The Number Ones: Future’s “Wait For U” (Feat. Drake & Tems)

May 14, 2022STAYED AT #1:1 WeekIn 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.In 2024, Drake went into the fight of his life, and he was demoralized right from jump. His feelings were hurt. Drake's feelings were often hurt. This was nothing new. He might be the most feelings-hurt rap star in history. Drake spent years mining his own hurt feelings for gold, and he usually found it. But this time, he faced massed forces that didn't care about his feelings. Suddenly, half of rap's A-list was arrayed against him. It was a "20 v. one," as he put it. Drake's real enemy in that moment, the one who he truly had to worry about, was past and future Number Ones artist Kendrick Lamar. But when Drake launched his first volley in that feud, his opening words didn't have anything to do with Kendrick. Here's how Drake started things off: "I could never be nobody number one fan/ Your first number one, I had to put it in your hand." He was talking to Future, and he was talking about "Wait For U."Does Drake have actual friends? I'm sure he does. He has remained tight with the small Toronto crew that came up with him, and a lot of those guys seem to have prominent roles in his various business interests to this day. Drake also forged long collaborative relationships with a bunch of his rap peers, but that always seemed like a series of mutually advantageous business arrangements, less like real love. In that 2024 moment, all of Drake's foes were his former collaborators. But for whatever reason, Future was the one whose participation hurt his feelings the most. Future, the codeine-fogged hedonist prince of Atlanta trap, wasn't the type to get involved in rap feuds, and he and Drake went way back together. If even he was mad at Drake, things must've been really fucked up.Drake had been in rap feuds before. He hadn't always won them — Pusha T powerbomed him through the ring — but those public back-and-forths hadn't hurt his bottom line. Drake's tone toward Kendrick on his genuinely underrated 2024 diss track "Push Ups" was dismissively condescending, but when he talked to Future, he sounded sad. When Drake said that Future owed him his Hot 100 fortunes, he attempted to big-dog Future, but he also wanted to remind Future that they'd done important things together. His first number one! That's a big deal! ("Push Ups" peaked at #17.)The Drake/Future relationship was never quite as simple as "your first number one, I had to put it in your hand." In 2021, Drake's not-great quasi-novelty song "Way 2 Sexy" debuted at #1. Future and his friend Young Thug were both on that song. Thug had been on a couple of Hot 100 chart-toppers before that, but Future never had. He'd gotten close. Future's pretty boring Drake collab "Life Is Good," for instance, peaked at #2 in 2020. (It's a 5.) Drake didn't put "Way 2 Sexy" into Future's hand. Instead, that song was a Future track that found its way to Drake. Future never bothered to tell Drake, "Your ninth number one, I had to put it in your hand." Maybe it wouldn't have had the same impact.Less than a year after "Way 2 Sexy," Future and Drake were back on top of the Hot 100, and this time Future was the lead artist. After all those years as a cultural force whose crossover tracks didn't quite have what it took to conquer the pop charts, Future continued to gain commercial steam even as his music lost its heavy, compelling nihilism and circled the diminishing-returns drain. That was the Drake effect. Before the Kendrick Lamar beef, Drake could release any old shit and still debut atop the Hot 100 without breaking a sweat. Sometimes, his friends benefited from that situation, even if they didn't necessarily appreciate it.Drake didn't put "Wait For U" in Future's hand, either. Instead, it's another "Way 2 Sexy" situation — an unfinished Future idea getting a little bit of that commercial Drake pixie dust at a time when the Drake pixie dust absolutely did not guarantee a good song. That's the story here — two increasingly uninspired superstars continuing to rack up hits without having to work for it, one guy's resentment toward the other still buried under the surface. Too bad that situation is more compelling than the song itself.Before we get any further, can we talk about this song title? "Wait For U." I hate it. It's so lazy. My big issue is that Future didn't call it either "Wait For You" or "Wait 4 U." Pick one! Are we writing song titles in text-message speak or actual words? You can't do both. You need to commit. Maybe that title is a signal that "Wait For U" is a song about the refusal to commit, but that's giving it too much credit. It's just one more halfassed slapdash thing about a halfassed slapdash song.Like so many songs that have appeared in this column recently, "Wait For U" has way too many credited writers and producers. Its main sonic architect seems to be Jacob Denzal Canady, the producer known professionally as ATL Jacob. ATL Jacob was just 21 when "Wait For U" debuted at #1, but he'd already been working in Future's orbit for a few years. As the name implies, ATL Jacob is an Atlanta native. He played in marching band in middle school, and he started making beats around the same time that he started high school. When he was still a kid, he worked as a recording engineer, and he met Future just before he went to prom. Jacob's first beats appeared on Future projects in 2017. In 2019, he produced a bunch of tracks on Future's album The Wizrd, including "First Off," a Travis Scott collab that peaked at #47.ATL Jacob continues to specialize in the kind of instrumental tracks that attract Future — melodic, echoing Atlanta trap dirges, often with a sinister edge. His work with Future led him to produce for other artists like Young Thug, Roddy Ricch, and Lil Yachty. He made the "Wait For U" beat about a year before it came out, and he gave it to Future, but he didn't think that Future was actually interested. When Jacob thought about pitching that beat to other artists, Future told him not to let anyone else touch it. Jacob told Complex, "[Future] said he listened to that beat every day for a month straight, without rapping or nothing. He was just listening to the beat like it was a song." The "Wait For U" beat was a song, or at least a sample of a song. The Nigerian singer Tems is listed as a featured artist on "Wait For U," but she doesn't actually sing on the track. Instead, it's built on a sample of "Higher," a track that Tems released in 2020. That feature credit must've taken some backroom negotiation. Whenever someone gets that credit just for being sampled, it feels fake and weird. In this case, though, the sample probably is the best thing about the song. And anyway, it means we get to talk about Tems. Let's do that now.Temilade Openiyi spent a little bit of time in the UK as a little girl, but she mostly grew up in the Nigerian metropolis of Lagos. (When Tems was born, Bryan Adams' "Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman" was the #1 song in America. If anyone can point me to a Nigerian chart archive so I can figure what was at #1 over there, don't be shy.) Her first name comes from the Yoruba phrase for "the crown is mine," which is cool. She sang in her school choir and wrote her own songs as a kid, and she fell in love with the pirated CDs of American pop and R&B that she got from her brother's friends. But her family didn't consider music to be a real career.Tems' mother, a doctor, convinced her to study economics at Monash University College in Johannesburg. While she was at school, Tems taught herself how to produce music through YouTube tutorials. After school, she found a job in digital marketing but quit because she wanted to make music. Later on, she told The New York Times, "I just thought, 'This is what I’m actually gifted at. I should do something that comes naturally to me rather than trying to force it.'" Once she started making music, things happened quickly.Tems put out "Mr Rebel," her first single, in 2018. A year later, she released "Try Me," a tough and determined song that found an enthusiastic audience in Nigeria. This was during the boom times for Afrobeats, the slinky Nigerian sound that pulls in Western influences like American R&B and Jamaican dancehall. Another Tems single, "Damages," was a top-10 Nigerian hit in 2020. More importantly, "Try Me" earned Tems the attention of Wizkid, the Afrobeats star who has already been in this column for appearing on Drake's "One Dance." (Drake's first number one, Wizkid had to put it in his hands.)In 2020, Tems appeared in Wizkid's track "Essence," which became an international hit. A year later, Justin Bieber, someone who has been in this column many times, jumped on an "Essence" remix. The Bieber remix gave a big boost to both "Essence" and Tems herself. The remix reached #9 on the Hot 100, and Tems joined figures like Burna Boy and Davido on the short list of Afrobeats stars who were marketed hard across the world. (The "Essence" remix is a 7.) Around the same time, Tems appeared on Drake's song "Fountains," a Certified Lover Boy deep cut that peaked at #26.Tems didn't actually have to do anything on "Wait For U." It was just a matter of ATL Jacob sampling "Higher," a song from Tems' 2020 debut EP For Broken Ears — a young producer from one Black musical tradition latching onto a track from a young performer who comes from a different but vageuly adjacent Black musical tradition. Jacob probably didn't actually sample the studio version of "Higher" but a live-performance video of Tems singing her song over nothing but guitar. He took her pained chorus — "I will wait for you, for you" — looping it and messing with its speed. The murmuring, crystalline loop of that guitar is probably just as important to "Wait For U" as the sound of Tems' voice. Jacob put the standard trap 808 drums and bass-hits on the "Higher" sample, and that's the beat that Future listened to on repeat, like it was a song.Lots of people ended up with production and songwriting credit on "Wait For U." ATL Jacob might've made the original beat, but he's not the only one with his name on the track. Tejiri Akpoghene, the Nigerian producer who made "Higher" with Tems, gets co-producer credit. So do FnZ, the Australian duo who have already been in this column for their work on the Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber's "Stay." The producer Israel Fowobaje, aka 1SRAEL, has a credit, too. He's a member of Working On Dying, the Philly-based rap production collective, and an occasional Kanye West collaborator. Also credited is the Dallas-born Don Toliver collaborator known as Sonic Major. I don't know what any of these people did on the "Wait For U" beat. It just seems to be one of those things where a half-dozen producers need to tweak a Drake song before the public gets to hear it."Wait For U" isn't officially a Drake song, and it didn't start out as a Drake song, but it still has that numbingly sleek Drake gloss on it. I haven't seen any information about how Drake ended up on "Wait For U," but he was a frequent Future collaborator who was into that Afrobeats sound, so it wasn't exactly surprising to hear him on there. That's the thing: There's nothing surprising about "Wait For U." It's the sound of two dominant superstars getting tired and winding down, their music continuing to dominate the charts even as their vitality fades into the mist of memory.Man, I just don't like this song. It has things that I should like. I was always into the contrast between Drake and Future's voices — one low and grainy, the other sleekly nasal — and that contrast remains, even if the ideas that once animated it are exhausted. The beat itself is pretty enough, though it doesn't particularly stand out. I like what ATL Jacob and his, what, six co-producers do with the acoustic guitar from the Tems track. If "Wait For U" was just a replacement-level Future/Drake collab, I wouldn't love it, but I wouldn't mind it, either. I guess what gets on my nerves is the song's bored, sulky, unexamined notion of romantic love.Drake and Future sing-rap about different situations on "Wait For U," but neither of them has too much to say about what they've got going on. Future is always high and always on the road, and he's talking to a girl who wants to get closer to him even though he's "in the field like the children of the corn." But the two of them can't even talk because their brains are so fogged that emotions only emerge in dim outlines: "I get more vulnerable when I do pills/ When you drunk, you tell me exactly how you feel." He could genuinely feel awful about their continual communication breakdowns, or he could be manipulating her for sympathy. Either way, the effect is the same, and he keeps her at arm's length.Drake on the other hand, wants to lavish affection on someone without making any commitment to that person because he's more interested in traveling and making money. He's mad because she's hooking up with someone else, though he doesn't say that he's being exclusive, either. A common Drake theme emerges. He says that he's buying expensive stuff for this girl, and he's disappointed that she still gets mad at him. He's so condescending: "Girl, put a muzzle on it, all that barkin' over dinner/ I was fuckin' with you when you had the tiny Presidential/ You got better when you met me, and that ain't coincidental/ Tried to bring the best out you, guess I'm not that influential/ Guess I'm not the one that's meant for you." It's like he's trying to dump her and guilt-trip her at the same time. I cannot sympathize with one word of this.Future and Drake shot the fake-medieval Game Of Thrones-ass "Wait For U" video with the rap-video auteur formerly known as Little X. (He has been Director X for a long time now, but I can't stop thinking of him as Little X.) A lot of money clearly went into it, but it's pretty stupid. Future is "the Toxic King," and he leaves his queen behind so he can go fight on a fiery battlefield, though he's also in a bedroom with a bunch of girls in sexy Ren faire outfits. Drake is a knight in shining armor who rides a horse and swordfights some guys to protect a fair maiden. Tems never shows up. I guess some guy betrays Future? And he dumps the queen at the end? The video ends with almost a full minute of credits, but if it came out today, I'd probably assume it was at least partially AI-generated."Wait For U" came into the world on Future's album I Never Liked You, which is mostly decent, at least as far as late-period autopilot Future albums go. It's probably not a great sign when the artist is asleep on the record cover, though at least his sleep mask matches his suit. Future's previous releases hadn't generated that much heat, and he and his label invested resources into pulling in big guest stars and turning the album release into an event.Drake is on two I Never Liked You tracks. The other one was "I'm On One," which has nothing to do with the 2011 DJ Khaled hit with the exact same title, even though Drake was on that song, too. The Future/Drake "I'm On One" is a little more spirited than "Wait For U," anyway. Past and future Number Ones artist Kanye West showed up on "Keep It Burnin" and shot a video for the song with Future, though it was during the time when West always wore those blank masks in public. ("I'm In One" peaked at #11, "Keep It Burnin" at #15.)The week after I Never Liked You came out, all 16 of its tracks appeared on the Hot 100, four of them in the top 10. "Puffin On Zootiez," the album's second-biggest single, peaked at #5, and I like that one. That's Future in eerie-banger mode, which is always my favorite Future mode. (It's a 7.) "Wait For U" debuted at #1 during the period that Harry Styles' "As It Was" was in and out of the top spot. As you'd probably expect, the song fell from the top spot after one week. As you might not expect, however, "Wait For U" lingered. It's not one of these incredible disappearing #1 songs. The song parked itself in the top 10 for months, and it stayed on the Hot 100 for almost a year. Today, I Never Liked You is double platinum, and the "Wait For U" single is platinum 11 times over. Why were so many people drawn to "Wait For U"? Why are so many people still apparently drawn to "Wait For U," given that song some of Future's biggest Spotify numbers? I have no idea. In any case, it was a big moment for Tems, though she still hasn't transitioned into a different level of global stardom. Tems' biggest chart moments all came alongside established Western superstars, and most of them happened in 2022. A few months after "Wait For U," Tems appeared alongside Grace Jones on past and future Number Ones artist Beyoncé's excellent album track "Move," which peaked at #55. Later in the year, Tems co-write and sang backup on Rihanna's "Lift Me Up," her soundtrack song from the Black Panther sequel Wakanda Forever. It briefly looked like that song might signal a Rihanna comeback, but that obviously didn't happen. ("Lift Me Up" peaked at #2. It's a 4.) As lead artist, Tems is currently having her biggest-ever chart success. This week, her song "What You Need" is at #29, and it appears to be on the way up.I Never Liked You was a successful record that showed Future in a prolonged creative stasis, but that wouldn't last forever. Later in 2022, Future showed up on future Number Ones artist Metro Boomin's "Superheroes (Heroes & Villains)," which also features Chris Brown, someone who's been in this column a few times. Chris Brown's only barely on it, though, and not in the video version at all. Mostly, it's Future over his old friend Metro's most cinematic production, sounding generally more animated than he did on anyone else's tracks at the time. ("Superheroes (Heroes & Villains)" peaked at #8. It's an 8.)That "Superheroes" song was on Metro Boomin's Heroes & Villains album, and some not-that-interesting complications with its release and its Grammy fortunes led to a rift between Metro and Drake, a guy who had already rapped on plenty of Metro beats. Eventually, Future apparently got sick of Drake, too. A couple of years after "Wait For U," Future had a few pointed lines that seemed aimed at Drake, and he and Metro also released the song where Kendrick Lamar went public with his long-simmering anti-Drizzy vendetta. But we'll get to that song in a future column. Or a Future column. You know what I'm saying. A future Future column. Future and Drake eventually made up. That's a relief, right? You were worried, I can tell. Earlier this year, Future appeared on Drake's resentful sulk "Ran To Atlanta," a years-late riposte to another song that'll eventually appear in this column. Future and (especially) Drake both sounded reinvigorated on "Ran To Atlanta," and that song peaked at #2. (It's an 8.)As for Drake, we're nowhere near done with him yet. He'll be back in this column very soon.GRADE: 3/10BONUS BEATS: Here's Meek Mill, another guy with a long Drake-feud history, rapping over the "Wait For U" beat:(Meek Mill's highest-charting single is his 2019 post-feud Drake collab "Going Bad," which peaked at #6. It's a 7.)The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal The History Of Pop Music is out now via Hachette Books. Every time I ask you to buy the book, I get vulnerable.