGoldn: “I won’t ever let a shorty go and set me up/ Only thing I need to know is if you wet enough.” The two of them together: “We play games of love to avoid the depression/ We been here before, and I won’t be a victim.” These are not exactly nuanced portraits of young love and relationship dynamics. They’re instinctive complaints, delivered without much thought. That kind of perspective goes back a lot further than the MySpace emo days. Plenty of songs from the ’50s and ’60s are about the same thing, more or less. That doesn’t make it any less dumb.
But “Mood” doesn’t necessarily come off as a whine session because the two guys on the song don’t sound sad. Instead, they attack their sleepy little melodies with buoyant, careless energy. They sound like they’re having fun, and they probably are. The beat behind them is simple and clean. The jaunty guitar riff and the trap drums don’t contradict each other. They fit together like Legos. It’s like these guys almost accidentally hit on the kind of earworm that song-machine professionals are always working to construct.
Once Goldn and Dior had a rough demo for the song, Goldn brought in a song-machine professional. Blake Slatkin grew up in Los Angeles, and he had an internship with the big-deal producer Benny Blanco when he was a teenager. Slatkin went to college at NYU, and he produced for artists like Gracie Abrams and Omar Apollo when he was still at school. By the time the pandemic hit, Slatkin was back in LA, and he had the same management as Goldn and Dior. (We’ll see Slatkin’s work in this column again.) Slatkin worked to make “Mood” sound a little more polished. Once it was done, Goldn started posting teasers for the song on Instagram before he released it.
By the time “Mood” came out, 24kGoldn had a pretty decent level of viral buzz. In summer 2020, he was part of the same XXL Freshman class as future Number Ones artists Jack Harlow, Polo G, and Latto. I’d never heard of Goldn when he showed up on that XXL cover, but he was the one who made it into the class by fan vote. Soon after “Mood” came out, the song picked up steam on TikTok, and the behind-the-scenes people at Columbia started pushing the song onto different Spotify playlists. Since “Mood” has elements of a few genres, it found its way onto a bunch of playlists. Pretty soon, radio picked up on it. When radio falls in love with a TikTok hit, it ceases to be a TikTok hit. It becomes something else.
Many of this column’s recent entries have been about big stunt-casting pop events that debuted at the top of the Hot 100, often disappearing soon afterward. That wasn’t the case with “Mood.” 24kGoldn and Iann Dior had a little momentum going, but they weren’t stars when the song came out, and “Mood” was not an event. Instead, “Mood” climbed up the Hot 100 the old-fashioned way. It found its way to #1 during a slow week, when no pop superstars had new product to push. In its first week at #1, “Mood” didn’t have the most airplay, streams, or downloads of any song, but it did well enough across all three metrics that it became the new champion. Then “Mood” hung in there through sheer radio inertia.
Over the next few months, “Mood” just kept racking up weeks at #1. A couple of times, a big act came out with a noisy release and knocked “Mood” off its perch, but then “Mood” would just come back a week later. It wasn’t until Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” retook its annual holiday-season spot that “Mood’ finally fell down the chart. The COVID lockdown was still happening, so Goldn and Dior couldn’t do much to promote the song, though they did film performances for various talk shows and second-tier awards telecasts. Today, the single is octuple platinum.
That was it, though. 24kGoldn’s debut album El Dorado didn’t come out until March 2021, when people were already sick of “Mood.” On paper, Goldn and his team made smart choices with that album. Some big-name artists made appearances on El Dorado — former Number Ones artists DaBaby and Swae Lee, future Number Ones artist Future — but Goldn recorded almost the entire thing with Omer Fedi, KBeaZy, and Blake Slatkin. He stayed in his lane. He made sparkly little singsong tracks that could potentially get the same kind of viral boost as “Mood.” But it didn’t work. “Mood” already existed, and it was already played out. Why would anyone need 12 more songs like “Mood”?
El Dorado debuted at #22 and then disappeared completely. I’d never listened to the album before writing this column, and I was only vaguely aware of its existence. The whole time it was on, I was just kind of dimly annoyed. I don’t really like “Mood,” but the song instantly felt familiar, so I never really hated it either. The rest of that record doesn’t have the instant-familiarity thing going for it. I don’t blame the world for ignoring it.
Goldn did some features with dance producers and got a few songs onto a few soundtracks. His voice can apparently be heard in the two most recent Fast & Furious films, which seems about right. He put out an EP called Icarus this past summer, so he’s still around. Auspicious title, right? This guy had a giant hit before he knew what to do with it, and his career couldn’t recover. There are so many stories like that.
Iann Dior has pretty much that exact same story, too. He made the same moves as Goldn — some features, some remixes. His 2022 album On To Better Things debuted at #28 and didn’t hang around. His 2023 album Leave Me Where You Found Me didn’t chart at all. Both of these guys are still extremely young; Goldn can’t even rent a car yet. Both already feel like relics of a bygone moment. Life is long, and either of those guys could reinvent themselves and score another hit. Also, monkeys could fly out of my butt.
“Mood” was arguably the culmination of that moment that pop-punk and SoundCloud rap found each other, and it sure feels like that moment is over now. But that ’00s pop-punk revival didn’t go away. Instead, it trickled into other styles of music. Pretty soon, we’ll see the rise of another young artist who applied that influence to Taylor Swift-style stadium pop. She scored a huge hit of her own right away, and she stuck around, unlike 24kGoldn or Iann Dior. We’ll get to her soon enough.
GRADE: 5/10
BONUS BEATS: Here’s Lil Wayne and Gudda Gudda rapping over the “Mood” beat on the 2020 mixtape track “Drag Em”:
(Lil Wayne has been in this column a few times. Gudda Gudda doesn’t have any Hot 100 hits of his own, but he was on Young Money’s #2 hit “BedRock” in 2009. It’s a 7.)
BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here’s Glass Animals doing a doofy BBC Live Lounge cover of “Mood” in 2020:
(Glass Animals will appear in this column.)
The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Fuck around, buy it brand new.
