#980-#976

 #980. Lime Cordiale - Dirt Cheap (#86, 2018)

97th of 2018

This is a great segue from the previous entry because there's a relatively similar phenomenon with regard to the Hottest 100. It's what I like to call the preview hit. A song from a relative newcomer debuts them to the poll, perhaps surpassing contextual expectations. A year later they're unstoppable. I like to imagine that at least part of this is because when people make their votes, depending on the kind of voter they are, it's possible that they might exclude certain artists from their vote, since they have no chance of getting in. We don't have the liberty of ranking all the hundreds of choices like when voting for the Senate. To be added to the hypothetical list of artists who can realistically poll can be a great boon. Failing that, there's also the general added exposure that getting in for the first time does. A lot of artists will peak in performance in either their first or second year on the Hottest 100, either because the material isn't resonating quite as much, or there's not as much drive to see them just replicate the success they've already managed.

Lime Cordiale fit this model almost perfectly. After this song snuck into the list for 2018, they had a monster year in 2019 with 3 entries in the top 20. They have continued to poll every single year since with very good but also diminishing returns. But then I could also say something similar about another artist up until they re-wrote the record books in 2023, so maybe Lime Cordiale still have a big outing to come.

As fascinating as I find the whole arc, I wish I was able to get more out of this song in general which has me feeling a bit out of the loop. For the most part it's just a simple love song but it's filled with all these strange lyrical choices. It certainly makes the song more memorable, but how many times do you need or want to hear the phrase 'picture us nude'? The answer is three times apparently, so it's a three-pronged attack that L.T. Smash would be proud of. Aside from that, the song's mixing just doesn't feel finished. It sounds like the triplejunearthed version of a song that would eventually get a bit more kick to it. There's a charm to that in general but this one leaves me fairly underwhelmed.

#979. DOPE LEMON - Marinade (#62, 2016)

98th of 2016

I'm really surprised to even be talking about DOPE LEMON. If any context is needed, it's just Angus Stone. He'll appear later on in the list with his sister (who will also appear on her own), but it's under this moniker that this time window gives him the majority of his entries.

The main reason I'm surprised is because we've been down this road multiple times and yielded nothing. Angus Stone released his first solo album back in 2009, under the name Lady of the Sunshine, and it barely cracked the ARIA top 50. 3 years later in 2012 he'd release another solo album, this time under his real name. Credit where it's due, that album was very successful, debuting at #2 and getting a gold certification. It didn't crack the Hottest 100 though, I suppose back then it was a lot harder to make a residency on the list. I don't think it's for lack of quality either. There were two main singles from that album, "Broken Brights", a lovely sparse folk tune that shows off his vocal talents quite well, and "Bird On The Buffalo", which I don't think would be out of place in the DOPE LEMON catalogue. Adding to this, Lady of the Sunshine had a certain song called "Big Jet Plane" on that first album, and it's barely different to the version of the song that would go on to top the 2010 poll. I can't decide if it counts when it comes to the adage that any song destined to be a hit eventually will be.

Maybe this is the wrong angle to take when it comes to Hottest 100 voting habits, but it was hard to avoid the glaring issue around DOPE LEMON when I first heard about it. It's a stupid name. It sounds stupid to say, and I feel like I'm dignifying something that I shouldn't be when I type it out. This one hit it off though and he's kept the name around for 4 whole albums now, the first three all yielding Hottest 100 entries.

I guess then I just got off on the wrong foot here because this is from the first album and I've never really been able to wrap my head around it. Maybe catch me in the right mood and I'll find the main guitar riff somewhat catchy, but otherwise it's a remarkably meandering 4 minute song. I could draw a comparison to Dave Graney's "Night of the Wolverine" which polled even higher back in 1993 (#48), but that song actually pokes its head out on occasion to remind you that it's there. All I can do here is marinade on it for a while.

#978. Flume (feat Vic Mensa) - Lose It (#95, 2016)

97th of 2016

Flume is quite fortunate to have managed multiple imperial phases. His debut album "Flume" was a huge success locally, and then he managed to find some international fanfare which helped steer him to massive success here again with second album "Skin". His albums since then haven't had quite the same success, but his Hottest 100 voters have never gone astray. If you include a handful of entries that he's remixed, he has the most entries in this list all up. 2016 is a big contributor to that, where he had the classic year of taking the top spot but also littering the list with other entries that had their own varying levels of fanfare.

I'm not sure if it's by accident or design that "Skin" took off internationally as much as it did (you could admittedly make the argument that it was in the right place at the right time with what was going on with Spotify's in sound), but in any case, the album was readymade for it. "Flume" is largely driven by its instrumentals, with just a handful of guest vocalists to provide a slightly more conventional sound. This division still exists on "Skin" but it's definitely been skewed in the other direction as it's loaded with guests and more conventional song structures. Some bigger names too, as this album has Raekwon & Beck on the same project! We'll see some more in future entries on this list, but for this one we've got Vic Mensa.

This is the only time Vic Mensa appears in the list. I feel like he had a reasonable amount of hype in the mid 2010s but never got fully off the ground. I mostly know him for his debut single "Down On My Luck", an immensely catchy hip-house track that's just loaded with hooks. It managed a week in the UK top 40 at #37, a month after streaming data started counting to the charts there. That shift tended to make it harder for more songs to reach the charts, so it's entirely possible that a couple months later it wouldn't have been able to get in. In 2018, Vic Mensa got involved in separate controversies with 6ix9ine and XXXTENTACION (posthumously). My main recollection from these events was a radio interview where 6ix9ine asked people to even name a single Vic Mensa song, where he was met with silence. Obviously this wouldn't have happened if I was in the room. It might not help Vic Mensa's case when he's ended up on the same Flume album as another rapper whose name is similar enough to warrant confusion remembering which is which, and with the Hottest 100 and on this list he's come up short both times.

This is one of the songs that surprised me a little making this ranking. I never really remember having any strong feelings either way about this until I started comparing it to everything else here. That's when the cracks start to show and I had to ask myself if I even enjoy anything about this song. I don't think it's just a dud by default, I'm fairly receptive to Flume's approach in instrumentals. I'm nothing if not a person who will gladly tell you which dial-up sounds are my favourite. Not these ones I suppose. It feels like the bag of tricks runs dry pretty quickly, and the oscillating siren-like motif we do get here isn't one of the greatest. Vic Mensa isn't a terrible presence on here either, but it doesn't feel like he's on his A-game with this one. The elephant in the room here is the hook. It...doesn't give much to work with. Vic ends up just sounding a bit silly on it. Can't win them all I guess Flume.

#977. Ziggy Alberts - together (#43, 2020)

98th of 2020

Depending on what perspective you take, 2020 was either the longest year ever, or it's the shortest year alongside all the other pandemic years that collect up in a mushy pile. What can be odd with the Hottest 100 is that so much can happen in the space of the year, and yet the vote comes around and those January hits are waiting to be compared to things that just came out.

Ziggy Alberts really illustrates that situation with this entry, to date his last Hottest 100 entry (he's got another coming up eventually on this list though). It was released back in January 2020 to help raise money to help with the bushfire crisis in Australia at the time. That's admirable. He could have vacationed in Hawaii instead after all.

In June 2020, Ziggy Alberts released another single called "don't get caught up". It got him a lot of negative attention from people who tended to just ignore his existence otherwise with lyrics about vaccination and 5G conspiracies. triple j never played this song and if not for "letting go" getting plenty of airplay into 2021, you could make the argument that he was blacklisted because of it. Except it wouldn't be a very good argument, since he still got played 5 times in July 2020. Always good to look these things up before you form a narrative out of nothing.

This song is well meaning but it's saddled by the timing a bit for me. Frankly it was just so weird after what had happened in 2020 to hear this land in the countdown as if everything was all normal. It even managed to land at the same rough position that all of his songs do. But then everything was normal when the song came out, and it's remarkable in an odd way that the Hottest 100 reflects this. I didn't really hear it much when it came out though so I only really associate it with the post-COVID-19 perspective. It ends up rubbing me the wrong way in the end, or at the very least, makes lines like 'we will fight for this country I adore' read a little bit differently. I think he tackled the environmentalist angle in a more compelling & catchy way on that later entry in this list anyway.

#976. Vance Joy - Saturday Sun (#54, 2018)

96th of 2018

I find it interesting to see which folk-adjacent artists and songs manage to get popular. For the most part, it's dealing in relatively sound-alike ground and so you have to get something going for you that'll make it stand out from the hundreds of other possible choices. It's why I remind myself to be relatively optimistic when I see a new artist instantly break out, marketing can only go so far.

Vance Joy is plenty established at this point (you can read that as either the date I'm posting this or the date this song came out), so he has a bit of a head start there. On the other hand, I feel like he plays to a relatively fickle radio audience who would quickly turn on him if he didn't provide that 'it' factor in his new singles.

"Saturday Sun" is the 4th single from his second album, one of three that will appear in this list (the other two are possibly forming a nation as we speak). I get it as an obvious single. It's so obvious that it's actually by far the most streamed song on the album, even though the other two big hits polled higher. He's digging deep into his bread and butter here but unfortunately it doesn't quite land for me. The dynamics are surprisingly all over the place, with the chorus sounding extremely overproduced after more gentle verses. If that's not enough it builds to probably his weakest hook, as he vocalises the 'baba' of the horns over the top of them, and does it several times. "Baba Is You" came out a year later but this was an unprecedented amount of baba at the time.

This song also employs the classic pop jump scare intro. It takes exactly 1 second to immediately make itself known. Almost purpose built for when Heardle decided to have a particular fondness for picking Vance Joy songs. It's not something I'd dock the song for, just something I find amusing as a stark contrast to "Fire and the Flood", which I recently got all the way to the chorus (50 seconds if you were wondering) thinking it was a different Vance Joy song. You'll never make that mistake here.