Mega Monday: An Eight-Year-Old Leftover Just Outlasted the Song That Borrowed a Record-Breaking Hook
Taylor Swift's 'Patient Zero' holds No. 1 for a third week, Drake and Don Toliver's 'Solar Eclipse' vanishes from the top 10 entirely one week after debuting there, and Dominic Fike's 'Babydoll' -- a 98-second EP track he wrote on house arrest in 2018 -- finally breaks the top 10 on a TikTok resurgence eight years later.
By Song Reviews · October 26, 2026
What Mega Monday Is
Every Monday, Song Reviews takes the previous week’s Billboard Hot 100 top 10 and asks the one question a chart position can’t answer on its own: is the popularity deserved? Two weeks ago this column watched three of Taylor Swift’s four simultaneous “Encore” debuts evaporate from the top 10 within seven days of entering it. This week delivers an even faster version of the same lesson, aimed at a different song entirely – and, in the same ten positions, the slowest possible counter-example: a song that took eight years to get here.
This Week’s Chart
The Hot 100, week of October 24, 2026:
| # | Song | Artist | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Patient Zero | Taylor Swift | 5.8/10 – holds No. 1 for a third week. |
| 2 | Choosin’ Texas | Ella Langley | Holds at No. 2. Already given the full Feature Friday treatment twice over; not re-reviewed here. |
| 3 | Boston | Stella Lefty | 8.0/10 – holds at No. 3, still the top 10’s best-reviewed song. |
| 4 | Been by Now | Morgan Wallen | 7.3/10 – holds at No. 4. |
| 5 | Dracula | Tame Impala & JENNIE | 6.4/10 – climbs to No. 5. |
| 6 | Nicole Kidman | Adéla | 7.1/10 – climbs to No. 6. |
| 7 | Hate That I Made You Love Me | Ariana Grande | 6.0/10 – holds at No. 7. |
| 8 | stupid song | Olivia Rodrigo | 7.4/10 – holds at No. 8. |
| 9 | BbY WOW | KAROL G, Judeline & rusowsky | 7.7/10 – climbs to No. 9. |
| 10 | Babydoll | Dominic Fike | 7.3/10 – new entry, Fike’s first-ever Hot 100 top 10. |
Is the Popularity Deserved?
Start with the song that’s gone. Last Monday’s column noted, in passing, that Drake and Don Toliver’s “Solar Eclipse” had debuted at No. 5 by lifting its entire hook from “Choosin’ Texas,” the single it was charting three spots behind; Tuesday’s column went further, pointing out that the album it comes from, Habibti (FOMO), was drawing some of the harshest reviews of Drake’s career. One week later, the verdict is in the chart itself: “Solar Eclipse” has fallen completely out of the top 10. A song built on somebody else’s already-written hook got exactly one week of borrowed momentum before gravity took it back. That’s not a coincidence stacked on top of last week’s column – it’s the same mechanism playing out faster, on a song that had nothing but a promotional surge and a stolen melody holding it up in the first place.
Everything else in the top nine is mostly a study in stability. Taylor Swift’s “Patient Zero” holds No. 1 for a third straight week on a record this column has already called competent rather than exceptional; Stella Lefty’s “Boston” and Morgan Wallen’s “Been by Now” hold their spots on the strength of being, respectively, the best- and second-best-reviewed songs in the top five; Tame Impala and JENNIE’s “Dracula” and Adéla’s “Nicole Kidman” both tick upward a few spots without anything new driving them beyond streaming numbers that kept compounding. None of that is a story. The story is at No. 10.
Dominic Fike wrote “Babydoll” in 2017, on house arrest, for an independently released EP nobody was tracking for chart potential. It sat there for eight years as a minor deep cut – until a TikTok resurgence this year sent it back to Columbia for a proper single release, then to radio, then, this week, into the Hot 100’s top 10 for the first time in Fike’s career. That’s a flatly stranger success story than anything else on this chart: not a promotional push, not a feature, not a borrowed hook, but eight years of dormancy ended by an algorithm finding an old file and deciding, on its own schedule, that the moment was finally right. “Solar Eclipse” needed somebody else’s record-breaking melody to get one week at No. 5. “Babydoll” needed nothing but time, and it’s still here.
Hero image: “Babydoll” single cover art, Columbia Records. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.