#145-#141

#145. Flume & Chet Faker - Drop the Game (#5, 2013)

29th of 2013

They're calling it the most obvious collaboration ever. It's a collaboration that's so obvious, it had already happened before this, and depending on how you measure these things, was certainly a success. Chet Faker appeared on Flume's debut album, on one of the more popular cuts, "Left Alone". This was around the time that Chet Faker's debut EP was getting some strong traction, and the song "I'm Into You" landed at a pointy #24 in the 2012 Hottest 100. Chet Faker started releasing music with Future Classic, the independent label strongly associated with Flume. A few months after "Melt" (#621), he's interrupting his own album campaign to release a collaborative EP with Flume. Flume had been operating on a huge, gradual word of mouth campaign for much of 2012 and 2013, and this was the first new material he'd put out since his album. It was primed to do fairly well, and it did fairly well. It was something of a stopgap for both artists who'd go onto much bigger things in the near future. This is a rookie collaboration between two artists who'd eventually top the countdown individually (#862), (#472), (#400). For Chet Faker though, this was new ground, and a taste of how his moody electronica could actually work in a top 40 context.

"Drop The Game" was thusly one of those funny chart runs. A new release designed to break Australian broadband that was able to debut reasonably high on the charts (at #21), before settling into a steady baseline as it grapples with the competing concepts of 'It's actually worth the hype' and 'It's serving a pretty niche audience'. With a mid-November release date, it almost feels purposely planned to fit this success model, because like many before and after it, the song reached its final peak position (#18) after it became one of the least surprising Hottest 100 hits of all time. Maybe it's a little surprising to see it so high, just because very new releases do slip in the margins, and 2013 is not short of very potent contenders. I look at that list and it's odd to think an even better timed "Drop The Game" drop could have slid up the rankings even more. Rubbing shoulders with the giants.

"Drop The Game" is mostly just two hooks, one sung by Chet Faker and the other hummed by Chet Faker and matched behind it by Flume. These two hooks are played over and over again just in case you somehow missed them, and layered on top of each other, played in counter, whatever's on the menu for the moment. There's only a brief reprieve during the song's one regular verse, because the second verse is just the chorus again, and then the bridge is the chorus again. I've been seeing 'ooh ooh ooh', I've been seeing your 'ohoh, ohoh, oh, oh, oh'. Still, repetition can beat you down in a good way, and I can't help but leave it thinking that it's the most compelling and engaging that Chet Faker has ever managed to sound. For Flume, it's another day in the park of generally having an ear for what works. For me, the best moment is when he pitches it up in the middle of the song in a way that just sounds unnerving, but also doubles as a satisfying transition when he brings it back. This one weird trick to play the same thing back to back and make it work.

#144. Hockey Dad - Join the Club (#18, 2018)

15th of 2018

In the pop music world, there's a meme that developed in the mid-2010s that as far as I can tell is still going around now. I'm just interrupting this paragraph here to provide more space for reading so you don't catch where I'm going with this and get some time to ponder 'How on earth is this going to make it back to Hockey Dad?'. Honestly I try to do this whenever I can but the medium doesn't always allow us to control the way someone else's eyes might dart towards things that stand out. Anyway, the term 'skinny legend' took hold as a way to compliment someone's favourite artist. It's most associated with Mariah Carey thanks to one tweet that succinctly expresses their thoughts on both her, and the police. It's a knowingly silly term of endearment that makes for some funny looking photoshops, and I'll admit that I get a chuckle out of someone throwing shade on someone's toddler to say that Mariah is skinnier. I'd probably have largely forgotten about it all if not for "Join the Club", which in all of its aspirational goals set in the song's chorus, has the most memorable one being 'You better be skinny'. I don't think Hockey Dad were trying to evoke that side of Twitter, but it's all I think about.

That's the core tangent for "Join the Club", a song about living with unrealistic expectations mounted on you on all sides. It's enough to make you feel particularly inadequate especially if you think someone else is getting through it all more effectively, as if we're all fighting to get an A+ evaluation on our death bed. I think about a TV show I've been watching lately. I won't say the name of it for just a little while longer but if you scroll down about 2 entries from here you might see what I'm putting down. It's a TV show with a lot of different people from different backgrounds forced to face adversity together and coming at odds with their different perspectives & skill sets. Yet ironically, in all of this, it's those very differences that keep them operating, because it's just not feasible to do it all. You need someone who specialises in a different area because you just can't do it all yourself. Every time a problem emerges and there's one person who knows what to do, maybe it feels contrived, but I think finding those key specialties that everyone has, even the seemingly useless, that's just a core tenant of life, getting along, loving thy neighbour and so forth. It's not a competition, it's a collaboration.

As far as the Hottest 100 goes, this is as big as it gets for Hockey Dad. I don't know if I'd call it their biggest hit (one of their earlier songs, "Seaweed", has it beaten on Spotify). It does feel like the song that came out at the right time for them though. They'd just properly put themselves on the map with another song, and here's the nice, shiny follow up in the new year. It's not too hard to like this one because it gives you all the fun energy you expect from the band (though it's surprising just how many of their hits have been more slow burns). Just a sign that they received momentum and capitalised on it thusly by putting out a very agreeable, and likeable song.

#143. Billie Eilish & Khalid - lovely (#17, 2018)

14th of 2018

When I was in Year 7, we'd get weekly quizzes to do for homework each week. A lot of it was straight-forward and I did pretty well, but the one question that's stuck with me over two decades later was something like 'An egg is hatched by an i_______'. I might have the wording a little wrong, but I was so confused by this. It felt like it should be something simple like 'bird', and that the initial letter 'I' was an error. It turned out to not be an error at all, but the word they were looking for was 'incubator', a word I was pretty certain I'd never encountered in my life. Maybe not a big deal, but I felt that common feeling many people have in these situations, 'How was I supposed to know that?'. A couple of years later, I also mixed up a quiz that was looking to match words to definitions. There was 'low ranking army officer' and 'high ranking army officer', and that was the day I learnt that colonels considerably outrank sergeants, despite every vibe I'd encountered previously seeming to indicate the opposite. Again, it wasn't something I'd been formally taught, so it felt like I was just shooting into the breeze.

Despite not being especially attuned for it, I developed an interest in trivia growing up. I don't know if I could be considered especially good at it but that's because I'm so often surrounded by the best of the best, people who'd potentially go on very long winning streaks if they got onto Jeopardy!, and people who have done just that (a couple of weeks ago, three people I've known for a good while were all on Jeopardy! on the same week by coincidence, I haven't seen their episodes yet so I don't know how they went). Generally though, it's hard to properly weigh my own knowledge against others because so often, trivia falls into a range of regional bias, where one person's obscurity is another's day to day life. American bias is the most common instance.

Getting more actively involved with the trivia scene has taught me a lot about the craft of trivia itself in ways that weren't remotely clear to me for a long time. Initially, I might have seen all trivia equally as a collection of knowledge that you may or may not have acquired at some point in your life. Maybe some things (world capitals, famous wars, definitions) might come to mind as something worth studying. Once I was out of school, it felt like everything was fair game. As long as the information is accurate, the quiz master is free to ask anything they want.

This is not how the trivia world sees things. I was having a discussion the other day about the use of the term 'canon'. It's a shorthand for trivia's Overton window, the broad, but ultimately shallow reach of what could be expected to get asked about. It'll vary in different institutions, but it basically turns into a game of trust between both parties. One of the most satisfying things a player can do is to correctly interpret the difficulty of a question, and start using contextual deduction to pull out an answer that they don't actually know. Which composer conducted the Karelia Suite at the Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki in 1893? Well I didn't know that piece but Jean Sibelius is the only Finnish composer I've ever encountered in trivia so it's probably him, and now I've learnt something new about him. Once you understand this concept, studying can be a breeze and suddenly you'll look like a bottomless pit of information through your A to B associations. I memorised all the US state capitals in a few hours (some with very specific links & mnemonics) and to anyone who knows I'm not American, it looks impressive.

For the same reason I cried foul as a child, this is a subject of great scrutiny and controversy. People like to know what they're getting into, and if you stray too far out of that as a quiz master, you can be derided for your deeply unserious trivia. Pop culture for instance is an endless well of threads that is a struggle to keep up with on even the most famous examples. It'll be derided as trash by people who do not have the desire to learn more about someone else's obscure favourites, or the obscure details of any favourites. You'll learn everything there is to know about the Roman empire only to stumble on not knowing which Paul brother is which. I'll admit that I lost on a trivia night because I lacked enough knowledge on Jersey Shore, but I'm content with that result, and I've never forgotten 'gym, tan, laundry' ever since.

Music trivia specifically is a huge net that can go in any direction. Even the most avid music fans I know always have big gaps somewhere because the wide range of genres, eras and ranges of measurable popularity just make it all completely impossible to cover. You might need information that can only come to you if you're actively listening to the music multiple times in order to get it to stick, and even then, you don't know what you're gonna get and you'll miss it still. I like doing music quizzes on Sporcle but I'll almost never get a perfect score because it's largely potluck. There are many ways to keep up to date with music. You can just experience it in your life, maybe actively listen to a relevant radio format. Maybe you'll do what I've done in the past and listen to literally everything that spends even a single week on the charts, or otherwise just keep up with what everyone else is talking about. Everyone goes down their own rabbit holes so the realistic result is a mix of multiple ideas.

I've said all of this not to actually talk about music trivia, but about the way I've seen music fans talk about music that falls out of their own periphery. It's very common to see people hole up, the same way hardcore trivia fans do so, even without the same intent. On the most basic level, it's a 'Who??', but it can manifest more rationally as someone who disregards any evidence of importance just simply because it hasn't met their arbitrary standards. This can happen across international lines, where not everything is on an equal level, but the most common case I've seen is one where top 40 is literally the word of God, and nothing that hasn't done the little dance there for at least a few months is ever worth considering. Certifications can offer an accurate weighting over time, but without that communal feeling of everyone learning about the song at the same time, it feels like it's extra-curricular.

"lovely" is one of the biggest hits of Billie Eilish's career, and possibly the biggest of Khalid's. It might not feel like this, given that it's competing with some monster hits from both discographies, but if you look at the raw figures, it's absolutely in elite territory. By the time this post goes live, it might get overtaken, but as I'm writing it, this is Billie Eilish's most played song of all time on Spotify. It did very well in Australia at the time, but wasn't a top 40 hit in the US or UK. It's just been accumulating popularity for 8 years now with no decline in momentum. It's strange to be glued to the complex deductions of what's a hit, when in reality, it's largely being decided in closed spaces that you're not privy to. You might not have any reason to know which songs have fallen out of favour, and which other ones have just been continually discovered by complete strangers you'll never meet. Technically this is what we're supposed to be interested in, but it so quickly derails, like trying to walk in a straight line with your eyes closed. It's not going to resemble your version of events at all.

Like most of the long screeds I go on here, this all comes from witnessing it first-hand. Seeing "lovely" be brought up as one of the biggest songs of the past decade, and seeing UK music fans be dismissive of the facts. Disregarding it completely (and probably liking the song less) just because the song wasn't a major part of their life in 2018, regardless of the strong reality that this early hit was a foundational moment for her growing popularity. It'd be like disregarding Cold Chisel's "Khe Sanh" because it's not one of the band's multiple top 10 hits. It's a lot easier for me to buy into all of this just because "lovely" was a big hit right away in Australia. I'd like to believe I could do the same even if it wasn't, but then I suppose I don't ever have strong feelings about her even earlier song "ocean eyes". I know it's a big deal, but I wasn't part of the moment and it means very little to me.

As for "lovely" though, it's always been a song I've liked a lot. I was pretty on board with most of what I'd heard from Billie Eilish at this point and found her approach so refreshing, possibly something to tackle more with another entry. "lovely" is a little more conventional in the way that it needs to be. I still find it very interesting though, the way the song builds up only to completely drop it all for the hook. It feels like it's playing for the big sweeping dramatics, but wants to have a second calling card that's completely detached from it. I've no idea why it has endured as strongly as it has, other than the fact that big collaborations like this can help land you in two artists' Spotify top 10s, giving you two fanbases to pool streams from. It can be the kind of thing that just grabs a lot of people at the same time without them realising it. That 'accidentally on everyone's playlist' vibe. I consider it to be very important in the long term.

#142. Camp Cope - Lost (Season One) (#74, 2016)

18th of 2016

Depending on who's reading this, this is either my secret, not-so-secret, or blatantly-obviously-at-this-point-mission. There's a song here called "Lost (Season One)", of course I'm going to watch season one of Lost. You know, that TV show from the 2000s about a bunch of people trapped on an island after a plane crash. I've told several people that I'm explicitly going to do this, just that I never wanted to say when I would, lest I make it too obvious when this entry is coming. I've been spending the last couple of weeks dipping out of voice calls for exactly 42 minutes at a time, the perfect crime. How else am I meant to contextualise that title? It's one thing to just say you're watching the popular media property (#224), but the specificity brings all new questions. Namely, why would you specify the season like that? Well, if you didn't have your head in the sand in the late 2000s, maybe you can figure that out yourself. But I like challenging perspectives.

I am a strong believer in the regularity of coincidences. There are just too many things happening at once and too many ways to observe them that sometimes, we're going to find some strange commonality that sounds like fate. This sounds like I'm riffing on the events of Lost but I'm not, rather, it's the events of me starting to watch Lost. I sat down at my desk and started to watch the pilot, which is named "Pilot", and is possibly a pun on the fact that the plane's pilot makes a brief appearance. As I'm doing this, I get a DM from a friend who hasn't messaged me in months, but someone I know is a big fan of Lost and perhaps in some small part has indirectly convinced me to give the show a proper chance. There's no way they could possibly know I'm doing this but in the brief moment before I checked, I got a little paranoid about it. That's not much, but then later that same night I end up watching an episode of The Simpsons. I've very slowly been going through the show from start to finish, well entrenched into episodes I've mostly never seen before. I'm pretty irregular about watching the show at the moment, what with all the secret Lost watching I'm doing, as well as various other things on my plate, but I decide to watch an episode that night. Little did I know that it ended up being an episode in which Homer gets deeply obsessed with watching (a thinly veiled reference to) Lost on demand, years after the show has finished. I'm watching this in a group and I have to stay completely silent about the fact this has happened, and all the minor details I'm now familiar with, while also hoping I'm not inadvertently spoiled of something major. I got out of it okay, but this is exactly the kind of strange, quirky thing that would turn up in a flashback on the show, raising more questions than it answers as Homer might say.

I find it all interesting to look back at 20 years later because Lost really was one of those huge TV phenomena. An early incarnation for global theory crafting in the online world as the show would continue to unravel little threads that get more unusual as they went. What starts as a simple premise of a plane crash leaving people deserted on an island, left to put aside their differences and work together, becomes this truly bizarre tour de force of science fiction & fantasy. It felt like pretty much the most important thing to watch, and I did watch it at the time. I don't remember very much aside from a handful of characters and plot devices with only the broad strokes of a modestly invested teenager who was likely second monitoring the show to play video games.

It's been fascinating to go back to season 1 of Lost, in part because I know some of the things that are going to happen, but also just to put myself in the mindset of someone watching it for the first time, without being bogged down by how supposedly complicated and unfulfilling it may end up getting. It's a very watchable show. Somewhat slow paced because what 25 episode season wouldn't be, but also because they have to go to great lengths to develop so many different characters at once. Most of it is done through relatively self-contained episodes showing flashbacks to that particular episode's character in focus, revealing their greater motivations, things they might be hiding, and how they ended up on a plane from Sydney to Los Angeles. That's another thing I hadn't remembered about the show actually, just how Australian it is. Not in terms of authorship, all the creators and most of the actors aren't, but so much of the show takes place in Australia, going lengths to include that characterisation, rather than just be America with different accents. If someone told me that the show was disproportionately popular in Australia, partly because of this, I might believe them. likewise I could probably believe that Camp Cope's affinity comes from this as well. In general though, I do find the cast of characters to be fairly likeable, even when they're clearly doing bad or selfish things. That complex code of ethics that we all have, and how it doesn't necessarily undermine us, that's one of the main things I've taken away from the show.

Recently, I've been watching the Dropout series Game Changer a lot. It's built on the premise of being a game show where the rules are fluid and the contestants are thrown into the deep end without a paddle every episode. A lot of fun to be had, but the thing I've taken away the most from it is the show's ability to always go one step further than expected. Playing a game with both the contestants and the audience by having them potentially expect a twist, only for that to be exactly part of the plan to distract you from the even bigger twist. I don't think it's a coincidence that the host also habitually does magic tricks.

I don't necessarily have that level of showmanship in me, but I do find the process to be very fascinating, and something I'd love to emulate if I too had those kinds of resources. If I've succeeded on one level, it's that if you go back and look at the earlier entries on this blog, I'm shocked at how quaint they are. Where I started and where I ended up are two very different places. What I'm really trying to say is that if anyone ever caught me saying that I was planning to, or had already watched Season 1 of Lost for the purposes of writing this entry, I was not being entirely truthful. No, no, I didn't just lie about it and get a bot to write all that previous stuff (gross), I did the only thing that felt right which is going an extra step further. I watched all of Lost over the past three months. The first four paragraphs of this entry were written right after I finished Season 1, on my normal posting schedule. I spent the next two months going about my usual business but also watching Lost almost every single day, because I needed to fit in 5 more seasons of the show in that time. The show has 121 episodes, it's a lot. I was able to use the time lag effectively though because it allowed me to get it done in time, and write more of this closer to the date it goes live. You are normally reading my thoughts from months ago, but this is me on a Monday night mere days before I hit publish.

The reason I went to such lengths is mostly pretty simple. I do not trust popular consensus when it isn't positive. I'm often times pretty easy to win over, because if a movie is widely acclaimed, I'll probably like it. All those old comedy movies that are extremely dated? I love them. It's so interesting to look back at such a long time ago and seeing the way it's approached, the similarities and differences to now. Whoever decided that the movie Arsenic and Old Lace needed a man who's convinced he's actually Teddy Roosevelt probably thought it was hilarious at the time, and it is to me as well, if only because I've never seen anything like it. Jack Lemmon mentions offhand in The Apartment that he keeps a tennis racquet around so he can strain pasta, and then later in the movie he's casually doing just that and I can't stop thinking about it. I think a big part of this all is trust. If you get yourself in that headspace of being above the media property, or above the people who are hyping it up, you can quickly fall into cynicism, which is something I'm just not interested in. My perspective of Lost was that of a show that was once must-see television that slowly descended into its own head with sprawling plotlines and mysteries that were never resolved. I heard enough in the defence of the show that challenged this that I just felt unsatisfied to let myself remain perpetuating a consensus without actually forming my own. I want to think for myself, don't tell me what I can't do.

If there's a lesson to take away from all of this, it's that short form content really does rot the brain. I don't mean that in the way that it tends to be seen with things like Skibidi Toilet or other nonsensical dystopian children's content that doesn't feel like a human has made it. I mean the normal stuff. The way longer videos are cut down for viral clips designed to shock, entertain, or outrage. There's a certain necessary calm that's being cut out for us when we jump from highlight to highlight. It spikes emotional reactions and has us acting up irrationally because everything just has these large stakes. I can't really say that it's shaped these perceptions of media or Lost in particular because these things go back further, but I do find it hard to broach these kinds of topics without feeling like I'm just doing the same thing, loudly proclaiming an opinion to get a reaction, or just get people looking at me.

This is all to say that rumours of Lost's decline are a bit exaggerated. I will be frank with this and say that I can understand a rational reason for declining interest in the show. The show's pilot and much of the first season sets up an expectation for what the show is about that is largely not where they end up going in the long term. You're initially gripped because these people have been put in a difficult survival situation and have to deal with all sorts of challenges that the setting provides. You might even consider what you would do if you were in their situation that isn't too unrealistic a scenario in the first place. It's just that the further you go, the more threads unravel and it stops feeling like random people who were in a plane crash, and more like a decades, centuries long planned out sequence of events all for the purpose of fulfilling destiny. Those strangers on a plane that had to come together to survive start to seem less and less like regular, everyday people as it turns out pretty much everyone has something to hide, and also maybe they all crossed paths at some point or another. What was once a show squarely focused on a specific, principal cast, seems to keep finding new ways to bring in more groups of people (often times ones who were already on the island), who inevitably are also always keeping their cards to their chest. You've got multiple characters who act as an agent of chaos, including one who is nonchalantly introduced in season 2 and just seems to stick around forever. They finally manage to leave the island but there are still several seasons to go, so now they need to go back to the island. There's time travel, bootstrap paradoxes arrive, and it's been a long time since survival from the elements of the island has ever been a going concern.

I just don't really see this as the issue that's put forth when the show gets brought up. It just feels like an increasingly disinterested audience gave up, came back to the show for the finale, and got mad at that for either its hokey ending or that it didn't give us a scientifically plausible answer for why any of this stuff ever happened. One of the more specific memories I had when the show was still airing was hearing someone spill the beans that the show had been figured out online. The island was purgatory. That's why all the children disappeared early on, and why all the main characters seem to be harbouring dark secrets all the time. You're constantly seeing religious imagery, and it's a perfect fit. It's something I kept in my mind the entire time I was watching the show because I had my doubts. As such, I kept running into problems with it that just didn't work out. All those kids do come back at one point or another, after all. It's another thing that might trip you up too if you just watch the finale. The purgatory thread is canon...just not in the way you think. Rather, it's relevant for a parallel storyline that runs separately to everything on the island. All those characters are in fact dead, and the last season gives them an opportunity to find closure in limbo. In the timeline where the island is real, all these things happened.

I just feel like an inattentive audience has done the whole show a disservice by spreading a poorly formed understanding of the whole thing. It feels clever to reveal that the show that felt like it was too smart for you actually didn't, or that you were justified to lose interest because the end result wasn't rewarding. I just found the whole thing compelling. The way they could continue to introduce new things and not have them feel tacked on. The more you learn about the characters, the more compelling they can be, and they don't even have to be plot important or anything like that. Hurley probably is one of the most important characters but at the heart of it, he's just a chill guy who wants everyone to be happy, and has multiple episodes dedicated to fulfilling that role, plot be damned. Desmond is an ostensibly normal guy who keeps getting thrown into ridiculous circumstances that fry his brain and then some, but he's believably motivated by the woman he loves. The same could be said of Locke who is probably insane all for it, but he remains steadfast in his convictions. I just love being along for the ride with these people as the universe seemingly is out to get them, but seeing the humanity shine through overall. I think there's a lot to like about the show from start to finish, and I wouldn't say it drops off much either (although Season 5 is a little harder to follow).

This is also core to my experience of watching the show, which was not one of constant joy and wonder, but isolation and despair. As time went on, I felt like I was experimenting on myself. Finding out what would happen if you forced someone to spend an incredibly long time watching a show like Lost, which is meant to provoke discussion and intrigue, but introduce the notion that they can't talk about it. It was maddening. So often I'd have to hold myself back from my autistic need to talk about the tangential thread that I just picked up, filling the void with nothing. My attempts to keep it all secret meant that there were necessary steps to cover as well. My trivia well of 'Oh actually I saw that actor on another show' just being barricaded over and over again. A couple of times I actually broke, responding to a very specific trivia question I saw, and then also writing and sharing one I'd thought of (because it was pertinent to current events). I think I got away with it, in part because as far as secrets go, secretly watching a popular TV show is pretty limp, but these past two months, where I've also been at home alone far more often than usual, have been strangely oppressive. Obviously I've known the finish line is around the corner, but sometimes it just makes you want to will it a little closer. It's like walking home and just wishing you were the first house on the street because then you'd be home already. I feel a little like this with this whole list in general, but the sheer amount of time I spent going through this entire TV show just upped the stakes tremendously. I've never been more relieved to hit the publish button.

As for Camp Cope, my story begins in 2015. I'm not certain the band had actually formed at this point. I just distinctly remember someone retweeting the triple j airplay account because they'd just played a new song called "New Phone, Who's This?" by Georgia Maq (it's not on YouTube for free, I can't link it). It stood out to me just because a version of that particular phrase had just caught on (or at least, I'd just become aware of it) and it seemed novel that triple j were playing a song that leaned into this. I probably didn't think much of it again until I was counting Hottest 100 votes and saw it come up again. I'd later learn that Georgia was the daughter of Hugh McDonald from Redgum of "I Was Only 19" fame, and that same year that she'd started the band Camp Cope, who'd very quickly rise to prominence next year.

I was a little late to getting properly on board so I often forget how quickly Camp Cope released their self-titled debut album. This particular single was released in January 2016, and the album in April, which set the stage for the band being all over the airwaves for the whole year. It was once again memetic phrases that caught my eye, because I first noticed them via the curiously named "Jet Fuel Can't Melt Steel Beams". I can't fully recall my former mindset. I tend to do a small write-up on the weekly album chart but the week "Camp Cope" entered at #36 was the same week Beyoncé released "Lemonade" and Prince died, so I was a little pre-occupied. I am fully imagining that I saw the title again as a joke and didn't really take the band seriously for a while. I don't know if anyone else gets it, but there's this strange, intangible instinct that sometimes tells me not to pursue interest in something. Whether it's for good or otherwise, it's difficult to shake that feeling that I should stay within the walls I've constructed for myself. It can ease the mental overload of focusing on everything.

It's for this reason that I wouldn't get invested until November. By that point I'd just had a moment that clicked for me with Georgia's singing style. It's hard to describe but difficult to forget. In particular, I cottoned onto the song "Done", which felt like the easiest one to get into. No funny, distracting song title, absolutely killer bass, and a big, cathartic rush of a hook. It wasn't a big thing for me, and I nearly moved on from it by the end of December, until it clicked for me again. Riding that second wind, it became a big favourite of mine, and I ended up buying the album and getting pretty obsessed with it, including all those previous singles that had just mostly passed me by previously. It's very tough to match the first five tracks on it, although it's a tale that continues when I get to their second album on a later entry. As far as triple j airplay goes, "Done" and "Lost (Season One)" got similar shares of airplay and "Jet Fuel Can't Melt Steel Beams" was a bit more sparing. It probably reflects the result of the poll, where "Done" got pretty close to making the cut, but I guess people just liked the first single the most. The first single tends to get the most buzz, the most attention. When people look back on the thing, they probably think most fondly of the first single.

"Lost (Season One)" is very good, nonetheless. For all I said about "Done", this is probably the one that gets the point across most conventionally. It's played up a little as a lyrical trick, which they do on both songs, where the title lends itself to being read in different ways. "Lost (Season One)" has it both ways, where it's used as both an adjective and a proper noun. If you haven't been spoiled by meta data, it might come as a surprise when she uses the TV show as comfort food post-breakup. It's good, it works, and it makes for a satisfying bow on what's otherwise just a sensibly enjoyable song.

#141. Doja Cat - Boss Bitch (#67, 2020)

18th of 2016

It doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, but I can't help but focus on the way the TikTok machine has been weaponised by major labels in an attempt to forge the appearance of organic discovery and artist development. I'll always raise suspicion at the way it all seems to work in the favour of already thriving major label artists, as if there's a theoretical risk that these artists would be out of a career if they don't get a viral hit that always just seems to accidentally happen. Doja Cat was probably the most flagrant example of all of this. At a time when the transition was still coming along, she was the artist who seemed to just always go viral on TikTok, every few months. It appeared as though her charisma and evident stardom was either just speeding along an inevitable process, or it was uncovering a new breed of pop star that we weren't getting via the original channels.

The clue to me is usually just how quickly it's all acted upon. Music release and promotion is a step by step process that takes months if not years, with rollouts carefully planned. A genuine fluke of a crossover is not something that can be prepared for, and it'd be foolish to plan around it. Like, can you guess how long after Doja Cat's previous single "Say So" blew up that this new single was ready to capitalise on it, and also promote the big budget Hollywood film "Birds of Prey"? It's a trick question; this came out at pretty much the same time. Maybe that can be a haphazard strategy juggling multiple hits at once but it turned out fine when this one took a little longer to get going, and wasn't really a major force anyway. It's just that the funny thing about this delayed gratification means that while she'd get major flowers the next year, this was Doja Cat's only Hottest 100 entry, for a time.

I could potentially have decided to watch Birds of Prey for this entry but it has come in at an inopportune time re: the previous entry. It would also be an act of betrayal for me, the person who has been watching a Marvel movie just about every week for nearly 2 years now to suddenly jump ship to the DC Extended Universe. I've probably just blown my shot with Margot Robbie by saying this, alas. Amusingly, Doja Cat actually mentions Barbie in this song a few years before Margot also got that role. My affinity for this film only goes as far as the brief bites of soundtrack that I got around to. I'm obsessed with that one other song that I will needlessly hold onto for a later entry even though it's not actually one that'll appear on this list.

This song can also share those flowers though. The fact that "Boss Bitch" became a top 40 hit in Australia, and an entry here, feels like delayed gratification for Azealia Banks' "212", which did neither of those things. It has the belated bonus feeling that no matter what you feel about Doja Cat, I'd rather her have the success even if the song isn't quite as potent. It's all pure cacophony though. Maybe I'm too easy to please but once she switches up her flow, I'm just all over it. Maybe that's the real reason she had those two hit songs at the same time. It's one thing to have a hit song that's riding on its catchy pop hook, but if you want people to stick with it, you need to do something that shows what sets you apart from everyone else who could've recorded it.

#150-#146

#150. Ocean Alley - Touch Back Down (#20, 2021)

6th of 2021

Ocean Alley have done a tremendous effort to try and restore the year by year balance. The latter years are very quickly running out of contributors, but here they are, absolutely flooding the market and saving their best for last. Hearing "Touch Back Down" was such a revelation that I never could have seen coming, and to make matters better, it still isn't their last entry here, as an even later song is still to come. I think we're all used to generally liking an artist's earlier material the most, but I suppose when you're a little more ambivalent to begin with, there's more possible range to do the opposite. They've come through with some pretty solid additions in the last two countdowns as well.

"Touch Back Down" came out during a pretty pivotal period. Ocean Alley had already experienced their big breakout on "Chiaroscuro", and followed it up with a pretty popular, but ultimately less successful follow up. The next album after that had a chance to sink them down to being yesterday's news, or just 2010s nostalgia. In that regard, it probably filled its role, quickly asserting itself to land in the top 20 for the Hottest 100 despite being released very late, in the middle of November. I wonder if they delayed the album a bit too much after that though, and didn't have another big hit to back it up, so it's certainly their least successful album. Their most recent album, "Love Balloon", has probably steered the ship back on course, but it has an admittedly misleading chart run as the first Ocean Alley album to come out in an era with heavy restrictions on the album chart. It's spent considerably more weeks in the ARIA top 50 than all other Ocean Alley albums combined, which doesn't feel like it's speaking to any particular truth. You take the opportunities you get though.

If you're used to the adage that Ocean Alley make the same song over and over again, I don't know if "Touch Back Down" challenges that assertion at all. To me, it felt like a revitalised version of the band, maybe initially lulling you into familiar territory, but with the secret weapon of perhaps the band's best hook. It all just comes together, the guitars, the 'ooh', the assertions that it won't be long until they touch back down, and how they would very much like to touch back down. It became something of a joke to me at the time, going out of my way to turn it into a prompt and response whenever Ocean Alley came up in conversation, and maybe sometimes when they didn't. I'm glad that this is their second highest entry here. I can't promise you that it won't be long until they touch back down, but they will assuredly touch back down at some point.

#149. Thelma Plum - Better in Blak (#9, 2019)

11th of 2019

I'll start by answering the question that might have risen immediately upon seeing this song title, 'Why Blak?'. It's not a mistake. It's a term that's been around since 1994, when an Aboriginal artist (who passed away in 2024) insisted on the spelling for an art exhibition, 'Blakness: Blak City Culture'. Her reasoning came from the way she had frequently experienced white people using the phrase 'black c***s' and decided she wanted to remove the 'c' from 'black'. It serves as a unique signifier when talking about the racial discrimination experienced in Australia to differentiate it from similar, but different cultures and experiences in other countries.

When it comes to any country's history with regard to European settlers and how they interacted with the native population, the story is never particularly a shining thing to look back on. It's all just a stark reminder of the dehumanising things that were readily normalised and acted upon by a ruling class that bestowed greatness upon themselves. For Australia, it doesn't get much worse. You can talk about invasion, colonisation, genocide, and feel some distance from it because it largely happened hundreds of years ago alongside very distant relations. All history looks pretty bad back then. The thing that always stands out to me with regard to Australia, is just how recently these incredibly horrible things were happening.

I think specifically about the Stolen Generations. There was a policy enacted by the Australian government for most of the 20th century to take Aboriginal children out of their homes and integrate them into white families, with the primary objective to breed the colour out of them. I'd always thought of it as the Stolen Generation (singular), but in reality, this was happening for about 60 years. Through this awful program that was recent enough to still have living 'participants', they've done irreparable damage to the very national culture and identity they were supposedly trying to strengthen. We have an incredibly diminished population of Indigenous Australians now, one that increasingly has lost that distinguishable image. It makes me so mad, the way Indigenous Australians are treated even today, where those negative racial stereotypes continue to filter down to the younger, current population. One of the lines that infuriate me the most is that empty retort to anyone who speaks out on any of these issues because they're not black enough. I'm not someone who speaks in expletives and derogatory language very often, so I don't feel qualified to conjure up the right words to succinctly say how much I wish the people who say that could fuck off.

"Better In Blak" continues the legacy of famous songs that express this experience, alongside "Took The Children Away" and "Treaty", among others. Thelma Plum voices her frustrations with both the system and the individual, the kinds of things that would just never come up for a white singer. It's always worth remembering that this came out a couple of years after the controversy surrounding Sticky Fingers (#705), where Thelma Plum's version of events was so often dismissed. Just that triple whammy of institutionalised sexism & racism, alongside the way that the discourse tends to side with the more popular artist with the most fans in their corner. Whatever really happened, there's no justifying the response she got, certainly not 'calls in the middle of the night, saying 'You're not worth it, you deserve it''. In her own words, this song was born from that vitriol, and she absolutely owns the moment. To make matters better, it's become her signature hit, a double platinum single, and a top 10 finish in the Hottest 100. Not everyone can do that.

I love the lyric, 'But if I keep quiet, I'll be the one who's lying too'. I don't think anyone would necessarily put the two actions on the same level, but it's flexing the personal strength to overcome the moment. A lot of people have never experienced anything close to the level of fame that causes that ugly side of things and probably think they could tank it. Once you're in the public spotlight though, it changes everything and you're no longer always able to shrug it all off, or respond the way you really want to. Your image, career and well-being can be under threat if you're ever caught giving any sort of response to it. Fortunately Thelma Plum was able to turn it into a great song.

#148. Nothing But Thieves - What Can I Do If The Fire Goes Out? - Like A Version (#72, 2018)

17th of 2018

I voted in triple j's Hottest 100 of Like a Version back in 2023. By that point, I was very set on my mission to complete this list, and so when it came to posting my vote online, I made sure to censor it for the relevant information. Most of my votes weren't really a going concern, but I did have to omit two songs that were going to appear in this list. If you've been keeping count here, you might notice that including this one, there are just two Like A Version entries left in this list. I did not vote for this cover. I actually voted for "Dumb Things" (#208) instead. Whether that's a failing on my part for being inconsistent, you can decide for yourself, but I don't think this was really on my radar in those terms. I did vote for the last Like A Version though, that was a safer bet.

Maybe that was a reasonable course of action to take at the time. This particular cover probably represents the more uninspired side of the segment. It's not always really up to the artist, but audience metrics so often tell us that it's most lucrative to just cover the popular song from a year or two ago. Everyone seems to be more than happy enough to just vote for the same song twice (I may have done this once myself, but that's a story for another day). The song is still fresh in everyone's head, and you don't necessarily have to find yourself competing with it by taking a little more time, a win-win for all. It does make it a little strange when I do this list and I find myself having to talk about a cover of a song that I will also talk about at a later date. You know, that Gang of Youths song that Nothing But Thieves covered.

This is not the only time Nothing But Thieves will appear here, but it is very belatedly the first. Nothing But Thieves were building their profile and almost settling into a residency in Australia, 2018 being the third consecutive year they stopped over. Funnily enough, it was actually back in London where the connection comes from. Nothing But Thieves got asked to do a UK support slot for Gang of Youths and got fairly acquainted, something that seems strange to me because I can't think of a time when Nothing But Thieves haven't been more popular than them in the UK.

I'll readily admit that if you're hoping for hugely transformative experiences that become essential counterparts to the originals (or maybe a replacement?), then I don't think you get it here either. That's been pretty apparent early on which is why it didn't really register for me when thinking about my Like A Version votes. It was just one of those surprise packages that came along with making this ranking list, where once I'd give it the time and listened to it, I was always hooked. Maybe it's just that other easy adage where it's very easy to go along with a cover of a song you already like. If there is something I want to highlight about this version though, it's that it's cutting the lengthy original song to a brisk 3:18, and they meld it into their own sound. Not to the point where I'd say it's better (evidently), but the way they ramp up the energy just hits a little bit differently, and Conor's distinct falsetto stands out as well.

#147. Billie Eilish - you should see me in a crown (#46, 2018)

16th of 2018

Depending on where you look around for this information, the word 'flop' is often a dirty word. It's a fun word, certainly. One that has come about and can perhaps be dished out retrospectively for anything that didn't measure up to its potential, or the potential that was there if the music was more resonant. The problem is that once you're aware of it, it begins to hang around in the air as a spectre. You want to spot the early signs, because you've done this dance before and see where it's going. It's no longer done just retrospectively, and it's now a social media race for just how quickly something can be declared a flop to a frankly insensible level. Even though very few songs will have reached even 1% of their total lifetime audience reach at that point, the arms race of first day streaming numbers can have it chucked out after one day of anything short of chart-smashing numbers. I can understand the draw to doing this, especially in an era where negativity is such an easier outlook to post online, but I can't think of a time when I, or anyone, has ever had to go back to an older post and praise someone for their insight in calling the flop in record time. Making fun of someone for absolutely blowing it though? I guess negativity begets the negativity it deserves.

When you break things down, the life cycle of any song, hit or otherwise, is very similar. It gets released on a Friday to good (for that artist's reach) streaming numbers, it dips heavily on the weekend, and then gets a slight second wind on the Monday (because people just like listening to new music on that day of the week). You'll perhaps get additional boosts along the way with an album release, a tour announcement, or if the single gets tacked onto the next single's track list. Otherwise it's mostly just days of steady numbers that don't amount to much in a sea of the rest of the world's music doing the same thing, unless the song goes viral for whatever reason.

I find the album release week to be the most interesting part of it because it's had a history of giving songs the extra boost they've always had in them. When an artist releases so many loose singles along the way, not everyone has time to prime themselves on release week, and maybe it will just flounder from there, but when the album comes out, we get a better picture as to whether everyone was just skipping the song, or if it never got the exposure it needed in the first place.

"you should see me in a crown" is always the first example I think of with this phenomenon. It was released in 2018 to a pretty muted response. Billie Eilish was still getting established, but even in Australia where she'd just had a top 5 hit (it'll be on this list), it struggled to limp into the top 50 and was out of the conversation completely about a month later. You start to wonder if those early adopters to Billie Eilish singles had a certain sound in mind for her which this song just wasn't satisfying. I don't think it's a new sound for her really, as her previous EP had occasional moments like this (see "COPYCAT"), but the version of Billie Eilish that was on the charts at the time wasn't like this at all. There was a missing link in the chain that meant maybe a lot of people who would have liked this from her, just didn't hear it.

The song's fortunes were considerably reversed when the album came out. It wasn't just a single week moment, but for several weeks, this song specifically was outperforming its initial peak in 2018. It's something that might still get lost from a chart observing space, because at the end of the day, it's still a song whose first and second chart runs look like victims of gravity they can't defy, but if you do that enough times, you tend to accumulate winning numbers. This song doesn't have the exciting jumps into a lot of global top 10s like "wish you were gay" (#993) and "bury a friend" (#206), but on lifetime numbers, it's rubbing shoulders with them. Sometimes you have to just escape your pre-conceptions and trust the numbers, because they continue to tick up even if you've decided they're not worth the concern anymore.

Early Billie Eilish is occasionally on the edgy side of things. She was pretty early on the boat of uncapitalised titles that lack correct grammar after all. This is probably not her most edgy entry, but that's for another day. It might be the most sinister though. I always think of that sharpening knife sound effect to set the mood, as well as how much extra weight it has on the song's promise. When Billie Eilish is ruling, you'll be the first against the wall. Good thing we don't have to worry about that. Now I'm just going to take a nice sip of coffee and look at the next Hottest 100 result after this one.

#146. Vampire Weekend - Unbelievers (#90, 2013)

30th of 2013

Vampire Weekend cut their teeth not on necks, but on making quirky, if a little obnoxious songs. They're the "A-Punk" band, and though that was quite a long time ago now, it remains true. It's not necessarily a bad thing either, I like "A-Punk". I don't know if I could confidently pin down why it works sometimes, and doesn't other times, but it's something I've wrestled with ever since "Unbelievers" came out. I've spoken in praise of "Modern Vampires of the City" before, and I'd do it again, with its really nifty arrangements that make for beautiful motifs. On the other hand, I generally just really like this quirky upbeat number.

It was a fruitful time for Vampire Weekend here, capable of polling with the third single on their third album, just continuing to rack up the entries in a short space of time. On these terms, this is actually the last Vampire Weekend song to ever appear in the Hottest 100. They're just not the same band without Rostam. It's technically not the last Vampire Weekend adjacent song on this list, and if you want to talk about chronology, then you'll get into an inconclusive split regarding single and album releases.

"Unbelievers" is actually a song that takes a little while to hit its stride. Generally, I found myself vibing with it for the perky chorus. I love those little staccato notes. Over time though, I've found myself liking it for all the more subtle moments as well. Often times, the band lock in together with nothing really sticking out, but it all coming together neatly. It lets you focus on all those little details, like that rising synth in the background. It comes to a great finish on the song's coda. I'm a big fan of the bridge to "Obsession" by The Cairos, and I feel like Vampire Weekend somewhat beat them to the punch by a handful of months.

#155-#151

#155. Fred again.. - Jungle (#26, 2022)

8th of 2022

I've mentioned it before, but the pivot to streaming has completely changed the electronic dance music scene in ways that it might never return. Obviously it changes periodically, but once the economy changed from getting attention to not diverting listeners, there wasn't a way back. We entered the world of Robin Schulz and Kygo. "Are You With Me" was a #1 hit, and that Scottish guy got his first #1 hit with something unrecognisably his just a few years ago. Once it's clear what works, it'll always accelerate as everyone races to get in on it. Not necessarily in a cynical way, but if you're in the business of needing to make it, it comes with the territory.

Things might be turning around a little bit of late. The era where you'd look at the dance chart and see a whole bunch of pop stars throwing their clout around feels gone, and replaced by some of the least famous singers on record. Maybe the bangers are returning too. There's a steady uptick in attention to that very good Ninajirachi album from 2025, and though he plays it both ways, Fred again.. is delivering a service in that regard too. I never realised how much I missed it until I was listening to the 2022 countdown as it was happening, and found that a song like "Jungle" was as much a point of excitement as songs I'd actually voted for. No one usually sees the strange kinds of dancing that I do when listening to music sometimes, but "Jungle" is the kind of song that's hard not to turn into a one person mosh pit. It's all about tuning yourself to that same frequency and letting everything loose.

"Jungle" comes from a fine tradition of finding an unusual source and turning it into something completely unexpected. The main thing you're hearing in this song is a sample of Elley Duhé's song "immortal". See, she did return to the list (#320). That's a considerably more chill song, operating on a drum beat similar to Glass Animals' "Heat Waves" (#741). I'm not sure how Fred came across this and decided to do what he did, but it's a worthwhile venture. Maybe if I was previously familiar with the song, I'd feel different, but as it is, it's one of the most explosive drops going around.

#154. Tkay Maidza - M.O.B. (#66, 2015)

22nd of 2015

Sometimes you can look at the charts of old and get thrown off by the little things that just don't seem right. Like when the single run for a big album doesn't quite match up to your recollection. I remember seeing the charts of 2007 whilst having created my own version of events and it's interesting how many major players (to me) were non-events, and how the general energy just doesn't match. To me, "If You Keep Losing Sleep" was Silverchair's last big song, and thoroughly doing the rounds in September 2007. To the charts, it's relevant for a single week, when the CD single comes out and it disappears without really being part of the conversation a week later. The era of physical singles isn't too far removed from the modern state of album releases in that regard, it's just odd nowadays to think you could be hearing a song for weeks before it hits the charts.

These kinds of time lapses are very easy to just forget about in hindsight. The chart becomes the record, details about radio airplay and exposure become muddied, giving you very little reason to refute the more objective evidence. I like to set the record straight for that. You have to go digging a little deeper to spot it, but "M.O.B." charted in Australia at the end of June 2015. It climbed to #52 in its second week and went no further, so it's an almost hit in some regards. Once again, it had done the rounds, and was being played heavily on triple j from February to April. Suddenly that lapse looks a little weird. You can't point to physical sales anymore, because the song was very available. I myself downloaded the song from iTunes on February 28th. The song just took months to fully break through.

My only real guess to any of this is that it was part of that brief period of time when Tkay was getting a serious push for stardom by her label. It's the kind of thing that when done right, you can't really spot anything and it all looks organic. My specific recollection is that the song was heavily promoted and discounted on the iTunes store, giving it a short burst that left it a mark on the chart record. Here, I see a song that was never really primed to hit the top 40, but nonetheless had all the stops pulled briefly to give it a go. Not entirely unsuccessful really, and maybe they were pulling all the strings successfully anyway. It's something that stands out more in hindsight, now that we've seen Tkay go through numerous years of great buzz & acclaim, yet is unable to crack the Hottest 100 ever again. This isn't even just baseless puffing up from a loud minority either, she's doing considerable numbers, and it's possible that her 2020 cut "24k" is actually her most successful song to date. I really wish there was a chance to cover some of that later material because she's been on an incredible run since around 2018.

What we've got instead is a still fairly potent Tkay, but one who's still figuring out what she wants to be. The potential is absolutely there, but the direction isn't solidified. Her tone is regularly brash at this point, and it's certainly promising, but compare it to something like "Grasshopper" and you'll realise just how much further she could have gone with it. I'll concede that there's a little less crossover appeal with that one though. In any case, we're left with an undeniable talent who just doesn't have the right audience reach to go all the way.

I guess it makes "M.O.B." as an interesting case where it's arguably the peak of that commercial viability. To me it feels like a tough sell for commercial radio. It has a lot of small moments that certainly sound catchy, but it's a little jarring all together. We can't escape the fact that the title stands for 'Money over bitches', and no variety of censorship is going to make that stick the landing. It's certainly a good showcase for both of Tkay's sides, the rapper with impressive flow who can also sing her own pop hooks. I was certainly on board for it. It's the last time she appears here, but make no mistake, I could fill an entire album with songs of hers that would be landing much higher if they were part of this conversation properly.

#153. Bring Me The Horizon - Shadow Moses (#92, 2013)

31st of 2013

Suffice to say, Bring Me The Horizon have played their cards right. They weren't content with being just another scene band from the 2000s that quickly gets discarded once their audience grows up, they went for much more. This is the 14th and last time I'm talking about them here, and in the years since, they've added another 4 to that tally. They're genuinely one of the most popular international rock bands in Australia, just an incredible turn of events from where things started.

I couldn't tell you when I first heard about Bring Me The Horizon, but I can tell you when they first became a focal point. It was in 2010. There was a bit of doldrums in terms of album sales as things shifted digitally and they became less of a regular cultural purchase. I think we were just lacking for viable choices to energise the economy at the time. A mostly hit-less Linkin Park album had just spent 4 consecutive weeks at #1 (up to this point, they'd only ever spent 1 week at #1, with their previous album). That's a prime situation for a new #1, whether it's something climbing up, or more likely, a new entry. What do you do if there isn't a really big release though? Kings of Leon were about to follow up their monster 4th album, but that was a week away, someone else had to have that turn, and it happened to be Bring Me The Horizon. They'd charted before, their second album "Suicide Season" peaked at #28, notably a fair bit higher than in their native UK. The band managed to break two interesting records with the follow up. They had the longest ever album title to get to #1, all 18 words of that title, and they also had the lowest selling album at #1.

There isn't really much you can do with this but just marvel at the oddities the chart can chuck up. Bring Me The Horizon were a niche band with no crossover appeal whatsoever, and I was in no communication with anyone who was particularly interested in taking them seriously. This was just a band getting a fluke moment of isolated success that we'd all move on from. Listening to some of the album now, it's an interesting experience just because I know what the future holds. Oli's voice is still recognisable, just that he goes for much more growling than we're used to now. Musically though, I don't feel the same range as there is now. Just a lot of confronting, down-tuned guitars that sound very of their time, that's probably the biggest difference in the band's modern sound.

I don't know what it was like for any triple j listeners who don't follow music charts (i.e., most of them), but when Bring Me The Horizon suddenly became triple j mainstays, it was very amusing to me. Seeing this band who were something of an abstract joke to me get the last laugh. They'd go on and get three more #1 albums and it became the expectation at that point, doing so with healthy sales and pretty good longevity. All of this starts with their first single that could vaguely be described as a crossover success, "Shadow Moses".

I will briefly point out that "Shadow Moses" is named after a location from Metal Gear Solid. Or, if you're like me, you'll know it as the stage from Super Smash Bros. Brawl, introduced as Solid Snake became a surprise inclusion in the franchise roster. I've never played any Metal Gear games. Maybe I should just because everything I've heard tells me the story beats are exactly my kind of absurd. I just don't think I vibe with the gameplay. Whether it was related to this song or not, Kojima obviously repaid the favour because the band would end up doing a song for Death Stranding (#378).

The big surprise for me was just how palatable the transition ended up being. There are a lot of possible trajectories for a metalcore band pivoting to the mainstream and it's not something that typically goes very well. It could be disingenuous, or just expose the limitations in how the band sounds under a different setting. "Shadow Moses" isn't a complete transition but it's pretty close. The backing vocals are pretty on the nose, while Oli's singing is mixed to go well in front of the music. They've written catchy hooks for this song and they want to make sure you're hearing them. Once you put yourself in the mode they're running with here, there's a lot of fun to be had. Those down-tuned guitars are still there, but they're not so oppressive in the mix. This is the family friendly version of Bring Me The Horizon, complete with evocative images of sandpit turtles.

#152. Gang of Youths - The Deepest Sighs, the Frankest Shadows (#5, 2017)

19th of 2017

While I am a very information hungry person in most cases, there is an undeniable enjoyment that can  be had through depriving yourself of that. Chart watchers of the present might not realise how we used to have it. In many cases, you'd just wait for the new chart to come out (or be printed somewhere you could see it, any number of days later), with no real insight on what to expect other than anecdotal intuition. What's going to climb? What's going to debut? Is that #1 single on its last legs? The chart reveal would answer all of those questions.

For a while, I'd listen to Take 40 broadcasts being syndicated, which was like the official chart just with things shuffled around a little bit for various reasons. I knew there was a real chart but I didn't have convenient ways to access it. My home internet had serious limitations, and school internet had its own brand of that as well. In 2008, I happened upon a website that hosted ARIA Chart archives, and it was updated on a weekly basis. I now moderate on that website (which mostly just amounts to deleting spam posts), and it's held together by backend shoestring. Those very reliable updates have become anything but that.

I very much trusted it though, and my trust was rewarded. I'd learnt at some point that the school library opened up about 10 minutes before home room, which was enough time for me. Every Monday morning, I'd go to the chart website, cover my eyes, and copy out the entire chart to be printed out on a few pages. I'd then scan it all from #50 to #1, experiencing it all as a countdown, which I liked to do. I still have months of those charts in a folder, and I suspect I only stopped because school holidays started, and by the next year, I had more reliable internet to look at the ARIA website right when it updated. I'd still look at it the same way, scrolling to the bottom to reveal it in reverse order, and even now in 2026, I'm still doing this. I just always get the #1 spot spoiled because the website now auto-plays it on YouTube. Granted, I usually know what's going to be at #1.

Something I do associate with my print-out charts era was the unexpected rise of Kings of Leon. They'd never had a top 50 hit in Australia before, but they'd built up a bit of momentum with their 2007 album. It was quickly followed up by two singles, "Crawl" and "Sex on Fire", the latter entering the top 40 on release. After I'd watched their last album not really garner any crossover success because no one seemed to have heard the songs, it was a gratifying moment to see the exposure tick over. I liked the song a lot at the time, and felt like it had potential if it got played on the radio. This obviously happened, and it all paid off when I experienced the shock of it jumping to #1 on the charts, staying there for a month. Kings of Leon became the hottest property, eventually ending up with the highest selling album of the year, with all the rest of their albums returning to the chart as well. The Australian public, on all accounts, could not get enough Kings of Leon in their life, and subsequently, they scored a second sleeper hit at the same time. Tracking about a month behind "Sex On Fire" was another hit in "Use Somebody". It wouldn't quite get to #1, but it lucked out for a week to get to #2, and would end up being the band's big crossover in their native US.

I was very familiar with their album at the time and I liked it, but I always found the attention for "Use Somebody" a little strange. The higher it climbed the charts, the stranger it got, while I largely just accepted it as a win for the band. It just wasn't really a song that stood out to me in any way. It ended up incredibly high in the Hottest 100 that year at #3. At that point, you can't deny the popularity, although funnily enough the song just completely slipped out of triple j rotation afterwards. From what I can tell, since mid-2009, the song has only been played on the station twice, and one of those times was because they were replaying a segment of the Hottest 100. Kings of Leon's other songs still get played, but that one's been abandoned randomly. It's not a remotely forgotten hit either, and just this week was in the Spotify top 100. I do wonder if I'd have felt differently about the song if I experienced the rollout the way most people did, with it formally introduced as the second hit. To me, it was just one of the tracks on the album, nothing wrong with it, but nothing that stood out either.

I have warmed up a bit more to "Use Somebody" in the years that have followed. Call it American bias but when a song gets that much attention, that much appreciation as one of the last big rock hits without any caveats, it's bound to rub off on you a little. It's mainly about the song's anthemic qualities that never really stood out to me initially. I think I was more interested in more jagged, showboating guitar riffs that I didn't feel this one landed on the right frequency. It's absolutely a song that builds to the right pay off. Funnily enough though, the big revelation didn't come from "Use Somebody" itself, but at one point I was listening to "The Deepest Sighs, the Frankest Shadows", a song I was already all-in on. It clicked with me that the song was remarkably similar to "Use Somebody". Suddenly the (differing levels of) huge popularity of both songs just completely clicked for me, one of those funny realisations that different generations of music fans have more in common than they realise sometimes. Just like "Use Somebody", this song was the initially unassuming later single (they'd released 4 songs before this one) that shot for the fences and landed. It was a little surprising to see this song projected, and indeed land so high in the Hottest 100, a song with a cumbersome title like that should weigh it down, but just like "Use Somebody", it found its audience very quickly, and ended up far bigger than I think anyone would have predicted.

It's one of those cases where I think having a less obvious (though still in the song) title does it some dividends. Partly because calling a song "The Unbearable Triteness of Being" might be a bit much, even for Gang of Youths. I think it compels you to treat the whole song as a performance, rather than just focus on the song's hook, and that probably plays to their strengths. We've gone from the shortest Gang of Youths entry (#157) to the longest, and you certainly feel it by the end of this one. This song keeps showing up in additional Hottest 100 countdowns, and I can completely understand this being someone's favourite song, whether they're here for the Nietzsche philosophies or not.

#151. A$AP Rocky (feat Rod Stewart, Miguel & Mark Ronson) - Everyday (#80, 2015)

21st of 2015

I think I'll always have a soft spot for N-Trance's version of "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy". Just one of those songs that were in the right place, at the right time. Entirely possible that it'd mean nothing to me if it came out a year earlier and I'd missed it, but as it stands, it's one of the most distinct reminders of its time period. That's part and parcel when you're one of the biggest hits to not escape the trappings of the '90s. A song like "Tubthumping" from the same time period feels too eternal to serve as the same kind of time capsule.

I'll admit I don't think the song is very good. It's a series of '90s trappings that understandably haven't aged well, though I'm finding it hard to believe that daggy early '90s rapping should still be doing the rounds when it got released on an album in 1998. At no point could I really compliment N-Trance on providing exciting ideas on the production side of things, although the fake crowd chant moment has its charm. This is all in service of reviving a Rod Stewart hit from about 20 years ago. The one where he abandons his previous sound to jump onto the disco trend, very successfully. My impression once I learnt about who Rod Stewart was, was that he was old. He's always sounded that way which is why I'm inclined to ignore the fact that I'm older than he was when he recorded that song, but he was old enough that the idea of him getting latched onto a hit in the late '90s is incredibly anachronistic. Imagine if he did it again nearly 20 years later, that'd be outright silly.

There's an Australian rock band that I don't think get very much attention nowadays called Python Lee Jackson. They're best known for their song "In A Broken Dream", with guest vocals by Rod Stewart, which they released in 1970 to basically no interest. Two years later, "Maggie May" had become a monster hit single, turning Rod Stewart into a star. Python Lee Jackson re-released their single and on the back of this, it became a big hit, reaching #3 on the UK Charts. I don't know how many people actually remember it, but I certainly had no recollection of it until it resurfaced for "Everyday".

You might be surprised to learn that Rod Stewart's vocals in "Everyday" are not actually a sample, but re-recorded to allow for more aged vocals. It would be quite amusing if they used the original vocals if only because Rod Stewart would ironically be the youngest person on the track, as he was only 25 at the time. He provides a great contrast to A$AP Rocky's energetic bravado. Rod also ends up trading lines with the younger upstart Miguel, who was continuing to establish himself as one of the key figures in alternative R&B.

I was initially a Miguel skeptic. He emerged around the same time I was listening to a lot of The Weeknd & Frank Ocean, who at the time weren't getting much in the way of crossover success. In comes this guy from out of nowhere with a big hit and I immediately don't trust him to be as exciting or adventurous as my guys. That probably was true, really, but as the years have gone by, I've learnt to trust Miguel on his vocal talents. If anything, he might just be the underrated one in that trio now, as he's never really gotten his full commercial dues, generally skirting on the edge for most of his career. He finally had some relief in 2023 when his earlier single "Sure Thing" had a second go through and became a big top 10 hit in Australia, we're talking 21st biggest hit of the year big. Like so many other cases though, it's a very isolated thing that hasn't actually sparked interest in his music. He went from regularly having top 10 albums in America to his most recent album released in 2025 seemingly charting nowhere. On that album, I'll go in to bat for "Nearsight [SID]", with a big, unexpected rock pivot that sounds like the ideal Sam Fender song in my head.

A$AP Rocky probably is the weak link in this. He's certainly not a dreary presence or anything like that, it's just that the one thing I always remember is the brief moment when he starts evoking God and then drops a derogatory slur for lesbians, one that was very out of date even when Kanye West did it on "Stronger" (and at least his was somewhat funny wordplay). Then again, A$AP Rocky calls himself a piece of shit right after he says it, so maybe this just is his villain turn (though regrettably, he's going to do it again later on this list). I'm mostly just here for the cross-generational hook. The idea that A$AP Rocky can flex his own popularity to the extent of getting kids to listen to Rod Stewart again is so funny, but I can't deny that it works.

#160-#156

#160. bbno$ (feat Rich Brian) - edamame (#24, 2021)

7th of 2021

I understand that when you're prompted to consider the rapper who had a novelty hit in 2019 but then unexpectedly had a lucrative career after the fact, you're thinking about Lil Nas X. The bigger twist in this is that he's not alone. Now, I'll grant you that bbno$ has never come close to the level of success that Lil Nas X has had, but persistence absolutely pays off. I'm looking at Spotify monthly listeners and Lil Nas X has 19 million to bbno$'s 13 million, surprisingly close all things considered, and it feels like momentum is on bbno$'s side. He might be the more likely one to get another hit in the future. I need to stop being surprised about it.

This is all admittedly strange if you consider just how thin the thread was that we started with. For myself, and many others, my introduction to bbno$ was when he guested for record producer Y2K, introducing himself to the world by forgetting the melody of his own song. Depending on who you ask, it might just be the most memorable thing about the song "Lalala". It's either that or him telling us all that he's Canadian (or if you go back to the music video, finding out that he was doing the 6-7 motion with his hands back in 2019. Of all artists to do it, this seems most apt). It's a song that's operating on such an insular level that it feels above any criticism. In any case, I don't think I ever expected to hear from him again.

I quietly observed the rise of "edamame" in 2021. I mean that quite literally because I spent a long time just seeing it do solid numbers while not listening to it, adhering to the fact that it had been omitted from the ARIA Charts at the time, meaning I had no mandatory requirement to hear it. Instead, it ended up springing up on me in public one day, which is very odd given how rarely I hear new or current hits in public settings. I found myself weirdly fascinated by it because it sounds so distinctive. Just an incredible beat that sticks out immediately, followed by addictive rap flow that might be doing enough already but they have the nerve to stick all this onomatopoeia and words you're just not used to hearing. I'm inclined to see this as a success story in making people get distracted, having to pursue the strange thing they just heard. I think that's always the goal but it absolutely got me this time.

bbno$ is a particularly serious rapper, which is why the first thing he says on this song is 'Balls hanging low'. For the music video, he and Rich Brian are fully decked out in suits of armour, making it look as silly as possible. I mean, they could lean into that when being threatening but instead we're talking about popping someone like a pea. It's all just wonderfully on brand. He's also probably tricked me into listening to the song far more than I otherwise would because it's so short that I'm always left wanting more. It's very funny though. bbno$ has had 'baby' in his stage name since 2016 and he's just now making a 'Baby in the sun, like the Teletubbies' line, love it. I bet he'd love those "28 Years Later" movies.

I find myself most interested in Rich Brian's contributions here. He strikes me as the better rapper of the two, just without the same novelty appeal, so this is his only real mainstream venture. I've occasionally been hearing other songs of his though. "VIVID" with $NOT sounds like one of the best BROCKHAMPTON slow jams out there, and "Sundance Freestyle" is just a really fun exploration of the sheer wonder of fame and success (I guess recommend if you like Lupe Fiasco). Oddly enough, I think my favourite bbno$ song I've heard to date is "still", an honest to God ballad that sounds like Joji. Put that one on if you want a shock to your system. Otherwise, "edamame" is just a party in your pocket.

#159. Alpine - Foolish (#57, 2015)

23rd of 2015

This is a strange one to tackle. Partly because all of my strongest associations with Alpine come prior to this cut off, yet here they are as late as 2015 still making an impact. Maybe there's an alternate version of history where everything was in order and they were just making hit after hit for years to come. They had everything going for them. A distinct sound & vibe, while being nothing if not prolific on the touring front. This appearance they have here seems to hint at the notion that Alpine were here to stay. Everything just comes tumbling down after that.

Flash back to the early 2010s, and it's absolutely prime time for a band like Alpine. In a time when rock is no longer the dominant sound, there's a lot of room for various brands of twee. It's all so cutesy, what better time to start this minimalist 6-piece band? The fact that there are 6 letters in the band name just feels so apt. I think I first heard them via the song "Villages", which I might not have paid very close attention to. It just sounded a bit different with its stiff guitar riff, and the way that it resolves into its own contained chaos. In hindsight, it's quintessential Alpine, I just didn't have many reference points to go by yet. I'd notice them more clearly a little later on with the single "Hands", mostly just because the video was memorable in an almost elevated horror kind of way. Simultaneous bewilderment at what's going on, and also why the song sounds like it does. It eventually won me over and went a long way to making me pay attention to the band going forward.

Their debut album "A Is For Alpine" comes out in 2012 and it's rather enjoyable. It feels like after some initial trying out, they've solidified their sound going forward. Very clean, tidy instrumentals elevated by the harmonising of Lou & Phoebe's distinctly different voices. It's all very breathy, but very intimate, with very tight compositions. The way they manage to sneakily lock into choruses while you're not paying attention always just sounds really good. At that point it felt like them making eventually the Hottest 100 was a formality, and they did it with "Gasoline", a song that's probably their biggest hit just by being the one that came around at the right time. I'm especially fond of the later single "Seeing Red", which balances the light & dark really well. A lot of their songs sound reasonably similar to each other so it's more just a matter of slight preferences usually.

You can see a clear change in focus by the time the second album comes out, where Lou & Phoebe have absolutely become the face of the band. It was probably already getting to that point, I'm not sure the rest of the band are even in the music video for "Gasoline". The video for "Foolish" ramps this up and instead of getting a whole bunch of extras, they've just done some aggressive cloning (there is a small cameo from the rest of the band if you look closely). It looks a little silly but I still remember it all these years later. The song itself sounds a little more polished but unmistakeably still Alpine, while memorably giving us the title to the band's next album, "Yuck". I never listened to that album quite as much as the first, but it did give me the song "Damn Baby", which answers the question of what would happen if this band suddenly got EXTREMELY LOUD. The phrase 'yeah, I'm here' has been permanently trapped in my lexicon ever since, just can't get enough of it.

There's a slight downturn in success there, which you might attribute to the shift into the streaming era and the subsequent changing of the guard but it's nothing that a big comeback can't fix. The only problem is that it doesn't really come for a while, with the band on hiatus for a few years. When they did return in 2019, it was to reveal that Lou was leaving the band ahead of a new single. She's not on that new single, "Dumb". It's very noticeable but I still thought the song was pretty good, if understated. I didn't realise at the time that it'd end up being the last song they ever released.

This is where it all stops being fun. I don't think there was anything untoward about the lineup change, which all seemed very amicable at the time. The band even went on tour to promote the new single, and posted about how the new album was coming along. There are some new songs they played at those shows too, everything just went radio silent after 2019. The last regular social media post came at the start of 2020. You'd think maybe COVID-19 derailed everything, but apparently the band had just quietly disbanded at some point in 2019.

We all found this out at the end of 2020, when Alpine unexpectedly ended up in the news. The story that broke was that the band's guitarist was accused of sexually assaulting a teenager on the street in mid-2019. There's very little information about the aftermath of this as he apparently fled the state to escape arrest, but with how much time has passed, I assume he did some kind of plea deal to get out of having a criminal record. It was not a great thing to find out about.

All of these conflating factors were more than enough to make the band persona non grata. You just will not find anyone talking about them anymore and their listenership has considerably shrunk. It's a reminder to me about the brutal reality of consequences, which is that it works the same as a fine. For those above a certain threshold of power and influence, it just doesn't matter. For those below, be prepared to be completely abandoned, even if you're merely just within the blast radius. I find the whole situation so frustrating because at the heart of it, you've got 4 or 5 people who've done nothing wrong but be stuck alongside a bad character unknowingly. It's all well and good to have these consequences, but there's never been a good way to do it without adding too many people into the blast radius. Phoebe still releases music, but the numbers are considerably down. I don't even know how many times her most recent release has been streamed because Spotify doesn't reveal it if it hasn't gotten to 1,000. In contrast to all of this, the drummer of The Neighbourhood was accused of similar misgivings (by a famous singer even), which got him kicked out of the band for a few years, but he's back now, and that band have the third most streamed song of all time with no sign of slowing down. If there's value to be mined from the brand, the brand will not sink. Alpine is just a cautionary tale. One that really gets to me, because I remain so foolishly attracted to their music.

#158. Flight Facilities (feat Micky Green) - Stand Still (#48, 2013)

32nd of 2013

I can understand not looking too closely at the little ranking I've been putting underneath every entry, which feels like and probably is meaningless noise for the most part. It's probably starting to rear its head now at the pointy end. The dust is settling and the differences between years is starting to show itself significantly. If you scroll your way up, you'll realise that there are only 6 more songs to come from the 2021 countdown, while this will tell you, and it's no mistake, that there will be 31 more 2013 entries after this one. You should probably just expect a 2013 song to come with every post now because that's the average we're sitting on.

It's easy to draw a conclusion from this, and it's not even one I'd easily refute. My discovery of music was more in line with what was getting played on triple j at the start of this timeframe than it was at the end, and as such, many more of my actual favourite songs featured on the list back then, than they do now. I used to go into the list with no qualms about what was missing from the voting list because basically nothing I'd ever want to vote for would be missing out. Not only that, but I'd reasonably expect most of those votes to get a spot. Stark difference to today when most of my favourites aren't within earshot, and I generally take one successful vote out of 10, about the same hit rate you'd get from just picking 10 random songs on the voting list. On that level, this all makes complete sense, and this result is reflecting that.

The more important thing I think though is that it's more about the year 2013 specifically. It's a year in music I've always highly regarded, in the moment and in hindsight. So much so that when I was first looking over the first 20 years of the countdown (1993 to 2012), I assigned scores to every entry to try and work out my favourite list. The scores ended to jump all over the place, but there were clear spikes that made sense to me. 1997, 2001, 2004, 2007, all have always felt like good years in music to me. I decided to score 2013 not long after and it turned out to be my favourite list all up, no nostalgia required. On either side of it, 2012 & 2014 never favoured particularly strongly (and there are only 18 songs left from 2014, quite a drop off). I don't know what changed in my brain chemistry but I just turned out to be so positive on nearly everything around then. Maybe it all just makes sense though, so many heavy hitters.

I wouldn't necessarily put Flight Facilities in that basket, but at the very least they made sure not to go into a slump for the year. In typical Flight Facilities fashion, they released exactly two songs that year, and maintained their standing of most of their discography having made it into the Hottest 100. This was their 4th year in a row, and they'd keep wringing it out until they got to 6 in a row. I quite enjoyed the other 2013 single, "I Didn't Believe" with Elizabeth Rose, but "Stand Still" was always clearly the main event.

You never really knew what you were going to get from them, arguably still true, and the vibe would just change drastically from single to single. "Stand Still" feels like the most unique of all of them, by virtue of not really having any recognisable hallmarks. No club, disco or even dark electronica beats, "Stand Still" is just a breezy summer tune, complete with whistling. Unexpectedly upbeat for that matter.

Some of this also comes down to guest vocalist Micky Green who makes it her own. She's an Australian singer though I feel qualified to say that she's not particularly famous here. Most of her success happened overseas, in Europe. Her debut album netted the hit song "Oh!" which did pretty well in France in the late 2000s. That's a very bluesy song and maybe not much of a primer for what she's doing on "Stand Still". She's very playful, too cool for school even.

I also want to briefly expand upon something I hinted towards when I wrote about "Two Bodies" (#170) because I realised now that it's going live I never got around to it. Specifically about Flight Facilities' debut album "Down To Earth". It's one of the more hit-laden albums we'll come across with regards to the Hottest 100, as 7 of the album's tracks have polled, with such a careful spread that you'll only once go two tracks in a row without them. I like to think that I trusted them with the sequencing because from what I can tell, I listened to the whole thing from start to finish as soon as it became available for online streaming, which is an incredible show of resistance for me to not immediately jump onto a particular track which I will talk about in the future. Outside of the hits, most of the rest of the album functions as pretty chill downtime. It's all very carefully crafted house music.

Another thing I find interesting about it is that when we talk about the commercial viability and prospects of the album as potentially hinted at with the intro to "Two Bodies", we have to look at what the duo did with the track list and in particular the credits. It's something they spoke about after the album came out, where they didn't want to just overload it with feature credits, lest it feel like an excess of names, so there are a few songs where the guest vocalist is there but isn't credited. One of those uncredited guest vocalists is actually hard to spot on "Waking Bliss", and gets a proper feature later on the album. Another one of them is rather famous Australian singer Katie Noonan on "Apollo". Lastly, they snuck in a guest spot from actual Kylie Minogue to sing the reprise to "Crave You", which actually is credited on Spotify now but never was originally. That's a crazy guest spot to just not advertise when you're talking about optimal crediting. It's a bit like rejecting your own clickbait, and I respect the hustle a lot.

#157. Gang of Youths - Strange Diseases (#50, 2016)

19th of 2016

Sometimes the biggest proof of an artist's efficacy is the sheer volume of attention they get when they're not really shooting for the big leagues. It's something I remember noticing with Taylor Swift very early on. The way she'd send loose non-album singles towards the top of the download charts, it just showed how many people were out there and ready to dig into everything she puts her name onto, which has continued all these years later. This was before she had fully taken over the world too, lacking a US #1 hit for a couple years to come, but that's the sort of thing that implies the inevitability of it.

For Gang of Youths, the stakes aren't going to be quite that high, but the implication was all the same. They'd just put out a successful debut album, but the kind that's not going to show its full potential as word of mouth can be slow and gradual. The next album would let it be very clear, but a year before that, we had "Let Me Be Clear". This was a 6 track EP between albums, though because we're talking about the excess of Gang of Youths, it still runs at 34 minutes long. All original songs until a Joni Mitchell cover at the end, the main focal point was the single "Strange Diseases". The EP got to #2 on the ARIA Charts (their previous album reached #5), and here they are still sneaking into the top half of the countdown while clearly being on a stop gap.

I mean no disrespect when I say this. Just listening to it, I've always felt like it's not quite shooting for the band's usual extremes. It runs at a brisk 3:20, comfortably the band's shortest ever Hottest 100 entry, while their usual average is just shy of 5:00. When you're used to them doing things like that, this is a song that ends very abruptly. That's probably fine, as they still pack enough into this one to be worth admission. The strings provide the usual grandeur, and it all still explodes out the gate when it needs to. There's a neat little shift on the bridge where things go deeper, more suspenseful, and it feels like a prelude to what would happen on the next album. Then it's followed by some of the clearest Arcade Fire worship with the excess 'oh oh's. In general I think they get a lot out of what could otherwise be a straightforward template, and it doesn't feel like a filler entry to any extent, just a nice little entrée.

#156. Caribou - Can't Do Without You (#55, 2014)

18th of 2014

I always find this topic to be a little difficult to discuss, but I think it'd be good for me to get it into writing. I am just absolutely terrible about facing criticism. I don't just mean directed towards myself, but directed towards anything. My own self-preservation techniques involve staying away from anyone who could potentially spell trouble, and that's one of the things that do it for me. There's a fine line between healthy venting and the kind of anger that makes me feel unsafe. The kind where you're suddenly afraid to say anything, lest this person spark up and retaliate either disproportionately, or in a way that reveals that they're finally letting go of their inhibitions, ready to say every mean thing I've had coming. Yelling, disrespecting others, excessive swearing, it's all very disarming to me. I don't know if it's drawn on from very specific memories of mine (my parents divorced when I was young and I was within earshot of a lot of things I wish I didn't have to hear), or if it's just common sense. I only think otherwise sometimes because I never see anyone else react quite the same way as me. Maybe they're just better at hiding it. I remember during the aforementioned divorce that my younger brother was much more visibly upset at the time but I had to do my best to stay strong. Obviously I had very similar thoughts akin to 'I really wish this wasn't happening', though it probably did help me mature in a way that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

I've been thinking about it a lot recently and to me it feels core to the neurodivergent experience. If you observe anything about it, more than anything, it's that extreme interest in wanting to talk about a current interest. Sometimes probably oversharing to an embarrassing extent, like telling a friend about freeze frame details you spotted on your 5th DVD watch of a movie that came out years ago (on the non-zero chance that person is reading this, and non-zero chance they remember this, I am avoiding details). Maybe this is all fine, something cute to remark about someone who sees life a little differently. I'm always a little weary of where it heads though. I have a handful of entries to cover on the horizon that are going to get incredibly off topic and precisely into that brand of minutiae. Probably to be expected at this point, but I'm not oblivious. Unless you have someone so enraptured that they need to hear every thought you put out there (or maybe that in itself is not something most people ever do), it's annoying. It's testing patience, it's wasting time, I get it. When I think about it, I think the core of why I do these things is because on some level, they provide me some happiness. To experience that, I think it is what we all strive for, and so the desire in it is to potentially spread that happiness. I think of so many people who seem perennially unhappy and I put myself in their shoes, so many sources of joy for me are completely outside of their purview, and they might not necessarily have an equivalent. It starts to feel like a civic duty to spread the word.

The only problem is that I'm incredibly bad at doing it. A lifetime of occasionally being burned will ward you away from wanting to do anything like that again. I think it's part of why I like doing it in this setting. The lack of immediate feedback makes it so much easier to get the ball rolling, while I'll feel a little less emotionally attached to it when the post goes live. It's a slightly different me, 2-3 months earlier who wrote that, and current me is just the middleman. It's a matter of how many chips you're pushing in, and perhaps will be something to contemplate the further up this list I get. This is all something I could have spoken about long ago, but it makes sense to save it up for the higher reaches, where it feels like I'm starting to put a stake into it. Increasingly sincere and severe adoration isn't always given enough presence, in part because offhand cynicism is just so much easier, particularly in an economy when baiting a negative reaction is much more viable. It's the kind of thing where you start getting trained to feel that way. Ostensibly positive posts written knowing they really want you to cut things down a size. Surround yourself with enough of that and it becomes difficult to express sincerity. You just get beaten down into misery until you're convinced that nothing will ever be good again.

As I said before, it's just an energy I don't want to be around, and I don't want to foster. I'm even hesitant to linger so much over it because it becomes its own brand of cynicism to only focus on the kinds of people I don't want anything to do with. I very much would like to focus on the positives; it just needs some initial context which gets its start with the fact that I didn't particularly like "Can't Do Without You". I thought Caribou had done better and that the song was fairly repetitive to little pay off. I had a little bit of patience for it because at the core of it, I was happy to see Caribou get the attention and I otherwise generally liked the album, but it wasn't a song I ever sought out myself. It was seeing very similar views to mine parroted, with a slightly more cynical edge but nonetheless not that different, that awoke something in me. I got so strangely upset about something that I had so little stake in. I think some of it might have been contextual, and an extension of this strange, unfair mental trap I fall into. This feeling that you want everyone to know their place, and that you don't want to hear anyone chime in if they know less than you do. Thoroughly unreasonable and a little arrogant, but I think it manifests itself more strongly when I position it in that negative lens. It's less about the person knowing less about the topic in an academic sense, but that they've considered less about the emotional weight of their words. The idea that they might hurt someone's feelings, and they're not just unaware of that, they might just embrace that. It's something that's taken me over a decade to properly articulate, and like many other circumstances, it's made worse because there's no reasonable way to derive fault, just that there's a resultant unhappiness that you want to pin down a source for. Maybe I can self-reflect and accept I'm the burden here, but it's not something that's going to make you feel any better, which is why I lament the situation more than the individuals.

I've had similar situations in the past. The one that stands out the most to me was about 15 or so years ago. I was watching music videos late one night as I tended to do at the time, and I had a revelation. At the time I was someone still making the transition from ardently being against music, to obsessing over it to a great degree, and as a result, I was constantly having nostalgic flashbacks as I rediscover familiar sounds that meant nothing to me initially, but now evoked pleasant, vague memories. That moment when you finally find out the name to a song and can enjoy it at your leisure. I immediately went online to express my excitement at this discovery, and shortly after, got an indirect clapback from someone who clearly wasn't having it. My revelation seemed now as if I was drudging up a forgotten horror for someone else. Smile and optimism all gone, I may have broken down into tears.

I won't say what that song is, but that it has provided me a frustrating quandary going forward. I've still never forgotten this incident (though I suspect the axe very much has). Listening to this particular song always drudges back the memory, and I'm left with two options. I can either avoid listening to this song in the future, lest it remind me of something unpleasant, or I can listen to it with that particular incident in mind. Powering through it maybe, or perhaps even turning it into a spite listen. See the raise, re-raise as well. I don't particularly like either option. Consequently though, it's been a catalyst to change my own perspective about what I share online. I can't deny that on some level, I absolutely deserved this kind of vitriol (whether direct or otherwise), because a younger me on the internet had no qualms whatsoever about being just as, if not more cynical than anyone else. If something didn't seem important to me, I was quick to make fun of it, disregard it, and never once consider that maybe I was the villain of the piece, simply because I felt it was deserved. I could dish it out but couldn't take it, so I decided to stop dishing it out. Doing so, was one of the biggest changes in perspective for me, because I'd become my greatest enemy. I wanted to distance myself completely from this previous version of me. I got more empathetic to other perspectives and actually gave them the time of day. I didn't just stop telling people that I hate all these things, I genuinely stopped hating them. My recalled version of events can't say it made me happier in the moment (perhaps a story for another entry), but I certainly see the light now. 

In any case, against my better judgement, this is what ended up happening with "Can't Do Without You". My strong desire to position myself away from cynicism found me instead looking at the people who saw something in it. It was probably on a baseline, brought on from my own trust in Caribou, who had made a number of very evocative pieces I loved, so I didn't want to see this as a dud, but mostly I was just very mad. Forcing the song on myself in that sense has made me grow to enjoy it a lot, so my frustration is more pinned at myself for not seeing it sooner. We're looking at something like Daft Punk's "Around The World". It's very funny to point out that the song only has 3 words, but it's doing yourself a disservice to only look at it in that measure. They didn't set out to write an interesting song and get stuck thinking of more lyrics, and the people who like it aren't just looking at a one second loop for several minutes in a row. That repeated line is just an instrument, a tool to provide some stability alongside everything else that's happening, and accentuate it when it stays the same while everything else is changing.

Maybe 'Around the world' isn't the most evocative of phrases, but 'I can't do without you'? That's a phrase that carries a lot of weight. It's sheer desperation from the speaker, and something that absolutely amplifies the more times it gets said. It's appropriate then that the song itself sees this and runs away with it. When you think of how the song starts, and where it ends up, you've gone on a mighty journey. You haven't changed, but everything else has. That big build up and release is done completely tastefully, not in the style of a mindless banger (there's a place for both, of course), and it really justifies the whole piece to me. The coda adds a few more words into the mix but it's really just dressing on a sentiment that was made very clear at that point. It might just be something that I'm subconsciously drawn to, given that I was recently talking about a certain singer I like a lot, and someone affectionately described one of their songs as being very simpy. I'd never really thought about it and I couldn't refute it. I'm now paying more attention as to whether there's some merit to this new theory of mine.

I just feel like this song gets to the core of what had always appealed to me with Caribou's music. It's easy to say that it's just electronic music for a slightly different audience. However, I'm looking back at some of his other songs I've really liked, and seeing that there's a common pattern there. Songs like "Melody Day" or "Second Chance" hit at that same frequency. Tension brought on by boisterous instrumentals that overpower the vocalist, and the older they get, the more that nostalgic mournfulness becomes an ingrained feature. If I was ever so protective of a Caribou song I didn't particularly like very much at the time, it's probably because I was unknowingly projecting these feelings that his music had brought for me. Like I was parasocially defending someone who had tapped into crucial feelings of mine, crying in the corner while screaming 'You don't get what it means to me!'.

Yet I come to the end of this piece not really feeling any anger towards anyone. Sometimes it can be a tough, but important lesson in humility. Something that, if perhaps for the wrong reasons, has set me on the right course. It's just something I enjoy thinking about. I constantly find myself in conversations about these incredibly specific things I think about. They're almost always instigated by me, and I'm aware that I might be a little overbearing about it all. I do love having these conversations though, because it's always interesting to me to find out if anyone else is thinking the same thing, something similar, or something completely different. It opens you up to a perspective that I just don't usually see because they're not the kinds of things that ever get prompted. Bad memories have had me dreading writing this entry for years, but now I'm feeling better than I was before I started. Doing this blog has really helped me see things in a new light. Just typing things out can be the most liberating experience.