Should 42 million YOUTUBE plays of a video that loops the hook of a song for three and a half minutes count toward the song's placement on the BILLBOARD singles chart? That's the totally fair question being asked after POST MALONE and 21 SAVAGE's "ROCKSTAR" became the fifth (!!!) rap song to top the HOT 100 in 2017. Streaming numbers pushed the song over the top, and a big chunk of those streaming numbers came from the only version available on YouTube, a repeating loop of the chorus posted a month ago by REPUBLIC RECORDS. It's an ad for the song, not the song itself. A long ad, but still an ad. Imagine posting nothing but the ANNIE vocal sample from JAY-Z's "HARD KNOCK LIFE" (highest chart position: #15) and crediting it as a full play every time someone clicks on it. But then again, so what? What constitutes a full play anyway? Thirty seconds? Sixty seconds? The whole song? Just the phrase "grrra-ta-ta-ta"? Is there any way to fully, accurately quantify a song's popularity when no one's walking into a store, or even navigating to a store, and buying the thing? Was there ever a way? Were the pop charts ever scientifically accurate? Have they ever been more than an educated guess based as much on aspiration, marketing and perception as on reality? I believe in science and I believe in statistical modeling, don't get me wrong. But I also believe statistical modeling, especially in a field such as this, is only as accurate as the statistical modeler, who tends to come with his or her own perceptions as to which streams, which downloads and which purchases matter most. If the Billboard chart experts have deemed this particular loop to be equivalent to this particular song—and let's be honest, "Rockstar" is pretty much all hook anyway—who's to say that isn't a fair way measure the magic that we call pop?... Related discussion point: Would radio be better if it just played the hooks of pop songs and dispensed with intros, verses and everything else?... This offends my notion of music programming (pay the labels and publishers but serve the listeners, first and always), but I get it... Perhaps inspired by this adorable BOB DYLAN performance, LA BLOGOTHÈQUE launches a series in which an artist performs for a single listener. BON IVER goes first. I love this... MR. ROBOT, under pressure... There's no reason to be surprised that IVANKA TRUMP, who was 9 when NEVERMIND came out, liked NIRVANA, or that she now refers to that as her "punk phase." I would file all of that under normal human behavior. And she wouldn't be the first Nirvana fan to have, let's say, a slightly different outlook on life and culture than KURT and his band had. That, unfortunately, is normal, too.