#325-#321

 #325. Glass Animals - Your Love (Déjà Vu) (#51, 2020)

25th of 2020

I have to wonder if Glass Animals knew they had a hit on their hands. They'd probably say no, and I'd believe them. The single release order suggests a lack of confidence in their hand. The first single from "Dreamland" was "Tokyo Drifting" (#968). Potentially it gets attention for the obvious reason: the divergence from being a straight up Glass Animals song. "Your Love (Déjà Vu)" comes in next as a means of re-assurance. It's the song on the album that reminds me most of "How To Be A Human Being". The big twist in this whole arrangement is that they were sitting on something that could be described as the biggest hit of all time (in Australia) in "Heat Waves" (#741), and it was the 4th single. If they did have some faith in it, it's a good strategy. Bring it in for the middle order in case the early wickets fall too meaninglessly, keep the momentum up. Or maybe they just thought the same way I did, "Your Love (Déjà Vu)" had to be the hit because it's self-evident.

Maybe this is something that doesn't really come to mind with this band. They're in the middle zone where they have hits, but aren't a chart band (one exception aside). It's in their best interest to work this angle, and they have managed to do it covertly. Their previous album is the perfect example of this. It never really had a chart hit, but has amassed over a billion streams thanks to a series of low key hits, some I might even talk about here. This might change over time because nothing feels set in stone anymore, but going into this album, the surprise packet for Glass Animals was "The Other Side Of Paradise", a deep cut that overtook all of the actual singles. It probably didn't make sense as a single, coming close to 5 and a half minutes, but it's very adaptable to a short snippet based economy. I could make the case that it's the catchiest hook they've ever written, even in a sea of "Baby Blue" songs that have done the rounds.

That's why I think "Your Love (Déjà Vu)" was pushed early. When I listen to it, I hear a band (well it's mostly just Dave) trying to isolate what they had working before and trying to make it into a radio single. The whole chorus is trying to hammer in a whimsical instrumental hook. The only thing it's missing is a big confident performance on the vocals, which you think you're gonna get on the bridge but it falls a little short. This should be where I lament that the luck of the draw with hits is a cruel mistress and that this fell devastatingly short, but actually it's done pretty well for itself. As I write this, it's making ground on all the other singles from this album (apart from "Heat Waves", naturally), which is occasionally the sign of a random surprise hit bursting out the gate. That's a slow and ungratifying process though, I speak through having spent the last several months tracking a song that's slowly been climbing but still not really breaking through. More likely, "Take A Slice" is the band's ticket at the moment. Either way, I did always like this one. I guess I have to pay some thanks to "Heat Waves" on it because seeing this poll as well as it did, just reeks of the typical splash back you get when one song is tremendously powerful. I did not think this song had the momentum to make it in back in May 2020.

#324. Desiigner - Panda (#81, 2016)

34th of 2016

Something that I don't think is fully appreciated when looking at popular music is the sheer magnitudes of difference we can be dealing with. Right now as I write this (yes, in 2025), Bad Bunny just had 69 million streams on Spotify yesterday. In the same space of time, Khalid had 6.9 million streams, Nate Smith had 0.69 million streams, and Broken Social Scene were close to 0.069 million streams. I think we're tempted to bunch everything closer together when we're familiar with it, but the reality is so different. If you ever feel tempted to fall into the trap of being shocked at unfamiliarity with something that's being hyped up, think of just how easy it is to fall into the 90%, or the 99%, or the 99.9%. Not everyone listens to Bad Bunny either, so those numbers are being extremely generous. It also means that when something blows up, those early stories that may have formed are no longer part of the narrative. Most people missed the early parts of the careers of Post Malone, The Weeknd, Lana Del Rey, take your pick. Most people never saw the weird ascent of "Panda" before it already happened, so you might not know the story and it gives me an excuse to reiterate it.

In February 2016, Kanye West released his 7th album "The Life of Pablo". We've tackled it here once before (#659) and we'll do it again. For now I want to focus on an album cut, "Pt. 2". It follows "Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1", the 'bleach my asshole' song. It goes through without much to remark upon, until you get to around the 30 second mark, and you hear a different MC on the track. He's a new guy, but everyone thinks it sounds like a certain Atlanta rapper (and he apparently has broads there). That rapper will appear on this list at a point in time I'd describe as the opposite of the past. He had just released his most acclaimed album 7 months ago so he was getting a lot of attention. Eventually we find out that it's Desiigner, who was just signed to Kanye's GOOD Music label earlier in the week. It also turns out that his verses are actually being sampled from his own song, "Panda" which had initially been released online, but was re-released a couple of weeks later. It debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 in March, and reached #1 in May. Now this song is being heard all over the world, and reaching far more ears than a TIDAL exclusive Kanye West album track ever could. It's also a giant slap in the face to that rapper I haven't mentioned, a copycat wunderkind getting a #1 hit before he could even get close. Put a pin in that one because the story continues long after Desiigner is consiigned to irrelevance.

I just find the whole thing interesting because it's a much weirder timeline than you'd think, one that isn't generally documented properly. Anyone who's coming into this after the fact is likely going to misunderstand that. Listen to "Pt. 2" now and you might think it's just a rip off of "Panda", a sample that looks incredibly lazy in the already absorbed new context of "Panda" being a smash hit. In general though, "Pt. 2" will never sound the same as it did on the day that it came out, unless you've managed to completely avoid "Panda". Maybe you have, it's not like they thrashed it on the radio or anything.

When I first started to notice "Panda" getting a proper push, I marked it as a potential #1 hit (in America at least). It had the right pace of ascent, and there was a nice opening as Rihanna & Drake's "Work" was just waiting for the next #1 hit to come along and replace it. If the timing wasn't right, Desiigner might have been stuck behind Drake's "One Dance" (#796) which shot to the top 2 weeks later. In Australia, it was a low top 10 hit, which is pretty good given how trap music tended to perform here. Even in America though, "Panda" feels like a harbinger of the future. It wasn't the first trap song to top the Billboard Hot 100, but it's the first one that didn't feel like it was a pop song with trap elements. For many years to come, this became the default sound of rap, as everyone would start coming up with dark, menacing beats. Many like to attribute musical trends to presidential eras, and this one would be perfect since Rae Sremmurd got to #1 with "Black Beatles" right when Trump was elected for the first time, but Desiigner singlehandedly ruins it all by being half a year early.

Seemingly by accident at barely 18 years old, Desiigner became a pioneer. He flamed out pretty quickly after that, decide if it's bad artist management, or just a gimmick that didn't have many legs. I adore his later single "Tiimmy Turner", but I think it captures everything I could need from Desiigner (it also snuck into the Billboard Year End list, so keep that in mind if you're tempted to call him a one hit wonder). That and the fact that there's a better artist still going around who already sounds the same. Like many pioneers, the intrigue is there, and there's reason to be interested. If you're looking for something deeper than talking about cars, drugs & money, then you'll probably be left disappointed. "Panda" works best for me from that initial "Pt. 2" context because the whole thing is a strange fever dream. One where half the song is ad libs, and the main hook is just the word 'panda' repeated over and over again. I wouldn't want it any other way, but if it feels like a new depth of denigration in popular music, I get it.

#323. Lorde - Mood Ring (#62, 2021)

26th of 2021

"Solar Power" is supposed to be Lorde's flop era, and I've already gone into that (#526). The narrative doesn't work when I end up with 3 songs on my plate. They're far lower, but it's still just as many songs as "Pure Heroine" has here. I'm not about to go through the whole album again for content. I still think "Fallen Fruit" is a gem. How about I go off tangent and say that the latest album, "Virgin", is actually really good. The lead single never sparked my interest but now that I'm hearing it all, it's all locking into place. I may have to revisit it when I do my own End of Year business, although if you're reading this now, I probably already did that, good on me.

"Mood Ring" was always the song that made me feel a bit strange regarding the reception of this album. For anyone who doesn't like the album, while the arrangement might be off-putting, it's pairing it with the lyrical content that takes it a bridge too far. It's an odd thing to talk about because it's spirituality mixed with pseudo-science in a way that's generally pretty female coded, and will have men loudly proclaiming superiority over anyone duped by it. "Mood Ring" turns it all up to eleven. Saluting the sun, meditation, astrology, crystal collecting. The song is called "Mood Ring" after all. Even if it's a bit of an exaggerated joke, it's just a reminder that adult Lorde is distracted by snake oil.

At the heart of it though, I've never been able to get caught up in this because when a melody clicks into place, it can disrupt your judgement. The whole thing is hooks upon hooks, and I think Lorde's breathy delivery of the song's chorus is a fresh side of her that really works. Just a really strong single and I'm not surprised it managed to get some attention.

#322. Tkay Maidza - Switch Lanes (#100, 2014)

37th of 2014

Voting for the triple j Hottest 100 of 2014 kicked off on December 15th, 2014. I decided to try and count up all the votes I could see on Instagram manually. Just an utterly laborious ordeal but I truly had nothing better to do over the summer. As a bonus, it gives me otherwise unsearchable answers to questions about some of my lesser known favourites, there's one tidbit I want to share in the future to add to what I suspect will be a fairly long entry when I get to it (longer than this one, I fear). I also shared my findings regularly on Twitter at the time, which gained me some followers, a couple whom I still interact with from time to time. Something maybe obvious in hindsight you learn is just what the pace of voting is like. New votes come in every day for sure, but it's the first day, and the last day where they really come in. That's the point in time when I'm not physically capable of keeping up with the load, but it's especially the last day that does it. Things changed for me just a little bit on January 13th, 2015.

You probably know the basic story, but in 2015, BuzzFeed published an article written by Mark Di Stefano titled 'Why Isn't Everyone Voting For "Shake It Off" In The Hottest 100?'. When I call it an article, it might be more accurate to say that it's a series of GIFs and images with single sentences captioning them. I get what this is for and I'm not trying to disparage it (I also generally quite like what Di Stefano does nowadays and generally agree with a lot of his opinions). I just want to make it clear that the monumental grenade that set off an absolutely heated bit of discourse that still ripples through today, has considerably less words than this entry does so far. To summarise it to be even more brief, it's an article that suggests triple j's snubbing of Taylor Swift from the voting list is an injustice, but one that can be fixed due to the poll's write-in function. The final line says 'Let's teach those music snobs a lesson. Get around #Tay4Hottest100.'. It's clearly a bit of fun, but it started to take off and get a serious push from there. Voting was 5 days away from closing and a new horse had entered the race with some serious consideration that it might disrupt the institution. People genuinely thought Taylor Swift might win the whole thing. We're talking $10,000 being put on the line on Sportsbet (to skip ahead, it was refunded).

I noticed this pretty immediately one night. Up until this point, I had seen 5 votes for "Shake It Off", not too bad for a write-in, but far shy of the roughly 500 of the frontrunners. Votes for it suddenly swept the count. I actually had trouble counting it because I had a self-imposed rule for consistency to only use a single hashtag in my search, meaning that anyone who used Buzzfeed's tag and only that one would fall outside of my range. So while there were a lot of votes for the song, I only counted enough to have it land at #106, about a quarter of the posts I should have been seeing. If it was just about 100 extra votes for Taylor Swift I saw, this wouldn't really be any issue to write home about, but my main observation was just a huge sweep of posts left, right & centre for days. If you've ever felt inundated with discourse, let me make it clear that I was fully in the trenches for this one, as I subjected myself to every pro-Taylor Swift post, and ever anti-Taylor Swift post, as well as a whole lot of people who didn't necessarily comment on it, but probably were reminded to vote due to all the buzz(feed). As someone who generally liked the song and album at the time, it made me grow very mad at it all for consuming my day. There probably was a lesson to be learnt from it all, but when all you see is rows of people mocking you for your interest in music, it's hard to take it in.

Do I think that triple j had an elitism problem? Potentially, but not anymore than most other radio stations (everyone has some kind of 'other' group that they can toss aside to feel better about themselves), and not really by the 2010s. To me, it's pretty clear that everyone fosters a certain audience and then caters to that. triple j will occasionally play music that's arguably just as pop as Taylor Swift, the same way another station might arguably play an artist that's as indie as Chet Faker. It doesn't have to be a big gotcha to point this out, and it doesn't have to be acted upon. Music isn't a competition, if you think it is and you're trying to pull a fast one on everyone else by proving they're doing it wrong, then you're probably losing that one. At the end of the day, Taylor Swift doesn't need triple j, and triple j doesn't need Taylor Swift. The available variety is what's great about music.

This is not the nuanced discussion I was really seeing. To me, it felt like a long bubbling sense of contempt to the triple j crowd. A sorely awaited point of attack to a station and audience that have been flexing their superior influence on music. The way one station had complete control over festival line ups, ARIA Award distribution, and could single-handedly make a hit. I'll admit it was a hyperfixation of mine that I probably drove to an irritating degree and I'd do it differently if I had a second chance. Nevertheless, here was the opportunity. triple j were obligated to follow the results of their beloved annual poll, even if they went against the original intentions. Just a superb opportunity to make all those hipsters mad.

Except it didn't really happen. In the days leading up to the countdown, triple j had declined to make any comments on the campaign (though something about it did air on the station, another entry, another day), either through neutrality or not wanting to stoke the flames by acknowledging it. The silence was broken at the top of the countdown broadcast on Australia Day by Lewis McKirdy, who revealed that Taylor Swift won't be on the list, and that the reasons why can be found on triple j's novelty website they whipped up, triplejfeed.com (it immediately crashed but was saved by the Internet Archive). In BuzzFeed fashion, triple j lists 8 reasons why the song was not included in the list. I want to stress that there are multiple because after all of this has happened, every discussion I ever see about this will take a simplified conclusion to this all. This idea that KFC singlehandedly spoiled the campaign. They ran a frivolous ad campaign on the back of the hashtag asking people for their favourite Taylor Swift song for a chance at a $19.89 discount. One promoted Facebook post and she's out just as easily as she was in, even if it likely barely moved the needle on the campaign. I've never subscribed to this idea. While it is one of the things mentioned on the webpage, it feels more like a scapegoat, one that didn't change any minds internally. To me, the more telling part of the article is all the different ways they talk about trolling the poll. Ever since this happened, triple j's How To Vote page has always included a section where they clarify they want genuine votes from genuine listeners, and that 'any campaign that undermines the Hottest 100 may result in that artist or song being disqualified'. With that in mind, I'm certain that a future instance of this would be possible (in fact you can draw comparison 10 years later to Sabrina Carpenter landing in the top 200 with "Espresso"), but it was the whole smug 'we're better than them, let's ruin their day' angle to the campaign that soured it all.

One other point that I want to focus on is one that I don't think had much of a leg to stand on, but is nonetheless very important. They highlight that if Taylor Swift were included in the countdown, it'd be bad luck for rising Adelaide MC Tkay Maidza whose debut appearance at #100 with "Switch Lanes" would be demoted to #101. They included the hashtag #Tkay4Hottest100 which I greatly enjoyed. This isolated example is the heart of why I felt so strongly about the whole thing. To me, the Hottest 100 was a wonderful ecosystem that allowed bands and artists that don't really get much of a foothold anywhere to thrive. My favourite part of the countdown was often the lower end, where you're treated to a menagerie of songs you've been hearing on the radio all year and get that delightful feeling of 'Oh cool, a lot of people also heard that song and liked it'. That's par the course for a radio station but have you ever turned on a radio, heard a song, and thought about how tens of thousands of other people are also hearing the song right now? It's all so distant, but this countdown puts it in front of you. Part of why I run this blog at all is because I look through these lists and look at all the interesting and occasionally unusual entries that on some level are given the same credibility as the extremely popular ones. Pretty soon, this whole thing is going to just be a series of gushes as we dive into the music that's especially important to me.

I'll admit that sometimes the higher profile that artists like Taylor Swift can provide can also serve a positive purpose through attention by association, I'd rather let the station themselves control how they dole that out. It runs the risk of destroying the credibility of it all and wrecking it for everyone. I'll admit it's amusing in hindsight that one of the joke campaign ideas that triple j mentions on the webpage is one where everyone votes for Rebecca Black's comeback single, an artist who's been getting increasingly more airplay on the station since then. Taylor Swift's "1989" really is a turning point for poptimism in general. I think about this in tandem with Pitchfork's End of Year albums list including it despite the website never reviewing it in the first place (because the list was a staff aggregate and there were enough Swifties there despite the site's disposition). It never felt weird that they weren't reviewing her music, but now it'd be mighty weird if they didn't. It's those artists like Tkay Maidza though, that's what triple j is about to me. Artists that this government funded station exists to propagate, who would otherwise be carelessly tossed aside.

With that in mind, let's look at it finally. This is a very young Tkay Maidza who had previously released one single, her odd, somewhat novelty song "Brontosaurus" which achieved minor notoriety (it actually made the ARIA Chart for a week), but couldn't quite crack the Hottest 100. Actually there was another single in-between in 2014, the irresistible "U-Huh" that properly put her on my radar. That also missed the Hottest 100 so it was just this song that started a brief hit streak. This wasn't quite the same hit for me but I did like it enough to purchase it, amusingly just a week before the Hottest 100. Normally I spend the day simultaneously collecting the list, so it's a funny twist to pre-empt the first song like that.

"Switch Lanes" is still a fun song. If Tkay's earlier singles were loud and obnoxious, this one dials it back a bit. A cute little instrumental on the hook, and some fun crowd vocals near the end that sound like late '80s dance music. I should probably point out that Paces is sometimes included in the metadata as a producer, and it's a worthwhile acknowledgement because everything about the production elevates this. I especially like the drums. Otherwise it's still Tkay's show, and she's still running it as one of the most enjoyable rappers going around. This is just an early proof of concept.

#321. Ball Park Music - Cherub (#4, 2020)

24th of 2020

This feels oddly appropriate to me. In the 2014 countdown, Tkay Maidza was immediately followed by Ball Park Music (#421). We're 100 spots off it being the same song, but they're nonetheless here to complete the tradition. I can't promise a Bombay Bicycle Club song next week unfortunately, that ship has sailed (#778). In any case, we're trading Ball Park Music's lowest ever Hottest 100 finish, to their highest one. Me, I'm just excited to finally close all those internet tabs I opened for the last one.

Is this the big one though? That's hard to say. I don't think it's actually their most popular song, and while I might want to say that it most efficiently built up an audience in time for the vote, that doesn't feel true to me either. All I can take from it is that it's the song that most readily capitalised on the band's ascended performance. They went from regular middle carders to the main event, and with that arrived the mighty peak of "Cherub". They'd get another top 10 finisher 2 years later (#568), which makes this one feel a little less notable. More than anything, it reinforces the idea that we're entrenched in the era where voting for the band is greatly prioritised. Not in the traditional sense where all their run of the mill singles get a chance, but the modern, laser focused one. Let's all agree on which song we want to vote for and pool our collective numbers together. It's something I find can infect my own way of thinking though I haven't really acted upon it. Maybe if your loyalty is strong in the first place, it's easier to make the leap, but I don't want to vote for the more popular song I only kinda like, unsubscribe from that.

What makes it all the more unusual is that "Cherub" is the 3rd single from Ball Park Music's self-titled album. The lead single, "Spark Up!" fell way short of making it in, but this lengthy dirge just shot ahead of the pack, who could've possibly predicted that? Well, I might have done something like that. I'm not sure I'd have pinned it for this kind of success, but this was the first Ball Park Music song in a long while that I heard once and immediately got on board.

I think it's something that's difficult to pull off. When you make a song that starts softly but builds to a monster climax, you've potentially got two tasks to consider. Firstly it has to justifiably stand out. Be the kind of thing that gets the listener taken aback by something they weren't ready for. After that, it just needs to be something that retains its charm on subsequent listens. It's not always easy to do. In fact the whole song was such an unusual departure that the band were hesitant to even release it. They're the fun, sunny band from Brisbane, how can you be certain anyone was here for this? Evidently, it caught on.

I'm hesitant to commit to it having succeeded on both tasks. The first one, I'll give it without issues, but I find it hard to re-capture that spark 6 years on. It's certainly close to the mark, but I think if I was still fully under the spell then we'd be a lot higher on the list as I write this. I want to give it bonus points for reminding me what a cherub is, but I never quite manage to recall that fast enough in trivia settings. Just think of that smiling face on the artwork, could it be any more angelic?

#330-#326

#330. Gang of Youths - the angel of 8th ave. (#6, 2021)

27th of 2021

I get unnecessarily bothered about the way chart positions are wielded to make an argument. Even when I was incredibly uninformed about it all, I could figure out the shortcomings of shorthand. You inevitably come into contact with a song that doesn't chart very high, but hangs around for a while. Something will come along in this time frame and chart just a little bit higher, only to bomb out as a brief curiosity. No one should think the latter is the bigger hit, but as chart positions become our future reference point, it ends up favouring the ones that didn't necessarily earn it.

When it comes to Gang of Youths, if you're trying to determine what their biggest hit is, you've probably got 4 options. There's "Achilles Come Down", which is by a wide margin their most streamed song, despite being 7 minutes long and not a single. Ponder on the idea that some might only know them for that song. The other songs you could choose include the one that got them the highest in the Hottest 100 and has some pretty well rounded stats without complete domination. Then there's that dark horse, the one that might be lesser known, but evokes a lot of passion and has proven to poll very well in future triple j festivities. Alternatively, if none of those float your boat, have you considered "the angel of 8th ave."? It's their highest charting single in Australia. It peaked at #48 on the week it was released, just one place higher than the band's only other ARIA Chart entry (which got there the week after the 2017 Hottest 100). Sure, it doesn't really have the cultural penetration of those other songs, but by an arbitrary metric, it got just a little bit closer to the top of the charts than any other Gang of Youths song probably ever will. That's why all of it is a bit silly. I should be completely fair to this song and stipulate that for the week it charted in question, it was sitting below almost the entire track listing for Olivia Rodrigo's "SOUR", meaning that there's every possibility it could have snuck into the top 40 on a less competitive week.

In saying all of this, I did tend to get interested in these kinds of hits. The scenario is that an artist has a particularly good year, one that allows them to emerge as a potential next big thing, and accrues them some steady fanbase growth. When the next album cycle comes along in a couple of years, we get to see all the fruits of that labour begin to ripen at the same time. Possibly they're an artist who never charted before, or maybe they did under unlikely circumstances, but what it usually can mean is that the charts are about to be rocked by something that doesn't necessarily belong. Often times, the charts are very rigid, and dictated by dominant trends, so it can be especially interesting to challenge that. In the case of Gang of Youths, it's thinking about the late 2010s and early 2020s, where you ask yourself just what it would add up to if you managed to build up the most popular contemporary rock band in the country, one that most people seem to like. They might stick out like a sore thumb, but numbers are numbers, and there's a small space set out for them. In hindsight, this might end up being one of the last of its kind, at least for an Australian artist (Linkin Park have done something similar in recent years, even had a UK top 5 hit). The shift from sales to streaming makes it harder to notice those small but passionate fanbases, so mass appeal and/or intrigue is a necessary component once again.

It's a little funny to say all this about "the angel of 8th ave.", which is not exactly a challenging song as much as it just isn't really a conventional pop song. All the emotional loft you come to expect from Gang of Youths is here, but it just isn't something you'd think the kids are gonna sing along to, far too wordy. In case you're wondering what the title means, it's referring to Dave's wife. I'm fond of the anonymous Genius annotation that explains that when Dave calls her 'the goddamn greatest thing that Laney ever made', he means that she's better than Michael Jordan, who went to the same school as her. I liken it to a bit of wordplay. Gang of Youths reside in London now, specifically around The Angel, Islington, which is mentioned in the previous line. It only stood out to me because once when I was...maybe 8 years old, I was playing UK Monopoly on a very old computer, and that particular light blue property always stood out to me, for its cumbersome name. For a long time I thought it was a very strange coincidence that only mattered to me, that Dave used both of those words in quick succession in the song.

Something that's worth considering when you think about the relative successes of these last two Gang of Youths albums is what Dave said about this song going into it. Specifically that this song is probably the only song on "angel in realtime." that sounds like their old music. I appreciate that artists don't want to stagnate, and that it's better to give an advance warning for something like that, but I can't help but think of the huge fanbase they had built up in the years leading up to this, in it for the exact brand of rock they were putting out. How many would feel betrayed, and how many would jump ship? The stats say quite a few, though it's very difficult to avoid that no matter what happens. I don't know if it's necessarily true of the album anyway, but I can see where he's coming from. "the angel of 8th ave." does in many ways feel like a concession to fans of their previous work. It's new, but familiar. I don't think I'd ever call it one of the best songs on their previous album if it was on there, but it could pretty easily slot in there. If nothing else, I'm glad that Dave is able to sing about someone who's important to him and is still alive. Listening to Gang of Youths can make it feel like it's nothing but tragedy, but then if you're able, why wouldn't you write about these things?

#329. The Avalanches (feat Rivers Cuomo & Pink Siifu) - Running Red Lights (#35, 2020)

27th of 2020

One of my favourite unusual chart stats is a record held by Weezer. They have reached the ARIA top 100 with 7 different singles in their career, spanning from "Undone - The Sweater Song" in 1994, to "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To" in 2009. Not one of these songs, not even "Buddy Holly", not even "Island in the Sun" managed to crack the top 50. No other artist has ever charted so many times without reaching the upper half. Actually, Tame Impala briefly did it. There was a brief window of time in which the project had managed 10 chart entries, but then one of those songs won a big triple j poll and belatedly redeemed itself. If you don't like that re-writing of history, well two more Tame Impala songs have made the top 50 now, so it's back to Weezer. Recent new chart rules have increased the possibility of songs landing within that range in the future, but it's so hard to ever imagine Weezer's record being matched because it's just so hard to get the ball rolling. I should also note that Rivers Cuomo actually has two top 50 hits on his own, or rather, singing hooks for B.o.B & Simple Plan, so cross out the second or sometimes third guy from the left I guess.

What does one make of the career of Weezer anyway. By all rights they probably should have flamed out decades ago, unable to recover from the changing tides of popular music and the initial uneasy reception to "Pinkerton". They seemed to pull out a lucky sort-of crossover hit every now and then when they needed it, and now they're just too established to ever really disappear. So few of their peers have stuck around quite as long. This is all the while being a band that is scarcely taken seriously, constantly ridiculed for their penchant of releasing absolute abomination albums that have never set the charts alight either (their highest charting album got to #11 in Australia). More often than not, they just seem like a joke, where the punchline is either the riff to "Buddy Holly", or some remark about Rivers Cuomo's very open fetish for Asian women. It's been a very long time since I've been able to consider them a band that I can take seriously.

They persist though, and here's Rivers Cuomo guesting for The Avalanches and making the Hottest 100 again, 26 years after the first time he did it. That's a near unrivalled longevity that dwarfs pretty much anything other than a couple of fluke Kylie Minogue entries 3 decades apart. The Avalanches also have entries that span 3 decades. It's pretty impressive...I guess.

"Running Red Lights" comes from The Avalanches' 3rd album, "We Will Always Love You". It came out 5 years after "Wildflower" which is relatively brisk pace by their standards. Clearly they'd forgotten how to build up anticipation. It was harder to get caught up in the hype. I liked a lot of the stuff on the album, but haven't really gone back to it, not in the same way the first two albums have a hold on me. Unlike those albums, this one is just loaded with featured artists and it's harder to sniff out what could be perceived as core Avalanches sound. It's almost as if they worked especially hard to make it not sound like what they'd done before.

I mean, I'm not sure there's anything about "Running Red Lights" that makes me think of The Avalanches. Maybe the intro, but it all feels dwarfed behind what ends up being one of their poppiest songs to date. Very funny how The Avalanches & Rivers Cuomo are relying on each other to remain relevant with a new generation. Pink Siifu might have a case but his contribution is brief and he doesn't strike me as an attention-grabbing feature. No, more than anything, this song reminds me of DC Talk, the Christian rap-rock group from the '90s. All my life I've lived in bewilderment that another kid at after school care used to sing the phrase 'Jesus is still alright with me'. I found the song and was still confused, but now I've learnt that it's part of a legendary TV commercial for the Christian Television Association that was on the air for years and years. Hook it up if you ever feel like singing something else over the bridge of this song. You could also take the Doobie Brothers version, because Michael McDonald will always be an improvement on anyone else. I guess I could also mention that there's an age old joke that every visual novel ever written will find a way to mention Schrödinger's cat. This doesn't necessarily hold up to scrutiny (although since I wrote this entry, I've started reading another one that's already mentioned it), but I just really want to share a moderately high effort meme I made 5 years ago, again.

#328. Thelma Plum - Clumsy Love (#79, 2018)

35th of 2018

An exciting upgrade of the stakes for this one, because this song reminds me of not one, but two other completely unrelated songs. I hinted at one of these about a year ago if you can remember. The instant this starts, there's an odd familiarity with benny blanco's "Eastside" (#888). They diverge a bit after that. Thelma Plum gets to the chorus quite a bit faster, even though her's is the longer song, but the intros have been throwing me for a loop for years. The other one is a little closer to my heart. Thelma Plum repeats the phrase 'Is she ever gonna go away?' at least 10 times in this song. She's got some competition in this regard, as a decade before this came out, Metric were asking 'Is it ever gonna be enough?'. Same cadence, mostly the same placement in the song (post chorus & extended outro), while both songs are very high tempo and close to a match (Metric run 180 BPM, this is at 170 BPM). Just some funny things to listen out for here, and another chance for me to confess my undying adoration of Metric.

Anyway, remember Thelma Plum? This is the first time I've covered one of her own songs in over 200 entries, just shy of half a year. A pretty long time ago, but when this popped into the Hottest 100, it was her first lead artist entry in 4 whole years, the equivalent of 400 entries here. Suddenly that's the big stop gap, and it makes this feel like a kick-starter to a second wave in her career, one that'd take far greater heights than the first one.

Maybe it's an unassuming kind of song to do this, but I posit that it has the pedigree. Once upon a time my random asides to Metric promised some degree of relevance to the greater picture. They've only ever had one Hottest 100 entry but you might have forgotten in 2009 they had 4 songs in the top 200. "Gold Gun Girls" is one of those at #132. There's another turn of the decade reference I can make, because "Clumsy Love" is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. It's the first song she made alongside Alex Burnett of Sparkadia fame, and he's been all over her discography since then. It's almost the majority of his Hottest 100 entries at this point, as he's still picked up a handful of others along the way. His discography is just filled with songs that you might have thought had a chance but didn't quite get there. I wouldn't say I entirely see the throughline to this, but then he's put out some very eclectic music post-Sparkadia so there may be no limits.

#327. Sofi Tukker - Purple Hat (#14, 2019)

23rd of 2019

I like to root for the underdogs. It's easy to get invested in them because if they've never won anything, breaking through can be a monumental occasion. For all intents and purposes, it's a big part of what makes Fremantle my second football team to root for. It helps that I live in their neck of the woods, but I just can't help but feel bad for them. The oldest club in the AFL to have never won a premiership, blowing their one shot at it a decade ago when their best player forgot how to kick straight on the big day. They're currently on a new wave of potential with a new and exciting squad that just have to get over the hurdle of every other team that's equally primed.

They're just such a goofy team that's easy to be ridiculed. They're the little brother to one of the most popular and successful teams in the country, and rather than have a regular animal nickname like most teams, they're dock workers. They even stray away from the usual colour combinations because they're the one and only purple team. It's just as goofy but I wonder if they could pay to rebrand themselves as rockers. When I go to their games, that's the vibe I get. There's a dude who plays AC/DC on the roof of the stadium at the start of their games, and at three quarter time, there's a Tame Impala hype anthem, which he wrote because he's literally their number one fan. They also usually play "Purple Hat" before the games start. Probably a no brainer there, as you don't get too many purple themed hit songs to come along. You take these opportunities when they come. I don't know how appreciated it is, but it's a fun part of the experience.

What we've got here is a pretty natural evolution on "Drinkee" (#363). It takes some similar ideas from it but re-arranges them into something that feels more accessible. When I go back to "Drinkee", I always forget that it doesn't have a guitar riff quite like this one. Everything else comes along with a big ramming thud, but it's nonetheless a winning formula. It never has to be too deep, just a thorough exploration of how many times you can change up the percussion, but stay consistently dancing on the people.

#326. Bring Me The Horizon - Parasite Eve (#38, 2020)

26th of 2020

A couple of years ago when I was in London, I got taken to a shop for comic books, manga, and assorted items of a similar fancy. I didn't buy anything when I was there, but I had a strange distracting feeling in my head at the time. Namely that there was a non-zero chance that a member of Bring Me The Horizon could possibly frequent the place. Maybe they might have actually been there at the time, it's not like I'd be able to recognise most of them. They've never been shy about their interest in weeb culture. Here's another one of their songs named after a Japanese video game and/or novel of the same name. I'm leaning towards the game because in an interview Oli Sykes gave about 18 months before the song came out, he said he'd like to spend his last day alive conquering a speedrun of Parasite Eve on the highest difficulty. Now I'm going to spend the rest of the day wondering if he's ever watched one of my speedruns.

I wish I had anything to say about Parasite Eve, the video game. It's just never really been in my periphery. Understandable in the first place because it came out long before I was ever buying my own games, on a console I didn't own, and honestly I don't play many RPGs. It feels like one of the widest mediums to sink into because of the usual time demands, and I'm reminded of this whenever I play video game music quizzes and I have a get rate of around 5%. Just an absolutely impractical number of things to choose from, and many of us are just very picky eaters.

The interview in 2019 is important here because this is one of the many early pandemic hits in their truest form, but obviously the idea was on his mind before it possibly could have been. There's a pretty quick turnaround for this, so it's possible that the main skeleton of the song was around, but the lyrics were purpose-built for the moment. As tends to be the case, it's not remotely subtle. You've got a fake sneeze, lyrics about 'washing hands', 'pandemic', and a general feeling that we're presently going through something. I can only conclude that Oli Sykes is again like me, seeing what's in front of him and finding a way to insert his hyperfixation. If I had a platform I'd totally try to get more people to play Stephen's Sausage Roll.

If there is one thing that makes this song stick out in its era, it's the length. This is not a quickly cobbled together song because it's nearly 5 minutes long. Much of that is taken up by quiet interludes, so it probably won't feel that way, but it's a lot to put into it. I can call back to "the man himself" (#494) here because this is the other song that uses the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir, though Bring Me The Horizon did it first, and managed to outwit, outplay, and outlast Gang of Youths given theirs landed a little bit higher. As for me, while I do find this to be a bit scattershot in composition, it does stand up as one of their more immediate singles. A big hook that just cuts through can do a lot on its own.

#335-#331

 #335. Kid Cudi (feat Pharrell Williams) - Surfin' (#40, 2016)

35th of 2016

Sometime in 2008 I became aware of the song "Day 'N' Nite". I'm not exactly sure when, because triple j never seemed to include it on their online hitlist (or if they did, they included it for such a short period of time that I couldn't manage to spot it just now on the Wayback Machine). It was on the Hottest 100 voting list in 2008 though, at least some proof that it came up. I won't pretend that I paid close attention to it myself, just that when we jumped forward to 2009 and the song became a global hit, it felt unusual to see this second wind. Depending on who you ask, it was more popular through the remix by Crookers (which also was released in early 2008), but that's becoming more of a footnote over time. Kid Cudi's moody rap might have come out too early for its own good, but now it feels like a prototype of rap in the 2010s, one that hasn't aged a day.

As is often the case, it put Kid Cudi in an unusual position as a rapper with mainstream appeal who wasn't necessarily playing to those expectations. Lupe Fiasco is always my primary example of this conundrum. He's obviously very gifted at playing to both sides of the fence, but not always at the same time, which has resulted in a very uneven discography. Like when the next thing you hear on "Tetsuo & Youth" after all 9 minutes of "Mural" is a Guy Sebastian hook, who's it being made for? Kid Cudi fell into a different trap. After years of being mostly adjacent to the top 40 and occasionally troubling it, he started getting really weird with it. I remember being put off by 2013's "Indicud", partly because of when it came out and the unrelenting copium I was huffing at the time regarding triple j's feature album selection, but also because it betrayed his initial ideas and just felt a little too strange. I haven't forgotten about that weird sampling of Father John Misty's "Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings".

Things took an even sharper dive 2 years later on "Speedin' Bullet 2 Heaven", an album I can't bring myself to go back to, but one that brought about a weird fascination at the time. Maybe it'll get its cultural reassessment over time, but its combination of loud rock riffs and Beavis & Butthead interludes left me a little cold. If there's something that should be looked into, it's the downward spiral of the lyrics, that's only gotten clearer further into his career. I would like to touch on that as well, but it's probably better served for a later entry (where Kid Cudi will not be credited, maybe you know the one).

That might be enough to derail a career, but Kid Cudi kept going along as if nothing happened. About a year later he had another album, "Passion, Pain & Demon Slayin'", which steers a bit closer to what everyone wants to hear, but not necessarily languishing in the past either. "Baptized In Fire" is a very early Travis Scott collaboration that's another stone on the foundation of his future dominance. What we're concerned with here is "Surfin'", a song that for whatever reason, charted in Australia's top 100 and nowhere else. Not the last time an American rapper will inexplicably do this and also be rewarded with a pretty good Hottest 100 position, in 2016 even.

My only guess is that triple j had enough reach that people actually heard the song over here and that made the important difference. Recent projects had probably taken Kid Cudi off Santa's Nice list for the radio, so it was probably harder to get him on there, even though the song is extremely radio friendly. By the time the album came out, the song was tucked away at the back of the album with a new 6 minute version that drags on a bit, so it's just a big hit that never got a chance outside of this market. That album version does have one other notable thing about it though, which is that Pharrell can actually be heard on it. If you'd never heard it, you might be scratching your head at how producing the song warrants a feature credit here, or wondering if you just missed him. This is also the first time Pharrell has come up at all here, and there'll be a decent amount of that, even without some of his biggest hits getting a guernsey. For now though, I was riding this wave. Just extremely good vibes here from the bright brass and lively percussion.

#334. Urthboy (feat Bertie Blackman) - Long Loud Hours (#33, 2015)

41st of 2015

It's so mundane that I haven't seen anyone ever comment on it, but I have a deep fascination with the ending of "My People" by The Presets. During the final chorus of the song, Julian changes the lyrics ever so slightly, to include the line 'party time, all of my people'. Ironically, for me it's always the clear sign that this seemingly unstoppable song is about to end. I'm just realising tonight there might be a good reason for me paying attention to that. A handful of months before "My People" was released, Urthboy was on the radio with "We Get Around". Another song that feels like an unending chorus, but also a song that does the same trick, as Urthboy decides just once to say that 'we stay around', leading into the song's bridge & coda.

Yes, this was another regularly scheduled 2007 nostalgia moment, which usually isn't for a good reason, but in this case I think it's fitting. Urthboy teamed up with Bertie Blackman and got into the Hottest 100, and on the ARIA Chart in the year 2015. It's such a strange moment in time to witness, and it's not as if it was done by playing the game. It was done with this odd-sounding song about the 1999 prison escape by helicopter by Australian criminal John Kilick. All around, an interesting story, and one that enough people bought into.

If you're hearing about all of this for the first time, you might also want to know that Urthboy is an Australian rapper, best known as a member of The Herd, a group that might have rivalled Bliss n Eso as the second biggest rap group in the country for a while. I'd say he's the leader, but no one in The Herd controls The Herd, that's why it's unpredictable. They were pretty early in the game though, and even if they weren't initially on the most serious of terms (ah, scallops), they were one of the more provocative acts of the late Howard era. In 2003 they were taking the whole country to task for abiding Johnny on "77%", and 5 years later they were dancing on his political grave with "The King is Dead". It would be easy to deride the latter as just courting an easy political stance, but I think it needs all the more credit for the sheer volume of quotable bars they pass around. How can you come back when you're being rhymingly called out for losing your own 33 year old seat?

The rise of Bertie Blackman comes a little bit later. She had her career very much on the fringe initially, with pop rock that wasn't quite finding its audience. In 2009 she played around a bit more with synths and saw unlikely dividends with what else was going on, that album "Secrets and Lies" easily being her most successful. It feels like the kind of album that I now discover was her first major label release but that didn't come until the next album. Her most recent album was released in 2014 and she's only occasionally done guest appearances since then. She's done arguably more important things since then like getting married and having a child. If she does decide to make music again, I'd probably be on board.

When this song did come out, it heralded a surprising late career surge for Urthboy. In the era when you might have expected him to have higher charting albums, he wasn't even cracking the top 50, but this one, with the cumbersome title "The Past Beats Inside Me Like A Second Heartbeat" managed to crack the top 10. I bought it, it's a good album. Especially fond of the pseudo-title track, which features an artist that will later appear on this list. "Long Loud Hours" is a good one too. What's surprising about it is that it tells the story mostly from the perspective of John Killick's girlfriend Lucy Dudko, the one who hijacked a helicopter to bust him out of jail. In that sense, this performance is largely gender-flipped as it's Urthboy providing this side, and you only hear John's side when Beato joins for the chorus. Both of these people are still alive but I haven't been able to find any response to the song from either of them. Killick did say in an interview in 2025 that he's tired of the story, so maybe he doesn't take much interest in there being a minor hit song about it.

#333. Drake (feat 21 Savage) - Jimmy Cooks) (#76, 2022)

28th of 2022

A little while back, I had something very strange happen to me. I received a DM on Twitch from someone I didn't know, who criticised my way of playing Tetris, I presume having just encountered me a few times and looking up my name from that. In all fairness, they were correct in part, that I'd been relying on a lazy method to begin my games, one that's very easy to spot and ridicule. My defence is that it's only something I do for about a minute or so, and afterwards I play normally (in case you're wondering, it's a technique called '4-widing', where you build exclusively on the 6 leftmost or rightmost columns, save for 3 tiles at the bottom. If you build all the way to the top, you just about get carte blanche to very lazily score a 15+ combo as you can very slowly drop pieces down the hole you create. Competitively, it's very difficult to fend off without adequate preparation). My rationale is that by giving myself a head start, it allows me to fend off the people who will continue to do it for an entire match, perhaps even warding them off their boring playstyle as it's not as infallible as they might think.

I was probably dealing with a troll but I decided to explain my perspective in a reasonable way. I left out the part that calls out what they must be doing if they've noticed this from me. I eventually got another reply mocking me further except I was blocked from responding again. It's not anything I'm too mad about, but it got me thinking about how unwinnable the situation is. Either I continue doing it and they get to mentally mock me should they continue to encounter me, or I stop doing it and they get the satisfaction of getting into my head. Once you've smugly decided you're above someone, it's very difficult to come down from that, whether you're right or not.

There's a messy allegory here, and it relates to the online response I saw to Drake's musical output in 2022. You could extend it further back than that, but 2022 was the year we got some serious data that proved the worst tendencies of both Drake and his fanbase. At this point, he's been on a decade-long streak of diminishing returns. Regardless of how successful he was, the general consensus of 'This is the worst album he's ever released' was coming through like clockwork. Drake was overexposed and washed, incapable of trying new things and just relying on his successful brand to stay afloat.

This changed a little bit in 2022, when Drake released the album "Honestly, Nevermind". In theory, it's a long awaited sea change. Drake steps away from reliable trap beats and makes an honest to God house record. There's just one problem; it's not well liked at all and it tanks. Every Drake album has gone at least triple Platinum in America, except this one that so far has just limped over to Platinum after a year on sale. Any further certifications it gets will likely be carried on the back of this one song. You know, the one song on the album that isn't house music, it's just that reliable team up with 21 Savage to make the trap music we expect from both of them. Of course, five months later they'd course correct with "Her Loss" and everything would be back to normal.

What I saw from all of this was the most tedious form of win-win smug commentary. That same kind where it's always anchored around disdain for Drake and his fans, and so it's just a matter of choosing the right reading from it to justify it. Here, it was mostly about the way his fans responded to the album, who are so narrowminded in their interest that as soon as he tries something different, they outright reject it. The success of "Jimmy Cooks" is proof positive that they're unadventurous and scared. Never mind the fact that a single collaboration on the album that sounds a bit different to the rest is always going to stand out. Never mind the fact that the execution on both might differ a tad, you've got more ammunition to say you're objectively better at listening to music than Drake fans, like you needed any proof.

Am I coming in the defence of "Honestly, Nevermind"? Not really, I've not been that interested to go back to it. I don't think it's a complete failure though, and I think if you want a trimmed down experience, "Falling Back", "Sticky" and "Massive" makes for a nice little pocket that shows a good bit of range within Drake's bounds of the genre. "Falling Back" was seemingly supposed to be the single from the album (it has a music video), but the quirks of the ARIA Chart that seemed to be linked to digital sales performance meant that it never even charted in Australia. It was probably supposed to be a top 10 hit. Our charts are known to be a little odd sometimes.

If I also choose to look at "Jimmy Cooks" on its own merits, I think it's a good one too. Drake's in his element obviously and fires off a verse that isn't necessarily memorable (the beat is doing a lot of heavy lifting here), but glides along nicely. It's yet another song for him that feels like multiple songs stitched together (possibly a Travis Scott song has a lot to answer for), but it does provide us with possibly the funniest start to a 21 Savage verse ever. The same kind of wingman energy we got way back when Jay-Z was summoned by his own name on the remix of "Diamonds From Sierra Leone". Just recently 21 Savage is facing tough competition from Stormzy on who has the best delivery of that one word. Beyond that though, he's still the heart of this song. Absolutely no reservations about his performance, it's the kind of thing I wish Drake would take more to heart and consider emulating. At this point he just exists to have circles run around him on his own songs.

#332. Middle Kids - Stacking Chairs (#39, 2021)

28th of 2021

Once upon a time I was extremely liberal in my tendency to overplay the songs that I like. Probably the important factor here is that I built up my music library from scratch and didn't have a lot of options. It's huge now, but it used to just be a handful of CDs and single downloads, you're gonna end up listening to "One Crowded Hour" quite a lot. I think I was also very obsessed with looking at my most played stats. Even in 2007, I was jotting it down on paper so I could witness how much it changed, and I was probably deliberately acting upon that.

Fast forward to the present and it's not really something I can play around with anymore. My most played songs have been locked in place for over a decade now. My last.fm profile tells me I've listened to 87 songs at least 100 times. That number will probably still grow, given that numerous songs are just on the cusp, but they're all songs that were in from the ground floor. Everyone who came in too late for that is aware. The last song I listened to 100 times was "Warning" by Cymbals Eat Guitars, from 2014. The only song after that which is even within striking distance is "Golden To Thrive" by Samsaruh, but at the current rate, it'll be another 18 years before she gets there, and then the song will be 26 years old, not exactly improving the state of play.

Part of what's happened is that my music listening has gotten so ritualistic. I have a current playlist of songs I'm listening to at the moment, and I listen to it once a week. At best you can maybe expect to last on it for 6-7 months and then that's it. Log about 30 plays and reside in the back catalogue to only occasionally be brought back up. My most played song of 2023 got 33 plays, and has only gotten 3 more since then. This isn't anything that's very important, and it's probably for the best that I'm spreading out my music listening a bit more, but it does mean that I'm just not hearing these songs as much, and they're likely making less of an impression on me, even though it doesn't feel like it in the moment.

The weirder side effect of this is that it's often making it harder for me to listen to albums. Here's a likely sequence of events: You hear a song you like, you stick it on your playlist and come back around to it as often as that might entail. The next time it comes up, you might start thinking 'oh, there's an album, I should check that out'. I have this frustrating problem where I hesitate to take this step, because I just listened to one of the songs, and I don't really want to hear it again in quick succession. My listening habit has become an odd crutch that makes me not want to overplay any songs. Just listening to something twice in a week is a rare privilege that I'll rarely dole out.

So I just don't listen to as many albums as I used to. I keep track of it on a spreadsheet for myself and there's a huge spike after I start using Spotify that very rapidly declines after 2017, until reaching a flatline in 2023. Often times when I've been listening to albums for this blog, I'll refer to this sheet to put them in the log, and be surprised to find out that I already listened to them, just because my current mindset is one that would surely not lead to me listening to these particular albums. Middle Kids did not make the cut. I'm listening to it now, but "Today We're The Greatest" is just the 25th album from 2021 I've heard. How many people could honestly say that it'd be one of the first couple dozen albums they'd go out of their way to hear in that year? I feel like anyone who heard it, probably heard so many more.

I had a good reason to do it too. The title track of the album is a big favourite of mine. I don't know how to pitch it, but I think if you're moved by the emotional swell of Coldplay's "The Scientist", I think it might resonate for you. It's taken this moment here for me to finally take the plunge. I think the best thing it has going for it is its surprisingly deep run of singles. I'd almost heard half of the album already, even though it's very top and bottom loaded. It never really comes close to those soaring highs I craved, but if you want to see a small scale version of one of those kinds of stacked albums, maybe give it a shot.

In any case, "Stacking Chairs" has proven to be the big song to come from it. One that I blazed past initially but found a warmer reception for it once it polled and became part of my increasingly monstrous music library. While I might be craving more just because of the song that's sitting just after it, this is still a good step in that direction. Maybe it's appropriate after all that I said that we've got a song that says 'When the party's over, I'll be stacking the chairs', because they might not get to reap the celebratory reward of being a permanent fixture in my most played songs list, but it is a viral function to serve by continuing to provide new hits, because I don't exactly just want to listen to the same songs over and over again. It's not a very Middle Kids sentiment though, is it? My good authority of being a kid is that stacking the chairs at the end of assembly was a riotous occasion, one that allowed all sorts of creativity in playing around with what the laws of physics allow. Maybe they're more like Upper Middle Kids at this point so they're just bored of it all, darn teenagers.

#331. Baker Boy - Mr La Di Da Di (#51, 2018)

36th of 2018

Let's just say for example, someone could potentially have a lot of money but be unable to use their wealth to be happy. Perhaps they tell themselves and everyone else that they're happy, but deep down, they exhibit a pattern of miserable behaviour for which money is no cure. Surely no one like that really exists, but if they do, then "Mr La Di Da Di" is here to rub it in their face.

When it comes to this song, that's one of two things you can really say about it. The other is that it sounds just a little bit familiar. Perhaps fans of Kendrick Lamar, or an album that beat him to a GRAMMY Award might be able to fill in the blanks, I'm not allowed to. Maybe there's some irony to the latter, given a certain song's materialism, but that would be a crazy war for Baker Boy to start. How famous does someone have to be for a rap feud to have any spice?

I think though in all sincerity that this is just Baker Boy tipping the cap to his idols. In an interview he gave with Musicfeeds about a month after the song was released, he says Kendrick Lamar is one of his favourite contemporary rappers, and then proceeds to fanboy over him and imagine having an awkward fanboy interaction with him at Splendour In The Grass. If you're a creative of any kind, it's always going to be hard to avoid cribbing from your favourite artists, I do it all the time. "Mr La Di Da Di" is still justifiably Baker Boy's own thing. He'll always have the bilingual aspect going for him, and it's just another notch in the belt of his endless positivity, even when he's saying rich people are stupid.

#340-#336

#340. Holy Holy - Teach Me About Dying (#50, 2019)

24th of 2019

Thank you so much for putting up with this bit. We'll meet the same time next week, and the next week after that too, and the next week after that, and the next month, and then it trails off. I won't be supplying any more Holy Holy, however. What a closing statement though. This feels like it's a discarded Dishwalla lyric, just unreasonably heavy.

When Holy Holy entered their imperial phase, I took pretty quickly to this one. I don't know if it stands out for the title as much as it does for the intense pace. They just lock into it and never deviate the entire way. Nifty guitar solo near the end if you can catch it.

I really wish I had more to say about this one, but there isn't a whole lot to it. When Holy Holy made a video talking about it, they seemed more interested in talking about how the song was composed, rather than anything specific about the meaning of the song. It's actually about living, not dying, but that's about it. Even in these trying times, I won't resort to using predictive text to waffle on about nothing, I can do that myself. I once wrote a 10,000 word story that was about 95% filler, this is nothing to me.

#339. Middle Kids - Mistake (#64, 2018)

37th of 2018

It's time for the exciting reveal. You can go back to the entry for "Edge of Town" (#600) and fill in the blanks with the important context. Middle Kids are the band that made "Edge of Town". Middle Kids are the band who couldn't quite make the Hottest 100. Middle Kids are the band who got beaten to the post by a cover of their own song, and Middle Kids are the band that finally broke through on their own terms a little bit later. A huge watershed moment as the heartbreak subsides, akin to The Big O getting his premiership medal last year. Even if it's not necessarily their most shining moment, who could possibly be mad at this?

I certainly wasn't mad. I go way back with Middle Kids because I was one of those people championing "Edge of Town" while it was going slightly under the radar. One of the funniest things for me on social media is that to this day, nearly 10 years later, they still follow me on Twitter. This isn't one of those 'we follow back everyone' deals; that list of followed accounts is pretty slim and exclusive. Being one of the 360 thousand accounts Kevin Rudd follows is a bit less interesting I think. In that intervening period, I kept listening to the band. I'm surprised at just how many singles I accumulated in my music library in this time, songs I've admittedly not listened to in years. The other unsung hero of this time frame I think is "Old River", a song that runs through The Jezabels' playbook without quite reaching for the dramatic highs.

"Mistake" was another good one though. It felt like a very low ceiling kind of song at the time, maybe it still is. But while it was lost deep in the sea of being just another Middle Kids song, I think it proved to have better legs than I imagined. When I hear it now, I hear a melody that might be a little sluggish, but still manages to tug at you. If nothing else, you can also make an allegory out of what we've got here. The word 'mistake' never appears in the lyrics, but we do have a chorus that mentions 'a debt to pay back, for something you did way back'. Consider it all a soft launch for the campaign to get Middle Kids into the Hottest 100, making up for the mistake of those who didn't vote for them the first two times.

#338. Violent Soho - Viceroy (#14, 2016)

37th of 2016

I've never watched Succession. It's another one of those gaps that come about when you spend a decade or so of your life being void of pop culture, and then spend the next decade catching up more on what you should have been looking at then. Maybe someday I'll catch up and that'll be next cab on the rank. The handy thing is that I've tended to be very good at avoiding big spoilers, or they just get clouded in so much vague discourse that it swings past me. By all rights, I should have known that [character] dies at the end of [tv show] I just watched recently, but I guess it's one of those details that gets lost like that. All I really know about Succession is that it's an allegory for the real life Murdoch family and the cacophony of what's to be done when old man kicks the bucket (my reverence for "Umineko When They Cry" leads me to believe there's something of value in this). Also that the family in the show have the name Roy, an old French term for a king. It's something I wasn't able to pull up when it appeared as a Final Jeopardy clue a few years ago, and maybe I should have, given that this Violent Soho song has been staring at me for many years. It makes you think 'oh duh, that's what a viceroy is' and then realise how dumb you are for not connecting it sooner.

"Viceroy" is the best-placing song from "WACO" in the Hottest 100. In 2016, that's by a handy margin, but the lead single came out in 2015 and landed just one spot lower. Even divorced from the politics of what it means to be a leading single, and what that entails (kind of like being the first-born son?), it's hard to know which song should get the honours when it's split up like this. This one's got a narrow lead in the Spotify streaming department though. It's just so very apt to say that I don't know if this song is king, or the viceroy, or if it's just king of the shit given that the most popular Violent Soho song obviously isn't part of this conversation, and that Violent Soho aren't part of most people's conversations either.

I don't think anyone is particularly surprised with this outcome though. Even without chart positions to go by (as they are an uncommon part of the Violent Soho lifespan), rarely does a single more clearly point to itself as the obvious hit. It's the one to vote for if you don't know which Violent Soho song to vote for, as it's clearly going to be the highest one. They're in their accessible mid-tempo era, with one of those supposed 'giant f**k off choruses' (#475), the kind that can serve as both a massive singalong, and also an opportunity for the mosh pit to get going. At this point we're just filtering down the ideal Violent Soho song to the basic necessities.

#337. Peking Duk (feat SAFIA) - Take Me Over (#5, 2014)

38th of 2014

We need to talk about performative, exaggerated outrage. It's the kind where the reaction feels so overblown for its catalyst that it looks ridiculous on the outside. Like when otherwise reasonable minds seem to genuinely think that kids finding '6-7' to be funny proves the decline of society (maybe they don't actually think this, but why do they do the performance?). I know I'm supposed to be talking about "Take Me Over" by Peking Duk, but let's be honest, no one else is talking about it, even when it's put in front of them. Such is the state of the algorithmic re-shuffle of priorities, that even one of the rare few Australian artists who were able to find consistent success in the streaming era have been demoted to a footnote. That's not the whole of it though, they haven't been necessarily forgotten. The current chapter is bringing an unprecedented level of discussion, just that it isn't about Peking Duk.

In late 2025, Peking Duk performed at the AFLW Grand Final. I think it's a pretty good choice. Keeping it local but still finding a band who have numerous recognisable hit songs (possibly the most if you keep out internationally famous ones of late). It ended up how it always seems to go. They've got a stage that's too far away from anyone in the crowd, and they're not moving tickets for it either. Any hype is strictly contained within the stage, and anyone who is excited in the crowd will be outnumbered by the disinterested many who probably can't hear it very well, and just want to see their North Melbourne girls complete the undefeated season that's been on their mantle for months. I thought the performance was fine, there's not much variation that can go into it for a band like Peking Duk, and if it was in a large part pre-recorded, that wouldn't surprise me. But it's all those bored crowd shots that told the story. It's one broad gesture that affirms a very important thing for many people lately: Adam Hyde is not only a hack, but a hack that the industry is forcing down the throats of a public that rejects it.

This is a story I've unwittingly told during this countdown. You might say I proved the point by siding with the mob before it had even formed. After a few years of success, one of the guys from Peking Duk decided he wanted to be more than that, and started putting himself behind the microphone, with disastrous results. I didn't actually think he was awful, just a step down from the usual talent that Peking Duk were usually wrangling (#926).

Ever since 2021, he's taken it a step further with a full solo project, Keli Holiday. That might be a revelation to some. I've seen many comments to the effect of him only having one song, much like "The Whale" has only one frame. It's really not true, he's got over a dozen songs (actually by the time this post goes live, there'll be an album out), but in this economy of limited chips, you've got to put everything in towards the one that's knocking on the door of the charts. If there is a major difference between 2021 and now, it's that he wasn't dating Abbie Chatfield. That's a can of worms I'm not fully qualified for, but I know the short version. She finished 2nd on The Bachelor Australia, got a villain edit, and would later present herself as a feminist with progressive views that she isn't shy about sharing. The first part of it is the most important here, as when Murdoch affiliated sources need a way to tend people towards belittling certain views, they don't even need to take the mask off. They can just point people in the direction of someone whose claim to fame is being stupid and unlikeable on a TV show people watch with a degree of metaphorically looking down. This superiority is a core world view that cannot be shaken, so any time Abbie says anything, it's an excuse to smugly unravel the ball of yarn, and maybe post a laughing emoji reaction, because you've figured out that life is unfair and anyone who calls for change is a naïve fool. Some people are so far behind in a race they actually believe they're leading.

Since they started dating in 2024, Keli Holiday is now an extension of the Abbie Chatfield brand. It's not like he's an unwilling participant. You can see him in videos she posts on social media, and it's easy to believe that he's just as left leaning as she is, just less likely to build a platform about it. His biggest solo hit thus far, "Dancing2", is literally a song about falling in love with Abbie. I've said it before here, but I don't think it'd go as far as it has if not for that connection. It's given a jolt of relevance for someone who hasn't really moved the needle in a few years.

Here's where a different algorithm enters the equation and breaks everything down again. All these people who have been foaming at the mouth about the worst act in the country of late have been doing it to themselves, they have, them and everyone else. I've experienced it myself on Facebook. If you so much as engage with any topic, even just clicking to enlarge an image or to look at the comments, the algorithm will take it as a blank cheque of approval. Any post, anywhere, that brings up the same topic will come into your feed. It takes a very strong will to recognise this for what it is, but in the moment, as you see the topic come through again and again, you'll think it's being forced down your throat. It actually is, but there's no conspiracy about it, you're just a victim of your own inhibitions, falling prey to discovering the difference between what you think you want to see, and what you actually engage with. Then you sprinkle in a bit of confused misinformation that comes from the way we all get small shards of the truth instead of the whole package, and any superlative can be believed. The narrative of the industry push sounds really good when you find out Keli Holiday won an ARIA Award. It falls a little flat if you realise he won it in a Publicly Voted category, and otherwise didn't make it into the industry voted contingent. The industry is actually pushing Young Franco and Folk Bitch Trio harder, didn't you know?

I'm writing all of this in December. By the time this goes live, not only will the Keli Holiday album be out, but the Hottest 100 will have happened, and regardless of anything else that happens, "Dancing2" will be the lightning rod. Much like how people praised Billie Eilish for defeating a certain supposed evil in 2019, Olivia Dean will probably be seen as a saviour, somehow proving that a still very high finish that is not at the top of the poll is a sign of rejection. Keli Holiday could always be more popular, but it's the people who are constantly enlightening us about how they think they can smell a video of him, the people who are giving him so much free algorithmic promotion, the people who are incapable of any deeper level of introspection whatsoever. They will once again declare victory and continue to have their world view shaped by an online landscape that is profiting on their worst tendencies. Here I am now in February to say that I haven't changed a word of this entry before it goes live, but it looks like it was pretty spot on.

I'm saying all of this to turn this entry into what the Peking Duk AFLW performance is to everyone else. The performance started with "Dancing2", before leading into half a dozen Peking Duk songs. There was no thrilling nostalgia brought upon by hearing songs like "Take Me Over" for the first time in years, the way these kinds of performances tend to go. The well was tainted in the first three minutes, and so Peking Duk, by its second degree association with that annoying woman, is also tarnished. I would like to take a moment to acknowledge it on its own merits. Mr. SAFIA is an inspired choice here, a collaboration to break the internet in Canberra. Given the big profile boost they got immediately afterwards, I can't get too mad at the song carrying an erroneous feature tag that implies the whole trio are involved. I do find it interesting that the song itself was a slightly tougher sell. It has an interesting chart run where it debuted high but initially seemed to be getting pushed aside before getting second wind. Maybe there was something about the song's rigid rising synths that made it seem like it was lost in indulgence. You just don't often get these kinds of chart runs anymore where you can measure up the initial weight of the brand with how the greater public chooses to get on board. It's something more suited to the top heavy sales environment of the album chart. A similar chart pattern to the latest Gracie Abrams album I suppose.

#336. Alex Lahey - You Don't Think You Like People Like Me (#97, 2016)

36th of 2016

It has to be mentioned here. For a long time, I thought this was my introduction to Alex Lahey. A pretty good breakout single that was a sign of things to come. Maybe you know where this is going, but I'd actually very briefly heard of Alex Lahey a couple of years before this, under very silly, but interesting circumstances.

I've been reading xkcd since around 2009. A friend in high school who had spent more time online and discovering the world beyond our small town mentioned it to me, and I was fascinated. The web comic was still in its infancy at that (I knew it in its 4th year, now it's up to 21), though it didn't feel like it. I kept reading it ritually, and there have been points in time when I was able to know exactly what hour of the day on Monday, Wednesday and Friday it would update. I'd go straight to the embedded forums to read the tri-weekly discussions. It was one of the first things that challenged my perspectives by the sheer notion of occasionally grand, sweeping notions. Just a lot of geek humour made by a geek, for geeks. Also it's very silly.

That more silly aspect manifested in the 'what if??' blog that launched in 2012. Initially a weekly segment that aimed to answer some potentially unnecessary burning questions, like how long it would take for a single penny in the tray of your car to end up costing an additional penny in fuel due to it weighing you down, or how many bouncy balls would you need to drop from a tall building to potentially kill someone. He's made a couple of books that compile these, and I own the first one, which is notable because of this question included in it. Back in 2013, years before finding fame in the music world, Alex Lahey was trying to cook a steak by dropping it from space. About a decade later, this resulted in a funny Twitter interaction as two people who thought they were only parasocially aware of each other found a long, lost connection. A few months later, Alex Lahey got the honour of being the last artist ever tweeted by the @triplejplays account, just a bumper moment for strange online interactions for her.

It was either mentioning this or getting way too fixated on her mentioning Mulholland Drive in this song and going on a 20 paragraph deep dive into David Lynch's filmography, which I'm not remotely qualified for, though I have seen that one. Before (or partially after) all of that, she was just an artist whose songs I heard and liked on the radio, in spite of any cumbersome components like say reining in a title. Maybe it's appropriate given what I just said that this is a song about second degree perceptions. It's something that's fundamentally interesting but always sounds a little bit cumbersome if you want to be clear. You can say Chess is about reading your opponent or thinking several steps ahead, but what you really mean is that you've got to know what your opponent thinks you know, and take advantage when they don't know that you know that they know that you know. I had no idea I'd be running back to back entries about the difference between what people say & think, and what they show. Who knew that "Good Luck, Babe!" actually already came out in 2016? Maybe I find this one a little bit more relatable because there's a heightened layer of self-doubt in it. There's no spiteful scorn, but she's a more passive voice of consideration to it. Then again, gay marriage wasn't even legal in Australia when this song came out, so that can be a factor as well. I think I just like it because it's fun to listen to though.