#840-#836

#840. Cosmo's Midnight - C.U.D.I. (Can U Dig It) (#99, 2019)

80th of 2019

Some artists seem destined to never reach the Hottest 100. Even when they come somewhat close, you just feel like it's not gonna happen. Cosmo's Midnight first made the Hottest 200 back in 2015, and spent some years creeping closer and closer to the main list. It always felt like they had their moment and would never quite make the A-list. As it turns out, they could manage to sneak through, twice even. It's a lesson in persistence paying off that you have to admire as long as you're not Northeast Party House or Confidence Man.

You can find yourself asking 'Why this song in particular though?', and there's probably not a satisfying answer. Cosmo's Midnight have 5 gold certified singles (including this) and nothing that's gone platinum, which is a level of consistency that suggests they just got lucky this time. They did so with a small enough margin that maybe the cloying questioning of the chorus got through, alongside the novelty that the song title looks like the name of a rapper who will eventually appear on this list.

Or maybe I'm asking that myself as someone who's been generally positive on the duo before and after this but can't move the needle much with this song. They've made lightweight music before. Their first big hit "Walk With Me" is probably the poppiest song that the featured artist has been involved with, and I can dig it, but there's not much meat to chew on with this.

#839. The Weeknd - Can't Feel My Face (#9, 2015)

84th of 2015

The Hottest 100 always serves as a time capsule. You can run it back over and over again to get a new result, but you'll never achieve something complete to be satisfied with. Best you can do is just sit with whatever the first attempt ended up being and let it capture the moment. The moment as it's relevant here, is that brief period where "Can't Feel My Face" seemed like the platonic ideal of what 'The Weeknd makes a pop hit' would sound like, cue the Always Sunny title card.

Much has been written both in real time and in hindsight about the changing tides of popular music in the 2010s. You look at what was topping the Billboard Hot 100 at the start and end of the decade and you've been taken to two very different worlds. "Can't Feel My Face" sits somewhere in the middle of this, but definitely leans more towards the earlier half. It sounds like a song made to get played to death on the radio, but manage to top the charts before reaching total saturation. That's what happened in America. In Australia it fell prey to those dominant 2015 sounds of Meghan Trainor and Lost Frequencies, how could Abel possibly compete?

The most revealing part of the whole situation is that it largely felt like this song's sound was usurped while it was in the charts. The single that The Weeknd released before this one (which I will eventually put on this list) peaked after it, and wound up sticking around for a lot longer. The Weeknd would continue to score more hits, many of them still in collaboration with Max Martin, but they wouldn't really sound like this. The novelty of this song being his big pop moment has disappeared and it just doesn't feel like a song that gets much attention anymore. The only layer of intrigue it has left is the way the sound of it juxtaposes with the dark lyrical content.

It's easy to draw a comparison with "I Feel It Coming" (#906). Four years ago, this was The Weeknd's 4th most streamed song. At the time of writing, it's slipped down to 8th, and furthermore, it's in 29th place on a daily basis. It's suffering from The Weeknd having so many hits that you can listen to an extensive playlist of them and not even get to this one. On the other hand, some years ago there was a lot of talk about The Weeknd playing at Coachella to a muted response whenever he went back to his "Trilogy" catalogue. At present, as many people are listening to the "House of Balloons" title track as this, how the glass tables have turned. I don't know if it's just been forgotten or if people are worn out on it. For me, I land at the latter. I can admire the craft, see all the parts of it that work, but it ends up as a light thrill that I'm never excited to hear.

#838. Ocean Alley - Double Vision (#59, 2022)

87th of 2022

One way I find myself second guessing the validity of my lists is my own personal hesitation to want to rank the same artist next to themselves. I'm not saying it won't happen at some point here, but it's probably extended beyond reasonable statistical averages that it hasn't happened already. On the surface it just feels like an unconsidered approach, but it still should just happen every now and then.

"Double Vision" and "Home" (#870) is just about the strongest I've felt this way because I've never really had a way to separate these two Ocean Alley songs. They don't sound especially different, and they just occupy the same space in my mind. Yet my sheer desire to compare their strengths and weaknesses within the Ocean Alley template has landed them 32 places apart.

I guess where it falls down is that I find "Home" to be the slightly more meandering of the two. That might sound strange given that this is a whole minute and a half longer, but it actually feels like there's something to look forward to along the way. It's not much but it's a start.

#837. Doja Cat - Woman (#37, 2021)

86th of 2021

This song has a pretty lasting legacy. There were so many Doja Cat songs in the 2021 Hottest 100 that on the broadcast itself, Hobba & Hing played this one again by accident, which would then get brought up and played for laughs over and over again. This was a very big hit at the time but it's still the first thing I think of in regard to it.

The second thing I think of is that it's not even the only female empowerment rap song released in the middle of 2021 called "Woman". Little Simz released hers a couple of months earlier and it was on my regular playlist when this came out. That's a head to head battle you can't expect to win. Little Simz has never made the Hottest 100 but she got way closer than I ever would have guessed in 2023 when "Gorilla" landed at #118.

In isolation though, this song goes alright. It's far from the most exciting Doja Cat song but the percussion is lively enough to give it a pleasing sound. The chorus sounds a little silly and feels like it's at ends with the rest of the song. If you recall that 'I'm the mushroom man' post that just keeps coming back over and over again about the juxtaposition of System of a Down lyrics (they say every SOAD song, but they really just mean "Prison Song"), this song is getting pretty close to replicating that.

#836. Billie Eilish - Your Power (#80, 2021)

85th of 2021

The massive success of Billie Eilish's 3rd album in 2024 has only served to further highlight her 2nd album as the black sheep of her discography (or maybe the white sheep, it's the only one where she doesn't have dark hair on the cover). I'll eventually get to the title track which did all it could to salvage things, but she had a fairly modest showing otherwise. This isn't technically the lead single (two 2020 singles made the track listing) but it's the first single released after the album was announced, and it only barely made it in.

At the same time, I do get it. This is a highly evocative song. It's playing out a relatively passive voice talking about an abusive relationship, and then flips the script after the second chorus to be much more closely involved. You won't find many other ARIA top 10 hits that acknowledge these kinds of toxic experiences without a single layer of artifice on top of it. These are extremely commonplace scenarios that no amount of global intervention can ever seem to remove from our society. Any position of power where culpability can possibly be avoided is going to be abused. This song doesn't even necessarily come down on it with damnation, but rather reserved probing, the kind that would eat away at a more introspective listener.

Good song with all things considered! It just has to end up fairly low here because I make this list on enjoyment levels, and this is just not a song I've ever found myself seeking out. It's a bit too much of a slow burn, and the extended vowels wear themselves out pretty quickly. There is a nice warmth to it in the instrumental touches (like the synth that comes in for the second chorus), but it's not quite enough to command an audience.