#59

#59. Karnivool - We Are (#100, 2013)

13th of 2013

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It's taken a considerable amount of time, but we've finally arrived on the first song. Sometimes I consider the potential advantages if I were instead to do this list in chronological list order. For instance, it allows me to pace things out more in a chronological story, and not have to worry about those troubling details of arriving at an artist's discography in an order that doesn't have a lot of sense to it. I'm also someone who's not particularly interested in music score meta where everything is boiled down to a hardline linear value, which is also partly why when I tackle these entries, I spend as little time as possible on going into that. On the other hand, the benefits can arrive because it means I can occasionally build up to the meatier entries, and maybe also with added time, new real life revelations can impact the content. That's true here, but also can you imagine if I started with this one? It'd potentially be a heck of an opener, but also one that I couldn't possibly match for some time, setting an incredibly unrealistic standard going forward.

Karnivool is a band I have a lot of thoughts on. We go back very far, back to when their song "Roquefort" was included on triple j's Hottest 100 compilation CD in 2007. It wasn't really a big favourite of mine, but it gained some heightened lore when I got the scoop that the band's lead singer was in another band. That felt like I was in on something and I felt a heightened investment in both Karnivool and Birds of Tokyo. Karnivool were also benefitting at the time because they had another song on the radio I liked, their cover of Gotye's "The Only Way". In that sense, Karnivool were also benefitting from Gotye's previously earned clout (there's a lot of 'It's fine when I do it' going on here). I didn't listen to heavy metal at all, but Karnivool was something I could appreciate. I wish I still somehow had a copy of it, but I was so obsessed with that cover that in 2008, when I had to make a Flash portal in IT class that was just an interactive menu leading you to different information pages about dinosaurs, I spent the majority of my efforts developing a secret mini-game where you have to evade your cursor from an angry T.Rex while the opening riff to Karnivool's Gotye cover played. In general I listened to Birds of Tokyo a lot more though because I came into this between album cycles for Karnivool so I didn't really know their songs (and Birds of Tokyo released two albums between them).

I made more in-roads by 2009 though. I had discovered their prior song "Themata", a song which is notable for getting a Perth-based Australian Idol contestant eliminated for their outrageous decision to sing it on free choice round (that singer was Reigan Derry who has gone on to have a surprisingly illustrious career in the aftermath). We Karnivool fans are nothing if not enthusiastic. We weren't supposed to have iPods at school, but I did bring one for the walk home, and since I tended to arrive earlier than everyone else (including the groundsman sometimes), I have memories of crouching down at my locker in private, or stepping off into the bathroom and privately rocking out to "Themata" on many a lonely morning. Recent experiences have reinforced to me that it probably is the definitive Karnivool song.

2009 was also a pretty pivotal moment for the band because it saw the arrival of their second album "Sound Awake". This was a pretty big success for them. It got to #2 in Australia (debuting just behind The Black Eyed Peas who were taking over the world that winter). It spent a good while in the charts too for a band that aren't exactly mainstream. It's possible that there was some good word of mouth at the time that I wasn't privy to. All I know (heh) is that "Sound Awake" is the album. So much of the band's reputation, both in Australia and overseas hedges itself on the fact that they are the band who made "Sound Awake". It's their "Spiderland", their "Loveless" etc, albeit not on that scale. You won't often find a Karnivool fan for whom it isn't their favourite album. It just covers the whole spectrum, relatively radio friendly and catchy songs like "Goliath" and "Simple Boy" as well as absolute behemoths "New Day" and "Deadman". Central to Karnivool's appeal is the sheer intricacy and range. They can catch you on a broad stroke with a big hook or riff, but then keep you hooked with all the interesting decisions that work around them. I just look at all of the songs and they're all quintessentially Karnivool, but also with their own flavour. Karnivool haven't given us a lot of music, but when they do, you can guarantee there'll be a lot to chew on for a while, and even the songs I've listened to dozens and dozens of times, I don't find myself getting sick of. Meanwhile my favourite song on the album is still just "Set Fire to the Hive", the aggressive lead single that set the stage for my sheer adoration of this band. At the time I deemed it my favourite song of the year, which felt a little like an arbitrary decision (like trying to challenge my instinct of giving Muse every win). While I'm not sure I would still do that (2009 is a very stacked year in this regard), hearing the song live a number of years back helped solidify it as my favourite Karnivool song. No song has been transformed by the live experience quite like that one, just feeling every note of it pounding through you, it's unrivalled.

We're arriving on this entry at the next album, "Asymmetry". This was another success for Karnivool, it got them their first #1 album (a few months after Birds of Tokyo also got their first), though opinions I've tended to see for the album are a little more polarised. I feel like on "Asymmetry", you'll find less in the way of fully formed songs, replaced by an influx of interludes, and songs made longer to fit between those. Maybe those songs just aren't as good as they were before. It's subjective of course, but I feel like they didn't really have a clear single to push the project. The first song debuted on it was "The Refusal", which is a very different sound for Karnivool, sounding much faster and more aggressive, with additional screamed vocals by bassist Jon Stockman. It eventually grew on me, but it was a tough sell initially. "We Are" was a palate cleanser to an extent, and it probably gets in here for that, being the closest thing to a regular Karnivool song. I'll get back to that one later. I found myself generally enjoying the ambition of the album, and found some of the bigger songs on the album to be pretty rewarding in the long run. "Alpha Omega" is a bit of a monster tucked away near the end. There's a tense, ominous atmosphere to it knowing that things are gearing up to change at any moment.

Something that made things tough as well for "Asymmetry" is where it landed in the band's discography. It's not only the weird album, but for a very long time, it was also the band's last album. Karnivool have never truly disappeared, but updates were few and far between, and there was a strong feeling that the massive success of Birds of Tokyo took over in that regard, as they continued to release music on a regular schedule. I don't really agree with that feeling because I have never really considered Kenny to be the central figure of the creative force in Karnivool (or Birds of Tokyo, really), and the bands easily managed to coexist with releasing music at the same time for years before. All I can gleam from interviews is that there were early sessions as far back as 2016 that didn't go very far, then life got in the way. The band kept playing shows and sneaking in some new songs. I heard one of them back in 2020, a fortunate opportunity to live in a pocket of the world that wasn't too affected by COVID-19 at the time (it did get worse in 2021), that new song was "All It Takes" which would end up getting an official release a year later. There was still no clear sight for new music even with a couple more new songs sneaking into the set list. Apparently it wasn't until 2023 that the band fully locked-in and realised they needed to get this thing done now or never.

I am so thrilled to say that in 2026, the promise has finally been fulfilled and we got a new Karnivool album. I love it so much. It's not saying much as I haven't listened to many, but it's probably my favourite album this year. Maybe some of that is rubbing off from the fact that much like The Avalanches, I just can't believe we have it. On the other hand, the result is just incredible and I love everything the band has accomplished on this album. They manage to play to both sides again, so you've got beautiful moments like "Opal" and "Salva" balanced with the intensity of "Ghost" and "Remote Self Control". Heck, one of the singles was "Aozora" and that manages to play that role while also coming with its own twisted drum pattern and big prog build up. Nothing about the album is overcooked. This is just experts in their trade coming back more mature and managing to show it with an album that sounds incredible from start to finish. In the lead up to the album coming out, I managed to catch the band live again in late 2025 and had a great time again (only regret is they couldn't fit in "Set Fire to the Hive" this time). I don't get out very often so there isn't a single other artist I've seen live more than once. I've seen Birds of Tokyo too so that means I've seen Kenny singing 3 times now, truly the GOAT, high school me always had it right. The past 12 months have really solidified my undying fandom of this band though. Maybe that was never in question, but they've really been bumped up into the upper tier now.

I haven't actually been talking much about Karnivool lately just because I always knew this was coming. The band getting their lucky last hurrah in this list by just barely sneaking onto the list in the first year of eligibility at #100. I enjoyed that a lot when it happened, and I enjoyed it even more 3 years later when it was met with Birds of Tokyo coincidentally meeting the same fate (#109). Only The Cat Empire and Oscar Dawson from Dukes of Windsor & Holy Holy have also managed #100 twice. The Cat Empire once contributed a horn section to "Roquefort", so there's a suspicious pattern emerging here. I do love it when the #100 entry feels like a big burst for an otherwise less appreciated scene. Once upon a time, you'd find a good chunk of triple j's playlist feeding into a similar audience as Karnivool. You got your Cog, your Dead Letter Circus, and don't forget The Butterfly Effect. Karnivool are just the ones that have managed to stick around beyond the 2000s as a highly sought after entity (let me be clear that I have greatly enjoyed post-2010 music from all of those bands I mentioned but they very much were not in the conversation anymore). Just a big air of fascination about them, like we still haven't solved their schtick yet.

Our morsel for today though is "We Are", the relative mediator on an otherwise very peculiar album. Maybe "Eidolon" is an easier sell for its soft intro, but it does get louder towards the end while this feels like a fairer measure. "We Are" doesn't make you have to work too hard to get all the parts together. Just wait a little bit and get your big release here and there. You've got one guitar tuned down all filthy-like, another buzzing in the background, pounding drums, and big affirming statements about how the world is turning into a disaster. I went along with it in 2013 but in hindsight it's a very strange radio single that I imagine was very puzzling for anyone who wasn't already along for this ride. As per usual, I do find myself appreciating the intricacies more over time, and there's appeal to be had from its 'everything at the wall' approach. Just an utterly deranged choice of song to have playing on the radio just before "Without You" (#708), what were the radio programmers thinking?

#60

#60. The Avalanches (feat Danny Brown & MF DOOM) - Frankie Sinatra (#28, 2016)

7th of 2016

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I still may not have gotten through watching all of The Wire, but I got to the end of Season 2, which means that I'm well primed to make one groan-inducing pun. One with an incredibly narrow Venn diagram of appreciation, that I've already found myself saying over and over again. Ah Frankie Sobotka, ah, Frank Sobotka. Frankie, me boy, don't know, how they got those girls all in the container. Just crazy how they named a whole song after him.

The unexpected return of The Avalanches might just be one of the biggest events in Australian music in the 2010s. Unexpected might be the wrong word, because it had been frequently speculated, but it's still something that you find yourself having second thoughts, and doubts about. I've said it before, but 15 years is such a long time. The first time The Avalanches were in the chart, they were sharing space with Savage Garden and The Superjesus. When they returned, it was Flume & Desiigner. People streamed music now, which had the immediate effect of drastically aging a lot of would-be comebacks from getting their moment in the sun. The age demographic that was controlling the narrative got a whole lot younger, and young enough to have no idea who The Avalanches were or why they should even care.

Nonetheless, this was something that defied the uphill battle. It's why I can report that after all those years, The Avalanches managed to get their first and only top 50 hit with the song "Frankie Sinatra", a song that immediately left the chart and never truly crossed over, but held enough intrigue to make its mark in the moment. Shawn Mendes released one of his biggest ever hits, "Treat You Better" that week, and The Avalanches managed to outpace it. After all the build-up, we just had to know what it was like. What we ended up with is something that's hard to fully unpack, because it feels like much of the song's identity comes down to its curious guest list, two rappers that I have a lot of time for.

Danny Brown feels like part of triple j folklore. It's not even really for a good reason, just that back in 2013, triple j chose his album "Old" as a feature album. This was an extremely polarising choice for many who found his idiosyncratic delivery to be a bridge too far. His high-pitched rapping voice becoming a calling-card as well as his habits for fast delivery and strange punchlines. It can sound like a joke, and sometimes it is, but when he's on his game, he's hard to match.

2016 was a pretty pivotal moment for him I think, because very soon after "Frankie Sinatra", he released "When It Rain", the lead single to his 3rd album "Atrocity Exhibition". That album is one of my favourite albums ever. It just lets him be completely in his element and sounds purely chaotic. I feel like "Ain't It Funny" should have managed to be some sort of hit by now. Over time, Danny Brown has just continued to prove himself as one of the most irreplaceable guys in rap because of just how unique he is. I've often felt like some of it comes from him being a relative elder stateman in rap music. There are many older rappers than him, but he didn't really break through until he was well into his 30s, so a lot of the reckless abandon just comes from a different place.

In all fairness, this is also something that can be said about MF DOOM, who was at around a similar age when he first started getting more popular. It feels a little different though because MF DOOM's music is more abstract and personal only in the sense that he takes on a fictional larger-than-life persona, but is otherwise not known for showing much of himself. He's so secretive that he died on Halloween back in 2020 and no one found out about it until Christmas (he did it on Halloween, the true Operation: "doomsday"). He's a villain, he wears a mask. He might just be some British guy who's really into comic books, but he still ends up being one of the all-time greatest MCs.

DOOM was an incredibly prolific performer with an absolute monster of a discography full of mixtapes, collaborations and side-branching personas where he constantly records under different names depending on who he's working with. It's always felt like an immense undertaking so my knowledge of his discography is pretty scattered. Definitely count me in as one of those people who is obsessed with "Madvillainy" though, his collaboration with Madlib. It's such a strange sell because it's not really a typical album as you might know it. Almost all of the songs are about 2 minutes long and rarely feel like 'singles', but just the whole package is so alluring. DOOM has an incredible gift in his flow where his complex rhymes schemes just seem to bounce off, combined with a good choice of ear-catching words and his distinct deep voice, I can't fault him. 

It's funny to look back at this collaboration with the way it positions The Avalanches in the year 2016. You've got the relative veteran in MF DOOM, as well as the relative newcomer Danny Brown, and they're joined together by a bunch of guys who haven't released much of anything since the year 2000 and have the potential to be incredibly out of touch. Maybe they still are, but in exactly the same way I am, so I've fallen for it. The main thing I want to highlight is that when they premiered "Frankie Sinatra" on the radio, they only prefaced it by saying Danny Brown was on it, with an additional guest star. This is something that has prime potential for clickbait trappings, the less interesting moment tucked away because it's not a headline. Instead, it turns the song's first listen into a surprise odyssey, where you're just shocked to hear an incredibly recognisable MF DOOM showing up. It's not his greatest verse or anything, but I do find it very memorable for the moment in the middle of the verse where he suggests that he's punching Rocky in the face with a classic punching sound effect. His verse is followed up with a sampling of "The Sound of Music", just another one of their strange budget flexes.

"Frankie Sinatra" is also an unusual song because the single version is actually longer than the album version, but not just in a manner of chopping things off. It's re-arranged just a little bit, the album version chops off the first 20 seconds, and also much of the extended outro. On paper, you'd think the single version's intro makes more sense on the album, but what you'll find is that "Because I'm Me" (#493) comes before it and actually inherits those 20 seconds (I feel like I didn't highlight last time but the last minute or so of "Because I'm Me" is incredibly beautiful). triple j actually played the single version of "Frankie Sinatra" when it made the Hottest 100 so there was potential for them to have played that same segment twice, but they cut off "Because I'm Me" right when it got there. Missed potential to confuse a lot of people by having this song appear to arrive super early.

#61

#61. Milky Chance - Stolen Dance (#4, 2014)

9th of 2014

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A big regret of mine is misplacing a February 2008 edition of JMag, triple j's on and off print edition. I liked getting the Hottest 100 editions because they'd go extra deep into the countdown I worshipped, and maybe you'd get some tidbits you wouldn't otherwise know about. Mainly I wish I had it because there was a comment from Richard Kingsmill that I'd love to confirm, where he said that "Knights of Cydonia" is the longest song to ever win the Hottest 100, but the length he cited was not the song's 6:06 length, but that of the shorter radio edit that triple j would exclusively play. This is an important distinction, I believe, because it's key to the song's legitimate eligibility. This radio edit didn't arrive until right around December 2006 making it squarely fair game despite having arrived on an album in the middle of 2006. Of course it doesn't really matter given that triple j were never tending to clamp down on it that much back then (Silversun Pickups' "Lazy Eye" also wouldn't be eligible that year, among others), but it's the boring, rational response to the controversy that even holds up by today's rules. We will later deal with a notable radio edit situation, but before that, let's deal with one that's even more obscure.

The case of "Stolen Dance" is one that I suspect I wouldn't be able to tell if I weren't extremely fortunate to have come across the song when I did. I believe it was either a direct or indirect recommendation at the time that put me across to the song and I very quickly grew attached. It was something of an in-thing for me and about two other friends who also saw the light. No one else seemed particularly interested in it but we were all-in and having a good time as a result. The catch is that I'm talking about November 2013. That's when I downloaded this song on iTunes and I still have the metadata to prove it. Milky Chance's album "Sadnecessary" was just all there though I don't think I listened to anything else from it at the time. I don't think they necessarily intended to promote it in Australia at the time, it was just a quirk of iTunes, which was often region-locked with its available material, but tended to just release things in every country for a period of time before clamping down. A lot of Australian albums would be available in the US for a day or a week, or something like that. "Sadnecessary" was released in May 2013, so it was there for a long time, but at some point after I downloaded "Stolen Dance", it was gone.

They had a good reason for this as it turns out, because "Stolen Dance" had started becoming a hit. It was a real shock to the system for me to see it on the iTunes chart, and to hear the song on triple j, the only catch is that it was not my beautiful wife, nor my beautiful "Stolen Dance", but a radio edit. The original song is a bit over 5 minutes long, while the edit cuts nearly two minutes off of it, as well as generally tinkering with the mixing. The edit feels a little faster, a little lighter, and very different all up. The way the guitar comes back in on the song's second chorus and the extra guitar bit at the end of the song are wildly unexpected portions to me, but maybe to someone who came up with this one are just regular pieces of the puzzle. I actually feel uniquely unqualified to judge this radio edit because the original version was just burned into me from months and months of repeat listens. "Stolen Dance" is a song that receives sometimes very strong reactions and I just can't really confide or disparage any of those because they almost always came from a different place than I did. I find myself wondering if I would have the same feelings I do now for this song if I hadn't heard the album version first, and also spent a very long time accustomed to it being forever just an obscure song on my playlists. As I've said before, new artists just emerging with a hit tends to breed cynicism, and I'm not entirely immune to it either, so who's to say I'd welcome Milky Chance into my life. More than that though, I just feel like the album version hits harder for me in general. It feels warmer, and most importantly, gives everything space to breathe. Rarely does a radio edit feel more like it's rushing to get things done than in this case.

The irony in all of this is that in the long run it just has not mattered. As has often happened in the age of streaming, the album version finds its ease of access winning over the lazier parts of the public and their memory before it just becomes the default. It's a bit like how more people listen to the original version of "Missing" by Everything But The Girl, rather than the Todd Terry remix that made it a hit in the '90s. If it sounds enough like what you vaguely remember, before you know it, it'll just supplant those previous memories. Actually, the radio edit that was big in Australia is a little hard to come by now, because it's not on Spotify. I can't find it on YouTube or iTunes anymore. I only have a copy via a friend who bought it on iTunes back in early 2014, so now I can't help but wonder if anyone who heard the song a lot in 2014 has noticed that the song never feels quite right anymore. The 'new' radio edit that's available feels more like the original version production-wise. I'd be very surprised if someone who felt strongly about the song back in 2014 and suddenly changed their tune via the added prominence of the album version, which is so popular that it's actually been spotted in the Spotify chart of late. I guess in the long term I've gotten my wish, so now I'll go back to reminding everyone that the version of "We No Speak Americano" that triple j played is probably not the one you remember. In any case, "Stolen Dance" is another "Knights of Cydonia" case, where the song was only eligible because triple j played a newer version of the song, but admittedly I'd have never known any of this if I hadn't come across the song 6 months early.

Sometimes I think what made the song work most for me is that I never felt inclined to put it in a box. The song just didn't really fit in with anything and I bought into it on the melody that drew me in. It's a folktronica song so it straddles the line, but it seems to often get derisively dismissed for being some variety of an acoustic guitar guy song, or just another one in the line of tropical house influenced songs that the charts were going crazy for at the time. I feel like it always reduces the song to less than it is. I hear people talking about whether or not the chorus is good and for me I'm just grooving to the intricate guitar picking. Milky Chance just weren't remotely close to being a mainstream entity to me at the time so I never had to consider what would happen if suddenly the whole country had to forcibly be put onto the song. It was an enormous success, nonetheless, even getting to #2 in Australia despite lagging behind considerably in most English speaking countries. Maybe triple j latching onto it early managed to convince enough people of Milky Chance having some sort of cool indie cred. In any case, the fruits of deleting the album on iTunes meant that they were able to put it back up for pre-order when "Stolen Dance" became a hit and it managed to debut in the top 10 in Australia, which possibly never would have happened if they just left the album sitting there available the whole time. A classic story of artificial scarcity.

I'll admit that I do also enjoy Clemens' unique singing style. It's very abrasive and cuts right through the generally chill demeanour of the song. He loves emphasizing random words out of nowhere but I think it makes the song stick in your head a bit more. The song's chorus has at least 6 different lines that are memorable non-sequiturs. It's been very fun to watch the rest of the world catch up on a very old in-joke we've had, where the chorus inexplicably suggests bringing it on the floormf. He's clearly saying 'I've', and if you try to mash those two words closely together, you might be surprised at what happens. It's very boba though, much like this song in general. No, I don't remember if I ranked this song based on the album version, radio edit, or some sort of all-encompassing vibe, it was simply so long ago. Now that the radio edit is so completely obscure and forgotten though, it's managing to give me back the feeling that listening to "Stolen Dance" in 2013 was like.

#62

#62. Drake - Nice For What (#40, 2018)

5th of 2018

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"The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" is so good. It's propped up by a handful of noteworthy hits, but really it's easy to like all the way through. If there's any more evidence to its potency, then we can take things back to 2018 when there were simultaneously two hit songs that sampled the same Lauryn Hill song. I don't mean just the increasingly easy chance of sharing chart space, I mean that the two songs came out one week after the other, and peaked at the same time. The first one was "Be Careful" by Cardi B, which if you haven't heard, is one of her most chilled out songs she's ever released (despite the threatening hook). It would have become a top 10 hit on its second week out but it was leapfrogged by Drake's "Nice For What" which debuted at the top spot. Cardi B also debuted in the top 10 with "I Like It" so it's partly her fault as well.

Both of these songs sample "Ex-Factor" by Lauryn Hill. For Cardi B, it's just a slight interpolation and one you might not even notice if you aren't looking for it, whereas Drake goes all out on it, running it either in the foreground or the background for the entire song in such a way that you couldn't possibly think it wasn't a sample. It was a failing on my part recently that goes against my desire not to spoil things in the slightest here that I was doing a Sporcle quiz with friends and came up to "Ex-Factor" which I couldn't recall by name in the moment, just that it's the one Drake sampled. It's quite easy to intuit from this that I obviously hadn't recently researched "Nice For What" and draw some conclusions about its pending ranking. I'm only now drawing attention to this gaffe now that it no longer matters, but the reality is that it's easier to feign ignorance than to mask it.

In any case, "Nice For What" was another huge success for Drake. It's something of an awkward middle child though, wedged between "God's Plan" (#507) and "In My Feelings". They were all #1 hits, but this was clearly the one that got the least attention at the time. triple j listeners felt differently though, as this one actually ranked the highest of the three. It might seem strange but it also lands pretty well with my experience both at the time and since, which is that this is one of the Drake songs that people who otherwise have no interest in Drake tend to like. Or even if you do, because a couple of years ago Billboard ranked all of Drake's 300+ Hot 100 entries, complete with blurbs for each of them, and "Nice For What" landed in the top spot. Again, it's the power of Lauryn Hill. I actually feel a bit boring by doing this, especially since "Passionfruit" (#86) is another of those. I can only play the cards I've been dealt though, and playing across the aisle has tended to be Drake's best way to find polling positions.

This song is Drake's tribute to women of the world. The title mantra sums the frustration up pretty succinctly. The video was also directed by Karena Evans and features a huge array of guest appearances from female celebrities. I'd say that's a big part of the appeal (just ignore that one lyric about high school pics), but I suspect the big driving factor has always been the song's vivacious launch into bounce music. The two go hand in hand though, really. If you're gonna make something into a self-affirming anthem, it has to sound like an anthem. This is just an endlessly fresh and fun hit song, and one of those times where Drake's haphazard approach of rushing out endless supplies of music actually lands on something particularly potent.

#63

#63. Tash Sultana - Jungle (#3, 2016)

8th of 2016

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I've said before that I find an artist's earliest impression to be fundamentally interesting. Often times you know where you stand with them in the long run, but the first time they come up, you're making some sort of decision as to whether or not you ride with them. It's something that with hindsight can look a little surprising. I know I look at Hottest 100s that I didn't witness in the moment, and it's full of all these isolated moments with artists that ultimately are on the mid-tier popularity scale but they just have this big one time awakening where seemingly everyone is capable of being on board.

I look at the 2001 countdown, and honestly you can use the sentiment for nearly every artist that's up there, but the one I find the most interesting is "Betterman" by the John Butler Trio. It's the first of many appearances for them, a legacy that runs all the way forward to 2013 (#810). It's not even their biggest hit in the end, but it's the most interesting result. If you look at the top end of the list, John Butler's contributions afterwards are largely treading the well trusted ground that "Zebra" set up. Extremely radio friendly, poppy songs. "Betterman" is an over 8 minute monster that stands alone simply because it was never re-created (although there are longer songs on that particular album). The song isn't without its appeal, but seeing it where it is on the list is such a shock to my system having only known what came after it. You look at John Butler from the lens of 2001 when he's basically only known for this and it's interesting to imagine the outlook of voters then. They might have thought they found the next big thing, and perhaps they were right although it panned out a little differently in the end.

I had an easier time piecing this together in 2016 when I felt like I witnessed the same thing all over again. Here comes Tash Sultana out of nowhere in 2016 and suddenly they're right up in the thick of it in this list. Hilltop Hoods' highest charting single of all time on the ARIA Chart? (#599) Get to the back of the line because this quirky guitar jam called the spot first. "Jungle" didn't even make the ARIA Chart until after the countdown happened so it doesn't even feel like a bandwagon as much as it is a very enthusiastic crowd who were instantly hooked. It's easy to see why. "Jungle" is one of those songs that can't help but stand out, with its pervasive, duelling guitar riffs and for better or worse, memorable scat-singing.

It's one of those songs, like "Betterman" that as an introductory statement, opens up a vague pathway for what Tash Sultana's music is supposed to be about. This is a song that is entirely instrumental for just shy of two whole minutes at the start, which is more than long enough to raise some eyebrows, the way hearing something that doesn't quite fit in with what you're used to tends to do. Unlike John Butler, the trajectory since this has been a little less clear cut. For all the more radio friendly follow ups we got (#302) (#773), we also weren't lacking for songs that felt like odysseys in one way or another (#290) (#951). I should acknowledge that "Jungle" did get a radio edit which just cuts down the song's intro to 40 seconds. If memory serves me correctly, it was actually a double-edged sword at the time because after the Hottest 100 when the song could've been primed to reach the Spotify top 50 (a big deal at the time and I'll get into it on a later entry), it never got there because its streams were being split between the two versions. I don't even think people necessarily wanted the radio edit, but somewhere along the way, that's the version that was put on Australia's biggest playlist. The song still fared fairly well, reaching the top 40 and so far being certified triple platinum (probably up to quadruple now). I find myself thinking about the intangible importance of maximising your potential when you've got the most eyes on you though.

While I didn't vote for it myself, I was one of those people who were very quickly charmed by "Jungle" when I first heard it. It's the holy grail I find myself comparing the rest of Tash's discography to, and it's just such a hard bar to clear. A song that's over 5 minutes long could run the risk of overdoing it, but there isn't a moment of this song that I feel is wasted. It's all a very steady process of easing in the listener, occasionally blasting them with something new (it's easy to notice the rapid fire second verse, but it's all building up tension to the big drum break that comes afterwards), but recoiling back to the elements that work each time. There's also just a huge (though brief) guitar solo at the end that reminds me of "Hotel California", John Mayer on Frank Ocean's "Pyramids", all the classics.

#64

#64. Anderson .Paak (feat Kendrick Lamar) - Tints (#67, 2018)

6th of 2018

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There's a solid period of time in the mid to late 2010s when a lot of collaborations just felt like cheat codes. There's a tendency for them to never live up to what you hope for, but at this point I was just all over it. For Kendrick Lamar, his tendency to do features seemed to drop off a little which made them all the more precious, while for Anderson .Paak, he just had this uncanny ability to effectively bounce off everyone and come out looking good. I only hesitate to go in deeper about this because it's very much going to happen again on this list. With that being said, it feels like a cruel injustice that Anderson .Paak has never even cracked the Billboard Hot 100 outside of his Silk Sonic work. This is someone who is teeming with charisma and should be a star, but might instead just be known as the guy who wins nearly every GRAMMY Award he's nominated for (he's won about twice as many as he's lost which is a maddening ratio).

Unlike "Bubblin" (#101), "Tints" actually did end up on Anderson .Paak's 2018 album "Oxnard". It's not an album I remember quite as fondly as "Malibu", but there were a handful of songs I tended to take away from it. Part of me wants to say that it doesn't have quite the same force of personality going around, but there are certainly memorable moments. I'm very fond of the song "Cheers", where Anderson .Paak reminisces on the loss of Mac Miller who died only two months before the album came out, and it also features another rapper thinking about their former bandmate who passed away not long before that. It's actually a fairly upbeat song all things considered. There's also the song "Headlow" and if you haven't heard it, I'll let you use your imagination regarding what that song's about. If I can say one thing about it, then perhaps it's that it makes sense why he needs his windows tinted on the next song.

When we get to "Tints", it feels like more of a victory lap than a big grand statement. It's basically him making something akin to a pop hit, even if it didn't amount to being much of one (it charted in Australia though, which is noteworthy). Gone are all those boisterous musical ideas and off-the-cuff performances, he's playing this whole song pretty straight. It's so straight that one might argue he's really saying that he needs tits. It doesn't make the song bland though. The ceiling for Anderson .Paak is just so high for what he can do. At the very least, the song still has an infectious guitar that locks into place when the chorus starts.

Kendrick Lamar is also here. It's just a 35 second cameo, and if we're talking about infamous guest verses of his, this just isn't going to rate much of a mention in a world where "Control" and "Like That" exist (I could keep going). It's assuredly a metronome kind of verse, where nothing's derailed, and you just stay with your good mood you were already in. Think of it as just another carefully casual opening round and perhaps don't double check just how many more times Kendrick Lamar is going to appear on this list.

#65

#65. A.B. Original (feat Dan Sultan) - January 26 (#16, 2016)

9th of 2016

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I think about the proverb about how the grass is always greener. There's some very serious truth to it. It goes hand in hand with the notion that no matter how comfortably successful someone becomes, there'll always be something they desire but can't have. Maybe money can make you happy so much as financial stability will do that, but do those super rich people you see ever look to be as mentally on top of the world as they are in a hierarchical sense?

This is something that can get weaponised through nostalgia. It's giving you a glimpse of greener pastures, perhaps ones you remember, dusting off the shakier parts of it, and re-selling it to you with the promise you can get back what was once lost. I'm not immune to the charms of this too, as I eagerly await a re-release of some old video games that are categorically worse than what came after them, but scratch a certain itch for the time frame they were in. I'm not so naïve to just say everything was better in a prior year, but maybe if you just take the good parts away from it, there's something to be salvaged.

One of the most eye-opening things I can ever recommend doing for any fan of music, if it's at all possible, is to specifically hunt down contemporary opinions on either the era or just specific, untouchable icons of yesteryear. History and marketing have a way of shutting out the dissent and glamourising the highs, but alongside every notable artist that never won a GRAMMY, or never had a #1 hit, sometimes the truth of the matter is that we've just had our perspectives clouded and the priority was never as strong as it feels now. It's always interesting to look back on things like this because it'll just feel like you've put a new filter on things, and you'll see people utterly disregard some all-time greats either because their potential hasn't been reached, or because they're in that moment staking the claim, and people have always been skeptical of the next big thing the way they are nowadays. The discussions are all very similar, just the names have been changed.

What I want to get into with this is culture wars. They're a frustrating reality, but one that can't really go ignored because it inevitably shapes the world view of everyone. Whether it drives passion, amusement or anger, the hold it has over us all is a big driving factor in global upheaval. All around the world, elections are staked, won and lost over this often incredibly petty part of life. I feel like it's the 'grass is greener' mentality that drives a lot of this. Someone will take something that is largely trivial to the greater populace, blow it up out of proportion, and incense a large swathe of the population into using it to drive their voting habits. Things like economic stability and infrastructure are almost certainly more important, but they're vague, hard to get a read on, and mostly just boring. What better way to motivate someone than to remind them of their own day to day hardships, and point the blame at a minority class who seemingly get everything handed to them? If you don't keep them in line, they're going to cut at your already crunched budget, or just get in the way of your own personal freedoms like being able to continue using those 'harmless' slurs you've been saying since you were a kid. It's an easy playbook. Just find any small bit of change, appeal to that sense of rejection to change, shrinkflation or otherwise and squarely blame those people who you already are at odds with for going too far yet again. In the age of AI slop proliferation, it doesn't even have to be something real, all too often I see sheer madness driven by something that was poorly explained, already resolved, or just flat out untrue in the first place.

The most apparent thing about all of this to me is the way you can see this way of thinking has lit a fire in the belly of people who were otherwise completely reasonable before. Like, it's all become a partisan battle that you're not allowed to ever concede on, lest you come out the loser. But more specifically, and this is another thing you can learn from looking at old conversations and writing, there are so many things that once went by without a whimper that now call forth outrage. Often times it can just make people unwittingly show their hand. When it comes to those culture wars, the unspoken part of it is that nobody can admit to being a bigot. It's one of those things that are just universally accepted as not okay, and will destroy any possible credibility one has, so there needs to be plausible deniability. Mind you, the bar for this is so low that certain world leaders and powerful people will freely refer to ethnic cleansing as a reasonable course of action, but it can so easily be waved away because they're just asking questions or whatever. Fascism or anything like it is just a fundamentally weak mindset that tries to reason with the idea that some people are just inherently superior, but completely undermined by those lesser than them. They'll never be happy because there's always a new problem. It should be completely untenable to all because if you tolerate this, the next target will land just a little closer to you.

The thing that I always find myself catching is just the more trivial sides of things. It's become something of a punchline to just conclude that something was done 'because of woke', on both a sincere and lampooning sense. Just the sheer lengths people will go to in order to keep up their one track mind (just don't ask them to define what 'woke' means). In the most trivial instances, it just ends up with someone making a fool out of themselves, and maybe in that sense they'll know better not to do it. I just can't help but think about the day of the year that triple j's Hottest 100 airs on.

For a very long time, triple j's Hottest 100 was synonymous with Australia Day, January 26th. Given that the school year tended to start a little bit after that, it was basically the only thing I ever associated with the date, as it had no real bearing as a holiday for me. If you want a quick history lesson, January 26th has been roughly associated with being Australia Day since 1935, but it wasn't locked in as the specific permanent date until 1994, meaning that triple j's Hottest 100 actually pre-dates it. For that reason, the Hottest 100 date has actually fluctuated a bit. In the earliest incarnations it was held in the middle of the year, but they changed it in 1991, delaying it to right at the end of the year. This proved to be pivotal to the result as Nirvana won that poll, having risen to prominent in the latter half of that year. I don't believe January 26th got locked in until 1996, which was also the first time an Australian band won it. From that point onwards, it actually gets difficult to verify because there isn't a lot of online documentation that's survived from before 2003. I did find a comment online from 2004 that suggested it wasn't quite on Australia Day a few years ago, but it's hard to say they're not just confusing it with the countdown that aired that year on January 25th.

I can readily believe that they missed the exact date in 2001 or 2002 because I know they did in 2004. It'd be for the same reason too, as a leg of the Big Day Out festival coincided with it, and triple j didn't want to divert their coverage of it. That's how easily they were able to break the tradition though, and so it was only from 2005 to 2017 that triple j consistently held the countdown on January 26th. A tradition to some maybe, but the main thing I found whenever the changed date was ever mentioned is that the biggest reaction you'd tend to get was one of slight bemusement. By today's standards, you should expect outright fury, but in a time where we weren't all being prodded at all angles to take a dramatic stand on everything, it just didn't happen. Since 2018, triple j have consistently held the Hottest 100 on a date that falls somewhere nearby January 26th, but never on that exact date itself. Righteous fury comes forth. This was the point of no return for triple j or something like that. Once again, short term memories that don't have all the facts in place start to override reality, and of course, empathy for the purpose behind the change. In reality it's much more reflective of contempt for that purpose. No one raises a fuss if a national touring festival gets precedent, but heaven forbid we listen to the plight and concerns of our Indigenous population. I'm sure they're not racists for this, just people who galvanise and reinforce the views that would be held by these theoretical white hoods.

If you're in the need for another history lesson, Australia was federated on January 1, 1901. It's a great date that's easy to remember, and would serve as a logical place to put the national holiday, if it wasn't already stuck in the calendar as a significant day that kicks off the year itself. After some discussion in the early 20th century, January 26th stuck as it marks the arrival of the First Fleet in Australia. This is a somewhat controversial decision to say the least, as while it is historically significant for Australia, it also marks the beginning of two centuries of genocide for the Indigenous population who had been living there for millennia. There was concern raised about this decision even back then, but given the way the self-appointed white government treated Indigenous Australians, it doesn't surprise me that they didn't waver on it. For many, January 26th is a day of mourning, and is often called Invasion Day. Recognition of this has increased in the 21st century, though it's admittedly a minority view that polls only about a third of the country as wanting to change the date, so neither Labor nor Liberal parties seem interested in pursuing a change that would inevitably cost them votes. As we've also learnt in recent years with the Voice referendum, there's no small part of the population who take pride in celebrating any form of progress being held up.

In 2016, A.B. Original jumped into this debate by releasing the song "January 26". It's a fairly pointed political track that makes their stance on the date clear. At the time, I felt like it was Hottest 100 nectar. What better way to send a message than to vote for this song, knowing it'll have to get a spin in the countdown on January 26th? I wouldn't have thought Briggs & Trials had the kind of notoriety to get that far, but sometimes these things can step beyond the music and end up on a different playing field. That's how we ended up with the song right at the pointy end of the list at #16, on what would end up being the last ever Hottest 100 held on the date.

For a good while after the song was out, I actually hadn't gotten around to listening to it. Sometimes when a song broaches a difficult topic, I can be hesitant to getting around to it because it can feel like I'm being suckered by provocative marketing, listening to something I'd never go near if it didn't have a bonus source of attention. My hesitation was born purely from not having heard the song, and once I heard it, it was a big remedy to it all. "January 26" is a protest song, first and foremost, but when you only look at it on that level, you miss the other vital aspect which is that it's just really good. This is a song that sounds like a hit on every level except for all of the provocative lyrics. It's short and sharp, never dawdles, and finds a great place for Dan Sultan to deliver a big hook.

Talking to people who have different politics to you is a frustrating ordeal. Sometimes the differences only have to be slight and that can still be too much to deal with. I feel like Briggs & Trials take turns here with two different perspectives. Briggs is direct, as he often is. Taking all the shit-slinging and throwing it right back, emphasizing all the tired, seemingly teleprompted responses people tend to give out. If his verse is a punch to the face, then Trials delivers it to the jugular, reminding everyone of their twisted priorities as they live in comfort provided by the very atrocities that they distance themselves from because they didn't directly commit or witness it themselves. It's important not to fall for all the classic trappings that the privileged parts of the country throw around to get away from any sort of reconciliation. They want nothing more than to ignore any sort of protest, leave it to only the small minority to be part of it so they won't have a loud enough voice to change anything. I'm well aware that I myself have a habit of wading out of difficult conversations because I don't always have the confidence to put up the right words to correctly convey myself and understand the situation. It is something that means a lot to me, and as I currently witness as the political opposition veers further and further right, it's not something I can just silently protest on with just my vote. There's no room for empathy when everyone's too busy looking out for themselves, or just having their strings pulled by the billionaire class. Fuck that.