Drake, Future, and Young Thug Hit Number One with "Way 2 Sexy"

9:04 AM EDT on June 22, 2026

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. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Alternative Number Ones on Mondays. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music .

One week in April 1964, the Beatles pulled off an unthinkable pop feat: They held the top five spots on the Hot 100 all by themselves. This was the supernova flash of the Beatles' arrival, a time when some estimates claimed that 60% of the singles sold in the United States were Beatles songs. Even so, certain things had to fall into place to allow the Beatles to dominate like that .

The previous year, when Beatlemania first swept Europe, Capitol Records, the American division of the Beatles' label EMI, refused to release their records in the US. As a result, their manager Brian Epstein licensed a few Beatles records to American indies, and they didn't really sell at first. But once Capitol finally gave in and gave the Beatles a huge marketing push, those other labels were able to push their own Beatles singles. Capitol would've doubtless preferred to roll out those Beatles singles one at a time, but the feeding frenzy was on. That week, the Beatles' five singles all competed with one another, but all of them were bigger than anything else out there.

For 57 years, the Beatles' record stood unchallenged. Nobody else could possibly hold down the Hot 100's entire top five. If I remember right, the general assumption was that the Beatles' record would stand forever. Over time, though, Billboard changed its chart rules for the Hot 100. Album tracks could chart. Streaming figured in. So did YouTube views. Suddenly, it became possible to consider a future in which a single superstar could release a much-anticipated album and dominate the Hot 100 in the way the Beatles had once done. In September 2021, Drake dropped Certified Lover Boy , the album he'd been hyping up for months, and he did what only the Beatles had done before him. He did them one better, actually. That week, nine of the top 10 songs on the Hot 100 came from Drake.

Now: 2021 Drake was not as big as the 1964 Beatles. 2021 Drake was extremely big , but his popularity didn't indicate a tidal shift in popular culture or anything. He was just the guy who took advantage of the shifting rules and who successfully made himself the only show in town, at least for one week. But Drake always had that Beatles record in his sights. He wanted to dominate. He wanted to own the entire top five at once. This was important to him.

In 2019, Drake guested on his former adversary Meek Mill's single " Going Bad " and made a big claim: "I got more slaps than the Beatles, boy." ("Going Bad" peaked at #6. It's a 7.) A few months later, Drake landed his 30th top-10 hit, breaking another Beatles record, and he celebrated by getting the picture of the band crossing the street on the Abbey Road album cover tattooed on his arm. Two years after that , Drake opened Certified Lover Boy with " Champagne Party ," a long and self-important song that kinda-sorta sampled the Beatles' " Michelle ." (It's really a sample of a sample of a cover of "Michelle," but nevermind. The Beatles never released "Michelle" as a single in the US, so it never touched the Hot 100. The week that Drake conquered the top five, "Champagne Party" sat at #4. It's a 5.)

Thanks to the way that streaming has affected the Hot 100, it's now commonplace for a single artist to hold the entire top five. It happens all the time. In fact, the last person to pull it off was Drake, just last month. This was after Drake got absolutely rinsed in a rap mega-feud that future editions of this column will recount in great detail. People thought Drake was done. Drake was not done. Drake might never be done. It took him a while to build himself back up again, and he's probably still not back at the 2021 level, but he continues to do extremely well for himself. Get used to seeing his name in this column, since we're not anywhere near the end of his run yet — not in this column and possibly not in real life, either.

In any case, there are no Beatles references on the Drake song that topped the Hot 100 in the week that Drake first held the whole top five. Instead, the Drake song at #1 that historic week was a mega-powers team-up with two other huge rap stars, and it paid tribute to another important British pop group from a previous era: Right Said Fred.

It must be so easy to be one of the bald guys from Right Said Fred. Actually, that's apparently not true. In 2021, just a couple of weeks before "Way 2 Sexy" came out, Right Said Fred member Richard Fairbrass was reportedly hospitalized with COVID-19. The COVID vaccine was widely available by then, but Fairbrass refused to get the shot. Instead, he went to anti-lockdown protests. After getting out of the hospital, he continued to insist that the vaccine was a gigantic scam, and he and his brother and bandmate Fred have have apparently slid further into the deranged conspiracy-theorist zone. There are too many obvious jokes about this sad development — Far Right Said Fred, "too sexy for this jab," etc. — but let's just keep it moving.

It should be so easy to be one of the bald guys in Right Said Fred. Their goofy novelty song " I'm Too Sexy " became a giant novelty hit in 1991. A couple of their later singles were big in the UK hits, Right Said Fred were definitive one-hit wonders over here, which means that they didn't have to do all the work that it takes to maintain a pop career. Instead, they could just live on the royalties from "I'm Too Sexy," and those royalties must be heavy, since people keep sampling or interpolating the damn song. In 2017, Taylor Swift reached #1 with " Look What You Made Me Do ," which apparently mimicked Right Said Fred's "I'm Too Sexy" cadence enough that she gave those guys songwriting credits. Four years after that, Drake outright sampled "I'm Too Sexy" on yet another #1 hit.

"Way 2 Sexy" didn't start off with Drake but with Drake's regular collaborator Future, another vastly influential figure. In fact, the Right Said Fred sample was apparently Future's idea. Future has come up in this column many times, but "Way 2 Sexy" was his first actual #1 hit. That distinction was a long time coming. By the time Future finally scored a chart-topper, he'd appeared on a genuinely astonishing 125 Hot 100 hits. This is our first chance to cover Future, so it's time to get into the extremely abridged version of his story. (Don't worry, I'm not going to name all 125 previous hits.)

Nayvadius DeMun Wilburn grew up in Atlanta's Zone 6 neighborhood. (When Future was born, Lionel Richie's " All Night Long (All Night) " was the #1 song in America.) Future was raised by a single mother in a tough neighborhood, but he had a great family connection to the music world. His older cousin was the late Rico Wade, a member of Organized Noize, one of the greatest production teams ever assembled. (They've been in this column a few times.) The Dungeon Family, the wildly creative crew of artists like Outkast and the Goodie Mob who orbited Organized Noize, got their name from Wade's mom's basement, where Organized Noize built their studio. Future was literally family with the Dungeon Family. Soon enough, he literally became part of the Dungeon Family, too.

Organized Noize had their greatest success in the late '90s and early '00s, when Future was still a kid. When he first started rapping, Future went by the name Meathead, and I kind of wish he would've kept it. Young Future was part of Da Connect, a young rap group that Rico Wade mentored, which meant that he was a peripheral Dungeon Family member around the time that the Dungeon Family was breaking apart. Da Connect recorded one album called Dungeon Family 2nd Generation in 2003, and it included a solo Future track called " Belly Of Da Beast, " but it never got a proper commercial release. Future did, however, get a songwriter credit on " Blueberry Yum Yum ," a 2004 Organized Noize-produced track from Ludacris, an artist who's been in this column a few times.

When Future came to prominence years later, his music sounded nothing like what he'd made in his Meathead days. Instead, he became the master of the Auto-Tuned sing-rap croak, a hazy but emotive style that emerged from the wake of T-Pain's hitmaking run and Kanye West's 808s & Heartbreak . Future had once been a straight-up Southern rapper, and his approach evolved into the zooted-out chanted melodies that made him famous. Still, I love that Future has that direct connection to the Dungeon Family, and I hear a lot of their swampy funk in his bluesy, guttural style.

Future doesn't often talk about the time between Da Connect and his reemergence as an Atlanta street-rap star. Given the connections between Atlanta's rap scene and the city's criminal underworld, there's probably a reason for that. Sometime around 2010, Future signed with Atlanta rapper Rocko's A1 label and released 1000 , his first mixtape. (Rocko's highest-charting single is the 2013 Future/Rick Ross collab " U.O.E.N.O., " which peaked at #20 and then became notorious for a rapey Ross line.) In 2011, Future first landed on the Hot 100 when he slurred the hook on fellow Georgia rapper YC's single " Racks ," which peaked at #42. That same year, Future released his own breakout single "Tony Montana," which just missed the Hot 100. Drake jumped on a "Tony Montana" remix , which started a long and sometimes-contentious relationship between those guys that continues to this day.

Future's big breakout happened during an explosive moment for Atlanta trap, when artists like Waka Flocka Flame and former Number Ones artist Gucci Mane were running wild. Future's sound was blurry and melodic, seductive and dangerous in equal measure. This Auto-Tune thing was relatively new and controversial. Future didn't just use it to chirp out nagging melodies. Instead, he burrowed deep into it, using that program's warping effect to build a sense of mystery around himself. He was a magnetic and slightly aloof force, and he recorded all the time, cranking out five mixtapes, including a full-length Gucci collab, in 2011 alone. That same year, he signed to Epic and appeared on the cover of The FADER .

In 2012, Future released his Astronaut Status mixtape and his proper debut album Pluto , two hypnotic full-lengths that absolutely hooked me. Those two titles hint at a certain space theme, and I guess Future's name does, too. It speaks to the unique feeling of free-floating haze that Future conjures. Since he came into the game, a million rappers have toyed with Auto-Tuned melodies, but few of them seem to exist within the flow of the music the way that Future does. There's effectively no difference between his singing and rapping. At his best, he lurches emotively through a soup of winding synths and 808 drums, rasping and howling his digitized blues before launching into sudden syncopated jags of verbiage. His seemingly improvised lyrics were often about drugs — selling them, the way his Atlanta peers all did, but also using them. That's how he became an avatar for a certain kind kind of hedonistic, psychedelic glamor.

Pluto marked Future's arrival as a prospective pop star, not just a regional mixtape figure. The album went platinum, and four of its singles reached the Hot 100 — none higher than the gasping love song "Turn On The Lights," which peaked at #50. In 2013, Future got engaged to former Number Ones artist Ciara, and the two of them collaborated on her #22 hit " Body Party ." The couple had a baby literally named Future, but then they went through an ugly breakup that continued to reverberate and get uglier in the years ahead, even after Ciara married her current husband Russell Wilson.

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_Originally reported by [Stereogum](https://stereogum.com/2502357/the-number-ones-drakes-way-2-sexy-feat-future-young-thug/columns/the-number-ones/)._