#975-#971

 #975. Macklemore (feat Skylar Grey) - Glorious (#52, 2017)

99th of 2017

I mentally pair this song with another that it polled right next to. Since I have less opportunities to talk about Macklemore, I'll save that for when I get there.

You're probably aware of Macklemore's runaway success in the early 2010s. He gets clowned on a lot for it, often for silly reasons (putting stake in the GRAMMY Awards is really not worth the effort, and I thought this *before* all the information about how crooked the nomination & voting process was). Honestly though, I totally get the big success. At a time when popular music was figuring out where it wanted to go next, here was this guy who stood out, not just for his odd voice that doesn't sound ready for the big leagues, but the way he and an as-of-yet non-appearing frequent collaborator carved out a variety of fresh pop rap. You couldn't easily get bored of it because the next single would sound totally different.

The main thing I just wanted to point out here is the extent of just how popular Macklemore was in Australia particularly. While "Thrift Shop" may have debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 a little while earlier, it rocketed up here so fast that by the time it did top the US Charts, it had already finished its 7 week reign here. That 7 week reign only coming to an end because it was replaced by "Same Love". "Thrift Shop" is a very rare Hottest 100 winner to not manage to climb up the charts on the week following its win, just because it was already being bested by another song that performed well on the countdown. Macklemore and that guy I can't name yet had another #1 with "Can't Hold Us", which would have been Australia's 1,000th #1 hit if Baauer's "Harlem Shake" didn't troll itself to the top a couple weeks earlier. Then, despite interest waning around the world, in 2015 they had another #1 hit, and we'll get to it on this list eventually. That's the end of the Macklemore chart topping saga here, but once again while America had sailed off that ship, he kept going here, and scored another two #2 hits here: One being a 2018 collaboration that is not on this list, but the lead artist will be, and this song here.

On the topic of Macklemore dethroning himself, it's actually somehow applicable again when this song came out...but this one's not even involved. Although the official result didn't come through until weeks later, there was enough of an assured response from Australia's 2017 same-sex marriage survey that "Same Love" returned from the ashes and topped the iTunes chart by a landslide. It was enough for it to re-enter at #4 on the ARIA Chart despite not even landing in the top 50 on Spotify. By sheer coincidence, this happened to dethrone Macklemore's song with Kesha, "Good Old Days" that was topping the iTunes chart at the time. This song didn't really see much of an adjacent up-tick, but it did end up being Macklemore's highest charting song on the ARIA Chart that week, and it was in fact the one week it spent at #2, trapped behind a monster hit that will eventually appear on this list.

To get away from Macklemore though, I'll also note that this is the only Hottest 100 appearance for Skylar Grey. It's very surprising that she even has one. Aside from having a first name that is spelt differently to how Walter White's wife (yo) does, and a second name that is spelt differently to how Conan Gray does, making all three of them difficult to remember, she's a protégé of Eminem, who has not appeared in a Hottest 100 since 2002. She and Eminem both traded duties in gifting each other hits, between Eminem's charisma & name power, and her skills at writing a hit. All of this was a world away from triple j, but Macklemore managed to bridge the gap. We'll see so many more cases of unlikely Hottest 100 entrants this way.

Anyway all of this background that I find interesting is just to distract myself from having to talk about this song, because I really struggle to get anything going there. While I can praise Macklemore's early run of hits for sounding distinct, this just feels like a hollow shadow of "Can't Hold Us", but without that usual collaborator's production flair, and without Ray Dalton's strong hook game. Skylar Grey just can't really connect in the same way there, so any momentum I might find myself catching onto just careens into the wall when the chorus comes through. It's democratic and all but this just feels like a weird inclusion in general.

#974. RÜFÜS DU SOL - Treat You Better (#23, 2018)

95th of 2018

Another group with no shortage of opportunities to go over, and another group whose entire Hottest 100 history is within this time frame. Well, they did make #192 with "Paris Collides" back in 2011 to be fair. It really shows how much the group has changed over time as it sounds like it would fit snugly onto their 2013 debut album "Atlas", but not much further than that. Tyrone Lindqvist's vocals are also not quite as expressive as they'd grow to be, he stays largely in a lower register, never really threatening to overpower the instrumental.

For now though, we're going completely arbitrary on the timeline and jumping to their 3rd album "Solace". They've maintained pretty consistent commercial success since 2013 but it's notably their first album that didn't go to #1 in Australia. On the surface, they didn't pick a bad week. A lot of competition but they had the best showing in the debuts, in a top 10 week with debuts from Disturbed, Troy Cassar-Daley, Khalid, Greta Van Fleet, the "Bohemian Rhapsody" soundtrack, and a Like A Version CD, RÜFÜS DU SOL came out on top of all of them. It's just unfortunate for them that it was also the week "A Star Is Born" was fully out in theatres in Australia, so that jumped to #1 in its 3rd week on the chart. The big hit "Shallow" has two co-writers who will eventually appear on this list.

When "Solace" came out, "Treat You Better" looked to become the biggest hit on the album. On Spotify it stormed past the three previously released singles (two of which will appear on this list) right away. It only narrowly missed out on being their highest ranked song in the Hottest 100 that year. I was fully expecting to find out that it's the most streamed song on the album now, but it's in 3rd place, just narrowly behind 2nd.

I'm not going to say that the title of this song is a bad omen. I don't hold any remotely positive feelings about the Shawn Mendes song of the same name that came out 2 years earlier, but there's little else in common between the two. Or at least the lyrics in this are vague enough that it's a stretch to also think that we're looking to score on the rebound here. Actually there aren't many lyrics in this song that aren't just 'I just wanna treat you better'. That's part of the problem really. While my initial feelings on RÜFÜS DU SOL weren't especially positive, time and familiarity helped me pick out something more in it. This song has just never really rewarded me with anything, just a general buzzkill all around.

#973. Bliss N Eso (feat Gavin James) - Moments (#53, 2017)

98th of 2017

Remember way back when I was talking about Macklemore and I said that there was another song I mentally paired with his? I've got some exciting news because we're finally talking about it.

"Moments" is to date Bliss N Eso's last Hottest 100 entry. They put out their most recent album in 2021 and it charted reasonably well despite a lack of crossover hits. It only missed the top spot because they put it out on the same week as a now disgraced hip-hop star that I'll have to figure out how to talk about many times in this list eventually. Make no mistake of their commercial prowess too. The album that "Moments" is on, "The Grid", managed to be the first album to unseat Ed Sheeran's juggernaut "÷" in 2017, a feat that many notable artists tried and failed to do both before and after Bliss N Eso. This includes that year's Hottest 100 winner. However this tenure might be over. Their latest single "Feeling Fly" debuted at #15 on the ARIA Australian Hip-Hop/R&B Chart two weeks ago and dropped straight out of the top 20. That's a chart that's been so stripped by recurrency rules that it houses multiple album deep cuts on any given week.

This came through at a fairly turbulent time for the group. Earlier that year during the production of the video for the previous single "Friend Like You", stunt man Johann Ofner was accidentally shot and killed on the set. Years later we learnt at the inquest that it was the result of negligence on the part of the firearms supplier, whose shotgun had illegally produced shells that were effectively not much different than real ones. The man in question also succumbed to cancer later that year. In response to the tragedy, Bliss N Eso played a tribute show for Ofner and raised $40,000 for his family. The music video for the song now is also a tribute to him, but generally it wasn't a single that got much of a promotional push, and won't appear in this list. I do like the song; I think it's got a fresh sound for them.

I'm a touch less enthusiastic about this song. It's not especially unpleasant, but it just feels like playing a little bit too safe. I'm not especially keen on Gavin James in this song either. He sounds a little like a discount version of a certain Australian Idol winner, who both also has two first names, and bizarrely will appear on this list. Only a problem for me though, the song did very well for them. Thanks to some very lucrative playlisting on Spotify, you might be surprised to know that this is their biggest hit to date. There was more love for "Addicted" in the Hottest 100 of the Decade countdown, but all the numbers lean in the favour of "Moments".

In any case, my main beef with regard to this and "Glorious" was really just a coincidence of placement. There's another song that will eventually appear in this list that also landed closely alongside these two songs. When it placed in the Hottest 100, I saw so much disproportionate outrage towards something that is ultimately harmless, and completely in keeping with the Hottest 100's history and general vibe. More on that when we get to it, but I just couldn't help but feel like these two songs were getting by on the fact that there's so little to really engage with that no one's going to raise an alarm. It's a general issue with this discourse. People are so quick to be predictable and get mad at anything that's even slightly provocative. A lot of triple j listeners think of themselves as being into music that's a bit more challenging, until popular music decides to be abrasive and shameless, and then it doesn't count. I'm almost always going to prefer the obnoxious choice over something that I feel nothing from.

#972. Ocean Alley - Knees (#10, 2018)

94th of 2018

I hope you're as thrilled as I am to get through 14 different Ocean Alley entries. They're about as consistent as Lime Cordiale, getting into the list every year from 2017 to 2022. They only finally ended their streak in 2023 by not releasing anything.

There's a common lazy criticism I've noticed of triple j going back to at least 2010, if not earlier. Simply put, if you want to sound smart and above it all, all you have to say is that everything they play on triple j sounds like [insert most recent Hottest 100 winning artist]. Usually when people say that, there isn't actually much substance in the way of examples. The only times the station tends to sound much like it is usually when they're actually playing said artist. We've had two generations of this with stomp & holler folk artists blowing up. As I write it up, the charts are supposedly littered with them when there's only really 3 of them. It'll call back to the time of Mumford & Sons, The Lumineers, Of Monsters and Men (all of these artists conveniently last appeared in the 2012 Hottest 100), and supposedly dozens more that are vividly remembered for existing, just not for having names or songs apparently.

Anyway it's not necessarily just 'most recent' Hottest 100 winning artist anymore, because Ocean Alley's tenure is one that's left its mark. 5 or 6 years later, everything on triple j sounds like these guys. I'm not really sure what's being referred to there though, but that's also partly because I'm not even sure it's fully understood what Ocean Alley sound like. Credit where it's due, they've switched up their sound quite a bit, so hopefully I'll have newer ways to look at their later entries.

For now we get to "Knees". When I was listening to triple j more regularly (usually my alarm played it for an hour a day in the morning, "Knees" is one of the songs that I couldn't help but keep hearing). Ocean Alley were still fairly new to me so I didn't have much of an impression on them, but this was yet another early sour choice. Unlike some other songs that might feel like they never end, this one is at least above average in length to justify it. I just don't really like the chorus at all. I also feel like the build-up in the bridge isn't quite as effective as it needs to be. It feels like that part alone got it into the top 10 though, maybe it's better live. Mind you I come at this having warmed up to the song a little bit. At the time it might have been my least favourite on 2018's list, so never give up hope. I'll also just use this opportunity to shout out the fact that this song was omitted from the ARIA Chart in February 2019, a careless error that leaves them with only 2 charting songs on the ARIA Chart. We'll get to them both, and so much more eventually.

#971. Meg Mac - Bridges - Like A Version (#91, 2014)

99th of 2014

I always found it remarkably strange and interesting that Scissor Sisters managed to poll two completely unrelated covers in the same list. Their big commercial breakthrough was their disco-more-than-just-tinged cover of Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" (we'll also get a very different cover of that Pink Floyd cover on this list), and then they caught the real luck of the draw when they later covered Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out", in a year when everyone couldn't help but vote for any sighting of the words "Take Me Out".

Meg Mac also achieved this feat. It's not likely you're going to see an artist directly do multiple Like A Versions in one year, so we've just got the one. This was Meg Mac's big breakout year but only 1 of her entries in 2014 was actually a song she wrote, which must feel weird. At least for her sake it was the highest one.

Compared to the Sticky Fingers cover of "Delete", this is a slightly different beast that occasionally finds some luck in the Hottest 100. This falls under the category of 'Covering that song that you wish you voted for last year but didn't know at the time, so it didn't make it'. The original version of "Bridges", by an NZ duo who will eventually appear in this list, polled at #131, a little bit behind Frightened Rabbit and Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros; what an odd list. If that's not bad enough, not long after that countdown aired, it reached the ignominious peak of #51 on the ARIA Chart. Not their last bout of misfortune on the charts, but that's a story for another time if I can remember writing this. I'm also not certain of the production cycle on Like A Version, but it's an interesting coincidence that "Bridges" attained that #51 peak about a week before Meg Mac did this cover. It peaked on iTunes exactly 8 days before this. I can't actually recall what made the song reach its peak. They did a support slot for a British pop star who will surprisingly appear as a featured artist on this list eventually, but that was about a week before the surge. Maybe it was just an iTunes front page plug.

Anyway the problem with the whole situation is that I'm just not really a big fan of "Bridges" in the first place. It gets as far as having a memorable hook but doesn't do much around it. The drop might have a bit of potential but it sounds a bit flat and stiff a decade on. When we go to this cover, it's even more low key and I can't really engage with it either. The most enjoyment I think I've gotten out of it is that when it was finally released as a single years later, it came accompanied by artwork that makes it look like she's holding up a fake moustache over her face and is proud of it. Many more chances to come on this list anyway for Ms. Cam Gem.