Welcome to Sleeper Hit Support Group, a 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, we're switching it up and comparing "B.B.B." by Juvenile featuring Megan Thee Stallion AND "Call Back" by Don Toliver

How did they get here?

After taking last week off to finally finish the first draft of my Bachelor's thesis (sitting at 42 pages right now), I found that the last two #100s had some parallels. Both Megan Thee Stallion and Don Toliver hail from Houston and rose to prominence through their songs blowing up on TikTok during the pandemic. The way the two have approached fame in the time since clues us into rap's current gender dynamics. But before we dive into that, let's take a quick run down of everyone's careers.

I had no idea who Juvenile was until I started writing this. His heyday came and went before I started preschool, but that's not to diminish his litany of accomplishments.

Juvenile (born Terius Gray) is a 51 year old rapper from New Orleans, Louisiana. He grew up in the Magnolia Projects and started rapping as young as age 10, sneaking out to perform behind his mother's back. His neighbors would taunt him with the nickname "Little Juvenile," which he began to use as his rap name as a teenager.

He got local attention as part of the bounce music scene in New Orleans, but didn't get any national attention until he signed to Cash Money records and joined the Hot Boys alongside Lil Wayne, B.G. and Turk. Cash Money Records was founded by brothers Slim and Baby Williams.

In his column about Juvenile's sole #1 hit, 2004's "Slow Motion", Tom Breihan of Stereogum explained the founding of Cash Money and Juvenile's place within it.

"At Cash Money, the Williams brothers put together a roster of hungry young bounce rappers and pushing them toward harder, more street-oriented music. The Williams brothers also had a genius as their in-house producer. Mannie Fresh had been DJ'ing since the mid-'80s, and his tracks sounded like beautiful chaos. On Mannie Fresh beats, drums and synth-pings would explode in every direction, forming a rhythmic bed that sounded perfect when paired with a thick New Orleans accent. Mannie and Juvenile quickly developed what would become one of the all-time great rapper/producer dynamics. Over those frenetically bugged-out Mannie beats, Juvenile would somehow sound relaxed, his sticky drawl easing into beat-pockets that out-of-town rappers couldn't even detect. Juvenile's Cash Money debut Solja Rags came out in 1997, and it became a regional smash."

Juvenile found solid mainstream success during his time with Cash Money and in the Hot Boys, and while his cultural capital was all but used up by the late 2000's, he remains respected as a pioneer of that gaudy, energetic southern rap sound. He performed a Tiny Desk Concert in June of 2023 as a part of the program's Black Music Month series. Mannie Fresh joins Juvenile alongside a 12 piece band, including Jon Batiste and Trombone Shorty. Despite being in his late forties at the time, Juvenile sounds endlessly youthful. In a first for Tiny Desk, the audience demanded an encore of "Back That Azz Up", to which the crew obliged.

"As a black man and musician from Louisiana, I can’t express how much this means to me these songs are engraved into the fabric of our state. Thank you so much NPR," one commenter wrote.

For a while, Megan Thee Stallion (born Megan Pete) kept finding herself in the right places at the right time. Pete was born an only child to an incarcerated father and a regionally successful rapper mother, who would take Megan to her studio sessions instead of daycare. She started writing her own raps as a teenager, but her mother forbade her from pursuing it as a career until she turned 21 due to the sexual nature of her lyrics.

Megan never broke that rule, not releasing anything publicly until 2016, the year she turned 21. Her freestyling videos started to gain traction in 2018, specifically those where she'd battle against male rappers. She adopted the rap name "Megan Thee Stallion" due to her statuesque, tall figure. It was at this time she began procuring buzz in the underground, and signed to 300 Entertainment as the label's first ever female artist.

Her first Hot 100 entry came in 2019 with "Big Ole Freak", peaking at #65 as she continued to garner critical acclaim. She was selected for that year's XXL freshman class alongside the likes of Gunna, YBN Cordae, and the now disgraced but once dominant DaBaby. She had the luck of following Lil Mosey's god awful (and memed to death) freestyle in the cypher, making her already-impressive performance sound otherworldly by comparison.

Megan's real breakout moment came just a few months later with "Hot Girl Summer", a track that played on the "hot girl" mythology she was building her brand around. Bolstered in part by features from Nicki Minaj and Ty Dolla $ign, it peaked at #11 on the Hot 100 and is still one of Megan's biggest hits to this day. It was good timing too, as 2019 was the last summer that could be ascribed "hot girl" for quite awhile afterwards.

Despite this, Megan's career hit a fever pitch once the pandemic had begun to take hold. Her single "Savage" spawned a widely recreated TikTok dance, and it went all the way to #1 after fellow Houstonian Beyoncè hopped on the remix. That would be the last time Megan's southern roots really took hold in her music.

The "Savage" remix would go on to win Best Rap Song at the mask-laden, socially distanced 2021 Grammys, which would simultaneously cement Beyoncé as the winningest artist in Grammy history. "If you know me, you have to know that ever since I was little, I was like, 'you know what? One day, Imma grow up and I'm gonna be, like, the rap Beyoncé," Megan said in her acceptance speech. "Houston, we did it!" she later exclaimed. Megan would win Best New Artist that same night, tasked with beating the curse that award bestows upon its recipients.

In the summer of 2020, Megan had a second cultural phenomenon with "WAP", her endlessly raunchy duet with Cardi B. It pissed off all the right people, and was named song of the year by Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, NME, and BBC. It remains her biggest hit, having spent four weeks at #1.

After her Grammy wins, Megan's career found itself with a strange trajectory. A lot of her public image (which had remained almost exclusively positive) was eclipsed by her ongoing legal battle with R&B singer Tory Lanez, who shot her in the feet in July 2020.

Megan's studio albums would consistently underperform outside of their singles, and her attempt to manufacture a crossover pop hit with a gauche, Dave Meyers-directed CGI nightmare video to boot immediately fell on its face.

Megan's last #1 hit, 2024's "Hiss", was a catch-all diss track against Tory Lanez, Drake, and most notably, Nicki Minaj. Megan's relationship with Minaj soured after their collaboration on "Hot Girl Summer", but the details of said relationship are both blurry and otherwise innocuous.

The line "These hoes don't be mad at Megan, these hoes mad at Megan's Law," directed at Nicki Minaj's sex offender husband, sparked a charged response from Minaj. "Big Foot" is perhaps the most embarrassing thing Minaj has put to tape throughout her 15+ year career. She digs primarily at things that are not Megan's fault: her height and getting shot by Lanez.

The track ends with confounding and unfocused rambling, which lines up with her behavior on Instagram livestreams she held while writing the track. Additionally, the Barbz doxxed the location of Megan's mother's grave amid this beef. Certainly the actions of people who believe they're in the right.

The eponymous 2024 record that included "Hiss" otherwise performed poorly, and that's the last we've heard from Megan as a solo artist.

Don Toliver (born Caleb Toliver) is a year older than Megan Thee Stallion, and is also from Houston. He rose to prominence in the rap sphere when he appeared on Travis Scott's Astroworld in 2018, an album that released just a day after his own debut mixtape Donny Womack. He signed to Travis Scott's Atlantic imprint Cactus Jack just a week afterwards. His first two charting hits – the smooth, midtempo "No Idea" and the endlessly catchy "After Party" – both garnered attention from soundtracking viral TikTok dances. They peaked at #43 and #57 respectively.

That's kind of all you really have to know about Don Toliver. He's has never had a huge, ubiquitous hit like Megan did. He was never any sort of driver of culture, he's just kind of been there since he broke through around the start of the pandemic. Your parents have probably heard of Megan Thee Stallion, but likely not Don Toliver. Toliver has kept a relatively low profile for how sneakily successful his music has consistently been. He doesn't really get involved with beef, has no controversies of his own, and seems to have a nice and mostly quiet relationship with fellow artist Kali Uchis. Even with his low profile, he has been a constant presence on the charts since his record OCTANE came out in January. Every single song on OCTANE charted, with "Body" and "E85" peaking at #14 and #15 respectively.

With all that said...

Are these songs any good?

Both of these songs are pretty short, so there isn't really much meat to dig into.

"Call Back" is fine. The hook is catchy, but Toliver's delivery just not really evocative of the desperation implied by the lyrics. He wants to shower this hypothetical woman in compliments and the promise of money when you read the lyrics, but when he sings, it's just noise. His heart's not in it at all because this is not his life. He's been with Uchis for six years and they have a son together. "Call Back" isn't evocative any way you look at it. Not melodically, not from the beat, nothing. The record being called OCTANE is entirely misleading from what the music actually sounds like.

"B.B.B.", on the other hand, is a blast. That power chord sample on the beat rules, Juvenile raps his ass off, and he sounds youthful enough in his delivery that the lyrics don't make him come off as a has-been trying to relate to the youth – he's just picking up where he left off. Megan fits right into this; if you ask her to rap about sex she's gonna do a good job, almost to the point where nobody really goes to her to hear about much else.

Megan Thee Stallion vs. Don Toliver: Southern hip hop in the 2020s

More than any other prominent American genre, rap is heavily regionalized. Not only due to regionalized scenes and its ties to street culture, but also in how distinct the sound of each region's music is. The genre's first three decades of existence were dominated by the diametrically opposed east and west coasts. But when southern rap emerged in the early 2000s, it dominated both coasts. From October 2003 through December 2004, the number one position on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart was held by a Southern urban artist for 58 out of 62 weeks. For better or for worse, it's not the early 2000's anymore and it seems the Southern pride has vanished from our Southern stars. For both Megan and Toliver, the quest for (inter)national success made them lose ties to their roots.

You would think Megan hopping on "B.B.B" was because she wanted to respect her elders and pay homage to a legend. Instead, it all comes back to TikTok. "B.B.B." went semi-viral on TikTok, with the sound's most popular video having on-screen text that said "This is the first time I hear man [sic] match Megan's flow on a song." Regardless, it's Juvenile's first chart entry in over 20 years. Megan clearly still has the cultural cache to boost a song by a legacy artist in this way.

More than anything, "Sweetest Pie" is what made it clear that fame is one of Megan's biggest motivations. It's why she always seems to walk this tightrope of pop and rap – trying to keep her credibility in both lanes.

Don Toliver, on the other hand, seems completely content with his low profile. He used to play a lot with chopped and screwed production techniques that came out of Houston. Now, he's focused on making that polished, sometimes sleepy, trap music that people listen to passively when they work out. Toliver is a mainstay on the "Beast Mode" and "Locked In" Spotify editorial playlists with millions of followers. He's fairly quiet on social media aside from promotional material for his music and shoe brand (but every rapper has a shoe brand at this point).

Megan is still doing all of the things that people trying to stay famous do. She's currently on a Broadway run as a Moulin Rouge stunt cast, retweeting the reports of bolstering ticket sales. She has her own tequila brand (?). She's doing elaborate Cheetos ads with Nickelback. She did a four part YouTube series to promote the Winter Olympics. She has a cameo in an episode of a new NBC sitcom starring Tracey Morgan and Daniel Radcliffe that aired last night. And I found all that from just one quick sweep of her recent social media posts.

Regardless of your feelings towards either of these artists, the "Dirty South" seems to have become quite polished these days.