#955-#951

 #955. Lorde - Tennis Court (Flume Remix) (#47, 2014)

95th of 2014

The phrase '(Flume Remix)' is one of the more common ones to turn up on this list. There's three of them really but that's one more than it usually takes to do the Phineas and Ferb joke so it must be super weird at this point. It sure is a curious bunch of songs that few people have ever thought about in quick succession until this happened. This one sticks out a little bit as well since it's a remix of a song that already polled in the Hottest 100 the year before. Eventually I'll talk about the real thing.

 

Pseudo back to back entries like that are actually fairly common in the Hottest 100. It doesn't even need to be the natural progression of a recent Like A Version. Sometimes the new version just is transformative enough to get people interested in it a second time. I imagine it doesn't hold up very much to anyone going through the archive to discover it, but the live version of "Ice Cream" by Muscles stood out quite a bit at the time. The year before, a certain hip-hop trio who will absolutely be in this list re-vamped one of their entries with a string section, and it was quite a lively re-interpretation. That one actually improved its performance. I won't say that this doesn't also significantly alter its source material, but it still does leave me a little bit cold.

 

In general I just get the feeling that this is a Flume song that wants to be its own thing but it's trapped in the confines of this Lorde song. It doesn't want to break the conventions of that either so it ends up being about 6 minutes long which is more than enough to overstay its welcome. There's a little bit of variation in the drops, even one that fakes you out for a moment, but like I said with his last entry, not his greatest. I'll try not to keep using that line because I could be using it for a long time.

 

This also slightly lets me down because while I'm not an extensive remix hunter, it's a rare enough coincidence to say that it's not even the only remix I know of this Lorde song. Just from listening to triple j in the morning at the time is how I learnt about the Mushin remix of the song. I'm not going to say that it's technically better than this, but it has a great entertainment value for me that can't be beat. The sheer audacity to play the song almost completely straight until it doesn't, it feels like a parody of this remix, except it came out way earlier, when the song was still pretty new. I wish I could feel something like that from this, rather than just waiting for it to end.

 

#954. The Rubens - Million Man (#77, 2017)

97th of 2017

I feel a little bad for The Rubens. Over one summer, they managed to become a pariah for absolute mockery all because they had the audacity of getting a handful more votes than someone else. It wasn't their fault they won. It's just like when Macklemore won that GRAMMY Award...I feel like there's another common link between these two things but I suspect I can't say what it is just yet. I'll have more to say on that eventually, but in the years that followed, they went from huge vote-getters to struggling to even reliably poll. They could easily have loads of entries here but I'm only going to talk about them 5 times. Suffice to say, they lost any sort of underdog spirit that would make people want to vote for them.

 

"Million Man" was their first time back after the fact. It's track 1 on their 3rd album yet also feels tacked on since it came out 9 months prior. The only thing I can really say about it is that it sounds like a worse version of their most popular song. So many of the distinctive hallmarks of that song are back, in goofball form! The drums might sound a little better but maybe they're just less distractingly in the way. The backing vocals are much worse, and the fuzzy guitar brought in on the chorus is just the worst kind of pay off. It all just sounds pretty amateurish.

 

#953. venbee & goddard. - messy in heaven (#61, 2022)

97th of 2022

The adage of Hottest 100 voters liking a swear is honestly a pretty universal fact. Maybe in the past it could be handicapped by the radio being the main point of entry, and in many such cases preventing the words from being heard. Maybe it adds to the intrigue. How many people in 2004 were influenced in purchasing hit songs by Frankee and that associated guy I miraculously can't name yet because he'll be on this list, just for the thrill of hearing that word so many times in a pop song?

 

"messy in heaven" doesn't technically have explicit language, and gets off scot-free without a tag, despite how provocative its lyrics are, combining religious imagery with narcotics. It ends up working the same way as swearing though because the chorus proves to be highly memorable in a 'did I just hear what I think I did?' kind of way. I guess nowadays you can rap about anything, including Jesus.

 

If the lyrics aren't enough of a clash, it comes in the form of a drum & bass tune. goddard. had previously had a hand in a big hit not long before this, with his drum & bass remix of Cat Burns' "Go" helping propel that to #2 in the UK. It would be reasonable to think that this itself is another remix. In some ways it is, the song was composed originally without goddard.'s involvement. venbee has not come close to matching the success of this since, but it wasn't a one-off genre experiment for her. All the songs I've heard from her since also inhabit a similar space, including one song where she collaborated with a notable drum & bass group that will eventually appear on this list.

 

This song has never especially clicked with me. I don't take issue with the lyrics but rather it's the production. When I first heard this song I was taken back to 2014 and the rise of another drum & bass group, Sigma. Their first big hit "Nobody To Love" has source material that's going to be familiar to this list eventually, so I'll probably bring it up again. The issue I've always had in that song is that while it comes out the gate with a lot of energy, the piano melody overpowers it. It turns the rest of the song into background noise. I can't help but think of it every time the piano comes into this song. It's a very familiar, but worn out sound.

 

#952. Eiffel 65 & Flume - Blue (Flume Remix) (#54, 2020)

96th of 2020

YouTube has been around for nearly 20 years at this point. I'm old enough to remember a time before YouTube but for many adults now, there's never been a time without it. One of my favourite things to do is to look at YouTube comments for songs that were uploaded to YouTube pretty early on, but also pre-date the platform. You'll see a lot of people take the upload date as gospel, and it's not even totally unreasonable sometimes. If you weren't around for it, why wouldn't you believe that "Mr. Brightside" came out in 2009? Maybe some people think that "Bohemian Rhapsody" is a classic oldie from 2008 now.

 

It's a side effect of being a chart nerd that I have a lot of release years stored for instant recall. You end up making quick, spurious mental links alongside other songs that were charting simultaneously, or even the nature of chart rules circa that year and how that potentially affected the song's performance. So the funniest thing about this release to me is that when Flume said in an interview that the Eiffel 65 song reminded him of 1998. That's the song's release date on Wikipedia after all, but I'm pretty sure he's really remembering the summer of '99/'00 when "Blue (Da Ba Dee)" was dominating the ARIA Charts.

 

I know I remember it. It's one of my earliest memories of pop music. In fact it's one of the earliest songs I ever declared to be my favourite song ever. This would be quickly surpassed in the next year, basically whenever a new Bomfunk MC's song got added to radio rotation, but I am both just about the same age as Flume and also one of the prime demographics that made it such a monster hit.

 

With that in mind, I can't really get mad at the song, or anyone who likes it. I can't say I still have the same fondness for it anymore. Too knowingly dumb & annoying to really hold any strong feelings about. Overexposure makes me just prefer hearing the other "Europop" singles. I'm way more fascinated at the creative process and vision going into the anti-capitalist anthem "Too Much Of Heaven" than I am "Blue (Da Ba Dee)".

 

So I wasn't too thrilled going into this. I think something that also happens when you get older is that a lot of these novelties upon novelties lose their intrigue. You see the reference points getting increasingly obvious and un-adventurous and it just feels boring. Or at least this is a song that is too big and omnipresent to ever generate that 'oh yeah, I forgot about that song' feeling. Maybe if Flume remixed "Tasty" by Ilanda instead it'd work. It was the right time for Flume to do it though. A decade removed from Flo Rida re-working it, and also getting in a little before the mass resurgence of David Guetta's interpolation a couple of years later (side note: David Guetta got unbelievably close to actually appearing in this list, with his remix of Shouse's "Love Tonight" placing at #115 in 2021). The best I can say for this is that I find the idea of re-writing chapters of music history interesting. So it's fascinating to me to think of Eiffel 65 as a group locked at the turn of the millennium in music history, and yet 20 years later they made it into triple j's Hottest 100. You just never know how long these stories will last.

 

#951. Tash Sultana - Electric Feel - Like A Version (#78, 2017)

96th of 2017

 

As far as Like A Versions that are popular enough to actually poll go, this is probably the one that generates the most groans, ire & eye rolls. They will appear many times on this list, but it's not everyone's cup of tea. If you do fall into that camp, then this probably more than any of their other entries is the epitome of it. Going so far into self-indulgence that the end product feels like it's actively wasting your time, spending less time resembling the song it's supposed to be a cover of than I spend actually writing about the song I'm supposed to be writing about in these blurbs.

 

This is not the longest song to ever appear in the Hottest 100 but it is the longest for the date range that I'm concerned about here. The closest contemporary in length is Death Cab For Cutie's 2008 entry "I Will Possess Your Heart", which also spends a particularly long time before getting to the radio ready point.

 

One of the Hottest 100's most isolated moments is the list history of MGMT. They had three top 20 finishes in 2008, a year later was another guest appearance with a rapper and electronic duo who will both eventually appear on this list, then nothing. What's especially unlucky is that it didn't have to be like this in the long run. The same year this cover came out, MGMT released the title track to their 4th album "Little Dark Age", a song that eventually found an audience but not in a rapid enough capacity to bear fruit on any notable charts. As I write this, it's actually their most successful song in America, with a double platinum certification that is still eluding the big three from "Oracular Spectacular".

 

It might honestly help the case for this cover that "Electric Feel" has always been my least favourite of the three big singles. I don't feel especially robbed of anything when they decide to take it in a different direction. The loop pedals make for a fun novelty, it's pretty crazy when you think that this is largely the creation of one person on the fly. No doubt it's a cool live experience but on record it's not something that necessarily holds up to repeated listens. Every time it comes on shuffle, I'm immediately casting my mind to the near 9 minute run time, at which point it's 'ah shit, here we go again'.