Just one week stands between “Luther” — a three-minute collaboration record by Kendrick Lamar and SZA — and breaking a four-and-a-half-year-old record on the coveted U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.
The third track in Lamar’s dozen-tracked 2024 album “GNX” has spent a consecutive eight weeks atop the charts, matching the record tally set by 24kGoldn and Iann Dior’s “Mood.”
“Mood” spent eight straight weeks at the summit across late 2020 to 2021, setting itself aside as not only the longest-charting collaboration track of the decade, but the second-longest rap song of the time frame — just behind the 11 weeks of Roddy Rich’s “The Box.”
Already with 786 million streams on Spotify as of this writing, “Luther” making it to next week still atop the Billboard Hot 100 charts would signal the end of “Mood’s” reign as the second-longest-charting rap song of the decade; the former would then be a fingernail’s distance away from “The Box.”
In Lamar and SZA’s path to chart supremacy stands a familiar foe: Drake. The Canadian rapper’s “Nokia” surged to No. 2 after this tracking week and could reasonably oust the Compton rapper’s song off the top spot. Should that happen, many fans will view it as a symbolic retaliation in the wake of Lamar’s monumental Grammy win for “Not Like Us” — a diss track that became the most awarded rap song in Grammy history this February.
