Song #6: "Love You Better" by Future

 

🎵 Today's Song

Future — “Love You Better”

2022

Random draw

• Selected era bucket: 2020–present

• Verified remaining eligible population at draw: 9,222 recordings

• Selection method: Equal-probability era draw, then one uniform random draw from previously unselected eligible recordings in that era

• Project song: #6

• My score: 37/100

Chart performance

• Overall pop peak: #12

• Billboard Hot 100: #12

• Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop: #8

• Billboard Country: N/A

• UK Singles Chart: #100

• Yearly rank: #277

• Weeks charted: 15

• Weeks Top 20: 1

• Weeks Top 10: 0

• Weeks at peak: 1

Future at this point

Counting every record on which Future receives an explicit artist credit, whether as lead, co-billed, or featured artist:

• Charting record: 138th of 225

• Top-20 hit: 21st of 33

• Top-10 hit: Not a Top-10 hit — Future eventually had 15

• #1 pop hit: Not a #1 hit — Future eventually had 3

• Previous Top-20: “I’m On One” — Future featuring Drake

• Next Top-20: “Keep It Burnin” — Future featuring Kanye West

Retrospective standing

• GOAT overall: #18,706 of 32,649

• Among Future-credited charting records: #44 of 225

• Among Future-credited Top-20 hits: #23 of 33

• GOAT points: 15,432

• Hot 100 portion of chart run: #12 peak, 15 weeks

Record details

• Entered chart: May 14, 2022

• Album release: April 29, 2022

• Radio single: July 26, 2022

• Recorded: Not reliably established

• Single: Digital/radio single; no conventional B-side

• Album: I Never Liked You

• Songwriters: Nayvadius Wilburn, Jacob Canady, Jayla Darden, Michael Mule, Isaac De Boni

• Lead vocal: Future

• Producers: ATL Jacob, FNZ, Jayla Darden

• Running time: 2:09

• Label: Freebandz / Epic

• Recording to use: Original 2:09 album recording from I Never Liked You

Listen / watch / read

• 🎧 Original recording: Future official audio

• 📺 Official music video: Future — “Love You Better”

• 📝 Lyrics: Shazam

Versions & title history

• Original or cover: Original

• The recording incorporates a manipulated vocal sample from Jayla Darden, who is also credited as a songwriter.

• Important earlier/later charting versions: None identified

• Same-title unrelated chart hits: Other songs have used the title “Love You Better,” but none is a separate charting version of this composition relevant to the project.

Streaming note

Use the 2:09 album version from I Never Liked You. That is the original recording that charted.

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Methodology note

This is the sixth selection in my One Song a Day project. The eligible pool begins with the Billboard Top 20 of July 9, 1955—the week “Rock Around the Clock” first reached #1—and then includes every recording that subsequently reached the Billboard Top 20.

The selection is made in two stages. First, I randomly select one of eight era buckets with equal probability. Then I randomly select one previously unselected eligible recording from that era. This time the randomizer finally jumped all the way forward to 2022.

And it immediately gave me a song that demonstrates why comparing chart statistics across seven decades can get complicated.

Could my office name ten Future songs?

I play a game at work where I give everyone in the office a week to collectively come up with the “Top 10” in some category.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I made the challenge ridiculously simple:

Name ten songs credited to Future.

Not ten #1 hits. Not ten solo songs. Not ten songs where Future is the lead artist. Any song on which Future receives an artist credit counts.

That should be easy.

According to my Billboard data, Future has 225 charting records. Elvis Presley has 153. Future has about 47% more charting records than Elvis.

And yet I seriously wonder whether my office would get to ten Future songs by the end of the week.

I suspect some people would begin by asking:

“Who is Future?”

That seems like a contradiction. How can an artist accumulate 225 Billboard chart records while remaining largely outside the musical consciousness of plenty of otherwise normal people?

“Love You Better” gives us a pretty good place to start answering that question.

I know I heard this song. I remembered absolutely nothing about it.

Before listening to “Love You Better” for this project, I was reasonably certain I had heard it before.

When this song was on the charts, I was listening to the Top 40 every week, usually about four times through. A song that reached #12 should not have escaped me.

But if you had asked me yesterday what “Love You Better” sounded like, I couldn't have told you anything about it.

After listening to it again today, I can confirm something even stranger:

I have no recollection of it at all.

There wasn't an “Oh, THAT song” moment. Nothing triggered a dormant memory. As far as my brain was concerned, I might as well have been hearing it for the first time.

Its original chart environment probably explains a lot of that.

Sixteen new Future songs in one week

When I Never Liked You was released in 2022, all 16 tracks from the standard album debuted on the Hot 100 in the same week.

Eight of them immediately reached the Top 20:

• #1 — “Wait for U”

• #4 — “Puffin on Zootiez”

• #8 — “712PM”

• #10 — “I’m Dat N***a”

• #11 — “I’m On One”

• #12 — “Love You Better”

• #15 — “Keep It Burnin”

• #20 — “Massaging Me”

One album release therefore created eight songs eligible for this project in a single week.

“Love You Better” debuted at #12.

The next week it was #61.

That is a very different path to #12 than I instinctively associate with a #12 hit.

In the pre-streaming era, a label generally had to decide that a particular song was a single. It would be released and promoted, radio would decide whether to play it, consumers would decide whether to buy it, and—if everything worked—the song would climb the charts.

There was a selection process before the song became a hit.

Streaming can reverse that process.

Release the entire album. Let the audience stream everything. Watch virtually the whole thing hit the Hot 100. Then figure out which songs have staying power and which ones are worth continuing to promote.

It's almost the “Kill ’em all. Let God sort ’em out” approach to choosing singles.

In this case, “Love You Better” wasn't even sent to rhythmic radio as a single until July, more than two months after it had already debuted at #12.

What exactly is a “hit” now?

None of this means that “Love You Better” didn't legitimately reach #12. It did.

But I don't think #12 necessarily means the same thing in 2022 that it meant in 1962.

The modern Hot 100 seems to contain roughly three kinds of records.

There are album-bomb songs like this one: songs from major artists that debut high because an enormous fan base immediately consumes a new album, then rapidly fall once that initial burst passes.

At the other extreme are the streaming-era monsters that enter the upper reaches of the chart and seem to live there forever.

And there are still plenty of conventional hits that behave more like historical singles: they gain momentum, climb toward a peak, remain popular for a while, and gradually decline.

All three can reach the Top 20. But the chart position can represent three very different kinds of popularity.

The GOAT data illustrates this nicely. “Love You Better” ranks only #18,706 out of 32,649 songs despite its #12 peak. In fact, 10,354 songs that never reached the Top 20 rank ahead of it.

Its peak was high.

Its sustained impact was not.

There's another revealing comparison within Future's own catalog. “Love You Better” was Future's 138th of 225 charting records, but retrospectively it ranks #44 among those 225 songs in the GOAT calculation. So it isn't even one of Future's weakest chart entries. Despite ranking in the bottom half of the overall GOAT list, it still ranks comfortably within the upper quarter of Future's enormous chart catalog.

That helps explain the Future/Elvis comparison. Future has far more chart entries, but that doesn't mean Future has a larger collection of songs that penetrated the broader culture. Streaming allows a sufficiently popular artist to generate a huge number of chart entries without every individual song becoming a separate cultural event.

And when I originally heard “Love You Better,” I didn't hear one carefully promoted new Future single.

I heard it among a whole bunch of new Future songs.

It was just another Future song.

Then it fell 49 positions the following week, depriving me of the repeated exposure that often turns an unfamiliar song into something memorable.

I heard it.

I just never had much reason to remember it.

This won't be the last time this project encounters this phenomenon, so I'm not going to try to solve the entire streaming-era Hot 100 today. We're six songs into what is supposed to be a very long project. There will be plenty more examples.

So what does “Love You Better” actually sound like?

The first thing that surprised me is that this really isn't much of a rap song.

Future mostly sings. There are occasional bits of the mumbled delivery I associate with him, but most of the track consists of Future singing a fairly simple melody over a beat.

The most interesting element isn't Future at all.

Throughout the recording there is a heavily manipulated Jayla Darden vocal in the background. For lack of a better description, it sounds like someone trying to sing underwater.

It's everywhere.

The first 25 seconds are dominated by this strange, hazy vocal texture before another voice suddenly announces:

“ATL Jacob! ATL Jacob!”

That's producer ATL Jacob's tag.

The underwater vocal then continues floating around behind Future throughout the song. Once I started paying attention to it, I couldn't stop hearing it.

It gives the recording an ethereal, almost ghostly quality.

And that turns out to fit the song rather well.

Two minutes of wallowing

“Love You Better” is essentially a post-breakup song.

Future isn't particularly angry. He isn't celebrating his freedom. He doesn't sound like he's reached some grand realization that will allow him to move forward.

He's sad.

More specifically, the song feels sad and slightly depressed.

The hazy background vocals, subdued beat, melodic delivery and lack of much musical movement create the sensation that Future is simply sitting inside the feeling.

I kept coming back to one word:

Wallowing.

A sad song can offer catharsis. It can build toward something. It can be beautiful enough that I want to return to it despite the sadness.

This doesn't really do that for me.

If I'm deeply relating to “Love You Better,” I'm probably not in a particularly good headspace.

That's not somewhere I really want my music to take me very often.

Final verdict

The strange thing about “Love You Better” is that the more closely I listened to it, the more interesting it became—but not necessarily the more I liked it.

Initially, it seemed like just another Future song.

Then I noticed the underwater vocal. I started paying attention to the production. I understood how that ethereal sound supported the post-breakup lyrics. I realized how consistently the whole recording maintains its sad, withdrawn atmosphere.

There's clearly some thought behind it.

I wouldn't call it a bad song.

But none of those discoveries made me want to put it anywhere near my regular rotation.

And perhaps that's the most appropriate conclusion for a #12 hit that I know I heard repeatedly in 2022 but couldn't remember at all four years later.

I understand “Love You Better” considerably better now than I did this morning.

I just don't particularly want to hear it again.

37/100