#115. Violent Soho - Kamikaze (#78, 2022)
6th of 2022
I think it's a classic example of not getting enough time to simmer, but I feel like the top ends of the 2020s lists for my personal preference just get a little weird. It's also a consequence of my music taste drifting elsewhere, and rather than being a reasonably encompassing experience of it, it feels like I'm just picking out the few workable scraps that stuck along for the ride. I look at the 2023 list and I think "Stockholm" by DICE is like my 2nd or 3rd favourite song on that list. Doesn't feel right, but I don't know what I'm supposed to put ahead of it. This is how I feel when I arrive on the Violent Soho song that is absolutely serviceable and doing what it needs to do, but feels so inconsequential all the same. I don't punish songs for lacking cultural impact, so here we are at the pointy end with...'which one was this again?', you might say.
There's even an argument to be made that "Kamikaze" has gotten even more irrelevant in 2026. Its one standout claim to fame was that it basically signalled the end of Violent Soho. They announced they were going on hiatus and left us with this last single. Earlier this year, they must have realised I needed more content for this one so two of the band members joined Mark Hoppus on stage, where he let slip that the band would be coming back together. Now they're gearing up for one of those classic 'Australian tour but only those 3 cities' that the internet loves so much. "Kamikaze" is still their last single, but there's every chance it also becomes their LCD Soundsystem at Madison Square Garden moment.
I touched on it a bit with the last entry (#122), but Violent Soho are not really a band that play by the modern script of hit making. If you try to look at them that way, you might be disappointed with "Kamikaze" for lacking bells and whistles. What it does have is one classic riff that goes into another classic riff, then overlays that classic riff and gets followed by a third classic riff. It's also got some solid action 'oh yeah', they sure know how to write a cliche song and get me to scream it.
#114. Lorde - Yellow Flicker Beat (#18, 2014)
15th of 2014
The main thing you need to know about "Yellow Flicker Beat" is that it was released as the lead single to the 3rd film in The Hunger Games franchise. These soundtracks tended to get some fairly notable names even if they didn't always translate to big crossover hits. There was a bit of weirdness to how it turned out though. Big team ups like Taylor Swift & Coldplay could net minor hits, while the real chart dominance came via the 3rd movie's score and "The Hanging Tree". There was also eventually big success for Sia's "Elastic Heart" though not the version from the soundtrack. Lorde was part of this as well, "Yellow Flicker Beat" roughly following the "Magnets" (#116) tiering of success in different countries. It did feel like competing elements of the major film sync up, Lorde's profile and the song being very catchy, coming at odds with the song not really sounding like a hit in the year 2014. It's a bit like when James Bond & Twilight were making "Another Way To Die" and "Meet Me On The Equinox" into minor hits.
For a long time, The Hunger Games was a big blind spot of mine, and I couldn't really tell how much of it was just me being the wrong demographic or not. In many regards, it inherited a lot of its reputation from Twilight as a monster YA novel with films coming out every year to massive success. That also meant that it seemed to come with the same backlash, readily dismissed as fodder for teenage girls and abundantly without merit because the kinds of people who dislike it on the outset will find any and all reason to point out its shortcomings. Not just bad because of a gut reaction conceptually, but objectively flawed in a way that makes you very smart for pointing that out and staying away from it.
I was content to stay away from reading Twilight because it clearly wasn't for me (though a few years ago I watched every single film, I wasn't overly fond of it but it doesn't ire me). The Hunger Games was different because it did genuinely interest me. Maybe romance wasn't necessarily my calling card, but we're talking about a story that's centred around a bunch of teenagers being forced into a fight to the death. That's surprisingly morbid for something aimed at teenagers, and it's also surprisingly in my wheelhouse. Strap yourself in.
I'm going to feel stupid for saying this because I just saw a post that was mocking this mentality, but I find death to be a very interesting trope in media (though in fairness, some examples I provide will also be evidence to say that I'm very okay with stories that meander and simmer in the moment). There's a permanence to this. A character that may have had some contribution to the story prior to this moment is immediately cut off. They're no longer actively moving the plot, and everyone else around them has to re-shape things around the fact that they're not there. If you re-experience the story, you do it knowing that they're a ticking time bomb, just filling out their role before it's cut off, and potentially not directly impacting the big climax. In reality, every character in the story is destined to die at some point, just that it usually would occur after the story is complete. It leaves things open ended, while if you don't make it to the happily ever after, your tale has been told.
More than this though, I think I'm drawn to things resembling elimination games. Taking a character, or two, or ten out of commission means more focus drawn to those who are left, potentially getting more to do, while also gaining a bigger target on their back as potentially the next to go. It probably starts with my interest as a child in the WWE. My favourite match was the Royal Rumble, where they'd get 30 wrestlers into the ring one by one and eliminate them by throwing them out until there's one left. The idea that no matter how battered and bruised they might end up, you know there's going to be a final person left, and it's exciting to see who that is. Slashers have a similar appeal though in those cases, the final survivor(s) are not always guaranteed. You still feel like you've 'won' in some regard if your favourite lasts the longest though. Reality TV competitions often work in the same way, just with eliminations instead of death.
On a similar tangent to this, I've long been interested in murder mystery stories. They appeal to the puzzling part of my brain, but they also provide an enticing premise: Someone in this cast of characters you've been introduced to will be killed off, and another person will be responsible. Maybe there's a strange cruelty to me in my fascination with reading or watching some otherwise normal people have their lives completely upended (my defence of this is that I do not care for true crime, too voyeuristic for me), but it's an extension of that notion of seeing how death changes circumstances suddenly.
What's strange about this is that I'm really having trouble working out when I got on board with this, because every example feels too late. It feels like there had to be something that came earlier, and that I'd have made more of a mental note at the time that it was something new for me. The first thing that comes to mind is the 2009 TV show Harper's Island, a murder mystery with an ensemble cast and the promised gimmick that someone gets killed off in every episode and someone else in the main cast is doing it. Strange cosmic coincidences meant that I ended up in the periphery of so many conversations & discussion groups about the show that my mental echo chamber insists to me that it was a very big deal and wasn't immediately cancelled due to poor ratings. Objectively, I don't even know if I could say it's very good, but it's such a core part of me that I cherish, and I lament that they never got a chance to do additional seasons/settings in order to potentially subvert the shortcomings.
It's a fix I've always been wanting to fill. I've read some Sherlock Holmes stories, I've read many Agatha Christie books, I also have very many more sitting on my shelf that I might just read if I wasn't currently spending my free time writing about them instead. They're good though and I find them to be an interesting exercise in seeing just how much variation can be done with the premise. When I pick a new one to read, I always go with the oldest one in my collection because I like the idea of an author having to subvert themselves over time to be less predictable. Like I can't believe how early Agatha Christie put out "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd". "And Then There Were None" is much later and that feels like a deliberate exercise in convincingly pulling off one of those death elimination stories, taking it to the natural conclusion and making it work. Wanting to see that pulled off is probably singlehandedly why I've read so many of them now, it's just a great hook.
I also accidentally stumbled into this world through my interest in visual novels (or adventure novels if you want to be more specific). It's a very accidental thing that I once made an absurd flowchart for, but the short version of it was that I liked the Professor Layton games (often for the story more than the puzzles that pulled me in initially) and I was told about the Zero Escape franchise on the Nintendo DS. Just a YouTuber I sometimes watched saying that it was like Professor Layton meets Saw (a franchise I hadn't actually watched yet at the time) and that was a funny enough pitch to pull me in. They're not strictly murder mysteries just because the scope is so much bigger, but they still hit the same itch. What's funny about it again is that I nearly backed out of it early on until someone I followed on Twitter started praising it (which itself is a crazy sequence of life events that led me to finding them) and that convinced me to dive back in and finish the game and its two sequels. I still wanted more.
Dive enough into the Zero Escape franchise and someone will mention its spiritual sister series Danganronpa. I assume most people who follow me are aware of it, but if you're not, it's a story where a bunch of super talented (read: quirky) high schoolers are trapped in a school and have to get away with murder to get out. If you've read this far, then you'd know that it could not be more of a no brainer and I loved almost every moment of it. Actually it was a nice bit of timing to discover it because the 3rd and thus far final mainline game in the series was due to be released later that year, and that's up there as probably the hardest I've ever binged a video game, as I cleared the whole ~60 hour story in the space of 3.5 days. It's a contentious one in the fanbase but it's definitely my favourite. Very much looking forward to 2X2 next year, though I'll probably moderate myself with that. Just playing these two series has turned me into someone who basically has to pay attention whenever these two writers do anything (they've since gone on to form their own studio together). Actually, I just had to quickly finish their latest game "SHUTEN ORDER", a multi-genre adventure game where you have to solve your own murder. A little rough around the edges but I can't fault the ambition. In hindsight, if there's one thing they've inherited from the Saw franchise, it's not the gore (though, yeah), but the penchant for absolutely ludicrous plot twists, and I can't get enough. I am fully convinced that the AI: The Somnium Files games (a goofy murder mystery with branching paths you create by exploring suspects' dreams) are built from the twist up.
The other dark horse in this whole conversation is the series I picked up while I was waiting for Danganronpa V3, which is the When They Cry series, specifically Higurashi & Umineko (I apologise to Ciconia, you did nothing wrong). On the surface, they're classic murder mystery stories. Higurashi is about a boy who moves to a small town whose annual festival is punctuated by someone getting murdered, and Umineko is about a rich family who meet up in their mansion on their island to dispute inheritance only for numerous murders to unfold, supposedly by a witch. Beyond that, they're so much more. Higurashi balances psychological horror (which was a new one for me) with commentary on the way children & outsiders are treated by institutions, while rounding it out as being a remarkably wholesome story about the power of friendship. One day I was so impressed with the chapter I had just read that I wrote an extensive review of it online (it's still on my Pastebin), which started another chain of events to helping me find some long term friends, which I'm eternally grateful for. Umineko feels like an enormous deconstruction of murder mysteries in general, getting you to look at them from every possible angle and then ask yourself what you're really trying to accomplish here. It's a story that's such an enormous undertaking (one of a few pieces of literature that are longer than this entire blog) but leaves a big impression on everyone who gets through it. The joke is that it makes people realise they're transgender, but for me, I was all about the great lessons in humility and empathy. You can genuinely track my online interactions and there's a big shift in how I treated people after I finished reading Umineko.
Now that we're through all that, I would like to go back to The Hunger Games because there's an elephant in the room that should be hosting Game Changer because it's been here the whole time. My entire perception of The Hunger Games has been shaped by the fact that many people will point out that its entire premise is largely lifted from the Japanese novel & film Battle Royale. That's one of those points against it especially if you want to denigrate it for not being quite as bloody as that story. For years now I've been grappling with the greatest mystery relating to murder in my life, which is that I don't know why I knew about Battle Royale in the first place. I know for a fact that I didn't just get it from The Hunger Games' discourse because I had in fact tried to write my own knock off when I was bored one night, years earlier. I even seemingly ripped off some very specific details which is strange given that I hadn't actually read it or seen it at this point. The answer that makes the most sense to me is that someone must have told me about it at school, or I saw it on TV Tropes.
Anyhow, about 10 years ago I decided to finally watch the movie. I thought it was fairly fun and engaging but I struggled a bit with getting attached to a cast of characters that mostly don't stand out or get much screen time & personality (understandably). The adage of books fleshing out characters better drew me in, so I ordered it online expecting to forget about it when it arrived 2 months later. Instead it arrived about a day later and I read the whole thing within a week. It does indeed flesh out the characters better and I found myself drawn into the pulpy style of it. Morbid, but engaging. I once started writing an extensive review of it, got to nearly 2,000 words but never finished it. Several fates are also changed between the two mediums to an extent but what I will say is that I had the most visceral reaction of incoming tragedy when I realised I was up to the lighthouse scene. I got so weirdly invested in characters that had barely appeared in the novel up to that point and it's just like watching a delicate thread slowly unravel.
All of this in mind is my far too long deliberation on why I felt out of touch with The Hunger Games discourse. I was supposed to believe it was bad because it was supposed to be bad, but all I'd spent the better part of a decade thinking was 'I just need a good excuse to watch this because I think I might like it'. That excuse ended up being the knowledge that I was eventually going to write this entry. So it ended up being right around when I started this blog, in late 2024, I just watched the first three films. Enough to get to "Yellow Flicker Beat".
I regret to inform that I just don't have very strong feelings about the films, one way or another. I think they're reasonably well made, the cast is solid, the adaptation probably does what it's supposed to do. I do not want to say that I was unsatisfied by the very expected result that there was considerably less blood than its contemporary, but I suppose I live more for the fun twists and turns. It's a lot of build-up and the Hunger Game itself never quite lives up to that. The internal politics are interesting, but it didn't have me on the edge of my seat like I had hoped. Not going to hate on it though, and maybe if I'm really up to it, I'll give it another go because I'm thinking by the time this post goes live, I'm going to have a lot less of a backlog of posts to be working on instead. Mainly I just want to live up to my promise that I really thought this was always going to be the longest post I ever write, though I think it's probably better this way. Big fan of "Yellow Flicker Beat" though. Just now wondering because it was so long ago if there was ever a chance I might actually overlap a back to back Disclosure with a back to back Lorde, it's felt so silly writing all of these on the same weekend.
#113. Tones And I - Dance Monkey (#4, 2019)
9th of 2019
Every now and then, a song comes along and it captures the imagination of the nation, maybe even the world. It's popular, but more than anything, it will start to infiltrate the minds of many who are certain that they want nothing to do with it. There will probably be an element of novelty to it. It needs something about it that stands out, otherwise it probably will never make this leap. You need something so singular, that just hearing the name under a prompt or discussion point about it being the worst thing ever will cause a gut reaction and get people agreeing even if they'd probably never had a strong thought before. I've done this before myself. Think of the most obvious novelty song of the '90s and I've probably thought and said that it's one of the worst things ever and it makes my life worse just thinking about it, like it's a torture device that should be against the Geneva convention. Utterly hyperbolic, but it's just the trap you fall into.
Shortly before I started writing this, Keli Holiday ended up in the news again. This time it was because he was detained at the US border for seemingly unknown reasons, which has prompted a bunch of gut reaction internet sleuthing. That's the better part of it, if anything. The far worse part is seeing a whole lot of reactions siding with ICE purely because seeing a picture of Adam, or remembering either his partner or his hit song is enough to throw all rationality out of the window. As if there's some accomplishment in so wittily coming up with an extreme adverse reaction to a headline that literally everyone could have thought of as well. It's something that happens so regularly that it feels like a hivemind virus. Like how there was a post from ARIA about when "Dancing2" first debuted on the charts that went largely un-noticed, but then you look back at it and suddenly there's a monster influx of comments that all came within about a one week window, months after the post went live. What a feeling to be arbitrarily goaded into doing something that only props up and exposes the very thing you supposedly want to put aside. But it's that group mentality, the way there are so many other things to be looked at, but strangely only this one beacon of activity draws everyone in like a moth to a flame. It only serves to make all the 'individuals' look so individually deranged. Just picking up the one sandwich out of a hundred that's covered in dog shit just so you can let everyone know that you don't like eating dog shit.
There was of course a much worse version of this year's before, and I suspect you know about it. In 2019, Tones And I had a breakthrough hit with "Johnny Run Away" (#530), getting a surprising amount of traction for a new Australian artist in a time when very few were afforded the opportunity. There was a fair amount of backlash to this because Tones And I's vocal style is evidently an acquired taste. Nothing could have prepared anyone for how nuclear this all went with the next single.
There's a brief window of time in which "Dance Monkey" was just the speculative follow up single to "Johnny Run Away". It did decently out the gate, but it was in the shadow of its predecessor for a decent while. It's only after a couple of months that the song had enough exposure for us all to realise that this was the big hit after all, and the ceiling for this went ludicrously high. It hit #1 in Australia at the start of August (unlucky not to get there in July, honestly). In January, it was still at #1, making it comfortably the longest running #1 hit of all time. I am hoping by the time that this post goes live, the ever-looming threat of Olivia Dean's "Man I Need" overtaking it will have subsided. In any case, the Tones And I streak feels more impressive and notable because it actually had major hits biting at it for most of its reign. "Circles" (#883), Dua Lipa's "Don't Start Now", Maroon 5's "Memories", and another song that will eventually appear here among the many that tried but failed to get over the line. "Man I Need" only ever blocked two songs from getting to #1, and one of them was one of her own songs.
You can probably solve the case of how Tones And I spent so long at #1. Early on, I pegged it as a likely long runner just because it had built up a pretty big lead and didn't look like slowing down, though I was more thinking in the world of 10-15 weeks at #1, not the absurd 24 weeks it wound up with. What happened to its favour is that its stint at #1 coincided with a gradual climb around the world, the kind that would tend to have some splash back over here by proxy. You'd suspect that something similar would have happened if "Somebody That I Used To Know" was a hit in the streaming era. Unthinkable that it was just barely hanging around in the ARIA top 50 while it was simultaneously #1 in America. I have to sell it on this notion because if I dare try and utter the idea that the song is clearly appealing and catchy as a hit song, many will want to tell me that they projectile vomited at the notion.
For as much attention as the song got, it came with an extra-large dose of disdain, and it's something like I'd never seen before. Even before the song hit big internationally, I was just seeing some of the vilest things I'd ever seen being accepted as the entirety of the song's Overton window. Anyone who dares speak up, confessing they understand the appeal of the song without disavowing it, and anyone who likes it, is offering themselves up to be loudly discredited. It felt like I was witnessing an unspoken contest of just how far you could go to say you don't like the song. Because the song was so popular, I suppose on some level it must have felt like a whole lot of isolated 'Am I the only one...'s, but all I could think at the time is that if you saw all the sheer hostility from the anti-Tones and I camp, you'd rationally come to the conclusion that this is not the normal group and want to disassociate yourself from it, even if you didn't like her.
When the song did become internationally famous, it got even worse. It'll always feel like punching up when you're talking about an artist who's getting millions of streams a day, but to me, it feels like the logical extreme of taking the easiest possible road. There were artists I dared not criticise because all it would do is make me out to be the pariah (this is not an open contest to speculate on, I largely just don't get that negative anymore), but if you pick on the likely one hit wonder artist with no discernible online fanbase, who isn't conventionally attractive enough to get an army of simps, you're shooting fish in a barrel. You're farming likes & karma because you're answering to the lowest common denominator without any chance of recourse.
One thing that always stood out to me, and it's probably a reminder not to read the comments in general (if this whole entry isn't that), is a nasty rumour I kept seeing spread around. In the absence of real evidence of a reason to root against someone, it's easy to just make something up because stopping the rot is just unreasonably difficult in a world where context gets lost, and not everyone is willing to scrutinise everything they read. What I kept reading was that Tones And I was racist. I saw it constantly. The smoking gun evidence that I would see shared around without any scrutiny was a photo of Tones And I wearing clothes that were draped in extremely blatant KKK style slogans, as well as some tweets from early 2019 before she was 'famous'. The irony in that is that the given time frame meant that it was after she'd made a name for herself in Australia, and the photo was an edited one of her on the red carpet at the ARIA Awards. I got a little offended on behalf of all of Australia that this massive scandal seemed to be right in front of us and the industry and completely ignored, like we're some monstrously openly white supremacist nation. On an unrelated note, I have severely cut back my use of Twitter in the last few years and while I won't say nothing of value has been lost, that's only because what used to be worth using it for, isn't there anymore.
I found the whole thing just very difficult to deal with. I'm not good at starting or maintaining conversation because it takes a lot out of me to work up the courage to bring something up, lest it trigger something in that person that they express externally or internally. I was particularly interested in following the dominance of "Dance Monkey" because it was such a plucky underdog story. A song that was originally uploaded to triple j Unearthed became the biggest song in the world for months on end. It's a feel good story for anyone who wants to see their favourite artist hit the big time, or maybe even be that artist themselves. It just got hard to keep up that enthusiasm when it felt like I was seeing nothing but shit flung at it from all angles. It's not even just a seasonal thing either, it feels like a cultural reset. The kind of song that still inspires incense 7 years later, the big punchline to agreeably be the worst song ever made.
The whole thing just feels so performative to me, like I have never really understood why this is *the* song that does it for everyone. Maybe it's a symptom of reaching too wide an audience where there's surely something less competently produced and recorded that has heightened hallmarks beyond the relatively tame things that are going on here. Maybe I'm just the problem because I've always liked this song. I think it has a potent bassline that keeps things moving along, and I'm a sucker for the staccato notes. More than anything though, I find myself drawn to the song's big build up. Like when the piano gets brought back in on the second half of the second chorus, or when she slightly changes the key right at the end. Simple trickery perhaps, but the stakes just feel so low. Surely the most ungodly, most repugnant song of all time can do worse than a hook that mostly just says 'dance for me' and 'move for me' on repeat. We used to hate songs because they were trying to stoke the flames, but this just feels like a large collective of people who occasionally pride themselves on listening to challenging music. Like Geese fans who won't hear a word of it if someone says Cameron Winter's voice is unpleasant, but they're unable to conquer a song that children can comprehend.
This is like the third or fourth time I've written in extreme length in response to the reaction that this song gets, but it's my only way to deal with something that just feels so unwieldy. This adverse, and apparently obvious reaction that I cannot fathom for myself. I find it hard to really tell what the grand consensus should be because it feels like the team of haters are so widespread and quick to the trigger that no one can entertain the thought that maybe that whole coalition of hatred just look increasingly weird. No doubt the nostalgia cycle will come for it someday, but like, at least call it the 5th worst song of all time, make it look like you have some original thoughts.
#112. Billie Eilish - bellyache (#38, 2017)
15th of 2017
I've said this before, but in order for music discovery pipelines to actually work, you need a sufficient amount of people willing to convey the news at every step of the way. If you throw things off kilter and leave one portion un-watched, the whole thing breaks apart and no longer works. Music charts can paradoxically be part of the problem because they act as a promotional tool for only the biggest of the biggest. Chart fans might think they want the charts to matter and be relevant, but the more they matter, the more their very systems start to crumble and the whole thing resembles a nightmare.
I think about this with the state of triple j's Hottest 100 in the 2020s. By all accounts, it's not adverse to breaking in new stars, the last two polls were won by artists who'd never appeared before. In reality though, they just represent another pipeline of promotion working as planned. It's still highly possible for artists to break through on TikTok, and maybe Spotify, but that just reveals a new lean of preferential treatment for some and not others. Australian music obviously gets shafted on the global stage.
In a way, we actually started seeing something like this with regards to Australian music that did get popular. There was a steady ecosystem where for every triple j darling that had a crossover hit, you'd also have the major label stars spruiked on TV and the radio making generally much bigger waves. Australian Idol was such a boon for creating household names that suddenly labels were signing up numerous also-rans from it, with the knowledge that they had a built-in fanbase ready to pounce. All of this seemed to dry up as a consequence of that initial bubble bursting, and there not being enough investment into sustainable long-term promotion. Australian music was still popular in the mid-2010s, but you saw a significant shift where nearly all of the artists who got big, had their start in triple j. All those old avenues are still out there, but they've lost the investment from the public to generate stars. A winning song from Australian Idol might once have been in the conversation as the biggest hit of the year, now they don't get within a mile of even grazing the chart.
This is what you can also say has happened with triple j's influence lately. I'm not qualified enough to say that the station has 'dropped off', because in reality even in its best years, its ratings were never reliable and it was always relatively niche. It just has to compete with so many outlets of entertainment and a growing feeling that the radio is old fashioned, while scrolling through reels & posts from people you don't actually follow is the opium of the masses. It's why 2024 was such a wake-up call. New Australian artists just aren't getting their name out anymore, and all we have left are the ones who already made it. They're keeping the fire burning but largely also living off nostalgia for more vital years.
This process is also exacerbated because the Hottest 100 had previously served as a proving ground. Whenever you hear talk about how triple j broke an artist early on, this is the pudding where you'll find that proof. It's a receipt that proves triple j were on the money, but in reality, it comes with the requirement of the listeners to trust them on that ride. I've described the modern situation as a catch-22, triple j need to break new and major artists to feel relevant, but triple j aren't relevant enough to break new and major artists. They're still on the cutting edge, but with no Hottest 100 receipts, you just don't get the same gratification. triple j have become that music fan who gets excited about these new artists to a disinterested friend, only for that friend to suddenly turn around and praise it 6 months later when someone else makes it popular. Everyone had their chance to stamp down on the Chappell Roan train in 2023, or the Malcolm Todd train in 2025, triple j gave them the keys to the city, they just didn't believe it.
Now if we turn our attention to Billie Eilish, this is one from back in the 2010s, so triple j have that receipt. Perhaps ironically, this still doesn't always work because her star has grown in such stature that it's hard to even think of her as a plucky underdog. After all, if everyone had known her at that point in time, she wouldn't have been a plucky underdog at all. I think there are enough people aware of this that it makes its way into the discussion every time it comes up, but I still see a reinforced, incorrect stance that bobs its head up every year.
triple j's Hottest 100 brings out fiery passion. If you're not upset that your favourite song didn't make it, you're heavily scrutinising what got the most votes, and why you so badly wish it should've been something else. The five stages of grief fit it to a tee. Bargaining breaks down to so many classic problems like 'Actually that song shouldn't be eligible', 'Actually people were only voting it because they wanted the artist to win', 'Actually they only won because the other artist split their vote', things of that nature. Another very easy one to trot out is when a non-Australian artist wins, and you can make the argument that the winning artist either doesn't know or care about it, or that they just couldn't comprehend how special it is by comparison.
Billie Eilish is a very common target of this. I think possibly because she's become an enormous celebrity and we can't help but let our instinctive feelings about that position of influence get in the way of facts. Now, it's probably true that Billie Eilish doesn't value the win she got as much as Flume or Mallrat may have, on the other hand, it's just not true that she doesn't care. When "bellyache" made the countdown, she did an interview with the station during the countdown. A year later when "when the party's over" (#809) made the top 10, she did an interview with the station during the countdown. A year later when she won the whole thing (I forget what song this was), she STILL did an interview with the station, and that's getting into seriously degenerate hours of the day for her. I kind of wish she kept this up, like how she's does the same Vanity Fair interview every year for nearly a decade at this point. I understand though that she's reached the summit and hasn't been back, so there's less imperative to shout her out unless she breaks the all-time record for appearances or something. I think part of why it isn't always remembered is because in reality, it wasn't very noteworthy at the time. It's a bit like how she & FINNEAS came in to do a Like A Version in early 2018, and it also wasn't a big deal. If she came back now, it'd be the event of the year, but it's all part of the process when you're in the process of eventual domination.
That's why it's fun for me to look back at her first EP, "dont smile at me". When I first heard Billie Eilish on triple j, I was pretty quickly into what she was doing. For a while she'd keep drip feeding new singles from that EP, complete with new utter failings at understanding how to use a ladder in the artwork. It was fun though. Along with BROCKHAMPTON at the same time, she was just the new artist I was really invested in, seeing just what she had to dish out. I particularly liked the dark sounds of "Copycat" and "my boy", but then it was "Idontwannabeyouanymore", the tender ballad that really stood out to me. Also it's about time I say that the first domino here was the song "bellyache".
When Billie Eilish released "bellyache", she had only recently turned 15. This was one of the big curiosities about her at the time. I remember doing this song & dance previously with Laura Marling and Joey Bada$$, but this was a step further. Like how Gout Gout isn't necessarily the fastest runner going around right now, but by all accounts we know the potential is there. Getting in on the ground floor for Billie Eilish's big moment has proven extremely lucrative. She & FINNEAS are now making music they couldn't dream of making back in 2017, and it's very good. There's still a lot to get out of those early recordings though.
When I think of "bellyache", I think of how readily I was won over by this catchy tune. Nothing too deep about it, just a good bait & switch melody that resolves itself in a way that felt fresh. Listening to it more, it became clear that there was more to it, and it became a fascinating case as a surprisingly dark song. It's funny because you can perhaps choose to look at it metaphorically and it doesn't come out too badly, but by all accounts, this teenager was very literal in her lyrics. When she says her friends' bodies are in the back of her car, she's not being cute, she's outing herself as a mass murderer. She plays around with it in a macabre way, where every moment of grief or concern is undercut by how apathetic she is about it all. She gets as far as questioning her own sanity before using it to boast about how she dumped her ex's corpse in the gutter. Maybe this is all the logical conclusion of that 'fun song, dark lyrics' dichotomy, but it's fun to think about. When I was that age (and younger), I was very interested in creating & drawing incredibly violent scenes (in contrast with how cowardly I was), and that's just part of the mind palace of someone that young. The serious explorations of relationships & life can come later when you have more experience to draw upon.
#111. Haim - The Wire (#11, 2013)
21st of 2013
I had a big plan here, I was going to use this entry here as an excuse to make up for lost time and binge the entirety of The Wire, the HBO TV series from the 2000s. The show I hear nothing but glowing praise as one of the greatest TV shows of all time, with its highly realistic depiction of crime in Baltimore from the perspectives of both the perpetrators, and the people trying to stop it. All that great character driven stuff and a huge ensemble cast of stars who'd go on to bigger things in the future, such as appearing in a Hottest 100 (#983). It was perfect, with the added bonus that it helps me cover for myself when I have to cover Haim here multiple times still, but all from the same album. I'm always looking for an out.
What I wasn't ready for is just how dense The Wire is, or rather how dense it makes me feel. The Wire is incredibly complicated and treats the viewer as someone who is fully aware of it. You don't get recaps or constant reminders of the big important details. Sometimes you don't even get to see them play out. While another show would fester on its big reveals with dramatic cuts to commercial & music stings, The Wire might not even show it in the first place. You'll learn second hand in an unrelated conversation that a character died off screen, treated not like a revelation, but something that's readily apparent. You'll be inundated with plot threads and be unaware of what you're really trying to focus on. I've watched the first two seasons and I would like to watch the rest, but my revelation by this point is that the show has far too much going on for me to possibly just casually watch it while I'm working on this blog. It needs my full, undivided attention, without a deadline to rush me along. Maybe it's for the best because it really has nothing to do with this song, and I had no consideration for pacing these things out when I put all these mammoth entries together that'll end up on the same post.
"The Wire" is Haim's big hit. I'm inclined to say that it made sense at the time although in hindsight it looks a little weird to see it get so much more attention than their other hits. Maybe it's technically not their biggest hit. They spent a decent while with this one crossover hit that got to #13 in Australia and that felt like it would be it, but a Scottish DJ threw them a life raft a little while later and got them a top 10 hit that is so unlucky not to be pending its own appearance here (it's very good). If that's not enough, they got the blessing of a Taylor Swift collaboration and one of the more popular songs on her album "evermore", which means that in the end, Haim do have multiple hits that on the surface are roughly equal in popularity.
I unintentionally learnt a lesson from this song. When I, and others were praising it highly as a fresh and exciting hit, I was getting some clap back, or stomp clap back. It was readily pointed out that "The Wire" has a passing similarity to "Heartache Tonight" by the Eagles. It's largely just the percussion but even the Eagles tune has a similar guitar riff that pokes its head in at times. This was treated as the ultimate gotcha. Putting those young millennials & zoomers in their place because their golden idol had a lot in common with exactly the kind of boomer music we'd readily dismiss. Maybe at the time I would say 'Whatever' to it and dismiss the claim as superficial, but I think there's some merit to it. Time and time again I find it very amusing to spot these kinds of things. It's a reminder that for as much as the youth want to find their own music to set them apart from their parents, we keep having these moments where we reveal our similar interests all along. You might still want to turn away from your parents' very uncool music, but before you know it, you're suddenly listening to something with the very same baseline appeal, it's just been presented in a package more suited for you.
Actually, it's not the only old music that "The Wire" resembles. A while back, I made a Spotify playlist because I'm very fascinated with one of the most common vocal stims in popular music, which is the performer saying 'I know, I know, I know'. The most classic example is Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine", but it has perpetually come up, even on this list. I had the realisation when I was writing the entries for "Leave A Trace" (#300) and "Cigarettes" (#290) that they were also part of this, but I didn't want to get there until we finally reached the most obvious example here, "The Wire". I just want to say that the playlist is public and I can almost guarantee there's a song you know here and never even noticed is part of this endemic. It's also maybe my excuse to sneak in some slightly less well known songs and give them clout by association next to Prince. I'm all ears for further suggestions, as long as it's a song I know, wouldn't want to ruin the title.
And yet with all this, I still think "The Wire" stands to its own merits. Danielle has lead vocals for most of this song and brings such a force of personality to it. What could be an entirely perfunctory song just rises to greater heights every time they do something a little different with it. That big percussion blast on the chorus, the choice and utilisation of 'retire' as a word to rhyme with the title phrase, and all those moments where they decide to complement each other's lines almost like they're the Beastie Boys (it felt right!). This is all to say that I'm screwing it over again by leaving it out of the top 10% of the list, but it surely won't be the last we see of Haim here.
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