THE LONG, SQUEAKY REIGN OF ‘THE BOX’

“THE BOX” is living proof that a good ad-lib can go a long way, and that sometimes it isn’t so much what the words mean as the way they squeak out, like a cat toy or an old door. “The Box” likely wouldn’t have been the biggest song of 2020 without the creaky “eeh-urr” that Roddy Ricch chirps throughout, which — as A&R executive Keefa Black told Rolling Stone earlier this year — was something the Compton rapper tacked on at the last minute, around 6 a.m., after a long session at New York’s Jungle Studios working on his debut album, Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial.

“I was sittin’ there looking at him, laughing, like, ‘Yo, you crazy,’ ” Black recalled. “He was like, ‘Bro, trust me.

This shit gon’ go.’ ”

Clearly, Ricch was right: “The Box” proved to be his breakout smash, a hit on radio and on streaming, and an infinitely flowing wellspring for memes. And now, “The Box” tops Rolling Stone’s

year-end Top 100 Songs chart, with 838 million on-demand audio streams and 193,000 sales from January through November.

While the song rose to the top early — reaching Number One in the first week of the year and going on to spend 11 consecutive weeks there — it proved hard to beat as the months rolled by: No song was able to eclipse it by year’s end. (The song that came the closest was DaBaby’s “Rockstar,” which features Ricch; that single managed to tie “The Box” with eight nonconsecutive weeks at Number One.)

Maybe it’s the ad-lib, or maybe it’s the fact that it was released in January and reminds us all of the carefree, unmasked glee of the Before Times, but nothing was able to top “The Box” in 2020, and nothing really came close. It finishes 1.1 million units ahead of any other song on the year-end chart, and 220 million streams ahead.