#215-#211

 #215. Vera Blue - All the Pretty Girls (#26, 2018)

24th of 2018

We're entering a strangely vast but also lucrative world with this one. Vera Blue released her first album under the moniker in 2017. I've been on about it a couple of times (#728), (#715). The album was pretty successful. I'm actually surprised it wasn't nominated for any ARIA Awards. Maybe it was released too late in the eligibility period to build a stronger case. Did you even know she put out another album after that? Maybe it's easy to remember because of the distinct artwork, but it also really fell by the wayside. That previous album got to #6 on the charts, and then she could only get to #61. It was released in late 2022 so it could be one of the newest things I get to discuss here, except none of the songs on that album actually polled.

Vera Blue released many singles between these two campaigns that just didn't end up on the album. These include some of her most popular songs, and they easily could've been tacked on as bonus tracks to boost the sales. I have to respect the integrity but it does make for a pretty unfamiliar track list when they're not there. The voters absolutely turned up for these though so we're gonna come back to this well a couple more times, and see the different kinds of carefree, pleasant indie pop she was peddling with these loosies.

"All The Pretty Girls" is a song that's inspired by Fleetwood Mac. She's tangoing so much in the night with this one. It's a good way of experiencing many of the best parts of some songs that I think we've all probably heard more than enough for one lifetime. At least for me it felt revitalised. As someone who wasn't massively enthused by what she was doing on that previous album, this felt like a return to some of those folksier sounds where she's more at home. It was my favourite song from her in quite a while. I would not necessarily say she stuck on that path but it does leave this as a song that stands on its own. It hasn't been outmoded by those later singles even if I do prefer them.

#214. Paramore - This Is Why (#45, 2022)

11th of 2022

In 2007, Fall Out Boy released "This Ain't A Scene, It's An Arms Race" as the second single from their third album. It was released right around when the term 'emo' had caught on as a catch-all term for all manner of anthemic pop rock and pop punk that was coming out at the time, regardless of how little it had in common with the genres past flag-bearers. It's always felt a bit weird to me. "The Black Parade" is just too much fun, outside of "The End", "I Don't Love You" and "Cancer" and I have trouble thinking of it as sad boy music. It tended to be the case with all the big names. They weren't getting on the radio unless they made something crossover friendly.

The Fall Out Boy song expresses frustration with the growing trend. Particularly as they were relatively veterans of the scene and seeing anyone and everyone starting to hitch themselves to the already full band wagon. I've always thought of it as being allegorical for the way audiences responded to it as well. Even if the music wasn't always deeply emotional in those associated ways, the fans certainly were. Many people who may have grown up during the boy band wars were at it again with a slightly more mature flavour but heightened stakes to make it all the more intense. Maybe for some people who just liked the music, they were all for it all, but I always felt like it was very likely that liking one band meant hating another. 'These aren't the charts, they're a [censorship of choice] arms race'.

It's a perspective that seems to lose out in the long run. Music audiences get more fractured and there isn't always enough space for that nuance in the discussion. After living through those years and feeling instructed to like some artists and dislike others, it never fits right to pretend that I feel positively on all of them as a representation of that emo phase I must have had. Certainly, it reflects my own feelings now, as is often the case. But I just refuse to believe that all AFI and Paramore fans got along. Heck, it wasn't even just confined to the scene. Easy to forget that what was for a long time Tyler, The Creator's most famous song basically outright said 'F**k Hayley Williams'. I have no idea if they've ever patched things up but I'll bet they have a lot more overlap in fans nowadays.

I'm not entirely sure where I was influenced in all of this. It's an easy answer to say that it was triple j and their policy of playing X but not Y, which I trusted enough to go along with, but it feels like it sells my own genuine reactions to the music out of whack. Fall Out Boy felt like a guilty pleasure as I kept finding more of their songs that I liked even when I felt they were the incredibly uncool top 40 band, but then there was Paramore. They weren't really on the charts but they seemed to come up in discussions a lot and I was hesitant on them. I'd hear their music and be very underwhelmed and/or irritated. I won't deny I was probably stuck with some subconscious sexism. That boys vs. girls mentality gets stuck into you at an early age and it's hard to challenge it.

In a similar sense, I think often triple j gets locked into these kinds of editorial decisions for a very long time that can linger on well after they stop making sense. That's why it's very interesting to see Paramore in this list with "This Is Why" being their only ever entry. This isn't a matter of them pre-dating the cut off. They were a band that had been around a decade and a half only just getting the tick of approval for the first time. Everything about it screams of new faces in the editorial department finding the very old 'Don't play Paramore' clause and getting confused by it. I can vaguely imagine it's something such a long time coming that was just waiting for an appropriate opening. In that great big war of the late 2000s, Paramore came out of it just about the best, managing to reinvent themselves in more than a few ways and stay in the conversation. While many of their contemporaries never saw it as good as they had it then, Paramore scored their biggest hits well into the 2010s, earning a fanbase that stuck by them, and perhaps winning over some of their early critics. It's me, I'm the early critics.

It's a strange kind of arrival here. Not long afterwards, triple j had Kylie Minogue back on the radio after scoring a relatively big hit by her modern standards, but "This Is Why" is not Paramore getting too big to ignore. It's not really one of their big hits at all. I almost wonder if it's something that just felt like a no-brainer in the 2022 context. My Chemical Romance had just released a new single for the first time in many years, newsworthy for sure. Then Paramore did the same thing, and under a 2022 context it just doesn't make sense to use the X and not Y rule anymore. It just feels like accepting that they've never really been that out of place on the station. For anyone who had a soft spot for Paramore, this was finally the chance to put them in the Hottest 100, and of course it's going to happen. There was enough excitement around the comeback that the album of the same name also went to #1, the first time they'd done so in nearly 10 years.

I'm quite fond of this modern iteration of Paramore. The potential's clearly always been there, but in a lot of their early work, they're so stuck in the mode of sounding like everyone else that it leaves a little to be desired. "Riot!" sounds so incredibly stuck in 2007 and suddenly sounds like they're putting on a costume to be a different band. Not entirely untrue though given the band's significant personnel changes that have taken place since then. Here, they just sound livelier and more exciting. Doing more with the guitars than just providing a sound bed and maybe the obligatory riff on top of it. I hear something that manages to be jagged and unpredictable but without sacrificing any appeal. There's a vitality to "This Is Why" that you very rarely get from bands that have been around so long. It's not just 'Listen to this because it's the new Paramore', but rather 'Listen to this because Paramore are cooking with this one'. Maybe my belated revelation I'm having here is that I hear a lot of early Metric in the album. Songs like "Poster of a Girl" and "Combat Baby" feel right at home with "Running Out Of Time" (oh hey, that's also a Tyler, The Creator song title) or "C'est Comme Ça". It's not even that weird when you consider that Hayley Williams is still only now roughly as old as Emily Haines was when Metric had their big breakout success in 2009. There are a lot of ways that seemingly contemporary artists can be so vastly different despite the similarities on the surface.

#213. Birdz (feat Fred Leone) - Bagi-la-m Bargan (#30, 2020)

13th of 2020

For the 2020 countdown stats page, triple j noted that there were 6 songs on the list by Indigenous artists, which was a record at the time. It wouldn't hold as the record for long. By my count there are 10 in the 2022 list, though a large chunk of them are repeated artists (King Stingray had 4 just by themselves), as well as artists who we're generally used to seeing. Not a single one was a debutant artist. The 2020 list seems more noteworthy because aside from Thelma Plum, all of these entries came from artists who had never polled before, with a diverse cast you might not necessarily pick out if you're not clued in. 2020 also has the neat moment where two showed up back to back, quite high in the list. This song, and another that will eventually appear on this list, 2020 really was the year for back to backs.

Birdz is a rapper from the Northern Territory with heritage in the Badtjala region around southern Queensland and northern New South Wales. He'd been releasing music for a number of years, first getting significant triple j airplay with his song "Rise" with Jimblah. In a very Australian declaration, he cites watching late night 'rage' and seeing the brief part of it when they'd show US rap videos as what made him fall in love with rap music. Fred Leone is Birdz's cousin, with similar heritage but a very different kind of performer.

"Bagi-la-m Bargan" means "Fighting Boomerang" and is a song written from the perspective of an Indigenous Australian upon the arrival of the First Fleet in the 1700s. It's a raw depiction of the hypocrisy that comes from colonisers and their warped perspective. As soon as you unilaterally consider yourself to be above someone else (through a framework that is shaped in your best interests, of course), you're simply unable to see eye to eye. That's the polite way of saying they internally justified their own genocide of a civilisation that had lived unabated for thousands of years.

The song went about as viral as you can in the 2020s under these circumstances. I think Fred Leone is an important part of that package. I couldn't tell you what he's saying, but there's so much gravitas in it that I can't help but be moved. Birdz is a contrast to this with his rougher delivery, but he's definitely landed on an engaging performance of his own. It's one of those songs that you're a little surprised to see here at first, but then there's enough in the way of hooks that it's not actually that unusual. As well as that, it highlights just how important it is to support our local music scene because these are the kinds of stories that you cannot just offload to higher budget international stars. There's undoubtedly something lost from the streamlined 'perfect' rendition of the popular music scene.

#212. Illy (feat Anne-Marie) - Catch 22 (#23, 2016)

25th of 2016

Many years ago I was sequentially writing about ARIA top 20 hits as part of a forum game. It stalled out around 1996 but it came with an ominous promise I had made. Once I got up to "Catch 22" by Illy, I would spend a ludicrous amount of time going completely off topic to instead talk about "Catch-22", the 1961 novel by Joseph Heller. I had recently bought it on strong recommendation because I was going to be on a 24 hour plane trip to Minnesota and needed something to pass the time. This turned out to be a very bad idea because "Catch-22" is an incredibly dense novel that is difficult to read if you're stuck on an uncomfortable plane seat. I maybe got through half a dozen chapters for the whole trip, but then I eventually got through it after I got back home. I hesitate to say that it's my favourite novel that I've ever read because I just haven't read enough for that statement to hold weight. I just struggle to think of something I'd put above it. Anyway, it's been about 6 years coming. It's time for that tangent.

I'm going to assume you're familiar with the titular phrase. I just wrote it several times in the above paragraph so that goes without saying. "Catch-22" is a novel primarily set during World War II and looks at the lives and experiences of a US army air squadron. The main character is bombardier Captain John Yossarian who spends most of his time doing anything he can to get out of flying more missions, becoming a constant source of metaphorical black-eyes on the record of his colonel. The titular phrase is most famously invoked early on, as a contradictory restriction that keeps pilots from being grounded. It's about how any pilot deemed not to be sane can't be sent on missions, but they must make an application to declare it. Since anyone who'd willingly fly missions must be insane, anyone trying to not fly must be sane, therefore they cannot successfully apply to be grounded. It occasionally re-emerges in other contexts, but the core principle always tends to keep those of low rank perpetually at the whims of their deranged superiors.

"Catch-22" is a highly satirical anti-war novel. Joseph Heller served as a bombardier during World War II, from which he drew inspiration for the novel. Supposedly he didn't experience the same cast of clowns that Yossarian did, and didn't feel anywhere near the same level of existential dread, but many people who did have found solace in the novel's depiction of war. The war in the novel is one that depicts the villains as the bumbling superiors whose vain, narrow perspectives convince them to put everyone's lives in danger. They're not usually depicted as being downright evil, but completely incapable of empathy, with their priorities focused completely on their own bureaucratic gains. Colonel Cathcart frequently expresses disdain for Yossarian not because of his insubordination on its own, but because his insubordination promises to reflect badly on him. He's frequently willing to give out a medal of commendation simply because it will look better on his record, even though he's incensed by the very same act.

The thing I've been leaving out from all of this is why I enjoy the novel so much in the first place. I can get sociopolitical satire anywhere I look, but rarely is it so disarmingly funny. In amongst all the characters that act in contradictory ways, is narrative prose that revels in doing the same thing. A line will be set up only to be countered immediately after. You're set up to be comforted by some sense of understanding what's going on, only to have to re-adjust constantly. It's just that profoundly human experience of being internally inconsistent everywhere we go. The kinds of things we might seek in others to put them below us while we're both aware and unaware of how guilty we are at the same time. The novel is just teeming with seemingly insignificant details, mundane actions from one character that are interpreted another way by someone else. The very first chapter of the novel has Yossarian in the hospital, being made to censor letters, which he gets increasingly bored with and starts turning it into a joke. Completely destroying the contents of the letters, and then signing it as Washington Irving, or Irving Washington. Multiple CID men are sent to try and figure out who is doing this and eventually they find their way to the wrong man who sees the signature and recognises the handwriting but still doesn't turn him in. At no point do they ever get close to finding the real source of something we've known for all of 500 pages. One character is logged for being on a flight they weren't on that crashed, so they're assumed to be dead even to people they're talking to. They send a letter to their wife to clear it up, but she also receives letters from the military insisting that any evidence he's alive is clearly forgery, and she moves away with no return address before he's ever able to clear it up.

There are several chapters dedicated to my favourite character, Milo Minderbinder, the mess officer. Someone who's incidentally promoted to the role and begins to take the whole thing far too seriously, concocting a full scale trade network across Europe that sells at a loss to make a profit, and begins to get paid by one side of the war to prevent attacks that he was also paid to conduct. Eventually he ends up bombing his own squadron but ends up being commended for it due to how profitable the venture was. He steals important military and first aid equipment for his ventures but always leaves an earnest note to say that it's for everyone's good. It's all just this comical venture of the always rising demands of capitalism being met by someone who genuinely thinks they're acting in everyone's best interest. Just one of many characters who are repeatedly rewarded and never punished for doing the wrong thing.

All in all though it's also a very tragic story. One where basically everyone is a flawed character but of those who are easier to root for, very few seem to get what they want. It's an unceasing tale of people being mistreated, scapegoated and abused by those above them in power. It's realising in real time alongside our main character how awful the circumstances of war are down to every detail, and reaching clarity upon eventually unravelling just what has made him this way. The very silly novel stops being silly eventually.

I think there are many things you can take away from the novel; it's quite dense, after all. What I find myself thinking about the most is the way a sense of progress can be considered more important than actual progress. The way so many parts of our society are built around putting people in permanent positions of power and/or employment that need to do things for the sake of justifying the fact they've been put in that position. The way that you feel pressured to keep up with something that's only keeping up to distance itself from the negative association that staying put brings. On a micro-level, it can compel people to do things just because they have once needed to be done, and because re-assessing your trajectory can be more taxing or consuming than just doing the same untaxing thing that provides increasingly little value. Maybe these situations won't be as hyperbolic and absurd as the novel describes, or even as drastic as I'm making it sound, but they're all absolutely there once you start thinking about it.

I think about what's been accelerated in the past decade in the music industry. We're in one of those spirals where previously safe bets have been gradually pushed out by a simultaneous algorithm & paradigm shift. The way we've never been more in communication with people overseas, overlapping their culture. It's never felt more like there's an inscrutable force that keeps the gap between the top and the less top growing.

I begrudgingly follow the @chartdata account on social media. I've done it for long enough to remember when the original user retired and let someone else take over. It's hard to distinguish them because they both have had an uncanny ability to post things very promptly, becoming a first source for many people even though they're rarely actually breaking the news. I suppose if nothing else, I respect their accuracy. It's possible they'll post something with a provocative lean to stoke engagement, but if I just treat it as an account that updates me on the charts, they're very useful.

I'll admit though that I find myself disagreeing with the general vibe of the account. There was another Twitter account I used to follow, @YTMilestones. It was just a bot account that did exactly what it said on the tin, automatically tweeting out milestones of a factor of 100,000,000 views on any music videos on YouTube. The account was created by kworb, the person whose website is another indispensable source of chart information beyond my wildest dreams. I had a bit of a 'seeing how the sausage is made' moment with this, because I would inevitably see a YouTube Milestones tweet pop up, and then at some point after, there'd be a Chart Data post that said the same thing. I knew that Chart Data followed this other account, but I had to see that for myself. At no point did I ever see their account cite the smaller account it was getting its information from. It's a policy that's also seen by the owner of that website now. Citation is clunky and it's just so much more profitable for your brand to do the dog act of stealing someone else's content as long as you don't draw attention to it. We disillusioned few aren't enough to stop it, and it would only punish me if I unfollowed in protest. Wrong behaviour being rewarded, correct behaviour being punished, it's all starting to sound like some "Catch-22" business here.

Another thing that stood out to me about that though is that Chart Data obviously was not going to tweet out every single milestone that arrived. There are just too many of them and they're not all that relevant or interesting to most people. So they'd pick and choose, no doubt prioritising the videos that are more likely to get engagement. It's not the first time they'd done something like this either. The account used to be a bit more adventurous. Taking the time out to observe international charts and trends. Nowadays they're just so focused on America and the Global charts that the usually very interesting question of 'What are people listening to in different parts of the world?' just doesn't enter the equation. This account used to tweet ARIA Chart information shortly after it was revealed. They'd even do the one song, one tweet method that they notably do with the Billboard charts. Only, they didn't really. That same selective policy would shine through again. It wouldn't be about the intriguing, unique parts of the Australian charts, but instead reinforcing that which we already all know about. I could never forget when in July 2016 they posted the whole top 5 of that week but left out the fast rising song at #2. You know, the only one that was Australian, the only one that wasn't charting around the world, the only one that would be guaranteed no engagement. They went out of their way to reveal that "M.I.L.F. $" by Fergie had climbed 8 spots to #37, but the song that had gone from #37 to #8 to #2 in its first 3 weeks never got acknowledged once. That song was "Papercuts" by Illy, of course (#857).

It's just so hard to not see any of the bad faith results of everyone looking out for their own best interests. I wrote all this before learning that this account also makes sponsored posts to promote unregulated online gambling, so it hasn't gotten any better. It becomes the ultimate dilemma for us all. Why do the right thing, which goes unappreciated if doing the wrong thing is easier and you're often rewarded for doing so. Before you know it, we'll all be doing it, and suffering the unstoppable feeling that the whole world is just one great big Prisoner's Dilemma filled with a whole lot more Betray than Ally. I guess the main thing that motivates me is the good feelings I'm wired to have when I do these things, even if they're not going to be seen or acknowledged. So often just setting up an internal system of mental rewards can do a lot of good. I'm not always very good at committing to one thing for an extended length of time, but if I cycle through them, I can create a system that works for me. I knew roughly 2 weeks ago that I was going to have to write this entry, and I buckled down to simultaneously pace forward with this blog but also re-read "Catch-22" at the same time. I'd alternate chapter and entry with an appropriate ratio such that I literally finished the book right before I started writing this entry.

Maybe it's a misguided version of merit. I'm not necessarily doing much good by putting this all down here. It's mainly for me as a way to collect several thoughts. I'm not convinced very many people will ever read it, but that's okay with me too. Sometimes just one person having a kind of profound response to something I wrote can mean the world to me. Sometimes I end up being that one person anyway. In a world where miscommunication and misunderstanding are as rife as it is in the novel, sometimes just putting our thoughts out, as unfocused as they may be, can provide a net good as a means of trying to communicate what makes us, us. Meanwhile, I'm also aware that it would be deeply inappropriate after everything I just said now to treat this Australian song as a vestigial fragment from which to make a point centred around an American novel. I will attempt to remedy that now.

The interpretation of the phrase 'catch-22' that Illy uses in this song is more about looking at life as a whole. Perhaps it's borderline nihilistic, but offset with a more optimistic outlook. If this is all it is, then why not seize the moment. Find ways to make yourself and those around you happy, instead of just spitefully trying to burn it all down. While I wouldn't necessarily say it's fully in the spirit of the term, Illy does echo the novel by using a lot of contradictory phrases. Plenty of antonyms offered as contrasting choices.

You might think that I resonated with this song because of its title, but in reality I didn't read the book until several years after. No, instead it's Anne-Marie that gets those honours. It was just an instant thing that clicked with me in her hook. Between her and M-Phazes' production, it was an undeniable ear worm that I couldn't stop going back to. I do think Illy does a good job as well, steering it along. Even the singing on the bridge is oddly endearing to me. The real tragedy of it all is that the song landed at #23 in the poll, and I may be partly to blame for that, if I remember to bring it up again in a future entry.

#211. Foo Fighters - Something From Nothing (#84, 2014)

28th of 2014

The game has changed so much. It's times like these, you learn to look back and see how we got here. For a long time, Foo Fighters could have been seen as the face of the Hottest 100. They had the most entries and so Hottest 100 success could be attributed to how closely you resemble the Foo Fighters package. Maybe it goes back further than that. In the last year that the countdown was an all-time vote, Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was unseated by those new upstarts Nirvana with "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Hard to imagine what it was like at the time as history is written by the winners, but for anyone who did see it as an overly eager generation propping them up too quickly, they reinforced it both times since then with the same format, winning in 1998 and 2009. triple j listeners were so obsessed with Nirvana, that they took the drummer's side project and rallied behind them for another two decades. Maybe Dave Grohl has done enough to not have it be seen as a side project. He is after all, the only member of Nirvana to ever play a show at the Rivoli. We're in the presence of greatness here.

That's the Hottest 100 story up to 2014 though. After that, Foo Fighters stop contributing to the story, and it continues on without them. Their tally of 22 entries stood tallest then, but they've since been overtaken by Hilltop Hoods, Billie Eilish and G Flip. Lime Cordiale will follow suit. If you're one of the people who shaped that tally in the first place, it might be hard to stomach this. One more holdout no longer for rock to still feel like it's atop the mountain. Some grumblings about either music release patterns or kids these days. If I do think back to 2014 though, all I can think of is how even by that point, how out of place Foo Fighters felt.

There's an implicit conversation when you deal with artists at different stages of their career in these lists. It's hard not to see diminishing returns and resign yourself to the fact that they might just be past it. In theory, that's just a matter of audience response, but maybe it's also warranted on its own terms. Maybe they're just not as good as they used to be. Here, Foo Fighters aren't so far off the peak. They actually got their highest Hottest 100 entry just 7 years and 2 albums before this one, with "The Pretender" reaching #6. You might be surprised to learn that it's one of only two Foo Fighters songs to make the top 10, after "Generator" in 2000 (though if you want, "Everlong" made an all-time top 10). They might not have had that cultural grip anymore, but they were still a huge album seller. 

Actually there's a funny quirk with it. Around 2014, the ARIA Charts had a unique property with regard to pre-orders. Albums would often release 'instant grats', songs (not necessarily promoted singles) that would be available to download on iTunes for anyone who pre-ordered the album. They'd been around earlier in the decade, but they were mainly visible for their property of erasing the sales of songs once the album was released. I first observed this effect in 2011, when the release of Britney Spears' new album caused lead single "Hold It Against Me" to register net negative sales on that week and drop on the Billboard Hot 100 from #52 to #75 (radio airplay keeping it somewhat afloat) before climbing back up to #59. We also had this happen in Australia. P!nk's "Blow Me (One Last Kiss)" fell out of the top 50 for a week in 2012 when the album came out, and despite otherwise probably registering its best sales week, Muse had "Madness" drop out without a fuss. There's also the ever noteworthy story with The Voice Australia in 2012, where all of Karise Eden's singles suffered heavily, including the previous week's #1 which is now saddled with a significant showing for the biggest drop off from #1 ever (a record it might still have, just not as starkly). Then again, if Christmas music never comes back to the charts, then that's Mariah Carey's record to hold forever.

I don't know exactly when it happened, but the script was flipped in 2014. It was no longer about those sudden one week sinks, but rather about offloading instantaneous sales that slyly made a mockery of the charts in a way that's not even obvious on the surface. Much like pre-orders would make songs instantly shoot towards the top of the iTunes chart, now you'd also get it for individual songs that were less specifically sought, and these sales counted to the chart. All those alt-J songs from 2014 I talked about here made the ARIA top 100, thanks to people who might not have even realised they downloaded them. Sia accumulated top 50 hits that didn't remotely feel like hits, and 5 Seconds of Summer scored a top 10 hit with "Amnesia" before it was actually pushed as a single. It didn't make it back to the top 10 (it stalled at #11), but it didn't need to, I suppose.

Foo Fighters' most recent top 50 in Australia was "Wheels" in 2009. If not for "Everlong" returning and scoring a new peak in 2022 after Taylor Hawkins died, they'd have their entire top 50 hit chart history confined solely to the '90s and '00s. It wasn't for lack of trying either, because in the 2010s, they managed 5 more top 60 hits. A mix of short lived hype on first week downloads, and genuine crossovers that just couldn't quite get there. "Something from Nothing" was one of the closest calls, getting to #53, but that was just the start of the campaign, and we knew the album was going to sell a lot. The instant grats took effect and Foo Fighters actually had two songs that spent a day at #1 on iTunes, "Congregation" and "What Did I Do? / God as My Witness". Popularity bars at the time alerted me to the possibility that Foo Fighters were going to score a very uncharacteristic top 20 (maybe top 10) hit with the former, but then it never appeared on the chart. ARIA seemingly pulled the plug on that loophole and Foo Fighters just missed the cut off. Another layer to their perpetual misfortune in Australia, unable to book a slot in the ARIA top 50 singles chart, no matter what zany schemes they had.

Maybe that's not a big deal. I was mainly rooting for it to happen because I love when the ARIA Charts serve up oddities like that. I wouldn't look back at those as vital, essential Foo Fighters songs. With that being said, I find myself making an exception for "Something From Nothing". Back in 2008, Metallica also had their last Hottest 100 entry with "The Day That Never Comes" from "Death Magnetic". That's an album that actually did manage to muck around with the ARIA Charts in the day, though with genuine purchases of the singles. I point it out because while Metallica were equally out of place (they were sitting next to Kanye West on the list), it was a great send off with a late career single that felt like it was justifying itself on its own. A slow burner that goes wild towards the end, reminding me of both the best and worst parts of Metallica, but landing on the side of positive. "Something From Nothing" is Foo Fighters' version of "The Day That Never Comes". It's a similar kind of odyssey that starts off slowly but builds to a monster climax. Even the guitar riffs towards the end sound a little similar. You thought I'd stop it at that, but it's me now also noting a strong resemblance to Dio's "Holy Diver" earlier on. Obviously Foo Fighters are still around, but this is the sound of a band at the end of their spotlight period absolutely relishing the chance to go all out. Genuinely one of their best singles right here.

#220-#216

 #220. SAFIA - Listen To Soul, Listen To Blues (#76, 2013)

39th of 2013

There's a definite risk if you're a new artist and you include the name of a genre in your song. You're gonna potentially alienate people from ever listening to it in the first place because it might be selling them something they don't think they want. This gets even worse if it's arguably not even the genre you're getting involved in. That way, all the people who thought they were getting one thing get let down when they instead get another thing. Just best to stay away from the whole concept until you're big enough to get away with it.

I don't know what anyone else's first reaction to SAFIA was, if this was the first song, but I remember being a bit confused by it. It's possible that I was ignorant enough to convince myself that this was something that could be described as soul and/or blues. It wasn't a very immediate song for me and I think that initial bait and switch might have slowed me down on it for a bit. Certainly, there's a soulfulness to Ben's singing, but outside of a shade of sorrow, I don't hear the blues in this.

It's the kind of thing that I think the radio can be very beneficial for. Sometimes the ease at which we can pick and choose what we listen to can make it that we miss out on anything that isn't immediately making its best case. The very fact that something is on the radio means that someone has decided it's worth our time even if we haven't realised it yet, and it'll likely make you hear it enough times to figure out if that's true.

The part of this I've been leaving out until now is that "Listen To Soul, Listen To Blues" takes a big pivot just after the halfway mark. The previously smooth backing just goes completely haywire. With this being SAFIA's first single, it's not clear which part of the song is more representative of their work, but with the gift of hindsight, I think this section is the SAFIA we'd come to know. It would grow to be my favourite part of the song, not for all the wacky sounds, but for the return of the song's chorus. There's this distorted effect they put on Ben's voice that adds some gravitas to what was already a pretty powerful hook. It's clearly the sound of a band in their infancy, but they're willing to try some interesting things, and the only way was up.

#219. Flume (feat Toro y Moi) - The Difference (#3, 2020)

14th of 2020

In what might be the most pointless thing to try to gain hipster cred for, I think I knew about COVID-19 before most people. I wasn't on the scene obviously, but someone I followed on social media was. Throughout December I was getting pretty regular updates on this serious issue that was spreading over China and the seemingly drastic response to something that in hindsight, the world just wasn't ready for. When you look at search trends for it online, it's practically non-existent until 2020, though that might say more about just how incredibly sharp the graph jolts up in March. It seems weird to think that more people weren't looking into it before, but it's easy to not think about something until it's absolutely uprooted your day to day life.

I touched on this a bit with "Sending Me Ur Loving" (#731). That was one of the songs that made it out into the world early on in 2020, one of the last songs to get the full extent of possible attention until the world got concerned with bigger news. You have to feel for the artists and labels who might have had a full rollout planned and then had to restructure everything because suddenly nothing was quite where it used to be. With Flume we've got a prime example. "The Difference" was released on the very same day that COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic by the WHO. 'Hey guys, check out my new song...oh, fair enough'.

If you look at charts and numbers (and obviously I do), you won't notice a significant change in terms of how the big hits tended to perform at the time. Maybe a slight dip in streaming numbers as it turned out the lack of commuting more than cancelled out the extra time at home in terms of reasons to put music on. I think the main issue was that it completely changed the dynamics of music discovery in a way that made people not really return to the old. I used to get annoyed at my brother if we'd be playing a game, someone would get called off to do something for a minute, and then we'd come back and he wouldn't want to play anymore. Just breaking that enchantment could have permanently kneecapped past promotional avenues like the radio. I'm not about to call "The Difference" a total failure and pin all of it on this, but when you compare it to his other high placing Hottest 100 hits, it didn't really have much to show for it on the charts. Only with hindsight has it held up as one of his biggest hits. More global streams than "Rushing Back" (#619) for instance.

Then again this could be a classic symptom of a hit that plays off better in hindsight. Something like an "On Melancholy Hill" or an "Instant Crush" (#293). Not really playing to the feel of the big hits that came before it, but hitting a sweet sentimental spot that resonates better out of context. The people who are just sampling random music they haven't heard before might get something out of this that the people pining for new Flume could potentially never see.

That's what I like the most about "The Difference". It's a Flume song that doesn't remotely feel like it's just doing his standard affair. He almost removes himself from the song completely without much of a hallmark, outside of the first 5 seconds. This is a drum & bass song that begs for you to run outside to on a hot day. I'd try it myself but it's too hot today. I'll admit I was a little surprised to see it poll so well. Maybe I'm stupid for ever doubting Flume in that regard, but it was a welcome thing to see.

#218. Silk Sonic, Bruno Mars & Anderson .Paak - Leave The Door Open (#47, 2021)

10th of 2021

It's always fun when an artist who knows nothing but success collaborates with an artist for whom those heights are a foreign concept. It's an unstoppable object meeting an immovable object. One of your guys has to break your rule! Usually what happens is something that breaks both rules by meeting in the middle to an extent. It can at times be a harsh reminder that as much as you may certainly think your favourite artists just lack the promotional game to get to the top, when they finally get that chance, they're just not famous enough to command the attention of that large majority of an audience that have been keeping them down in the first place. You'd more readily bring Bruno Mars down to Anderson .Paak's level than the other way around, it's just not what he does.

In 2021 we got a terrific demonstration of this all when Bruno Mars & Anderson .Paak decided to work together. It added a certain layer of intrigue that opened things up outside of the usual realm of Bruno Mars discussion. I say that thinking that I don't really see much discussion around Bruno Mars albums, despite the fact that he's sold so many of them and even won a GRAMMY for Album Of The Year for one of them. I'm much more likely to see people talk about a new Anderson .Paak album even if he categorically sells less of them and wins less awards. Now those people get to hitch their wagon to a juggernaut and use those numbers to validate the notion that it's a big deal when they do talk about it! In the end, it wasn't quite as successful as the average Bruno Mars album. I like to imagine it's a case of suffering from side project side effects, where there's just generally less imperative to check it out as not part of the mainline series. Maybe it just didn't quite have the hits, to which you might say 'Yes it did', but when you look at Bruno Mars' chart history, you have to remember what you're competing with. This is a man who had not remotely missed the mark once before this.

I mainly say all of this because I think the Silk Sonic project is really good! It's the kind of meeting of minds that works well for both by getting to inject that meeting ground on what both of them tend to do. Maybe you can be cynical and say that it's the kind of project that looks engineered to win GRAMMY awards and then feel alienated by the whole thing, but I hear it as a reward that keeps on giving. It pains me a little that it only comes up just the once on this list because "Smokin Out The Window" was a bonafide hit that's just right there. Evidently the mathematics of audience get even more complicated when you introduce it to the triple j circle, where neither of these artists are particularly notable stars (though Anderson .Paak will certainly appear more times here).

The Billboard charts have a funny tendency to just keep greasing the wheel for a certain handful of stars. From the outside looking in, it just feels like they're ordained the top spot while getting a reality check overseas. Just recently, Bruno Mars has had no issues scoring another #1 hit with "I Just Might". He's thoroughly backed by the machine and has the trust of radio airplay to plug up the shaky streaming figures. Outside of North America though, it feels like a hit that's only riding along because it's one of the few new and notable songs going around at the moment. In any case, I'm also describing a similar situation that happened with "Leave The Door Open", which also had its early week at #1 followed by the secondary week to coincide with better airplay. That one was a little less comfortable though, and resulted in a highly delayed Hot 100 since there had to be fraudulent downloads of Dua Lipa's "Levitating" removed from the count. None of that is on Bruno Mars or Silk Sonic, except to say that this collaboration was putting a strain on that guaranteed feeling of taking the top spot.

I'm also not going to knock it because I think "Leave The Door Open" is great. It's one of the best produced hit songs I've ever heard. Sounding smooth like a new born, or in a way that I feel like I'm going to be asked to leave quietly without making a fuss. Bruno Mars is still the star of the show, and I think does a lot to add to his own stocks when he shows off his vocal chops here. Usually he's the kind of performer that doesn't warrant a lot of comment, but his performance on this song is stellar. As for Anderson .Paak, he slips into the whole thing so naturally as if to make a case that he should be more of a star. I mean, I'd thought that for a long time already, but that's a topic for later entries. This is the kind of nostalgic throwback that is so well crafted that I can't help but fall for it. It's not good in a boring technical way, but in an 'I didn't realise how badly I wanted this' kind of way. Just absolutely puts me in a good mood.

#217. Tame Impala - Patience (#52, 2019)

16th of 2019

Still mining the well here. Something I always find interesting is the way the Hottest 100 preserves a state of time. The way we look at a lot of music can change over time. We can gain new insight that increases or decreases their worth to us. I heard an interesting quote recently about how we instinctively look for things that have been said before and try to find a way to level ourselves above us, in the abstract sense of either superiority or progress. Sometimes it'll be completely contradictory to reality. 'Why wasn't this song a bigger hit?' I say to myself while ignoring the fact that I was one of the people being a barrier to its success by not buying into it right away.

Going back to the original point though, Tame Impala's performance in the 2019 Hottest 100 remains locked in place. It's not changing, unless that one guy who keeps editing the 2013 & 2014 Wikipedia pages increases his scope. It leaves us with "Patience", the first new Tame Impala song since "Currents", nearly 4 years ago at that point. So many big accolades to come with it. It was nominated for multiple ARIA Awards, it was the first Tame Impala song to crack the UK top 100, named on multiple year end lists (including my own). This is a crazy amount of attention for a song that ended up tucked away on  "The Slow Rush B-Sides & Remixes". We did not know when "Patience" came out that it would never end up on the album proper, unless you count the Japanese bonus track, or one physical box set. Maybe the Hottest 100 performance really is an early reflection of it. Imagine a Tame Impala lead single not even cracking the top 50. You've got to scrub that immediately, the classic 'promo single' pivot that implicitly implies fans have to really do the work if they want the songs they like to get the proper treatment (except not so forcefully as to make it happen). Now it just feels like a random Tame Impala song that got in because it was one of three Tame Impala songs that were around in 2019 (well, four, but "Posthumous Forgiveness" was in December).

It's hard for me to not want to self-correct in the wake of this. I look at the way I responded to it initially and start to wonder if I'd ever give it the same time if it were just an album track. We're looking at the last gasp before Tame Impala fatigue started to set in and I look positively generous looking back. But then I want to cite "No Choice" (#307) and just contend with the idea that maybe this still is one of the best Tame Impala songs from this period. Maybe it's not really re-inventing the wheel, but the reverberated piano filling out the mix is positively striking. Then it's just the usual hallmarks. You've got drums that seem to splash, and all those mini odysseys where Kevin changes his inflection. It's definitely a little brother to that other Tame Impala song, but still worthwhile in a pinch.

#216. Boy & Bear - Southern Sun (#41, 2013)

38th of 2013

The locked in history can work both ways. For every hit that doesn't stand the test of time, there's one that probably should've been a hit but just wasn't really. You look at the performance of "Southern Sun" circa 2013 and it's just a modest comedown after their mighty success a couple of years ago. Still a hit to some degree, but one that comes off as a sophomore slump. Anyway, I don't know if you've kept track of things but it's absolutely Boy & Bear's most popular song now. All that says to me is that they just weren't allowed to keep the gravy train rolling into the future. Seemingly there isn't a song they could've put out that would've kept them at the top. It's why I do like to prioritise long time success. That's where the platinum certifications are hiding at least. "Southern Sun" is up to 3xPlatinum so far, which ties it with their cover of "Fall At Your Feet". I'm sure they'd probably prefer it if their own song is the one that goes the distance, given they implied as much when "Feeding Line" got their highest Hottest 100 position in 2011.

When I saw Boy & Bear live a couple of years back, it was a tour for the anniversary of their second album. They played every song on it, some for the first time in many years. I quickly also cottoned onto the fact that they were playing the whole thing in track list order. It's a cute, sensible idea in theory, but probably in practice isn't the most satisfying. The three most popular songs on the album are tracks 1-3. Maybe you've got some favourites on the back end but it's a long time to go without big highlights. This is how I also quickly realised that they were cheating on this system, and deliberately saved "Southern Sun" for last, so they could go out on a high, before coming back for several more highs when they brought out all the expected favourites that aren't on that album. It was quite peculiar though to see the reaction. Such a loud reaction for such an unassuming song. Maybe it's just a numbers game but funny how it works out like that.

There's an odd set up to this song though. A brisk walk the whole way, but with unusual moments to lift. You can't tell if the chorus is supposed to be the hook, or it's the nifty little guitar getting its moment afterwards instead. Generally stays at one pace almost the whole way until you get one of the great bridges. Maybe I'm doing it backwards as it's probably cooled off on me a little over the years, but hard to say it doesn't succeed in its mission.

#225-#221

#225. San Cisco - Too Much Time Together (#49, 2015)

30th of 2015

I can't imagine what it'd be like to be an adult in 2001, witnessing the meteoric rise of a certain New York band, the kind that's signalling a new era for rock music despite endless certain declaration that the scene is dead. Sure, the singer might have a nasally voice that's hard to decipher at times, but he's tapping into something raw. Maybe that's okay though, maybe I'm just describing Geese in the year 2025. If there are any doubts to their credentials, the problem is that it may well cause ripples that we are a long way away from seeing the conclusions to. Or all that stuff that came up after I wrote this.

I don't need to hide it though, obviously I'm talking about The Strokes. It's one of those reminders that a musical revolution does not necessarily make a big, obvious splash. It's very rare that you can take things in a new direction and win over enough of the stalwart gatekeepers who aren't willing to change the status quo. The Strokes don't really have top 40 hits. Surprisingly also, while they have all the hallmarks of a band that'd quickly fizzle out, they've remained surprisingly relevant as a group for over two decades now. Some of their most popular songs come from an album that was released in 2020.

If there's a point I want to make here, it's that beyond all the hype, I wasn't able to fully articulate just how much The Strokes mattered until I started hearing bands who were clearly influenced by them. Listen to "Eleven" by Last Dinosaurs and try to think of anything else. All the hallmarks are there: the fast guitars, the vocal distortion & falsetto, verse/chorus transitions that feel like they're lifted straight from "Is This It". If nothing else, it's proof of concept for me that there's still something to mine from this sound after so many years. I'm still finding songs to this day that scratch the same itch.

"Too Much Time Together" is another one in that chain. What is the main guitar riff in this song if it isn't just "Reptilia" or "Take It or Leave It" with less steps? What is the chorus of this song if it isn't just "Hard To Explain" or "Barely Legal" with less steps? It's just a very good way of doling out that instant gratisfaction even if you're hearing it for the first time. I will be completely fair to San Cisco and note that the vocal back & forth on this song adds a different flair to it. Jordi is not remotely trying to change things up and start sounding like Julian.

Actually the vocals are an interesting component of this because I've had trouble telling what's really going on in the mix. I tended to assume that Scarlett was doing all of the backing vocals but now I'm not so sure. The brief snippet in the second verse sounds like her, but when I was looking up live performances of the song, it's actually Josh adding those 'ooooh, na na na na na' parts, so it feels like a big group effort. Still, it's all the kinds of instant hooks that make me not surprised that this is one of the band's biggest hits overall, and the last one to make the ARIA Chart. This is the band's last song to appear here and I don't know how to round it out, so here's a wholesome picture of Scarlett, age 11, with Julian Casablancas & Fabrizio Moretti, no doubt plotting to eventually surpass them both in highest Hottest 100 entry, and total number of entries.

#224. Ruby Fields - Dinosaurs (#9, 2018)

25th of 2018

I love movies, you know that. Jurassic Park, now that's a good movie there. I say this with no strong level of nostalgia as I think I was very skeptical of it when I was younger and took a long time to watch the whole thing. Maybe that's what's stopping me from fully worshipping it, but nonetheless I have a lot of respect to hand out. I always think about how there was a contest to name the new Toronto basketball team in 1994, and due to the recent release of the film, 'Raptors' was the overwhelming favourite, and the name has stuck to this day. I did not think I'd bring them up twice in this blog (#500).

One of my greatest sources of entertainment with the film is a dumb anecdote of mine. I don't remember when exactly I first saw part of the movie, but it would have been at a time when I didn't watch many live action films or shows, and I had difficulty understanding how it all worked. My parents would watch Seinfeld and I wouldn't really understand what was going on, but I picked up faces. You watch Jurassic Park and very quickly think 'that's Newman!', and because of that, I'd 'solved' it and assumed the two things to be very closely linked. That's to say that for a very, very long time, I didn't know who Jeff Goldblum was and thought he was Kramer. I don't think anyone else ever made the same mistake I did, but something does resonate with me in an episode of Nirvanna The Band The Show when they're watching Jurassic Park enthusiastically. They're concerned over how Samuel L. Jackson's character is reacting, given what 'Newman' has just done to the security system. Just a subtle, realistic nod to the way we take note of famous character actors. I've seen Wayne Knight in so many things, but he really is immortalised as Seinfeld's nemesis.

I do find myself fascinated at the fluctuating popularity of dinosaurs with children. A lot of it does just come down to the media that exists at the time. Often it's just very hard to quantify though because anyone can relay their individual experience and misconstrue it as the general feeling. The first animated dinosaur film was in the 1910s, but I can't say for sure what impact it had. I do think that given the glut of associated films, there must have been a big peak in the late '80s and early '90s, one that still ripples from here on. Ruby Fields was born in the late '90s, but it's not a significant stretch for me to believe that she's still in on that wave. Dinosaurs are just too conceptually cool to not catch on like that with children.

If it wasn't in the title of the song I'm not sure I'd pay as close attention to that part of it. There aren't that many lyrics to be fair, but you could just as easily see me doing some sort of mathematical calculation to prove that it's not actually that strange to have attended more funerals than weddings as a teenager (the short answer is that your friends probably aren't getting married yet, and at the end of the day, there are probably more funerals to be had, logistically).

I also want to note just how much of a big, out of the gate success this song was. Just to put it into context, Ruby Fields was another one of those big 'check them out' Unearthed discoveries right from her debut single, a bit like G Flip. The only difference is that while G Flip's was an instant success, Ruby Fields instead landed at #137 and #152 in the Hottest 100. That easily could've been as good as it gets. "I Want" is a great track and I was surprised it didn't do better. I guess this song just speaks to more people through the specifics of its platitudes. That big build up and explosive finish, that's the stuff that top 10 finishers are made of right there. This is being filed in the same cabinet as "Don't Fight It" by The Panics. In general though I think there is something to be commended with making such a grand statement within relatively simple terms. Coming to terms with growing up and what it entails for you despite the fact that deep down you still are that innocent child you once were. Much like how a family movie can make statements about man's folly, and helpless desire to play god without being prepared for the responsibility, under the guise of 'hey, cool CGI dinosaurs!'. If I wasn't on a time constraint, I'd also consider putting on the film again.

#223. Alex Lahey - Every Day's the Weekend (#45, 2017)

26th of 2017

There is a certain kinship that comes with this very concept for me. In theory as someone on disability, every day is the weekend. In reality, I get so caught up in weekly commitments that it doesn't necessarily come across that way. My hours might not be rigid, but sometimes I keep myself so busy that the result is basically the same as working. I absolutely look forward to Saturday because it's the one day of the week that I don't actually have to do anything. It's one of those ways I can still tell the difference between weekdays and weekends, even when football season ends (#256).

This song isn't really about that concept, but instead it's about being deeply connected with someone (guess I'm out) and disrupting all prior commitments to spend time with them. On some level that is an experience I do relate to though, and I've had to force myself to occasionally saying no, simply because I haven't earnt the break, and future me will be lamenting past me and my laziness. Where I tend to fall on the whole situation is that it is important to have some sort of balance between productivity and recreation, but that might just be me speaking from my experience of always wanting to jump from one thing to another.

In any case, this song was an instant favourite for me in a way that's so self-evident that I have little to say on the subject. Upbeat, vibrant pop rock and it's just my bread and butter. It's employing that same sense of balance though with a steady chorus that runs on a metronome, but gets broken up with some 'wa-oh, wa-oh, wa-oh'. This is the end of the Alex Lahey saga on this blog which is saving me a bit of trouble when I didn't have much of a unique spin on things (don't look up how many more Skegss songs there are). I think part of that comes down to the song selection though, which all hits on a similar tone. My favourite song of her's is probably "I Want U" which feels like a completely different spin on things. It's slowed down a little and her guitar has more of a '50s/'60s reverberation to it. Then if we want to be technical, she also co-wrote and played guitar on "Heather" by Sarah Saint James. That's more in her typical wheelhouse, but an extremely catchy nugget if you haven't heard it, extremely likely given that view count.

#222. Genesis Owusu - Get Inspired (#17, 2022)

12th of 2022

I am occasionally ostracised for my refusal to install an adblocker. On some level I think it might be a generational gap at times, where growing up with a number amount of ads (especially watching kids TV) has me finding the current standard for advertising to be relatively mild. If watching YouTube is at best, 10% ads (or less if your hands are free to skip it), that's a pretty good ratio for me. I suppose the other thing is that I don't even necessarily find ads to be a worthless endeavour. It's inevitably a way to find out about things, and often through reinforcement, get accustomed to things that might not be in my periphery, but are important to others and comes in handy to know.

I won't deny that there are negative side effects to this. Depending on where you're sourcing things from, you are inevitably going to see the same ads over and over again, and that can get tiresome quickly. The basic HBO Max plan is great because it has some of the greatest TV shows ever in its library, but if you use it a lot, you have to get used to a very small rotation of the same ads constantly, that only seem to update every few weeks. Knowing every beat of the promotional ad to "A Minecraft Movie" hasn't really paid off for me yet. Meanwhile Flight Centre has made sure I never want to hear "Life In A Northern Town" or "Sunchyme" ever again. Why would they do this to me?

There are two possibilities here. You saw what song I posted above here and had an immediate reaction, amplified by the above two paragraphs, or you blissfully have been ignorant of the whole charade. It's something I've been hinting towards multiple times in previous entries, but "Get Inspired" is probably the song whose relationship with me has changed the most since I made this ranked list. I don't know if it's fair to say that I should change its placement, or that it's wrong to put it here, but it's been quite egregious for a song that I've comfortably heard far too much of in the past year.

"Get Inspired" is on a KFC ad. It's part of a long tradition where they tend to pluck out some song that landed in the top 20 of the Hottest 100 a while ago and trot it around far too much. First they came for Drapht's "Rapunzel" (fun story, since I wrote this, I actually met Drapht), then San Cisco's "Awkward", and then Icona Pop's "I Love It". Actually I'll pay the last one as it's become an inseparable part of the song now. They really chose the worst 3 words of the chorus to associate with their brand and it's so ridiculous that it worked. Usually they were doing it with a song that was about a decade old, and so a fun throwback, but the attack on "Get Inspired" happened when the song was barely 2 years old. It's one of the newest songs in this list because it came out so late in 2022, and so it's had the least amount of time to gain some notoriety, and now it's just that song I don't want to hear right now.

I will put forward a proper case for it though which is that I'm describing the worst, most unfair part of the scenario. It's not so much the song itself but rather a soundbite. You're only really hearing about 10 seconds of the song each time, the same 10 seconds, but that's all it is. That can provide an uncanny feeling, like rewinding the same section of a podcast multiple times, or just hearing your own voice playing back to you because someone hasn't sorted out their voice chat settings properly. Not great, but if you actually go back to the full song, you get much more variety than you're used to, and maybe on some level, it's actually improved for it. Like I'd totally forgotten the song has a bridge. It's just felt egregious for the past year knowing that I have to write something about this song, and that it's the highest entry for Genesis Owusu in the end. The rank just locked in a time when there was nothing to note about this song other than it being the closest approximation we're getting in this list to the wild energy of "The Other Black Dog". At least I can safely listen to his new music, but we never know when the KFC demon is going to strike again.

#221. Disclosure (feat Sam Smith) - Omen (#62, 2015)

29th of 2015

Every now and then you'll have a big commercial breakout that comes from an artist that really isn't suited for that limelight. Whether they crafted an effective crossover within their style, or they created something so fascinating as to supplant the usual process, they're an anomaly. Everyone knows this, and they know this too. The next question is what they're going to do next. They can either completely disregard it and do whatever they want, or lean further into it, to try and make lightning strike again. I think deep down we probably want something in the middle, as if it's too obvious in one of those two directions, it gets discouraging.

I technically already wrote about Disclosure's big follow up single (#251) when "Latch" turned into a huge hit for them. It doesn't feel like the complete story though. Given just how long it took for "Latch" to take off in America, it was a whole different ball game by that point. Disclosure's first album cycle and been and gone, and it was just about time to move onto the second one. Additionally, that guest vocalist they had hired had gotten just a little more well known.

This is the first and only appearance here for Sam Smith. Admittedly it's underselling their massive impact from 2013 to 2022, but it was mostly outside the periphery of triple j. In the same way that Adele was prior, and Olivia Dean is currently, Sam Smith was just the ticket. That mix of sensible, polite music that was modern enough that the kids were into it as well. Just a huge boon for labels knowing they can comfortably ship truckloads of albums and largely rely on big streaming numbers in perpetuity. The belated success of "Latch" overseas felt more like a deliberate vehicle to keep the Sam Smith train rolling, the same way Sam Fender is currently benefitting from an Olivia Dean feature credit. When an artist is on a hot streak like that, it doesn't matter whose songs they're on, people just can't get enough of it. They'll probably chew it up and spit them out in the aftermath, but that doesn't have to be a hard and fast rule either.

There are other loopholes of course. We're looking at the most obvious one right here. How many people groaned when they saw the big lead single from Disclosure's second album also featured Sam Smith? I probably did to a degree. They were probably right to do it, and well within their rights given they basically put them on the map, but it was hard not to see it as a cynical ploy for a hit. The worst thing about it was that you knew deep down that it could still work, even if it would remain confined to the shadow of its twin. You'd be hard pressed to find many people who prefer "Omen" over "Latch".

This would be a great moment to make the most controversial statement I've made here but I don't think I can do it. "Latch" is just timeless. The only thing I'll say on the matter is that years later, looking at it on its own merits and with the added context of what Disclosure had been doing on this album, I've found myself to be far more charitable to this song. It comes close to suffering from feeling overcooked, just desperately in search of a hook that sticks. It'll never be quite as sticky as it wants to be. When the chorus does arrive though, it's absolutely one of Sam's best hooks. The kind of song that's best served by sneaking up on you, maybe playing in the background. Let it perform without the pressure of having to be something it's not trying to be.

#230-#226

 #230. The Smith Street Band - Death to the Lads (#21, 2016)

26th of 2016

You might astutely have noticed that I placed the majority of the entries from The Smith Street Band within a very small amount of space (and the other two weren't far off). It's something that I tend to be self-conscious of. I don't want to fall into that trap of voting for the band, or otherwise assigning a rough cap to what they might be capable of. To me it just represents the incidental chance of this happening with a randomly selected set of songs. A faux linguist is breathing a sigh of relief that I finally didn't end a sentence with a preposition. I had no intention of doing this but it just ended up this way. In a sense, great, it's a solid set of entries. In another sense, just terrible here because I've never been able to recharge myself to find something new to put into this.

If I were to add a new tangent to all of this, I barely scratched the surface on the fact that most of The Smith Street Band's entries here were produced by Jeff Rosenstock, this included. I don't have an encyclopaedic knowledge of his music but I do like "WORRY." quite a bit as well as that Bomb the Music Industry! album that tends to get the most love. I wouldn't say the Smith Street collaborations are a carbon copy, but the best parts of his music just remind me of the best parts of PUP's music. It's an appropriate team up though, because who else would pair up extreme wordiness with anthemic singalongs?

"Death to the Lads" has one goal in mind which is to become exactly that kind of anthem. The moment I first heard of it, all I could think was that it was a deliberate attempt to engineer it. The great thing about it is that 'the lads' doesn't even need to be a specific sub-group. There are probably groups of people who are considered 'the lads' to one group, who have their own 'the lads' to push below themselves on the ladder. I don't even think this song is taking aim at any particular group. Rather it's about recognising our own shortcomings, so really, we're all the lads. I'm here thinking over this list for a solid year and I still end up putting the 'get out of my f**king face, mate' song ahead of all the more intricately introspective songs instead. If you've mastered the art of ranking things why would you spend half your time choking with blatantly uncouth decisions?

#229. Travis Scott - SICKO MODE (#3, 2018)

26th of 2018

This was a long time coming for Travis Scott. He'd been on the cusp of a big breakthrough for years but without a crossover hit to show for it. It was so willed into existence that a significant portion of his album swarmed the charts on the week it came out, despite his only top 50 hit prior to this being a feature credit on a moderately sized Major Lazer hit. It gives us one of those ascents you can map out as a projection of the general populace. "SICKO MODE" debuted in the top 10 at #7, but that was just the eager Travis Scott fans, and maybe some Drake fans as well. The song spent the next two months slowly sliding as those early listeners weren't maintaining the same enthusiasm, the way I imagine most people who obsess over an album probably will reach their critical mass for how frequently they listen to it very quickly. The song levels out, but then picks up a second wave of momentum, as everyone who was detached from the album cycle hype is now just tuning into what has turned out to be one of the biggest hits of the year. It's even easy to imagine someone half-heartedly trying it out, dismissing it as messy album filler, and only later finding that connection that makes the brain click with the idea of it being a hit song. The song got back to #7 another 2 months later, and when they seemed like it might be the end of it, the result of triple j's Hottest 100 a further 2 months later finally got it that shiny new peak. It got to #6. A tremendous result for a song as weird as this.

*TRANSITION*

They seem to get an unpopular reaction but I love the extra fluff that comes along with the Hottest 100 countdown. Maybe not necessarily calling up drunk parties (though I understand why they do that), but I'm talking about the extra sauce that puts more life into the countdown appearances. Little intros, interviews and that sort of thing. If you're in any way voting in the countdown because you want your favourite songs to get more exposure and commendations, then you should absolutely, more than anything else, hope that they get an introductory segment. I've found through watching the response to it on download & streaming charts that getting the extra bit of focus goes a huge way towards making people pay attention to them. We just like things when we know more about them and it makes them feel more important.

It's not often something that gets commented on very much, but there's one big exception to this. Before the #3 song was played for 2018, triple j played one of these info sections to build up to it. It starts with a clip of Anthony Fantano saying 'This generation's "Bohemian Rhapsody". It's taken from one of his 'Let's Argue' videos where he's reading a quote from a random Twitter user. If you listen to the whole thing in context, you'll find there's a degree of reluctance to it, where even though he likes the song a lot, the flaw(s) really makes it hard to fully support the idea. triple j's segment keeps running with it, but it's clear to me they're just having a bit of fun.

The people were not happy about it. For weeks upon weeks, any and all triple j threads about anything were at risk of being derailed once someone brought up the quote. This may have all been amplified by the fact that the "Bohemian Rhapsody" biopic was very recently released, so Queen idolisation was at a generational high. It eventually cooled off but as recently as a week ago I saw someone bring it up again and specifically attribute the quote to Ben & Liam, who were hosting breakfast and that segment of the countdown at the time. There is some slight truth to this in that they did say this (I apologise but I've never been able to distinguish which one is which so I can't correctly attribute this. I saw one person say it was Liam but I'm not about to take that as gospel). Once "SICKO MODE" ended, you hear Ben or Liam say 'They're calling it this generation's "Bohemian Rhapsody", except their microphone wasn't turned on at first, so the first three words came in very quietly. It's possible this one very slight radio gaffe amplified the situation, but it's impossible to say. It's certainly one of the all-time over-reactions though. It's so blatantly superficial and silly in an era where everything surrounding Drake was turning into a meme. It's not even the most famous "SICKO MODE" meme because it was around the same time as a screenshot from "The Polar Express" was being exploited to make people debate their preference between it and Sheck Wes's "Mo Bamba". A battle where the hits were not remotely on the same scale to make it fair, but it has that certain 'yob or wanker' feel to it in the world of memey but very popular hip-hop songs of late 2018.

*TRANSITION*

I do want to emphasize just how weird this song is. Everything about it (except the feature) screams of an accidental hit, the kind that is just not going to be pushed along by the machine unless it's forced to keep up. A song running for over 5 minutes, shifting between beats that have nothing in common. That's all while it's operating in Travis Scott's typically hazed out modus operandi that's never really proven itself to be pop viable. Even in those bounds, we're not done, because (especially during Travis's verse) you're caught off guard by every strange idea that has entered the man's head. I'm adverse to ever denoting this song as 'Travis Scott featuring Drake' because it's ignoring all the other contributions. Swae Lee says all of 3 words on the song but makes an amazing impression with it. Biggie even has 3 words of his own two decades after his death. Just the words 'gimme the loot' alone add 14 songwriters to this behemoth. At long last, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Phife Dawg, DJ Premier & Guru have co-written a Billboard #1 hit, I'm happy for them. Feel like I've left out a name or two there, I'm sure they'll get their moment.

Drake does naturally get most of the attention here. This makes sense because it's 2018 and this song is just a victory lap for him, though you can have fun with the fact that he's not normally credited on the song. I was strongly considering writing this whole entry without mentioning him once but it was too awkward to write around him. He's just a beacon for things to talk about, or maybe he's like a light, like a light, like a light, Lisa needs braces, pick up Bart, a part of us all. His best part of the song is the intro, where he lands on the sorrow, remorseful Drake mood which I find always connects with me. Perhaps put a pin in that for a future entry.

If there's something to be let down about in the whole experience it's that there's not nearly enough chemistry in here. The very fact that they tease it at the end probably makes it worse. I want to pretend they're in the same room trading bars, rather than emailing them back and forth. Still, the era of "SICKO MODE" is always one I'm happy to re-live. A tremendous high point for the people who made it, and the people who made it a hit.

#228. Arctic Monkeys - Body Paint (#79, 2022)

13th of 2022

Welcome back to the Arctic Monkeys lounge experience, enjoy your stay, we have jet skis on the moat. It feels miraculous to say that this is the second entry here from "The Car", given the album before this one only managed one, and at a lower position. They shouldn't have been able to get away with this again. At the time I had a brief inclination to say that I might prefer "The Car" to the couple of albums that came before it, but I'm not sure that holds anymore. Admittedly I've not gone back to those ones as I'm saving them up for later dates.

I can only guess that it was an accidental master stroke in timing. This album was released in mid-October. Normally I'd say aim for a month or two before that, but it's not quite as important if you're an artist of Arctic Monkeys' stature. They're guaranteed to get the necessary attention early on, and it's just a matter of holding onto it for long enough. A lot of albums like this run the risk of falling out of focus for the next big thing and then the enthusiasm dries up quickly. This is exactly that kind of album but they made it work for them. We are looking at Arctic Monkeys a solid 17 years into their career though. I wonder if younger listeners would see them the same way that I might have felt when Pearl Jam were finding their way into the list as late as 2006. Even Pearl Jam's big second commercial burst they had when "Last Kiss" became a #1 hit was more recent then, than Arctic Monkeys' "AM" success was in 2022. Unctic Monkeys, or something like that. It's not like the actual music would dissuade anyone from thinking that.

My personally biased point perspective here is that part of the success came from them holding onto the album's secret weapon as a second single. If there was an obvious beacon for votes like there was last time, they'd probably be doomed to repeating the performance, but here you had the pretty likeable lead single (#417), and then this one later down the line that's just a little more straight forward to get into. I can't exactly claim Arctic Monkeys aren't able to get away with lengthy song titles given what the early part of their career was like, but they had a certain whimsy you don't get from the ode to demanding a mirrorball. "Body Paint"? Much more straight to the point. It didn't quite take the lead as their most popular song here, but landed awfully close given how much less attention it got from the outset.

I like to count it as a win for "Body Paint" anyway, because it otherwise had no business getting through here. If I were to vote for an Arctic Monkeys song that year, it'd be this one. It takes their extremely mild chill out zone to new places, ones that feel a little less indulgent. I contain contradictions though so my favourite part of this song is the ultra-indulgent guitar solo at the end. So predictable, I know. It's just a very nice feather in the cap that they'd been building to the whole time. So while I might not go back to "The Car" very often, this is a very worthwhile cut to take away from it, was stoked to see it here.

#227. Violent Soho - Vacation Forever (#69, 2019)

18th of 2019

The funny number. The original funny number if you will. It is a number that does not discriminate in the Hottest 100, and is willing to be home to the deeply serious (gestures to Crash Test Dummies' "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm", and the deeply unserious (gestures towards "(Let's Go) Smoke Some Pot", "Waving My Dick In The Wind"). It's so thoroughly random what we get here that in all our time of Hottest 100 countdowns, just one artist has managed to slot in there twice. It wouldn't be right if #69 didn't have a partner, and fortunately, 3 years after their first stint, Violent Soho found their way in there again. I really thought they had a chance to do it again another 3 years later but it wasn't to be.

I sometimes forget that "Vacation Forever" wasn't just a loose single. The album came out in 2020 and went to #1 on the charts, forcing Dua Lipa to wait a little bit longer to hit #1. There were no further Hottest 100 entries though, a considerable drop off when they had 6 on the previous album. The reality of it is that they had two near misses, "Pick It Up Again" at #113 and "Lying On The Floor" at #117. I very much enjoy the latter which feels like the closest approximation of all the hits on "WACO". Good build up, good hook to lock it into place. Maybe a lot of time felt like it passed in 2020 and everyone just forgot about it. In general though, I don't think the album showcases their best for the most part. It's short and sweet, but drags on a bit, nonetheless.

"Vacation Forever" is a solid single though. It's the gift that keeps giving. You get a big hook, and then the chorus just keeps on going, and going. Only then do you finally remember that this is that one song with the 'baby boomer' lyric and it's the cement that holds it all together. Such great worldbuilding, what on earth is the context?

#226. Mallrat - Charlie (#3, 2019)

17th of 2019

"Charlie" was released on August 7th, 2019. At the same time it was released, there was a new #1 single in Australia. With the exception of a week when Mariah Carey's "All I Want For Christmas Is You" took over, that same song remained at #1 all the way up until the end of the voting period for the 2019 Hottest 100. In that same time, "Charlie" could not quite managed to crack the ARIA top 100 (though it would reach #50 in 2020, Mallrat's only ever top 50 hit). That song landed just behind "Charlie" in the Hottest 100. I'm not making any comment on that song here (although you may have realised it still hasn't appeared), just that it is one of the most monumentally extreme examples of how the charts don't always dictate the poll in the way it might feel they do. It's a David vs. Goliath situation where admittedly, Goliath has been getting his fair share of victories lately, and arguably he still did in 2019 (another song is being omitted from discussion), but you never really know how the dice are going to land, and that's very interesting. Just this idea that a song can be well beloved, but in an 'off the grid' kind of way.

Maybe for Mallrat, it wasn't so surprising given that all the momentum was on her side. She was climbing higher and higher on the list each year with this being the logical zenith. Maybe "Groceries" (#313) really was the bigger hit, but it also fully put her on the map as an undeniable hitmaker. Maybe on those metrics she didn't do quite as well here, but she succeeded in a different way by pulling at the heart strings.

Do you know the story about Hachikō? He was an Akita dog born over 100 years ago who would wait for his owner after work every day. One day, his owner suddenly died at work, but Hachikō would continue to come back to Shibuya Station in Tokyo almost every day waiting for his owner to come back. He continued doing this for a decade until he also passed away. There's now a statue of him at Shibuya station. You might also know this story via that one episode of Futurama. I am informed by people who have very deep affection for dogs in general that this is a heartbreakingly sad episode. Don't let my dog agnostic feelings get in the way of that if you feel this way.

Mallrat doesn't go into that sad aspect of it, but it is a song about the joy that comes with returning to her dog when she gets home. Nothing about this is particularly explicit in the text unless you know her dog is named Charlie, and even then, it won't turn up until you're nearly at the end of the song. I am undecided on whether the whole song is about Charlie, and it's just a misdirection before that or not, because you can read a lot of these lyrics as being about a prospective partner as well. I promise there's nothing suspect in that. In any case, the Hottest 100 has a long history with songs about how dogs are great, and Mallrat has just set a massive benchmark for the next comer to try and top.