#800. Rudimental (feat Anne-Marie & Will Heard) - Rumour Mill (#96, 2015)
78th of 2015
The vibes were off for this one from the beginning. Rudimental scored their biggest hit with "Free" (#858) and I felt like it was a worrying sign for their future output. The real sign was when they started rolling out their second album with the song "Never Let You Go". It's faithful drum & bass in typical Rudimental style but just lacks the pulse and excitement of "Feel The Love" or "Not Giving In". It's efficient that they got Foy Vance to fill in the role of both Alex Clare and the other guy who will eventually appear on this list, but he can't rise much above perfunctory even when he's giving it his all. It pretty much tanked their album campaign which was only salvaged by the easy saving throw of having an Ed Sheeran collaboration on deck. For someone who's never made the Hottest 100 before as an artist, I sure find a lot of reasons to mention him here.
The saving throw for the triple j crowd seemed to be this song. A touch too low key to really become a proper chart hit, but it did well enough and voters found room for it in the end. I'm not entirely sure what the draw card is. Anne-Marie hadn't really started her solo career yet, and while I was pretty enthusiastic for Will Heard's contribution to songs like "Sonnentanz (Sun Don't Shine)" by Klangkarussell and "Tear It Down" by The Aston Shuffle, they didn't exactly turn him into a household name either. I guess people just liked the vibe of the thing, it's a little different to what you'd expect from Rudimental.
Actually if we're talking about Hottest 100 performance, Anne-Marie is an odd one. She'll appear once more as a featured artist on this list, but she never made it in on her own. That might not sound so strange given that she very quickly moved away from the triple j radar, but if we're isolating that brief period in 2016 when she was in their good books, it feels like a serious underperformance. Australia was the first country to really give her stripes, with "Do It Right" and "Alarm" performing far better than on her local UK charts. She even came in for Like A Version to cover a reasonably niche Australian song that will eventually appear on this list. For all that she got as high as #195 and never got playlisted again. I always have to share the fact that she's a black belt in karate. As a music nerd who also moonlights as a world record holding speedrunner (or vice versa), I support those who find their calling in multiple fields. This song largely exists because Anne-Marie had already been working as a live vocalist for Rudimental for a couple of years at this point. It certainly won't be the last time we see that sort of relationship in this list.
With my Rudimental inclinations laid fully on the table (and the notable remaining entry for them prodding in a similar direction), I was largely unamused by this at the time. It just seemed to meander with no real sense of purpose. The repeated vocal hook that shows up in the second half of the song starts sounding very silly if you pay attention to it as well. I suppose though when I take the song for what it is, it's perfectly adequate. As I'm listening to it and writing this, I'm catching myself nodding along to it, which implies they were doing something right.
#799. Mashd N Kutcher (feat Dan Andrews) - Get on the Beers (#12, 2020)
75th of 2020
I don't know how many international readers I get here. For any of you out there, bravo for sticking through what is me talking about niche Australian music half of the time. Once again this is true but it's a little bit different this time. This novelty song featuring numerous soundbites from the then-premier of Victoria is a joke that you might have an easier time being in on than I do. It's been years and I'm still thoroughly not in on this joke.
Taking things back to 2020, we had the COVID-19 pandemic. Australia being its own continent and not being very densely populated gave us a decent chance to stay vigilant about it and keep it contained. As is often the case, any successful curbing will spawn skepticism that it's even a big deal, which then leads to it spiralling out of control.
I've been living in Western Australia for nearly 15 years now. We're so far away from most of the country that we're largely not thought about at all. London is considerably closer to Moscow than Perth is to Melbourne. Our COVID-19 response was short and sweet. The border was effectively closed down, and we scarcely had any outbreaks. Mask mandates were fairly brief, but in general the pandemic barely affected my way of life.
A key point of interest here is the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne. They're by far the two biggest cities in Australia, and fairly close to each other. It's hard to know how seriously people take it from where I'm standing, but there's a lot of back-and-forth about which city is better. For many years, a sticking point that Melbourne always had against Sydney was their lockout laws, effectively a curfew on the city. The city's nightlife can't help but be dragged down with it. This law lasted from early 2014 to early 2020.
A couple of months after that, Melbourne and the state of Victoria were met with constant lockdowns to try and quell the pandemic. At no point should I ever have been able to name the premier of a state I don't live in, but seeing Dan Andrews give press conferences over and over again updating the situation is something even I couldn't completely avoid. Given what Victoria had prided itself upon in the preceding years, I can imagine people weren't too happy having to put up with the constant containment measures. On the other hand, the Gen-Z (or thereabouts) response to this sort of thing often falls under the banner of nihilistic dadaism. Shitposting, in other words.
Mashd N Kutcher are an unexpected name to show up in the Hottest 100 history books. They're an electronic duo who largely specialise in mash ups, or usually just taking a familiar song and slapping a beat behind it. I was not particularly fond of what they were doing, but I suppose in hindsight I have to give them some credit for their source material. No where else would you find people digging through with samples of Art vs. Science's "Parlez Vous Francais?", or Powderfinger's "(Baby I've Got You) On My Mind". Still, they were a novelty act that never got played on triple j and were largely off my mind when they were off the charts.
It took me by surprise when they did show up like this. On the other hand, triple j as a radio station largely operates in two studios, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne. It's only natural that they're going to feed into this sort of discourse. They're the national youth broadcaster after all.
So what is this exactly? Well it's a novelty record that's taking snippets from a speech that Dan Andrews gave in March 2020, one where he declared it inappropriate to 'get on the beers' with all your mates around. This re-arrangement of words is all done in comedic effect to make him effectively say the opposite. It's done with the silly irreverence that makes it almost apolitical. It's a very Australian joke. I'm sure I, and many other people I know can quote Homer Simpson's 'sweet can' monologue verbatim after all. US President Donald Trump also has his voice appear on this track to get us to boo him for never having had a beer in his life. I say president, but when this actually polled in the Hottest 100, he wasn't president anymore, and I'm writing this now as he's president-elect, but posting near the start of the next administration. It's been a long 5 years.
To get back to the point, I'm someone who can honestly say I've never had a beer in my life, and I live in one of the few parts of the world that weren't drastically affected by the pandemic. On no level is this joke built for me. I can appreciate the comedic value of it, and it amuses me greatly that it both polled in the Hottest 100 and made the ARIA top 50, but there's only so far I can go with it.
#798. Meg Mac - Roll Up Your Sleeves (#24, 2014)
78th of 2014
When I think of this song, my mind draws back to 2023 during the AFL Brownlow Medal broadcast when they just randomly brought her on stage to sing this song (she also sung another one of her songs that'll be on this list, but I missed the start so I'm only just learning this). This might have started a new tradition because they did it again in 2024 with another artist who'll eventually appear on this list. I always see people saying they want more Australian artists to appear on the big stage and get proper exposure that's so often reserved for international stars and I agree, but then as soon as it happens you're just met with endless complaints about why some obscure singer is hogging up time. I kind of wish those two factions would dish it out together. I wish I could remember the timeline a little better because it's very possible that I had either just ranked this song on my list, or was just about to, so the timing of having it thrusted upon me would be amusing.
This isn't Meg Mac's highest placing Hottest 100 entry, or highest charting, but it's probably endured as her biggest hit at this point. It makes sense really. It's got all those hallmarks of esteem and grandeur. All those little chorus hooks for everyone to fight over what their favourite one is. At this stage I just wasn't fully convinced. I feel like there's too much focus on that piano melody and it stops everything else in its tracks while it's happening. The momentum does arrive towards the end of the song but I'm just never engaged on the way there. Also it's very funny that the song has the lyric 'he is not fancy, he just wears black', as if that isn't 80% of all Meg Mac photo shoots.
#797. RÜFÜS DU SOL - Like An Animal (#28, 2015)
77th of 2015
With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to say that RÜFÜS DU SOL's music has developed quite a bit over the course of a decade or so. Mostly it just sounds bigger, befitting of the bigger venues they're playing. It's not a straight line of course. I'm still avoiding mentioning of a certain song from this album that didn't poll under normal circumstances. On the other hand, we are looking at a time capsule of a moment when this was the slightly more idealised version of their sound. I just can't imagine them making something like "Like An Animal" again.
I can't think of another song of theirs that signposts itself for being as lightweight as this one. The high pitched cooing and breezy synths set a pace that never really changes. After that, I feel like it suffers a bit from a lack of personality. So much focus is put on the title lyric, but it never says anything of substance. Maybe they could have picked an actual animal? There's almost nothing in the lyrics to play into the theme, apart from maybe being 'on a hunt' and you can 'hear me calling'. I'm not saying that their lyrics are of utmost importance, and I can't pretend that there's much brilliant insight in the rest of their entries. But an empty simile just feels so much more draining than run of the mill lyrics.
#796. Drake (feat Wizkid & Kyla) - One Dance (#31, 2016)
82nd of 2016
Every now and then, the sheer mechanical nature of music's pecking order gets itself exposed to a wider number of individuals than usual, and the results are rarely flattering. It's largely a streaming era phenomenon but the principles of it have been in place for a long time. Relevant in this case is that popular artists have a certain expected reach when they promote a new song. If that artist reaches a high enough threshold, they'll start topping the chart with regularity. The result of every individual music fan listening to whatever they will, and the one who covers the most ground will win out. Possibly, they'll do it over, and over again because they've become a bigger part of their success than the songs themselves.
"One Dance" was the song that truly signalled that we were living in Drake's world. As a lead artist, it was his first #1 hit in the US, UK and Australia, after his previous single was unlucky to miss out everywhere, we will get to that one someday. Even so, that song would've just been a small blip by comparison, because "One Dance" just ruled the roost for months on end. In the UK, it was #1 for 15 consecutive weeks and fell just shy of breaking the all-time record. This is all while being met with confused puzzlement at the whole thing. "One Dance" is not a song that aims for spectacle, it aims for likeable, enough so that it might not be obsessed over in the greater scheme of things, but when the charts are added up, it's once again the song on the most people's playlists. It's arguably Drake's biggest hit to date, and in case you were wondering, no number of events transpiring alongside a certain other rapper in 2024 have clipped its wings. It still goes along in its merry way, getting streamed a million times a day on Spotify. Until we ship things off to a new platform, it's been decided that "One Dance" is a natural part of life, and even if we do move elsewhere, it'll probably find its way back in anyway.
I generally avoid talking about this song because it's a discourse I'm not very interested in adding to. Once you've seen a song's success blamed as a catalyst for Brexit (the vote happened in in the middle of its chart reign), it's hard to want to chime in and offer any views that line up with that mindset. If you're willing to meet Drake at his level, it's a fairly standard dancehall song. There are some nice hooks here and there. Wizkid & Kyla both feel like they're part of the tapestry rather than vital voices, which is unfortunate, but at least Wizkid has had a lot of success on his own afterwards. Kyla really is part of the tapestry though as it's just a sample of a very minor hit of hers from 2008. That's the kind of crate digging that a chart nerd can get behind.
I was never super convinced by the whole thing, but I never really got bothered by the success. I chose to look at it optimistically as a sign of the changing tides, where Drake had previously put out a lot of good music that never charted especially well here (Drake has 83 top 50 hits in Australia, "One Dance" is his 7th chronologically). So there was a new avenue to have some potentially great stuff dominating the charts. What we actually got 9 years on...well at least there's some enthusiasm to be found, and an appreciation for how well the Hottest 100 filters it down.