#895-#891

#895. The Rubens - Hoops (#1, 2015)

92nd of 2015

I'm going to get this out of the way immediately: Your informed take on why this didn't deserve to win the Hottest 100 is wrong. It's so frustrating to see the same misconceptions be repeated over and over again as a way to cope with this democratic injustice. It may seem like a bizarre result, but the Hottest 100 is filled with near misses that would've gotten the top spot if that other song wasn't there. There's an alternate history where "Rock It", "Parlez Vous Francais?" or "Stinkfist" got to #1 and it's strange to think about. The Rubens just happened to shoot their shot on a year with no "Big Jet Plane" or "Little Lion Man".

I've been intently following the ARIA Charts for over 16 years now, and if there's something I've learnt from doing so, it's that charts often exist to settle arguments. You can cast speculation on how popular something is based on anecdotal evidence, but the charts put those raw stats in front of you. They are obviously worthy of their own debate on a micro-level (something like 'oh, that's charting higher because it gets more airplay, because it's on a Spotify playlist, because it's on the iTunes front page'), but they really do a great job of highlighting all of the songs & artists who are completely off your radar, but doing serious numbers.

With that in mind, it's something that I think a lot of chart watchers need to remember. I find that for a lot of people, the charts reflect reality only as far as it's convenient. Afterwards, it becomes a game of mental gymnastics to rationalise the often harsh truth that people like music that you don't like. The Hottest 100 is a music chart too, and its followers observed a similar pattern when this came out on top.

I'll cite a specific example from the ARIA Charts now. When voting was being cast, "Hoops" had just finished up a 12 week run in the ARIA top 50, it had peaked at #25 at that point. The song's nearest competitor on this countdown charted earlier in the year. It had spent 10 weeks in the ARIA top 50 with a peak of #33. There's obviously going to be some variance to this, the #3 song in 2015's list was an ARIA #1 hit that was sitting cozily above both of these songs for most of the year. That's a matter of different audience overlaps. But if we're to believe that The Rubens are a band primarily popular on triple j (at least at this point), it doesn't seem unreasonable to say that any sort of ARIA Chart performance for them would bode strongly for the Hottest 100. We even have past performance to base this on, as 3 years prior, they had landed at #10 in the Hottest 100 with their song "My Gun", a #56 ARIA hit. It is once again very reasonable to believe that their new, bigger hit would perform better. If it landed at #5, it'd never face any scrutiny, so what's a handful more votes on top of that?

But a lot of people will scoff at this suggestion for the simple reason that it doesn't pass the smell test. You listen to "Hoops" and think there's no way this is anyone's favourite song of the year. The competition in 2015 is bold, daring, exciting, and this limp soft rock dribbles past all of it. That's where we get the biggest fallacy to be repeated over and over again, the idea that The Rubens only won because everyone gets 10 votes, and that it's everyone's 10th favourite vote.

Firstly, a vote is a vote. No one was complaining about this system before. Secondly, I don't know how everyone else goes about their Hottest 100 voting, but my 10th favourite song is not remotely something I'd describe as filler. For a lot of people, chopping down their Hottest 100 vote to just 10 songs is the hardest task they'll do all year. Thirdly, I do not think that this is a circumstance that strongly applies to The Rubens.

I had a phase around the 2010s where I got really interested in predicting the Hottest 100. It predates Warm Tunas in fact though I won't claim to have come up with the idea. Plenty before me drew the correlation of people posting their votes online to make for a sample, which can be extrapolated to fairly accurate results. I couldn't tell you what compelled me to do this, but for several years, even though Warm Tunas was around, I started manually counting Instagram votes. Thousands of them. My list was never especially different to Warm Tunas, but I did get a good feel for how things progressed, and even a rough version of what's going on below the top 100, or the top 200, that's valuable information you can't get anywhere else.

What's also interesting is that you get to see more than just the votes. You get to feel out what the mood is with the poll. People have something to say beyond just doing their annual vote dump. There are many apologies given to 11th place votes, many people skirting the system and voting multiple times, and given that it's encouraged by the Golden Ticket competition, many people professing their love of their #1 song.

I never counted this, but what I will say is that I felt like I witnessed a very similar outpouring of love, and a very similar outpouring of 'I hope this wins' for both "Hoops" and the 2015 runner up hit. If you do want to accuse a song of being a filler vote, you really should level it at the #3 song. "Hoops" may not have done especially well in the Hottest 100 of the 2010s, but it absolutely annihilated that song, and sure did get a lot of votes for what is apparently everyone's 10th favourite song of 2015. Actually I'm someone who voted for that runner up song in 2015, but not in 2020. At the time it was only my 6th favourite song of the year, so I guess it was just a filler vote for me.

I'll also always remember that towards the end of the voting period, someone made a montage video of their life in 2015. They soundtracked it to their favourite song of the year: "Hoops". The Rubens shared this post on social media at the time and I remember there being a slight vote bump that day. I suspect if the voting result was closer, we'd have gotten a number, but that did probably help seal the deal for them.

"Hoops" was always destined to be a winning song that doesn't age particularly well. I've seen in the 2020s that Australian artists who don't make it big outside of Australia have their cards stacked against them, even in Australia. If you look just a little bit lower in the 2015 Hottest 100 results, you'll see another song that has hit a new level beyond the stratosphere compared to "Hoops". It'll only serve to make the result feel even more fraudulent, but in the end, votes are cast in the present. It serves as a time capsule to remind us that circa 2015, "Hoops" really was bigger than those songs. We were even forewarned of this. In triple j's annual album poll, "Hoops" (the album) finished at #5, rubbing shoulders with all those more esteemed artists. It's made more interesting by the fact that the title track is the only song on the album that made the Hottest 100. Everyone else was splitting their votes and The Rubens had the monopoly on a single crop.

With that in mind, it's the only good time I have to talk about "Hoops" (the album). I very much did not like it, at the time, and re-listening to it almost a decade later. I often said at the time that part of why "Hoops" (the song) did so well is because it was clearly the best song on the album. I spent so many of the months surrounding this album just baffled at what had happened to this band. "Hallelujah" is probably my least favourite song they've ever made. It's just a right mess that never sounded good on the radio. The rest of the album isn't that bad but a lot of it does fall into a similar blues rock muck. It just sounds tiresome to get through because you're so rarely rewarded anything to break it up. "Hold Me Back" has a nice little piano line, and "The Original" has a menacing guitar riff towards the end. "Things About To Change" also mixes up the dynamics enough to suffice, and "Battles" is pretty solid in general. But that's me doing aural gymnastics to find things to like, it's so thoroughly not gelling with me.

"Hoops" (the song) does feel like it's cut from a slightly different cloth. The guitar is still a little muddy, but it's not overwhelming in the mix. The drums are a little flat but they give the song a bit of character. It's not especially hard for me to see why people gravitated to this song.

The main problem I've always had is in the lyrics & delivery. As I'll say with "Kiss Me More" (#996), this is a song where the syllables and my ears don't agree with each other. More so than that song though, this just runs them into the ground. The hook is so clearly designed to be an earworm but it just loses all meaning with how many times they say it. The bridge is a worse offender though, and doubles down because we're also subject to backing vocals that get too much space to breathe and become the centre of attention. The Rubens would keep doing this on later singles and it just sounds really bad.

This probably sounds like the most negative blurb I've written in a while but the position is still accurate I promise. I tend to fall back on the fact that the song is fairly short, and catchy enough in a way that I can see the appeal. It doesn't bore me I guess, even if it is ostensibly a non-event of a song. Yes, it's my least favourite of the 10 Hottest 100 winning songs in this time period, but it has to be one of the most interesting results we've seen.

#894. Tame Impala - Is It True (#17, 2020)

89th of 2020

The last blurb could have been just a slight bit easier to work through if I hadn't banished myself from saying the words Tame Impala until right after the finish line. Tame Impala. Tame Impala. Eventually these words will be rapped confusingly, and appear on this list. Even though two of them pre-date this time frame, every Tame Impala album will impact this list in some way or another. Primarily we're going through the latter two, firstly "The Slow Rush".

It's Tame Impala so I shouldn't be that surprised, but I was a bit taken aback with how high this particular song landed in the list. It doesn't even have the individual hype of being a pre-album single, it did this all on its own merits I guess.

I've never really been able to figure out why though. The Tame Impala sound certainly has changed quite a bit over the better part of more than a decade, but it's never sounded more tired than it does here. The bouncy bass line feels like it's trying to re-capture some past glory, but it's filled with half-hearted efforts to stand out beside it. I live so close to where Tame Impala started up that I can basically say the gargling synth is like 'we have Daft Punk at home', and then the chorus just never lifts anything up for the song. There's only a release of tension in the last minute when things chill out but I've usually just lost interest by that point.

#893. Peach PRC - Josh (#35, 2021)

90th of 2021

Peach PRC occupies a fairly unique space here at this point. Australia's music scene just cannot keep up with TikTok's content algorithms, the effect of which may come to haunt the Hottest 100 in years to come. Meanwhile in that wild west that I dare not interact with unless absolutely necessary, we've got an Australian pop star doing huge numbers, I think. She has 2 million followers on the platform, that's almost 10 times as many as triple j itself has. She's so much bigger than this list.

Evidently, I cannot say for sure how well that all translates to the bigger picture. She's not topping the Hottest 100 any time soon, and as far as commercial success goes, she's had this one song crack the ARIA top 50 on release hype and that's it. That is how low the bar is to be one of the biggest artists in the country though, so it's not her fault.

Peach is an odd pop star to me though. Her most striking asset to me is her voice on record. It's definitely unique in a way I can't really place. It feels though like something that helps make her stand out, but too much to the point that it probably puts a limit on how far she can go with it. With some more polish, this could be a massive hit Zedd song that would've dominated the radio at the time, though I might just be saying that because of the ticking clock.

She has another noteworthy element though, and that's her lyrics. I can say the same thing about her other two entries when they show up here, but she really has that provocative TikTok soundbite thing down. I'm not a big fan of using an 'insert name' to go viral. It feels like it's just preying on the fact that we all know enough people that we probably know a Josh and now we can make fun of them by promoting this song! It did get me wondering if Josh was even still a common name because to me it's someone born in the late '80s. Peach is pretty much the same age as football stars Josh Allen and Josh Dunkley though (all between 1996-1997), so maybe it still checks out. It definitely won't be the last time I ponder on these lines. Congrats to the Buffalo Bills for not getting knocked out before this post went live.

I guess I don't find name bullying very fun, even if they are the villain in question. I could get over this and rank the song higher but I don't really enjoy the production. The drop just sounds really bad.

#892. Empire of the Sun - Alive (#30, 2013)

93rd of 2013

I was really into that first Empire of the Sun album. I have memories both fond & specific of playing it on loop on an iPod Mini while role playing on the floor in my room with Jenga, marbles & toy cars. What a time to be alive. In some respects, Empire of the Sun were very lucky to take off as much as they did. They managed at least two fairly notable hit songs that have managed to endure. They've even got at least two fairly notable American mixtape rap songs sampling songs on that album (one of said rappers will eventually appear on this list, the other is Wiz Khalifa). What was initially just a fascinating side-project from The Sleepy Jackson (and another group who will eventually appear on this list) has gone well beyond that. Empire of the Sun *is* the project. They're lucky, but the songs being that good helped a lot too.

I fell off on them at some point and I can't exactly recall when or why. I remember making my last.fm account in late 2010 and being somewhat startled at how highly ranked Empire of the Sun were, and it became something of a mission to slip them down to a more reasonable ranking. They used to be #22, now they're #184, so mission accomplished I think.

That's all to say that maybe I had some negative bias going into their next album. I can't say for sure how much it's affected my feelings on this song and how much is its own doing. They'll have another entry in this list with an even later song so maybe that'll be the exception that proves the rule. Maybe this song just is a bit of a dud.

It's a song that feels like it's just doing the bare minimum. The general vibe is there, but it never reveals any interesting tricks. Listening to the verses is just the sinking feeling that the whole song is gonna be like this, and the chorus is just playing a Simpsons joke from nearly 20 years ago completely straight. It did plenty well enough but it's always made Empire of the Sun feel like a gimmick that had run its course.

#891. Thundamentals - Quit Your Job (#78, 2014)

89th of 2014

There was a point in time where Thundamentals were the fresh face in Australian hip-hop making a big name for themselves. It was a fairly big market that could pull some impressive numbers in all aspects despite not always having full commercial viability as a rule. Arguably, that point in time is still now because after Thundamentals hit it big, there hasn't been very much in their wake. The one elephant in the room feels increasingly tenuous at best.

I mentioned previously when I talked about Tuka's cover of "Big Jet Plane" (#933) how he was in rare company for only charting with his Like A Version. As it turns out, it wasn't even the first time he'd done this. With Thundamentals, his first Hottest 100 entry was in 2012 with a Like A Version. That's the only Thundamentals entry that doesn't fit this time frame, and this is the first of 9 that do.

This entry comes from their album "So We Can Remember". To me it feels like it's their commercial peak and it has almost half of their entries on it, but they had bigger hits on the next album so it's a bit of a toss-up. In any case, this and another 2014 entry of theirs just snuck into the bottom part of the list so they're on the right side of embellishing the history.

This song is fairly standard Thundamentals. Tuka & Jeswon are not abrasive rappers by any stretch so they're pretty easy to listen to. It's a vibe that works pretty well in their music generally, but not quite as much on this one. I'll grant that I'm not the target audience for this, but it's just the same as I mentioned on "Josh" (#893) where it's taking an easy, agreeable statement and shouting it for virality. Shout out to those who hate their boss and hate their job, there can't be many of those. In 2003 Butterfingers made the song "I Love Work" and it manages to stay engaging for over 4 minutes on a similar concept. This isn't much over 3 minutes and it overstays the welcome.