We’re trying out something a little new here: Each week, we’ll be taking a quick look at the newest Billboard charts to see, in the immortal words of Shakespeare, “who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out.” (Thankfully, the stakes are far lower here than in King Lear, despite the potential for high drama.) Even in this impossibly fickle era, when the days of a homogenized pop music culture are long gone, the weekly charts published by Billboard still give some indication of what listeners are turning to, what social media trends are running the game and who’s currently riding high. What we’re hoping to do is to provide some context that helps us ground and understand the current data — and maybe even help us divine larger narratives about what we’re listening to. So here we go.

TOP SONGS

As NPR Music’s critic Ann Powers observed over the holiday weekend on All Things Considered, the summer of 2024 seems to be leaning toward country — or at least country-flavored bops. The Billboard Hot 100, which ranks the top singles (via a combination of data from streaming, digital and physical sales and radio airplay) is dominated this week by the uptempo country breakup tune “I Had Some Help” by Post Malone featuring Morgan Wallen.

Post Malone made his name as a hip-hop/pop guy, but in recent months, he’s collaborated with both Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. In his current bid for song of the summer, he’s teamed up with Morgan Wallen — who remains perhaps the biggest star in Nashville, despite (or maybe in part because of) a string of controversies. This is the second week at the top spot for “I Had Some Help.”

At No. 2 is one of Kendrick Lamar’s many recent Drake diss tracks, “Not Like Us,” followed by Tommy Richman’s “Million Dollar Baby” at No. 3. Richman, a largely unknown singer and rapper before last month, teased his vaguely funk-tinged song on TikTok, where it found huge viral success and racked up millions of views even before he released the full single.

Two of Ann’s other predictions for summer hits round out the Top 5 singles for the week of June 1: Shaboozey’s hybridic country/hip-hop/rock anthem “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” at No. 4 and, debuting at No. 5, Billie Eilish’s woozy, seductive “Lunch.” As Eilish recently said to Morning Edition about “Lunch”: “It’s so fun and it’s silly and it’s … I don’t know. Life is so unserious. It’s important to remember to have a little fun with it.” If ever there was a time for such a thing, wouldn’t it be summer?

TOP ALBUMS

Speaking of Eilish: She and her record labels, Darkroom and Interscope, pitched a fierce battle to knock chart queen Taylor Swift out of the top spot of the Billboard 200, the weekly albums chart. Swift’s album The Tortured Poets Department had already spent its first four weeks perched at No. 1. Eilish’s new album, Hit Me Hard and Soft, did not do quite well enough to push royalty off the throne, but according to Luminate, the company that puts together the data for the Billboard charts, Eilish earned 339,000 “equivalent album units” — her biggest week ever. (Stay with us for a moment. An “equivalent album unit” is industry-speak for an enigmatic formula: the combination of tracks streamed or downloaded, plus physical or digital album sales, expressed as an approximation of what decades ago would have been a simple transaction — one album sold.)

Nevertheless, Swift won a fifth week at No. 1, with a total of 378,000 album units. How did she prevail? In short, by knowing exactly how to fire up her fanbase on the marketing front. Team Swift launched a marketing counteroffensive that included six new digital versions of Tortured Poets and a new CD version — all of which were sold exclusively on Swift’s website. She also released a remix of her song “Fortnight” — the biggest single from Tortured Poets, and the one that happens to feature a fellow named Post Malone.

This is a game that Eilish knows too: For the race up the chart, she released nine colored vinyl editions and her own digital version of Hit Me Hard and Soft that included isolated vocal tracks for each song, as well as a new remix of her song “L’Amour De Ma Vie.” The complete album was also promotionally priced as an iTunes download at $4.99. It’s a move that recalled industry marketing campaigns of the pre-streaming era — that is, back when Eilish was just a tween herself. (Given how easy and cheap it is for listeners to inhale whole albums these days, it’s not that surprising that all 10 tracks from Hit Me Hard and Soft have individually hit the Hot 100.)

All of these fevered machinations took place under the umbrella of a single corporate behemoth: Universal Music Group, which distributes both Swift’s and Eilish’s music. Cynics might note that no matter which individual artist made it to No. 1, Universal was guaranteed to clinch the top spot.

WORTH NOTING

The fourth studio album from Zayn Malik, Room Under the Stairs, finds the former One Direction star taking a turn toward Americana and country, aided by Nashville producer Dave Cobb. (Clearly, this is the sound of 2024, even for a fellow born and raised in Bradford, England.)

The album — Malik’s first in three years — hasn’t quite resonated with a large public: It enters the Billboard 200 chart this week at No. 15. But it’s also given Malik an intriguing career first: an entry on the Americana/Folk Albums chart, positioned at No. 5.

Jacarandas have burst forth once more with their galvanizing purple-blue flowers, an invitation to feel joy or annoyance, depending on one’s perspective toward the tree’s spectacular yet messy blossoms.

This year’s flowering has arrived three weeks earlier than last year’s, which many avid jacaranda buffs experienced as later than usual. Gretchen North, a biology professor at Occidental College, says the variable blossoming date reflects the tree’s non-native status.

“The thing to realize about tropical trees is that they’re not at home here,” says North. She explains that jacarandas respond to environmental cues, including heat and light, to determine when to release blossom-triggering flowering time proteins, known as FT. Because environmental cues are different in Los Angeles than in the jacaranda’s native savannas of Argentina and Brazil, the trees do not flower here by clockwork.

Instead, they improvise, leading to jacaranda flower fluctuation on the calendar and block-by-block across Los Angeles. “I live under two jacaranda trees in my house,” says Tim Thibault, curator of woody plant materials at the Huntington. “Plants one block away are flowering, but mine, not yet.” The San Marino museum has recorded flowering dates as early as Jan. 8 in 2010 and as late as July 7 in 2016. So far, flowering jacarandas have been spotted along residential streets in East Hollywood, Silver Lake, Venice, Pasadena and Long Beach, among other areas.

Thibault pays close attention to the date of the tree’s first flowering, and not just because that’s when he needs to cover his Jeep to keep off sticky fallen purple flowers. The first day jacarandas bloom is the last day he plants anything until autumn. “Jacarandas bloom because it’s warming up and drying out,” he says. “Those are conditions I don’t want to be trying to establish plants in.”

Los Angeles tree maven Stephanie Carrie also marks her botanical calendar with the emergence of the jacaranda bloom. As curator of the online arboretum “Trees of LA,” Carrie celebrates the power of jacarandas on Instagram to make Angelenos aware of other remarkable trees that flower simultaneously, such as vibrant orange coral trees.

Carrie notes the international adaptability of jacarandas, which have flourished in traditionally moderate climates from San Diego to Cairo. From Mexico City, however, comes a warning that jacaranda’s adaptability is not unlimited. Francisco Arjona, curator of the Instagram account “Trees of Ciudad Mexico,” notes that drought and heat this year diminished the jacaranda display he has long admired in Chapultepec Park. He sees their distress amplified in other traditionally hardy urban trees, such as Mexican ash. “Their leaves are not open and looking to the sky,” he says . “They’re dying very slowly, and it’s noticeable in April and May.”

In recent years, social media has boosted the breed’s popularity. “They are just so photogenic,” Dan McLemore, a corgi enthusiast, said during the Summer Corgi Nationals, an event held in Arcadia, Calif. “They are short, stocky, funny-looking, active — and they just always look like they are smiling all the time.”