YG Marley is on the Billboard Hot 100. “Praise Jah in the Moonlight,” the debut single he self-released on December 27, enters at No. 74 on the chart dated February 10, 2024, after 6.2 million official US streams — up 59 percent — in the January 26 to February 1 tracking week, Billboard’s Xander Zellner reports, citing Luminate.
The song is in the JamaicansMusic library: press Play above, open the “Praise Jah in the Moonlight” release page, or jump to the player below.
Joshua Marley — grandson of Bob Marley, son of Rohan Marley and Lauryn Hill — becomes the sixth member of the family to chart on the Hot 100, after Bob, Ziggy, Ky-Mani, Damian and Skip Marley. It is also, per DancehallMag as cited by Wikipedia, the first reggae song on the chart since Damian Marley and Jay-Z’s “Bam” seven years ago. His mother topped the Hot 100 with “Doo Wop (That Thing)” in 1998.
From Hill’s stage to TikTok
The song, which samples the Wailers’ 1978 track “Crisis” and lists Bob Marley as a co-writer alongside YG and Hill, gathered momentum when YG performed it at several of his mother’s tour stops over the winter. On TikTok it has soundtracked more than 150,000 clips, Billboard says, and a February 14 release for the biopic Bob Marley: One Love is not hurting.
Britain has moved faster. The single entered the UK Official Singles Chart at No. 63 on January 25 and has climbed to No. 20 on the chart dated February 8, the Official Charts Company shows; it has also topped the Official Independent Singles Chart. In New Zealand it has reached No. 1.
Update, March 9: the peak
“Praise Jah in the Moonlight” has now peaked at No. 34 on the Hot 100, on the chart dated March 9, 2024, per Billboard’s chart history, after reaching No. 39 the week before, when the song also sat inside the top ten of the TikTok Billboard Top 50 in the wake of the film’s release. In the UK it entered the top ten at No. 9 on the chart dated February 15 and peaked at No. 5 the following week, holding in the top ten for five weeks; it spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Independent Singles Chart and reached No. 9 in Ireland. Wikipedia’s chart tables also show a Billboard Global 200 peak of No. 11 and top tens in the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and Luxembourg.
Editor’s note: The song went on to be certified platinum in the United States and United Kingdom and double platinum in Canada and New Zealand; Cole Bennett’s official video, with a cameo from Hill, arrived on April 20, 2024; YG Marley was named JaRIA Breakthrough Artiste of the Year in March, and closed his Reggae Sumfest set with the song in July, with his mother beside him.
Listen and dig deeper
- Play “Praise Jah in the Moonlight” — the audio upload from YG Marley’s channel, with the official music video as an alternate version in the player.
- Browse the YG Marley artist profile and Damian Marley, whose “Bam” with Jay-Z was reggae’s previous Hot 100 entry.
Sources: Billboard — “Hot 100 First-Timers: YG Marley Shines With Debut Single ‘Praise Jah in the Moonlight’” (Xander Zellner, Feb 6, 2024); Billboard — YG Marley chart history; Official Charts Company — Praise Jah in the Moonlight; Wikipedia — Praise Jah in the Moonlight (international peaks and certifications). Official Charts’ prose dates the UK top-ten entry to February 9 and the No. 5 peak a week later; its chart-run table lists the corresponding chart dates as February 15 and 22.
Editor’s note: This story is part of an archive backfill covering Jamaican music news from 2022 to 2026. It is dated to the events it reports.