Right now the biggest rap song in America is Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’s “Thrift Shop.” Or at least according to Billboard it is—at the moment it’s number two on the Hot 100, right behind Bruno Mars’s increasingly unstoppable-looking Police pastiche “Locked Out of Heaven,” as well as number one on the R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart, the R&B/Hip-Hop Digital Songs chart, and the Rap Songs chart.
In the real world you can spend all day listening to rap radio, cruising rap blogs, and checking in on rap Twitter and never hear a note of “Thrift Shop.” If you look at the Hot 100 chart online right now you’ll see a little trophy icon under Macklemore’s face with a note that his single is a “Digital + Streaming Gainer.” That means that the song’s benefitting heavily from Billboard’s new reweighted methodology for determining chart position, which incorporates digital downloads and streams as well as traditional radio spins and tends to have some strange side effects, especially on genre-specific charts.