#825-#821

#825. Illy - Swear Jar (#39, 2015)

82nd of 2015

Whether it's artists themselves or labels in search of something to buzz about, there's definitely a constant search of records to be made. When you think there can't possibly be new records to break, chartdata always finds a way. Illy is popping up over and over again on this list because he has a near unrivalled streak of appearing in 8 consecutive Hottest 100 lists. The Living End managed 10 years, but I guess Illy has the consecutive years record for a rapper, a solo artist, or anyone who has a law degree (Note: Billie Eilish has since tied this, I probably could have come to that conclusion before the 2024 countdown aired but I shouldn't jinx her. She doesn't have a law degree though I'm pretty sure).

I've saved mentioning it for this song because it feels like the most transparent application of forcing the bit. After a quiet year between album cycles, Illy chucked out this song in the middle of November just in time to get the novelty buzz, and not lingering too long for everyone to get sick of it come voting time. This was also around the time when I started to feel like every new Drake song, for better or worse, sounded like it was made in a couple of weeks. It's difficult for this song to escape the allegations.

I don't think that's a death sentence for any song though, it just inhabits a different space to something that has a more professional sheen to it. For a song like this, it's probably better off this way. It's a borderline novelty song where Illy swears a lot, let's not put too much thought into it.

Something I always wonder about with these things is the reality that anyone who is part of the music industry inevitably knows more about it, as well as the other people involved more than I ever could. The song makes me want to know more about the juicy gossip that it could entail. All I can really gather is that the lyric about getting brushed off by an idol in the first verse is probably about Illy's awkward encounter with Snoop Dogg. There's a video where Illy explains it, basically he was supporting him on a tour (probably in 2007, before he was a solo artist). When he finally got to meet him, he froze up and Snoop brushed him aside. The psychic damage is immeasurable.

In case you were wondering but couldn't be bothered looking it up yourself, the actual origin of the chorus lyrics ('f**k you, and you...') is the 1999 film "Half Baked". Britney Spears also referenced this in the music video for "I Wanna Go" in 2011, making the inspiration clear as the 'you're cool' recipient is dressed up like the people in the movie scene. My own personal dumb anecdote related to this song is that because I speedrun the video game "Furi", made by a French game studio, I've come to know quite a few French gamers and watched them livestream in their native language. I don't speak French but I picked up a few things here and there (Manjula is some kind of spaceship). One time I very innocently had to ask what a certain word is that I seemed to just keep hearing over and over again, that being the word that Illy quietly mutters after saying 'Pardon my French'. We all had a good laugh about it. It's also very funny that this is the last song Illy put out before releasing his biggest hit to date, "Papercuts" (#857).

#824. Trophy Eyes - You Can Count On Me (#93, 2018)

86th of 2018

I'm fairly local, but I haven't been around. These words come from someone who doesn't get out much and doesn't really know anyone. By sheer coincidence this joke is ruined though because I'm hitting publish while I'm on the opposite side of the country. As far as I can recall, there are only two artists on this list that I've ever briefly interacted with. One will eventually show up, the other is the bassist for the coincidentally similarly named Trophy Eyes. It's nothing substantial, but back when I was posting Hottest 100 vote count updates on the regular, he DM'd me about it, in what turned out to be another fruitless year for the band's Hottest 100 prospects. I messaged him back a year later when this finally got his band into the countdown. He still follows me on Twitter, and if you love coincidences, the only other artist that follows me is another band who share a specific misfortune with Trophy Eyes of landing at #101 at least once.

That #101 finishing song, "Chlorine" from 2016, is one I'd have liked to see get over the line. I don't just say this because several of the songs that narrowly beat it have already showed up on this list, but because I think it does a solid job of bridging hardcore with pop punk. It's a good song and there isn't much in the Hottest 100 canon that sounds like it. The one time we did get Trophy Eyes in, it was with this song that I can't share the same enthusiasm over.

This song isn't that far removed from "Chlorine" but it does bring some baggage with it, mainly in the way it puts me in a constant battle to put up with its incredibly overblown hook. I can't help but wince at it, and the fact that it so badly wants to be quotable. Clearly it's here so it worked and I can't discredit it, but it's not generally my vibe. There's more to the song though fortunately. Instrumentally it's tight as hell. When the drums break through the mix, it's really engaging, and there's even a solid guitar solo on the bridge. Just wish the rest of the pieces came together in a different way.

#823. Lana Del Rey - Doin' Time (#85, 2019)

78th of 2019

Yesterday (in December when I wrote this), I was having a conversation about how the experiences of our pasts shape our perception of things in the present. A lot of things become cultural touchstones to the wide majority that experienced it, and eventually assumed knowledge. Internet memes are sometimes the most elucidating form of this, almost by nature. Surely you've seen this gif, and surely you know the context behind it, that sort of thing.

I often think about this with regards to my own upbringing, because peppered in with all the fairly common things I was exposed to, is a cavalcade of sheer obscurity, or at the very least, the sorts of things I'll never see spoken of outside of my own inner circle. In a time before the internet, there was very little means to clarify these bounds. I can't say for sure whether or not this happens more or less, but I suspect that anything that does garner enthusiasm is more likely spread around, just because it can be now.

As was often the case, I related these specific thoughts to video games, because so many of my experiences there flew in the face of the average turn of the millennium nostalgia post. How many other people could possibly have the exact memories of playing all those weird Australian edutainment CD-ROMs that I did? Maybe you knew "Kewala TypeQuick", maybe you knew "Convict Fleet to Dragon Boat", but were you down with "ArtRageous" and "StageStruck"? I highly doubt it. My brother and I can still recite half a script from a nonsensical play we wrote in the latter more than 20 years ago, it's such a huge imprint made by a tremendously obscure game.

The Lana Del Rey part of this story isn't quite on that level but it's still pertinent for me. I also grew up with the slightly less obscure PS2 game "Dave Mirra Freestyle BMX", which is just a game that's Tony Hawk on bikes and worse for it. It did have a pretty good soundtrack though. One that only had about 10 songs on it though, so any reasonable session on it will make sure you hear all of them over and over again. A lot of it is slightly deep cuts from well-known artists but I do think it shaped my music taste eventually. Early '90s cuts from Rage Against The Machine, A Tribe Called Quest & Gang Starr definitely warmed me up to better enjoying their respective discographies in the future (members of Rage & Tribe will eventually appear on this list). Is "Makes No Difference" anyone else's favourite Sum 41 song?

"Doin' Time" by Sublime is on that soundtrack. It's probably the quintessential inclusion on it. Nothing quite matches that feeling of being in an empty park doing bike tricks quite like this chill ska reggae hybrid. Bradley Nowell comes across pretty lame on it, but his slow and often changing delivery is remarkably memorable. "Doin' Time" is not an especially obscure song. Just a minor US hit in its time but one that has moved some ways up the ranks in the streaming era. I don't think it applies as much in 2019 though, because I felt like hardly anyone seemed to know Lana Del Rey's source material. Or even if they did, they couldn't possibly have had it seared into them to the degree it had been for me.

I had an almost immediate reaction to the opening seconds of this cover. It's played completely straight so I'm perked up by the first few notes, but it's the 'summertime' on cue that seals it. People in general seemed to like this cover. Its reputation is helped by being on one of Lana Del Rey's most beloved albums, but it's clearly doing the legwork on its own. This is actually the only song on "Norman F**king Rockwell!" that I get to talk about. I'd have a much easier time covering "Venice B*tch" or "The greatest", but this is where we're at.

For years I've found this cover just impossible to assess on any level. I know hitting nostalgic touchstones is usually a good thing, but this was one that was so specific to me that it's almost invasive. I can't possibly contribute to the discourse on this because my entry into this is so far removed from most people that it can't be reconciled. At the time I tweeted something to the effect of imagining someone just releasing a cover of No Doubt's "Just A Girl" as a single, but then imagine that everyone else is not acknowledging that elephant in the room, it'd be so weird.

The end result is that it can only do negative favours to how I see this cover. There's an argument to be made that it might actually be better than Sublime's version, and I wouldn't even necessarily be able to dispute it, but it just feels like I'm being robbed of a shared cultural experience. All the thrills contained within the song, whether it's the chords, the lyrics or the melodies are all something I already used up 15 years before. I love listening to new music and finding new favourites every week because they're always fresh. It's part of why I come down hard on a lot of cover versions. But when it's all tied to what is also one of the most acclaimed albums of 2019, it's hard not to feel like a freak exclusion from the common consensus. I probably like this but I can't hang out with it, I've wrung it out too, too, too many times.

#822. Yung Gravy - Betty (Get Money) (#97, 2022)

85th of 2022

Here's a solid counterpart to the previous entry because do you know what I did probably have the perfect upbringing for? Rickrolling of course. All going back to those heady high school days when the internet wasn't tremendously new, but it was getting more widespread, and the advent of YouTube was a launching point for so much content that had no prior comparison. It all created this strange ecosystem where I felt subservient to distant strangers and what they collectively decided was the funniest thing in the world, whether that be Chuck Norris jokes, that massive AOL search log leak, or getting trolled by a random '80s song.

The main reason I'd say I was the right age for this is because I wasn't alive for the song's original time in the sun, I didn't know it at all. I imagine for anyone who did, it's not nearly as interesting, but for me it's the perfect storm of it being a hit song (somewhat) lost to time, the immediate SAW production stabs, Rick Astley's voice, and the little bonus fact that it was basically the biggest song of the year, ruling across 1986 & 1987. If ever there was a song that could be utilised in such a way, it was this one. It's all in service of one stupid joke that probably went way past its necessary reach, but it serves as a solid touchstone of the sorts of stupid things people did on the internet when there was nothing better to do. I'll never call out zoomer or gen alpha trends for being a heightened strand of brain rot because I'm too familiar with my own generations attempts at subversive one-upmanship.

This song comes so many years after the fact that the meme is nearly as retro as the song was at the time. Yung Gravy was pre-adolescent at the time so he's certainly old enough to have witnessed it first-hand in 2007. This song whose title gives no allusion as to what's in store manages to find a new way to Rickroll everyone. There's no time to process it as you're hit with "Never Gonna Give You Up" the instant you hit play on this song. The result was actually a lawsuit because he only had permission to use the instrumental, but not to have a Rick Astley impersonation to boot. Generally not a fan of these sorts of cases, but it's another story for another entry.

As a rapper who doesn't take himself seriously, this is obviously a perfect fit for Yung Gravy. It gets a bit tiresome by the end of the song, but the combination of the ludicrous sample with anachronistic (and incompatible) lyrics gets a chuckle out of me whenever I think about it.

#821. The Kid LAROI - SO DONE (#37, 2020)

78th of 2020

When I was first writing about Thundamentals, I mentioned how they arguably were still the fresh face in Australian hip-hop since the sub-genre stopped producing stars to that degree shortly after then. That's not strictly true, it's just that many of the artists we have had on the rise since then have lacked the commercial cross-over factor of Hilltop Hoods or Bliss N Eso. No one's really had that full package to feel like they're following the lineage the same way. Huskii had a #1 album, Chillinit & Complete have both made a name for themselves, and then there was the whole Sydney drill scene, that perhaps felt primed to usurp a new generation of fans but was stifled by industry reluctance and unbecoming crime associations. You can't get big if everyone's rooting against you. That's become a dead end that hasn't really been filled and Australia is severely lacking in new stars this decade. With this one notable exception I suppose.

I don't know how most people feel about calling The Kid LAROI a rapper. By definition he is, but the vast majority of his most famous songs don't really feature him rapping at all. I first heard him through early singles like "Diva" and "Addison Rae" where the shoe fits, and then he changed so gradually I didn't even notice. It makes sense though. He showed a lot of promise early on and had the fanbase to support it, but he just didn't have songs made for crossover. Enter "SO DONE", he's instantly a top 10 hitmaker and it just makes sense. It's the obvious hit that he always had in him.

When I think of hit songs taking ideas from songs that weren't 'hits' in the traditional sense, I'm going to usually think of that one Tame Impala song that I promise will be on this list eventually. It's not alone though, as something similar can be said for Iggy Pop's "The Passenger" which has gone from being a bespoke classic to one that has the catalogue streaming numbers to back it up. In 2020, it popped up as sounding very familiar twice, first on 24kGoldn's "CITY OF ANGELS", and then on "SO DONE". They're not official samples in any capacity but I challenge you to hear anything else in the guitar strumming of both of these songs.

It's not a bad template though, and it makes this song a considerable earworm. I liked it quite a bit at the time, but it's cooled off on me a touch since then. Now that I'm far more familiar with his catalogue, I can't help but view this one a little less favourably. Something about his singing is just incredibly off here, like the whole song has been pitched up in post. I think his singing has gotten a lot better since this. He tends to go for a lower register where he's more comfortable, but even when he goes high, the end result comes out a lot stronger.