#73

#73. Phoebe Bridgers - Sidelines (#99, 2022)

3rd of 2022

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This feels like a glitch in the matrix. This is the only time Phoebe Bridgers comes up in this whole list and it's with a loose single that isn't particularly noteworthy in her discography. Technically she comes up again in 2023 because boygenius had a bumper year but otherwise it's all we've got. I think what you take away from it is two things. One is that it represents the sometimes realistic document of the year in review that triple j's Hottest 100 provide, the other is that sometimes triple j just fumble the bag a little bit.

In some regards, you can probably combine the two factors in one. The idea that triple j didn't fully prioritise Phoebe Bridgers sooner is a relic of a time when she wasn't quite as famous as she is now. You could make the argument that they should have been on board with her, but there just wasn't enough irrefutable evidence at the time that she was a major player outside of all the blogs & tumblrs of the world. The end result is that she landed at #109 in 2020 with the song "Kyoto", maybe an underperformance in hindsight, but it's a song triple j had played once prior to December 2020 and only scarcely after that. It's very rare you'll get something that isn't a crossover hit to defy the airwaves like this, and it was a big sign that there was something in all of this.

The only problem was that Phoebe Bridgers hadn't released a new album since then. I feel like there was serious potential for her to surprise everyone but we just hadn't had the opportunity to see it. With the right material, I suspect she could have seriously cashed in with this, whether intentionally or not. A bit like how it's not very surprising nowadays to see Lana Del Rey cracking the singles chart despite clearly not operating in that lane. Now that I've changed this paragraph all into past tense I feel there's some truth in the matter. Phoebe Bridgers now has charting singles in the US & UK as a lead artist, and also a #1 album in Australia. I suspect the Hottest 100 will follow suit.

I'll admit I'm not sure what that might sound like because I'm not entirely sure I'm the right market for Phoebe Bridgers. I'd listened to her first two albums and I often found the thrills to be few and far between. Of the two I'm somewhat partial to "Punisher" more so (early days, but I think "Lost Weekend" might be my favourite though), which has a bit more variety to it, and more lyrics that seem to poke their head out and take you aback. "Kyoto" is a very good song, and I can't not mention "I Know The End", the album's explosive closer that tricks you into thinking you know where it's going before it takes it to yet another level. I'm not opposed to her sound on principle. The elephant in the room here is that since that album came out, I've grown especially fond of Lizzy McAlpine who is not at all subtle with her influence from Phoebe Bridgers (with a side order of musical theatre). She put out 3 albums between "Punisher" and "Lost Weekend", and it nearly ended up being 4, so there's a gap in the market being seized. I must admit also that it's a nicer fandom to be in because while they're similarly popular, I feel like Phoebe's space as a critical darling & generally eccentric personality means people bring out their weirdest when talking about her. Strongly cultivated niche following backed up by algorithm friendly music and a genuine crossover hit (but not too big of one) feels like the sweet spot.

None of this all matters when it comes to "Sidelines" though, which I've always been enamoured by. It feels like an obvious single because it has a properly pronounced chorus and hook, but the whole thing sticks pretty easily. I wonder if it's partially indebted to the verse structure with repeated use of the phrase 'I'm not afraid of...', which uncontrollably recalls Hoobastank's "The Reason". It's a solid vessel though for Phoebe to deliver her typical gut-punch lyrics though. I love the little sprinkles of instrumentation though, you know you're obsessed once you start mentally cueing up something like those strings that break up the second verse.

By all accounts, I'm still a little surprised this is here. When you're sitting right on the edge at #99, it's a genuine toss-up that could've gone either way (lucky G Flip took another year to put out that album), but by all accounts, this just feels like a song without quite enough of a profile to get across, just stellar top 200 material. Whether it speaks to just how strong the song is, wanting to make amends for a near miss in 2020, or the potential avalanche of a fully focused Phoebe Bridgers campaign, I can't say just yet. I do love that this is the song we get out of it though.

#74

#74. Amy Shark - All Loved Up (#36, 2018)

7th of 2018

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I feel like I have to issue amends for Amy Shark. It's an inevitable part of the process that not everything with this list will hold up to scrutiny over the years. I look back at lists I've made over the years and want to shuffle things around. It's been a good 3 years since I started making this list and it's inevitable that it won't all sit perfectly. That probably includes things I haven't even reached on this list to some extent, though I find myself mostly content with it for now.

It's been nearly a year since I last had Amy Shark appear on this list so I haven't had an appropriate chance to mention this. Back in January, I caught "C'MON" (#928) on my shuffle playlist. This was an incredibly chance encounter because a few weeks later I'd load the newest Hottest 100 onto it and suddenly it'd fall so far down the priority list that I genuinely might not hear it again for years. As these things often happen, because it didn't have my entire attention, I couldn't lock into my own recalled feelings and it just kind of jumped out to me. I rather enjoy the song now. Measuring it on what the song is actually doing, rather than my own idealised version of it, there's something worthwhile. The instrumental doesn't take too many bold risks, but the gravitas comes across. I see the vision, and though I'll spare myself the task of re-sorting this entire list, know that the previous position is not doing it the justice I would like. That concludes the minutes of the previous meeting, let's get on with the current agenda.

I did not have the best first impression of Amy Shark (#871). Learning that she's also a landlord did not help either. The road to rehabilitation is a long and largely pointless one. When she's getting these Hottest 100 entries, she's getting my money either way. It's just a nice cache to have because I am sincerely not a hater and I don't want to be. I managed to prove myself somewhat open minded around the release of her debut album because she just casually released my favourite song of hers, and I wasn't at all shy with my enjoyment of it.

We have to get the elephant out of the room. This is a Jack Antonoff song. You could be forgiven for just thinking it's his non-union Australian equivalent, but it's the real deal. This is getting him at a pretty high demand part of his career, as he was just done with co-producing half of Taylor Swift's latest album "reputation". As a matter of fact, that might just have been the thesis statement on here because something that clicked with me pretty quickly is how much "All Loved Up" sounds like "Call It What You Want". That's the Taylor Swift song obviously, in case the title still only makes you think of Foster The People, it's important to consider all of the perspectives here. I'm a big fan of "This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things" so I know what it's like to have Taylor Swift take some of the most specific of song titles away. If I can fit it in, I might even have another story like that on this same album, because Taylor Swift's villain arc just knew no bounds at the time.

It's a superficial similarity I would say. You won't spot a familiar melody or anything like that. They're just both very washed out songs with echoed background vocals and a pre-chorus melody that feels like it's stepping over what was previously established. There's less than 10 seconds difference in length between them with very similarly reserved bridges. I know, I can't believe it either. There's history of producers doing this with Australian artists. Max Martin & Dr. Luke produced The Veronicas' "4ever" and P!nk's "U + Ur Hand" at around the same time and largely got away with it. Australia is the country that made both "Sexual" and "What Lovers Do" big hits, two versions of "Macarena", two versions of "Waiting For A Star To Fall", two tropical house versions of "Fast Car", we just do not seem to care.

I also don't really care. Mainly because it's funny, but because I like trying to pick out and ascertain the advantages in either case. Usually the winner is just marketing and I don't really get my wish, but it's fun to think about. Is Amy Shark ever competing with Taylor Swift? Oh absolutely not. I do like to think of this one as the slightly improved second attempt though, as "All Loved Up", just has all the extra dynamic range to get more out of it. Every moment of it just pops out.

#75

#75. First Aid Kit - My Silver Lining (#38, 2014)

11th of 2014

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A lot of discourse is perhaps unintentionally kneecapped by a need to be universal. It can have wider implications, and is possibly resting on those, but the headlining few have to be recognisable names. It makes the whole thing become a constant act of recycling that doesn't get to the depth of it at all. I'll suffer from it myself even when I do know better. Just earlier today I caught myself briefly unable to name any member of The Living End, something I've otherwise been able to do for decades, because they're not in the international cycle of discourse.

This is generally what happens when we start talking about big genre or stylistic movements in popular music. The top handful come to mind quickly, but then the rest of the suspects slip through the cracks. I think of the early 2000s when Coldplay became ridiculously successful and brought along with them, a wave of bands working under similar ideas. I know there are lots of them, but every time I try to name them, I just get as far as Travis & Keane. Given more time, I might also come up with Snow Patrol or Doves but I feel less inclined to count them as they feel bigger than that moment. You need to really dig deep to find all of the Starsailors of the world.

Another big one that seems to get a lot of attention is the rise of overly earnest folk music around the start of the 2010s. In fairness with this, triple j showed the very early signs of it in the late 2000s, showing surprising commercial viability for stuff that didn't remotely fit with the zeitgeist. A Hottest 100 that could've been a battle between Art vs. Science's quirky electro-rock and Hilltop Hoods' ever-charging popularity ended up with a late runaway victory to Mumford & Sons who created unusual buzz by finding a way to make banjos tenable to the top 40. This was the start of what could easily have been a long streak of rock music being phased out again for folk music as there arguably hasn't been a song like "Sex On Fire" at the top of the poll ever since. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis coming out ahead of Of Monsters and Men is the strange glitch in the matrix that did a lot more to diversify the results than is given credit for. You could even argue it goes further back, just isolated to Australia, when there were back to back winners from Bernard Fanning & Augie March. It'll be interesting to see the future reception if we break our current girly pop streak at the top.

To go back to my original point, whenever this whole scene gets brought up, it's always that same small number of names, the ones that crossed over. I pored through numerous discussions just now and outside of some people on the Indieheads subreddit (who know their stuff when it's in their wheelhouse), you'd never know anything that existed outside of "Home", "Little Talks", the other "Home", "Riptide" (#885), "Ho Hey" and your Mumford & Sons song of choice. It's reducing a supposedly hipster-driven movement by only the pieces that may well have been rejected by those same people who are being characterised. It'd be like making fun of someone who listens to Aesop Rock & Talib Kweli because Ja Rule was big at the time. triple j is such a melting pot for this that you just know someone isn't doing their homework if they don't know about Matt Corby, Boy & Bear, Xavier Rudd, Angus & Julia Stone etc. To me, nothing exemplifies the instinctive listening habits of people like this than the popular songs that weren't 'hits'. The bands that would sell eager quantities of albums and get big festival slots without really crossing over. Bands like First Aid Kit.

Unlike all of the artists I just mentioned, First Aid Kit aren't Australian, they're Swedish. Australia was a pretty lucrative market for them, but it pales in comparison to their home country, where they scored three #1 albums. Big enough that they might even brush onto the singles chart by pure volume, but they've never really made a crossover single I'd say, or rather, they don't have a song that has one of those quirky hooks that make people recall it in resentment. They exemplify this movement through steadfast refusal to oversell. They're so obscenely earnest about sounding like they've never gone more than 500 metres away from a cabin in the woods. The main draw has always just been the wistful quality of harmonies between sisters Johanna & Klara Söderberg.

By all accounts, the band easily could have disappeared, or faded into obscurity after the success of their first album, one that I don't think actually was successful enough to overturn the march of time and desire for new sounds that tends to throw out the also-rans. Maybe they just got lucky to start the next album campaign with what's ended up being their most popular song, but it's the kind that you'd expect too many people to just skip over in the first place and never give it a chance. I wouldn't really call "My Silver Lining" a crossover hit, but it did briefly chart in Australia, which speaks to just how efficiently they managed to win people over again, because they weren't remotely in that conversation before or since. More and more, it feels like this song single-handedly kept the band in the conversation for another album cycle.

Maybe we were all just won over by the tenacity of the song's message and wanted to see it through. I don't think they were specifically fighting against the tides of musical trends when they vied to 'keep on keeping on', but it shows a grown up tenacity that gives the song stakes. Without specificity though, the song becomes incredibly relatable, just that internal desire to stay headstrong and do the right thing even when you're beaten down by the weight of the world's inexorable march in the wrong direction. Sometimes these actions are eventually rewarded in a material sense, and other times they aren't, but I can't count how many things I utilise or examine from a distance that come about because somewhere along the way, someone has deemed it their duty to do an unrewarding task. The world stops spinning if we all give up. Miss me with that 'earnestness is cringe' nonsense. I much prefer it over providing surface level reactions to anyone who dares have a personality trait that isn't cynicism. I'll even take 'Alabama, Arkansas' over that, any day of the week. Also I love those strings, and "Cedar Lane" is a very lovely song from the same album.

#76

#76. Lana Del Rey - West Coast (#32, 2014)

12th of 2014

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It's so tough to do the follow up album. It's just about the most crucial step in an artist's career because it's the moment for many to decide whether or not they're in for the long haul or if the one album is enough for them. Sometimes it can come down to the enthusiasm you've nurtured along the way. Just having amassed enough ride or die fans can help encourage more to keep up with it. Maybe a lot of them won't, but you can break even if you have enough on your side.

Lana Del Rey had a bit of a gradual step towards this which may have helped her. By the end of 2012, she released an extended version of "Born to Die", which rather than just be a quick deluxe edition momentum booster, was genuinely substantial with 9 more tracks. Nearly all of these tracks have blue names on Wikipedia ("Blue Velvet" is a cover, but her version is pretty well known in its own right next to Bobby Vinton's big hit). As an added bonus, she got to spend 2013 as an odd hitmaker, getting dance remixes, and even initially proving without it via "Young and Beautiful" (#841). Given that she largely operated as a cult figure before this, having a genuine hit or two opened up her audience immensely, perfectly timed for the follow up.

I'm inclined to say that she remained a cult figure, but she never really stumbled after this point either. Not really making more crossover hits, but she had such a loyal fanbase that she repeatedly scored #1 albums in Australia without much surprise. Ironically it was her highly beloved 5th album, "Normal F**king Rockwell" that broke the streak. From this point on though, she's gotten so much more respect across the board that I feel it's fuelled a career renaissance for her. She's still not really getting crossover hits, but continues to boast enormous streaming numbers for an artist some might think never really stuck the landing in the first place. While someone might say 'What do you mean "Ultraviolence" has multiple songs with over a billion streams?', another side of the coin will be 'What do you mean "Ultraviolence" didn't have any hits at the time?'.

It's one of those cases where I might suspect it was just the wrong choice of single in hindsight and another might have fared better. The only problem is that "West Coast" has survived the sheer randomness of it all and is still the album's most popular song, so maybe there wasn't a better choice. I found it very interesting at the time because it's not at all something that screams a hit, but then that's a strange thing to consider when you're operating in Lana Del Rey's lane. I don't know what people are actually looking out for here. I suppose "Brooklyn Baby" is a reasonable proxy for what was already on "Born To Die", but that wasn't realised soon enough for me to talk about it.

All we have here is "West Coast" and in hindsight I'm a little surprised how popular it ended up being at the time. Maybe there was just too much desire for new Lana Del Rey that it gave her the leeway, but then you look at the Hottest 100 results and it's right up there at #32. By comparison, the title track to "Born to Die" only got to #34. I think there's a lot to like about "West Coast", I'm just surprised how universal it was. It's a song whose biggest identifiers are incredibly prominent drums and a tempo change on the chorus with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. I love the change up so much, I think it's one of the best choruses she's ever written, and it stands out more when there's basically nothing else that sounds like it, even on the song itself. She even starts singing in Spanish for a moment which just communicates to me that she's in full 'Could read the dictionary' mode and I'd be okay with it. It's a hypnotic song I suppose.

#77

#77. King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Gamma Knife (#61, 2016)

10th of 2016

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Getting interested in King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard is an extensive investment. The band have thus far released 27 albums and I wouldn't be surprised if there was another one by the time this post goes live (yep, 28 now). If not, we might actually be closing in on the longest gap between albums they've ever had, as "Phantom Island" came out waaaay back in June 2025. Still, that's more albums than there are James Bond movies, and they only started in 2012. In order to be into the band and have fully formed opinions about their discography, you have to be really into them. Give them a good rinse over and they'd become my most listened to artist almost by default. What ends up happening is that I'll have conversations about them with different people and they'll always end up bringing up something I'm not overly familiar with.

Fortunately, there's one big exception in all of this. It's literally the reason I'm talking about them right now, because if there's one almost universal thing that brings everyone together with this band, it's that "Nonagon Infinity" opens the door. It's the band's 8th album, released in the middle of a particularly prolific period for them and has run away to be easily the band's most famous album. You can pick and choose if you want their hard rock, blues rock or psychedelic pop (and all the other ones I left out), but this one feels like the quintessential inclusion. It's their Ocarina of Time, their And Then There Were None, their Season 6 of The Simpsons, hopefully you get the idea.

It's hard to hype the album much more than I do. It's just a complete thrill ride from start to finish. Only that's also an odd definition because it's an album where every track flows into the next one, including the album's closer into the start. Not only can you listen to the album on an endless loop, but I've also done it before. I once just spent hours on end listening to "Nonagon Infinity" and I came out of it, a changed man. Well, maybe that's a bit much, but it's very permanently lodged into my memory, and I have no desire to remove it. They largely get around any possible argument of repetition by having the album be relatively brisk at 9 tracks (get it, nonagon?) and you go away from each song largely remembering the hooks.

Oddly enough, it was one of the album's deeper cuts that first converted me over. The song "Wah Wah" which probably isn't a highlight for many, but it has given me a nice bridge during the album's slower portion in the back. The album is a little frontloaded in that regard but it's a necessary moment of recovery after the opening salvo. The run from "Robot Stop" to "People-Vultures" is just King Gizz at their absolute best, firing on all cylinders. That's nearly 20 minutes of highlight concentrated deliberate jamming that goes down a treat.

If you've done the observations here, you'll know that "Gamma Knife" fits in the middle of that too. For a band like this, reducing it all to just a single is tough, but I do think this song meets the assignment. As long as you've got that one frantic riff, and a good dosage of 'woo!', you've got the general summary on board. There's something primal about it all that I don't think I can put into words. The band just offers something you don't really get elsewhere, and I love them for that. Sheer volume means I'm never too far away from finding another King Gizz song I love.

#78

#78. Max Frost - White Lies (#42, 2013)

15th of 2013

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Sometimes we're a little betrayed by the truth. This is not the case. Unlike Miike Snow, Max Frost actually is just one person. I don't believe that his name was inspired by theirs, nor did he get it off of a hair dryer. His real name is Matthew Alexander Frost, so it's just a trendy shortening of that, I imagine. I can understand with a song like "White Lies", it would be easy to be cynical about this.

I don't know if there actually is a fascinatingly unique story to Max Frost, who seems to just be a guy who decided to make music and lucked out when one of his songs got discovered. I suppose the most interesting thing I found is that he was very interested in R&B and hip-hop music. He even initially was encouraged to sing hooks for a rapper but was reluctant to be part of it. I don't think he specifically said it's because he's a white guy from Texas, but it's probably what he means. Supposedly it's still a part of his sound but it's hard to hear much of it in his early stuff. His 2018 song "Good Morning" definitely matches the back story though. Ironically I do feel like the instrumental to his 2013 song "Be Who You Want to Be" sounds a little bit like one of his influences in D'Angelo, but specifically the song "Betray My Heart" which actually hadn't been released yet.

That's probably the most interesting thing with Max Frost, the way his music doesn't really fit into an obvious box. It's mostly that it's just not enough of any one thing to feel confident with it. I hear elements of pop, rock, dance, folk, blues, alongside Max's occasional rapid fire delivery and my brain just doesn't know what to do with it. I just opt for enjoying the music on its own merits here, because occasionally he has some fresh ideas with it.

"White Lies" is of course the main event. It might be the best example of that specific subset I mentioned with Thelma Plum's "Not Angry Anymore" (#194). The first thing you hear is that acoustic guitar that just feels so highly strung and thrilling. When Max Frost's voice enters the fray, you're taken aback by the way it's mixed, sounding too close to the microphone but kept back in the mix anyway. You could imagine him turning this into an in-your-face Michael Franti kind of performance (or otherwise what sombr does nowadays), especially on the second verse, but instead it's just this quirky sugar rush.

Other than "White Lies", I'm not sure Max Frost has done anything much of note. He didn't release his debut album until 2018, but prior to that he released two EPs. The second EP has the song "Paranoia" which triple j played a fair amount at the time, though it's lost in the sea of outweighed streaming numbers so it doesn't look like it's very notable on the whole. I guess I should shout out the song "Blind Fool" which is the least popular song on that EP, but the one that sounds the most like "White Lies". In general, he's just embodying that spirit of the person who could never quite repeat their first success, but that still gives him one more hit than the vast majority of people making music.

#79

#79. King Princess - 1950 (#34, 2018)

8th of 2018

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We're here to celebrate a momentous achievement. On account of the fact that it now statistically cannot be beaten, I'm here to report that King Princess has the biggest gap between appearances. You have to go all the way back to January 2025 when I got to "Pussy Is God" (#908), and there you'll encounter a fascinating juxtaposition as back then I was apparently content to write 5 sentences and be done with the entire entry. It was primarily because I thought I had more to say about this one, which is somewhat true. A lot of it is just general observations, but they're ones that read a lot nicer when you're talking about something you openly enjoy.

King Princess is 5 generations deep in the family tree of Lazarus Straus. She could never get suckered into getting an Ancestry account because all of this information is extremely publicly available and organised. Her great, great, great grandfather Lazarus Straus was an entrepreneur who by the chance result of living 3 years longer than his associate Rowland Hussey Macy, was able to acquire ownership of Macy's, the department store. He soon after handed it over to two of his sons, one of which died on the Titanic, the other has a city in Israel named after him. The former had seven children, and the youngest son of those is King Princess's great grandfather. You can call out nepotism possibly but I'm not sure she has accrued mass wealth by this long chain of descendance, and it doesn't appear that there's anyone famous in her bloodline that was alive even 80 years ago. If there is a noteworthy connection, it's that her father is a recording engineer who owns a studio, so she grew up seeing bands come through and grind out the recording process, which drew her into music, though it made her hesitant to sign on at a young age because she craved creative control. Very early on, before she adopted the stage name, her father did help record her music. She eventually wound up with the newly formed Zelig Records, a subsidiary of Columbia Records founded by Mark Ronson, and would end up releasing her first two albums with them.

I do need to mention Columbia Records because it makes for the most transparent part of the equation and it's the kind of thing that would get dragged through the mud nowadays. A good part of why you have even heard of King Princess is because in March 2018, Harry Styles tweeted 'I love it when we play 1950.' At this point, the song "1950" had been out for less than two weeks and hadn't really made an impression anywhere. A week later and it started popping up on Spotify charts around the world. Harry Styles is also signed to Columbia Records so it's not exactly subtle what's going on here.

I actually missed that part of the equation at first. When I first heard of King Princess, it was because the song inexplicably got foisted onto Spotify's Hot Hits Australia playlist, which at that point tended to decide what became a hit. Two weeks after first appearing on there, it rocketed towards the top of that playlist which tended to be a monumental boon. You'd hear two of the biggest hits of the moment and the year in "God's Plan" (#507) and "Psycho" (#563), and then get this inexplicable change of pace. It's possible that a lot of people bounced off of it, but as long as they made it to the 30 second mark, it counted, and "1950" became a #25 hit in Australia largely through this. The song only narrowly scraped through to #48 in Belgium and even lower in some other European countries, but this song hung around for months until the playlist swapped it out for her follow up single "Talia" and then it suddenly crashed out of the top 50.

This was all very common practice at the time and so if you look at the charts circa 2018, you'll see massive stars and iconic hits that just keep inter-mingling with these random, unremarkable artists who were never heard of before or since. Actually at the very same time this was happening to King Princess, future Hottest 100 entrant Noah Kahan was getting his chart breakthrough very early in Australia with some thanks to similar leveraging (I should be fair to "Hurt Somebody" though because it actually cracked the ARIA top 50 before this playlist got to it). Perhaps there's still time for Dennis Lloyd to become a household name, who's to say? In fairness, he's probably still more famous than King Princess is, but he's never made the Hottest 100, so never mind.

This is all well and good for securing a hit song but when it comes to retaining credibility in a music discussion space, just a frightening prospect. If she actually had become a global star thanks to this song, it'd probably be hanging around her for eternity, the same way many have negative views on Gracie Abrams because of her associations through her father and Taylor Swift. Instead she only ended up sort of famous only in Australia where it was easier to escape the scrutiny. I probably wouldn't have lived it down either but the sneaky work around here is that I just really liked the song. I guess sneaking around does get you somewhere.

It's just another layer of why the song's arrival was so peculiar. Everything about it strikes you oddly. The artist's name, the song title, and then you listen to the song and it's this strange, stilted performance that doesn't remotely sound like popular music of the time. It's obviously not completely unpalatable, but it fits into a strange place where it's a ballad that isn't direct enough to appeal to the ballad crowd. People like grand, universal statements, and this song has a confusing title lyric and a chorus that's hard to even make out the words to.

I am not the right person to be talking about this, but as best I can understand, King Princess is a gay icon. I was recently put across the fact that there are only 6 people who have an '___ as a gay icon' Wikipedia article and I don't think any of them are actually confirmed to be gay (it's a funny list: Cher, Judy Garland, He-Man, Janet Jackson, Madonna & Reba McEntire). King Princess very much is, and isn't remotely subtle about it in this song. The first line is 'I hate it when dudes try to chase me'. What the song's title lyric really means, is throwing it back to a time when queerness was heavily hidden in society, and all higher authority was corrupt. From that, the song captures the idea of worshipping someone so far beyond what they actually represent as a person. Enjoying them conceptually in a way that might paper over the cracks that get in the way of that ideal fantasy. It's the same way I very much enjoy the song and completely have to pretend that it got here on its own merits. Realistically though, that's just every hit song, some are just more obvious about it than others.

For me, "1950" represents an exciting new voice in music, someone who's not really playing by the pre-established rules, and being rather interesting for it. I may not enjoy "Pussy Is God" very much, but it's unquestionably just a strange song for popular discourse. A somehow even more unabashedly queer song that's not shy in the slightest. "1950" has a chorus that's very stilted with a strong vocoder effect, but it's used in a memorable way that makes every line delivery feel important. In the years since, she's continued to impress me in unexpected ways. I'm particularly fond of "Ohio", a slow burner that goes wild halfway through, and she even got my Hottest 100 vote a little later with the song "Only Time Makes It Human", which snuck in at #199 in 2020. It's full on disco pop and one of the catchiest songs I've ever come across, guaranteed to get stuck in my head when I remember it exists. Strangely enough, it's a song with the same co-writer as "1950", Nick Long, who has since gotten a lot more attention for co-writing nearly every song on mgk's two big pop punk albums. Diversity, thy name is Mikaela Straus & Nick Long.