#745-#741

#745. Halsey - You should be sad (#19, 2020)

70th of 2020

Back in 2009, Lily Allen released the song "Not Fair". It's a song with a light country twinge that didn't feel especially out of place. Just another hit for an artist on a bit of a run. In Australia it may have been even more than that, and there's an argument to be made that it was her biggest hit. In Hottest 100 terms it certainly is, landing up at #8. I'm drawing a direct parallel to this Halsey song, a country pop song that was particularly popular in Australia, and is in Hottest 100 terms their biggest hit. It seems arbitrary that Australia ticked the box best, but it makes sense. America loves country music, but it's very rigid. The ruling power of gatekeepers and box filers makes it difficult to get away with it outside of artists' typical field of play. At the moment, Chappell Roan's country-tinged single "The Giver" is not getting a great run because it's not the right kind of country for country radio. The UK is generally more open to different things but country has always been a tough sell. Even now when it's been more normalised as a pop template, there's still a feeling of hesitation towards it, like a generation of music fans are just wired to reject it. Australia lands in the middle of it all and is just right for this sort of thing.

Sometimes you can predict the last hurrah as it's happening. I would be very surprised if anyone predicted 5 years ago that "You should be sad" would be Halsey's last ARIA top 50 hit as a lead artist. They had a couple more entries after it, collaborating with Marshmello and then the late Juice WRLD, and maybe there's still time to stay the course, but as it is, Halsey's last top 50 entry is closer to their first one than to present. The Hottest 100 doesn't always play by these rules though, so of our remaining Halsey entries to be seen here, one of them is from 2021.

For this particular purpose Halsey is lucky, a star even, that they got this song out when they did. Lately there's been such a rise in the use of country music as a coat of pop music paint that the cynicism of it just drips through. It's made worse when it seemingly tends to come from a perspective that sees it as a multi-step template. Think of every typical country music motif you can think of that you'd normally make fun of and play it straight. Halsey wins again in that regard by not going overboard. Outside of the music video, the song isn't really tethered to what it sounds like. It's just a particularly scathing breakup song. Okay maybe that is pretty standard country music fare but I don't think it owns exclusive rights.

I don't think the lyrics are the high point here though. I'm not complaining about the curse word, I think that works fine and Halsey has a good cadence to pull it off this time. I'm just getting myself into English teacher mode and seeing the monster pile of redundant phrases. Just the first verse has 8 whole lines that can be summed as 'I'm not mad but you need to know this'. It's nothing compared to the chorus though, just landing with the worst thud when it rhymes 'sad' with 'mad'. I feel the same way about P!nk's revelation that someone is just like a pill, except that they make her ill. Maybe there's a song I can't think of in this moment that pulls off this grade school lyric construction, but it really puts a hamper in the foot tappable prospects.

#744. The Cat Empire - Brighter Than Gold (#89, 2013)

80th of 2013

I always thought The Cat Empire was a cool name. There's something neat about the silly image of it. Anyhow, I retracted my thought when I saw the album cover for "Steal the Light" which I've forced upon you now. I can appreciate that their weapons are their instruments but the whole thing is just very ugly on so many levels. As for The Cat Empire appearing here, I'm Moe the bartender in that 2000s era Simpsons episode, baffled at how they just keep getting in here. This is the last time though, surely.

The stop gap before this album was 2010's "Cinema". It landed two songs in the top 200 section but nothing in the top 100, a first time for the band. In hindsight, it's easy to look at "Falling" and "Feeling's Gone" and say that while they're pretty solid, there's not a lot to write home about. If The Cat Empire wanted to make it back onto the edge of the spotlight, they'd need to do what they do best. They needed to make a song that's endearingly irritating, and they succeeded when they made "Brighter Than Gold".

If you're like me, the most important thing you're going to remember about this song is the way Felix (the Cat Empire guy) layers his voice along with the backing vocals into this distracting mess. In hindsight, it's not so bad but on the radio it always sounded like some aggressive auto-tune work going on. Whatever's going on there, it definitely stands out in a way that a lot of their recent singles weren't. The album's title track also came relatively close to polling though, that one's also pretty solid, sounding like their older material. Really it's making me think that a lot of "Brighter Than Gold" fans forgot to come in and vote, "Wolves (#884) managed to land higher than it and it doesn't make much sense. I should mention that there's also a lot of song here that isn't the chorus. I don't find the verses very engaging, but when they get into spontaneous jam session in the second half, I'm pretty into it.

#743. Angus & Julia Stone - Chateau (#3, 2017)

75th of 2017

So much of music consumption nowadays is incidental. When it was all done by purchase, you can have your speculation on the merits of exposure and coercion, but it's very largely with intent. Really in the age of streaming, some of the most intent-driven actions are skips. That's data we're not privy to, but I'd be very interested to see what it looks like, and whether it evolves in a meaningful or interesting way. I try not to partake in much of the discourse, but it'd look a lot different if chart climbs we're told to believe are natural are accompanied by a big spike in skips. Given that 30 seconds of listening is enough to count as a play, you can also easily imagine a new concern, the fraction of ill-gotten streams due to skips coming 1-10 seconds too late.

The reason I bring all of this up is because it also has me thinking about the sound of a streaming hit. Back when it was a budding paradigm shift, there would be a lot of pet theories about how it came about. Why one song would sell well but stream poorly, and another vice versa. Are some streaming hits (especially the more unassuming ones) just lucky to get swept up in the moment. The alternative perspective is that we've removed a lot of gatekeepers, and we're just seeing a natural democratic process acted out. You wonder if there's a secret sauce baked into some of these songs that makes people inevitably respond to it in droves. I think about how often times you'd see a Twitter poll running for 24 hours. Even if it keeps receiving a steady influx of votes for that entire period, short of deliberate intervention, the general proportions of the vote will show themselves in a matter of minutes. Once you have that small sample, everyone else falls quickly in line with it, even if they are individually acting on their own accord.

Obviously though, this doesn't really hold up to that same scrutiny with music streaming. When you witness so many hits or 'misses' switch their role with no real provocation, you get inevitably distracted by how arbitrary it all feels. When so little of the music I'm into nowadays makes its way onto the charts, it's not that they're bad, it's just that there's so much music out there that what are the odds that the best music is what's being celebrated out there? It's just not likely. Even still, you just get so many weird cases. Back in 2014, WALK THE MOON's new single "Shut Up and Dance" was a surprise streaming hit, getting so many streams except that no one was buying it. Months later and the script was flipped, suddenly it was selling super well, but its streams couldn't quite live up to that and held it back from charting higher week on week. I make no exaggeration when I say that I've seen these two components flip their prominence on this song at least 3 more times after this. It's obviously a popular song that sounds like a hit, but the weird pace in which it converted that reality still makes it feel like a gatekeeper had to give it the go-ahead. But if there's anything to take away from these scenarios, it's that it's impossible to justify disparaging anything for not being a hit. They simply just haven't had their WALK THE MOON moment yet.

"Chateau" is not entirely a song that this applies to. Given how scant the situation is nowadays, you might be surprised to know that this song managed to make an impression on Australia's Spotify chart on the week it was released. Again, given that this is built on first impressions, I want to know how much of it is successful marketing as opposed to the natural virality of a hit song, but I digress. Whether by accident or design, "Chateau" had the special sauce and really converted itself into a major hit single, with numbers not too far off that of "Big Jet Plane". If you want to throw in an argument about those streams not amounting to any genuine connection, then simply look at its placement in the 2017 Hottest 100. A #3 finish is enough to say that people liked it. Angus & Julia Stone released their first proper album since then last year, made no Hottest 100 impact, and the biggest singles are struggling to match the streaming numbers on the deepest cuts from 2017's "Snow". Was the magic gone or did nobody hear it?

I just feel like with a song like "Chateau", it's incredibly easy to imagine it not being a hit. I don't foresee a scenario where it turned up on a later album and its special sauce makes it go gangbusters. It's so easy to say this because we've seen this play out already. I return to mentioning the original Lady of the Sunshine version of "Big Jet Plane" that received very little attention before or after it was made into a hit. If you think that they sound different enough to justify that, then fair enough, but I'm also always thinking back to 2022, when two near identical versions of the song "Miss You" came out around the same time, and it was the major label version that suspiciously usurped the independent one after a fairly even start.

So while I think that "Chateau" is a reasonably likeable song, more than pretty much anything else at its threshold, I just can't help but feel distracted by how arbitrary its success feels. Many hit songs announce themselves in a way that nothing could ever take their place, but this vague bit of escapism just never feels like it's stepping into the spotlight. You often hear talk of how some songs could only be made and be a hit in a certain time period, or the opposite where they could be made and be a hit in any time period. "Chateau" feels like a song that could be made in any time period, but really only could be a hit in this very specific late 2010s window. 5 years before or after and it's got no chance. They caught lightning in a bottle.

#742. British India - Suddenly (#76, 2015)

72nd of 2015

I don't know if anyone else has the feeling of growing up with an artist. It can be from being the same age as them and having the same vague experiences in life, and you'd imagine it builds an unrivalled bond. The guys in British India aren't really my age, but as someone who started listening to triple j right when they got their big break, I had that feeling echo through all the same.

It's May 2007. I've just experienced what feels like a near-death experience on a high school camp because of poorly explained intel, and I've tuned into JTV Saturday to see a new band emerge on the screen. The name British India has me curious. Which is it? I struggle to determine from watching the music video. They're Australian as it were, and their song "Tie Up My Hands" is commencing what will eventually be a charge to the #1 spot on this highly sought-after (by me) chart. Compared to what's usually getting to the top spot, it's quaint, but likeable. It kicks off what will be a lengthy career of making hits specifically to the triple j market that never quite hit the big time. There are some borderline cases, "Run The Red Light" had a lucky sales week to get into the ARIA top 50, and then much later, "I Can Make You Love Me" seemed to take them to a new level, scoring Gold sales without streams being added, fairly impressive for a song that peaked at #70.

We're at the back end of things, but from 2007 to 2015, British India were usually good for a Hottest 100 entry or two each year. In that respect, "Suddenly" is the swan song. It seems to endure as one of their most popular songs to this day, but with how it struggled to place much higher than their recent entries still, you can tell the writing is on the wall. In 2016 they made it to #194 with "I Thought We Knew Each Other", a song I rate quite highly, and it's been nothing since. Actually they went 7 whole years without releasing anything at all. They broke the silence last year with a single called "Threshold American", which they've also been touring. I feel like I wouldn't name a tour after a song that makes it sound like they're touring a different country, but I guess that's just British India's brand now. If you're after that raucous energy, as one of the few people who've heard that new song, I can say they've still got it.

I never really felt like they had it on this song though. I always found the popularity a little puzzling as I could never figure out what made this song in particular stand out or warrant attention. It has some similarities to "I Can Make You Love Me", but with none of the intensity that made that song click. British India have never been shy about utilising do-do's & whoa-oh's to get attention, but this feels like it doesn't have enough else to go with it.

#741. Glass Animals - Heat Waves (#1, 2020)

69th of 2020

Every so often following the ARIA Charts, I'll think I have a good grasp of what's capable of being done, until a new song comes along and practically re-writes the book of what the limits are. They'll manage a kind of longevity that has you in disbelief as all prior experience leads you to believe it shouldn't still be as high as it is. Once it was "I Gotta Feeling" by The Black Eyed Peas. Then it was "Shape Of You" by Ed Sheeran. The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" (#786) had a short turn, but it was merely a prelude to the reigning champion, "Heat Waves" by Glass Animals.

It's really difficult to explain just how much of a freakish outlier this song became. For many years, it felt like there was a soft cap on just how long a song could last in the top 10. You could get to about 22 weeks, and maybe a few more but that was the absolute limit. A couple of songs started to move past 30 in the late 2010s, and one song that'll appear on this list set a new benchmark when it got to 41 weeks, most of them at #1. The next big song to come along was "Heat Waves", and it managed 88 weeks in the top 10. I can't call this setting a new standard because it's still so far ahead of everything that's come along since. Another song that'll appear in this list eventually made it to 53 weeks, but you could add on Ed Sheeran's 24 weeks with "Shape Of You" to that and still need to find some change if you want to be on speaking terms with Glass Animals. In the time since I wrote this, Benson Boone has taken second place and is hitting 61 weeks today. Might have some gas in the tank too but he's starting to slip. If that's still not enough in the degrees of taking everything way too far, "Heat Waves" became a #1 hit in early 2021, a cozy 6 week reign that could've been longer if not for another song that eventually will appear in this list. One year later in 2022 it inexplicably caught some more headwind and returned for another 5 weeks at #1. If not for a single week of misfortune when a short lived Ed Sheeran debut pushed it down to #11 in late 2021, it would have never even left the top 10 between those two stints. It would end up one week short of spending an entire 3 consecutive years in the ARIA top 50. Recent trends I've observed suggest less stagnancy in the chart to allow for these kinds of runs, which leaves "Heat Waves" with some potentially unassailable records. Although, I always think these things can't be beaten until they are. I'm not gonna fall for that trap again.

Maybe the most interesting thing to ponder in all of this is that we're talking about "Heat Waves" by Glass Animals. A by-product of the streaming era is how strongly it's galvanised the power of the fanbase. It's not necessarily deliberate stan culture existing to buoy the biggest of the biggest, but it's just a natural by-product of the situation. A lot of people are going to their streaming client of choice, think of an artist they want to listen to, and go nuts. The bigger artists are just going to keep coming up trumps when this happens, and anyone who doesn't fall within that periphery will slip behind. It's why when you go through that history of unstoppably popular songs, there's a consistent throughline of them being by the biggest names in music. Artists with loads of hits, that strengthen each other in turn. Maybe you can allow an exception when there's a certain peculiarity to it that commands attention (a "Gangnam Style" if you will), but "Heat Waves" by Glass Animals just isn't that either. The construction of the song actually feels designed to bounce people off. The quiet intro with muffled vocals, and then the pitch-shifted ones that come after. You don't get the real pay off until 40 seconds in. If we're continuing my monologue from before and it turns out that this really just is the platonic ideal of a song as agreed upon by the most people, then it's so strange that it's this one.

Something that's going to be difficult to top in the running of 'Stupidest Thing I've Done For The Sake Of This Blog' is that I read "Heat Waves". That is, the fanfic about two Minecraft YouTubers expressing deep emotional feelings about each other with a running motif about the hypnotic power of the titular Glass Animals song. I should clarify as I don't expect anyone else reading this to have gone this far that I don't mean that literally, but they do obsess over it to a great deal, going out of their way to interpret the titular phrase in a sexual way like you do with (non-glass) animals. It's one of those things that almost seems too calculated to be coincidental, given how new the song was at the time, the fact that the album has 'Dream' in its name, and that the world responded in kind to make this song that hadn't made a major dent yet, to become one of the biggest hits of the decade (almost certainly numero uno in Australia). There are a lot of people who have incidentally built up a very curious relationship with this song that were belatedly rewarded by having to hear it everywhere a year or so later, strange to think about.

If you're dying to know my actual thoughts on the fanfic, it's really not my place to judge. I've read fanfiction before. It's low on my hierarchy of things to do when I'm bored, but there have been some media properties I've been into that translate well to the format. Cannot say I'd ever gone out of my way to read homoerotic fan fiction about actual real life people before tonight. As someone who mostly only watches streamers I know personally, the appeal is a little lost on me, but it's probably a generational divide. I'm also always thinking about classic literature and how many of their motifs that seem stuffy to me, were actually outrageously modern. If you consider "The Great Gatsby" (note: I swear I've read more than one book) to be the defining novel of the Jazz Age, does it ever occur to you that the book was released in 1925? What has become a time capsule to the prohibition era was written so long before the 21st Amendment, so long before World War II, that there'd be no inclination that great upheaval was incoming, F. Scott Fitzgerald was just writing about very present-day life. I am doing an awful thing and comparing it to a fanfic that frequently focuses on the minutiae of streaming and using Discord. Frequent mentions of how someone forgot to mute or unmute, eyes being locked in on the 'is typing...' notification. It's aggressively modern, but at the same time, I guess that is what life is like for a lot of people and there's some merit to printing that. On the other hand, there's one part where someone joins Dream on a call and he's annoyed at them because he's presently speedrunning on stream. In my personal experience, I'm used to having voice channels specifically for streaming, akin to a Do Not Disturb sign, but also if I don't want people to jump in, I just wouldn't be in a voice call while streaming. I mean, for someone with 10,000 times as many followers as me, they sure paint him to be stupid. There's also a sequel to this fanfic called "Helium", I suspect named after another track from this album, but that one didn't make the Hottest 100 so I've spared myself any reason to read that too.

In any case, triple j cited this as a factor in the success of "Heat Waves" (the song) when it topped the poll, and a year later, Billboard cited triple j's article to re-iterate that fact. This niche subculture is now a part of us all, a part of us all, a part of us all, you get the drift. It obviously doesn't explain the next-level degree of success that the song ended up with, but it's nothing if not a solid early barometer on the potential of how the song can affect someone. I mean the Hottest 100 votes do as well, but people like to cast doubts on how seriously people like the songs that they vote for, especially to explain away the popularity of underwhelming songs they don't care about. Absolutely no one is accusing the fanfic author of only mildly tolerating the song. The one weird trick to prove your undying love of a song, truly it doesn't get much weirder.

I should probably at some point here offer my actual thoughts on the song. Generally I've never liked it as much, or hated it as much as I've probably been supposed to at the relevant times. When something becomes this big, you tend to feel obligated to scrutinise it with a more powerful microscope (I will pause myself from linking to that Vance Joy song again just this once), but often times I just get so detached from the process of songs blowing up that I don't feel like I can muster the interest to do so. It's a pleasant chorus, the song avoids some of those bizarre lyrical trappings on the rest of the album, I just gravitate to other Glass Animals songs more.