Welcome to Sleeper Hit Support Group, a new column diving into the song currently occupying the bottom spot of the Billboard Hot 100.

In a pop landscape that asks more questions that it answers, I'm setting out to answer three questions about each of these songs: how it got here, if the song is good, and where it's going. In this 100th spot we'll find unlikely ascents, falls from grace, and resurgences of hits from bygone eras.

Today, miraculously, we're taking a look at "Big Guy" by Ice Spice.

How did it get here?

Ice Spice (real name Isis Gaston) was born on the turn of the millennium to teen parents in the Bronx. While she was raised mostly by her grandparents, the time that Gaston spent with her underground rapper father was in his car decked out with big speakers and a TV screen she would watch music videos on.

Gaston very quickly took to idolizing Nicki Minaj (who, for the purposes of this column, disappeared a year ago and has not been heard from since). In a 2023 interview with XXL, she shared, “When I saw Nicki, I was so mesmerized. She’s the first female rapper that I seen. And ever since then, I was kinda set on what I wanted to be.”

Eventually, Ice Spice would chart two collaborations with Minaj in a classic role reversal where Minaj was the one capitalizing on Ice's momentum as her own career found itself in increasingly dire straits. "Princess Diana", a post-release single from Ice Spice's debut Ep Like...? debuted and peaked at number four in April of 2023. The single planted seeds for a second collaboration between the two a few months later. The Aqua novelty hit-sampling "Barbie World" was commissioned for the end credits of the 2023 blockbuster Barbie, debuting and peaking at #7.

Unlike Minaj, the appeal of Ice Spice lies in her subtleties. There's an air of nonchalance among Gen Z's stars that Ice Spice (at least at first) clearly exemplified. She's relatively soft spoken, doesn't get into much trouble, and stays in her lane almost to a fault. The single that put her on the map, 2022's "Munch", is about as straightforward as it gets. She balks at a man who's obsessed with her, decrying him a munch to emasculate him. She's hot, she's rich, and she knows it, but delivers it in a way where it sounds like it's just another Tuesday. It's quintessential New York drill, and marks the start of Spice's signature triplet flow. It's a sound that we will only see her stray away from as her career continues.

"Munch" initially gained traction after being played on Drake's now defunct Sirius XM channel Sound 42, which sparked its TikTok virality shortly thereafter. Ice Spice's rumored falling out with Drake likely followed a similar narrative to the song itself. Less than two months later, Ice Spice inked a joint deal with Capitol Records and 10K Projects, an imprint that switched its corporate ownership from UMG to Warner in 2023. 10K projects has one of the most confounding rosters I have ever seen. Ice Spice shares a spot on this roster with Christian pop singer Forrest Frank and The Living Tombstone (the band behind the Five Night At Freddy's song).

Throughout 2023, Ice Spice was a mainstay on the charts, sending four songs as a main artist and three as a feature. The biggest among them was her feature on a remix of Taylor Swift's "Karma", a sign that Spice was in high demand and a player in the pop space. Her contribution to the song sent it all the way to #2 in June of that year, following the success of her own single "In Ha Mood" and her feature on PinkPantheress' "Boy's a liar Pt. 2". Spice joined Swift on stage in New Jersey to debut the remix, and they would be found buddying up at that year's VMAs.

From there, things began to take a tumble. The lead single from Ice Spice's eventual debut album Y2K! peaked at #37, but it left an impression that has marred her career ever since. "Think U The Shit (Fart)" is her highest charting song as a solo artist, but at what cost? When Ice Spice comes up in conversation, the litany of poop themed bars are mentioned without fail. Rap-centric publication Complex published a list ranking all the poop bars on the album, which exists outside of the context of her most notable poop bar ("I'm the shit, I'm that bitch, I'm miss poopie") from the EP track "Deli".

Y2K! on the whole released to mixed reviews at best, and the second and final song it sent to the charts was the Central Cee collab "Did It First". She returned to the YouTube channel On The Radar at the end of 2024 for a freestyle, and she just sounds sad. She mentions the passing of her grandmother and losing friends, but there are still commenters congratulating her for getting through 90 seconds of material without mentioning pooping or farting.

This all leads me to ask: why was she chosen for this SpongeBob movie? How far down the list did Nickelodeon have to go to concede on contracting an artist whose music is not at all for kids? The vast majority of her music is pretty inherently sexual. Is it the brand synergy with her old single "Bikini Bottom"?

My optimistic(?) answer to this conundrum is they wanted to market this movie to chronically online teens and young adults in a similar fashion to 2022's Minions: The Rise of Gru. For that movie's marketing campaign, Illumination tapped internet-famous rapper Yeat for a loosely Minion themed song. That and the 70's themed, Jack Antonoff-produced soundtrack got the teens in theater seats (admittedly including myself), a lot of them donning last year's prom suit. Some moviegoers got so obnoxious the theaters had to take precautions.

For the group of teens that this was marketed to, the Despicable Me franchise was something we grew up with. To use myself as an example, when the first Despicable Me movie came out in 2010 I was 6 years old, its target demographic. I remember going to see the second one, but afterwards I'd aged out of the franchise. This marketing campaign both tapped into the nostalgia I had for these movies, but also appealed to the pretentious, indie music loving 18-year-old I'd become. I still listen to that Phoebe Bridgers cover of The Carpenters' "Goodbye To Love" to this day.

So, by this model, tapping Ice Spice to both contribute a song and brief speaking role in the movie was Nickelodeon's way of trying to grab that same demographic. Looking at box office numbers, it doesn't seem as though that worked very well (if my assumption is correct), but the song has found a life of its own via its comical banality and a TikTok dance.

Was this guy paid to make up this dance? Probably. Seems about as low effort as the song itself.

Here is Ice Spice doing the dance herself a couple weeks ago.

And for good measure, here are the Costco guys doing the dance as well with some hard hitting social commentary.

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The TikTok dance seemed to have gained most of its traction in the past couple of weeks, allowing it to eke out a #100 debut. With that said...

Is the song any good?

In this instance, this is a particularly loaded question. A couple months ago I was at a friend's apartment for her birthday party. Once enough people get there and the booze is flowing, she likes to whip out her karaoke set-up (Spotify with the lyrics page up and two Bluetooth microphones). Eventually, "Big Guy" was selected by someone for karaoke. I was engrossed in another conversation at the time, but once I heard that fuck-ass guitar tone my attention was captured, and so was the rest of the room.

The song is, if anything, an earworm. I have thought about the phrase "SpongeBob big guy pants ok" nearly every day since its November release. It's a truly beautiful mantra. SpongeBob, in the cannon of the movie, is now a big enough guy to ride a rollercoaster. He wears pants, as implied by his last name... ok! But otherwise there is not much to say about this song. It exists to sell a product and not much else. Ice Spice doesn't sound nonchalant, she just sounds bored. She clearly did not want to do this given the lack of effort.

This song has been quietly omnipresent: a team at bar trivia named "SpongeBob big guy quiz ok"; clips of the song translated to Spanish: another one where the Spanish translation was translated back into English. That has to count for something. A bad but memorable song will always be more interesting than a boring song.

Where is it going?

I would not be surprised if this was "Big Guy"'s only week on the chart. People will not be streaming this after the novelty wears off. That's just how it tends to go with these kinds of songs. If Ice Spice's career continues to die out, this will probably have been at least among the final nails in the coffin.

It doesn't have to be, though. There are people rooting for Ice Spice. She has fans. If she realizes the pop machine pivot is not working for her and is able to make music she's passionate about again (her recent collab with Dominican rapper Tokischa is certainly a good start) instead of output for the sake of output, I believe she could turn it around. But considering the pop machine spits people out before it's even done chewing, the odds are not in her favor.