#685-#681

#685. Touch Sensitive - Lay Down (#31, 2017)

67th of 2017

See now this is a much easier Touch Sensitive song to talk about. Instead of having no words, it has roughly 7 of them! Actually the pedantic part of me that refuses to outright lie has to correct that and say that there are 16 words in this song, just two different lyrics uttered over and over again. That being said, I bet you never would have guessed that both lines of the song come up 12 times each. It really feels like he tells us to lay down for a while but it's really not that much after the opening salvo. I've always had trouble remembering when to use lie and when to use lay. On different occasions I've probably taught myself that this song is doing it correctly, while simultaneously, Eminem & Rihanna's "Love The Way You Lie" can be chosen to be interpreted as a song about taking a nap. They're both correct really. Also I always thought Snow Patrol used both of them on "Chasing Cars" but apparently I was just hearing it incorrectly, I like my version more.

Once again there isn't much insight to put into the Touch Sensitive song. In a pinch it's probably more gratifying than "Pizza Guy" (#689), but I have this recollection of getting worn down by it. It's slick and catchy for sure, but it really just beats you into submission sometimes. Every time I say that a song is repetitive in its lyric, a thought about questioning haircuts comes up that I find increasingly difficult to justify, but that's a problem for future me.

#684. Pacific Avenue - Leaving For London (#57, 2022)

69th of 2022

Dear Mr. President, there are too many bands named after oceans nowadays, please eliminate three. I am not a crackpot. Pacific Avenue probably fare the worst out of these. Really, they're named after a road in their native Gerringong in New South Wales, but it can't help but sound like an off-brand Yellowcard knock-off.

Mostly it just feels a bit strange to be talking about them at all. They feel so new to me that it's like going back and discovering a cameo you paid no mind to initially. Like either rapper on Destiny's Child's "Soldier", or when future Hottest 100 entrant Noah Kahan had a hit single in 2018. This isn't quite as drastic, just a curious 'oh, I guess they just made the cut off in time'. If you look below the 2022 top 100, you'll also have early sightings of Royel Otis and Old Mervs. Still, Pacific Avenue didn't even have an album out at this point.

I'm not totally sure where this band sit in all of this. They're definitely part of the story as one of the few Australian bands to get some heightened attention in the 2020s, but it's the kind where it starts to make sense why there's a lot less excitement for what's going on with our local scene. They're not remotely re-inventing the wheel, or even pretending to do so by emulating a more niche underground movement. They're just making pretty unobjectionable pop rock that doesn't even lean especially hard into either of those two directions.

This is the only one I'll get to. They've got 4 Hottest 100 entries now, the only thing they're missing is the stock standard obligatory Like A Version. They did one of ABBA's "Dancing Queen" in 2023 and it got to #130. I want to say that it's pretty good. It has the standard issue where the translation loses some of the dynamic range and thus the thrills (I am pointing in the direction of Royel Otis in this present moment), but they do a decent job at finding substitutes on the original (like playing the synth line that comes through on the verse on a guitar, or getting back up singers for those lines that Agnetha & Frida pause on. It sounds so strange when they emulate the chorus intro though, I think only ABBA can really pull that off.

I'm just getting distracted though, the thing I wanted to say is that their Hottest 100 catalogue largely sounds distinct from one another...when the songs start off. They have a habit of writing fairly similar choruses on every run around. Fairly catchy all the same, but I don't want to feel like them trying out new things is just going to be a fake out every time. "Spin Me Like Your Records" is probably my favourite because it knows what it's doing and doesn't muck around. This one's pretty good too, just doesn't jump out too much. I keep expecting to hear a cowbell on the chorus though.

#683. Lizzo (feat Cardi B) - Rumors (#73, 2021)

74th of 2021

Hey, it's me from 6 weeks ago when I was talking about "Saved" (#749), talk about foreshadowing, I even gave you the artist and everything. You probably haven't thought about this song in years but it constantly comes to mind for me, solely because it immortalised itself here.

It's basically an expanded version of what I was saying about "Big City Life" (#692), starting to follow the music charts gives you a definitive pecking order of what the biggest hits are. If you look at it with the crasser system that the discourse sometimes devolves into, you can instead say that it sorts out the hits from the flops. But what is a hit and what is a flop? I feel like there often are attempted definitions using chart credentials to accomplish this but it never really works out. If a new Taylor Swift single enters the charts at #38 and drops out after a month, that's not a glowing endorsement for it, but if your local pub band for some reason got millions of streams and snuck onto the charts in the 90s (position, not decade) for a couple of weeks, you could not under any circumstances call that a flop. The most successful flop is bigger than the least successful hit, and thus any formula breaks down immediately.

Chart positions are also their own can of worms because there are two kinds of hits that live side by side. You've got the parabolic climbers, usually from lesser known artists, and then you've got the hyped debuts that rapidly decline. In most cases, if these two songs have the same peak, you'd have to give more credit to the former as it spends longer accumulating an audience while the latter feels like it's shedding an audience it was never supposed to have. It becomes really difficult to tell whether or not these hyped up debuts have actually 'made it' when they are declining every week. Just feels like you have to feel it out on vibes. "Holy" by...wait I STILL can't say his name?! Obviously a hit, it spent 7 months in the top 50 after debuting in the top 5. "Pink Venom" by BLACKPINK? You could convince me it's a hit but it's hard to say that its own #1 peak isn't just a touch overstated.

I have done an act of deception with choosing those two songs. You might be moderately surprised to learn that "Pink Venom" recently overtook "Holy" in Spotify streams. It's doing this despite not really making any strong chart impression in the past year or so, but just doing a little better at accumulating the numbers and having that add up over a significant period of time. Yes, it's another roundabout way of me saying that everything is doing numbers in perpetuity. I feel like the mentality to label everything a flop gets in the way of seeing the bigger picture. It's this distracting desire to want to push everything out of your periphery as soon as possible so you can forget about it and assume that everyone else has done the same.

"Rumors" felt like a flop of some kind to me. It lived only in freefall while never ascending to especially remarkable heights, and vanished from all the charts in about 2 months. In Australia that means a #16 debut and out of the top 50 after 3 weeks. That's instant landfill territory, destined to be forgotten about. Lizzo didn't even put out a deluxe version of her last album to put it on, even though the numbers look pretty okay in the long run. This is a song that feels like it was made to be an event and just wasn't.

Except when you put all that together, you just have to remember that all of those weeks that it is on the decline, it still has a lot of people listening to it. Tens of thousands of people did just yesterday, even as Lizzo stock is at an all-time low. I'll bet a large chunk of those listeners aren't aware of the chart machinations at all, to them it's just a catchy song they like. That's what it is to me at least. I find the flows very sticky, and there's a very satisfying build up. Also hello Cardi B. We'll encounter her on her own songs eventually in this list, but for now I just have to say that she does a great job when she's on her auto-biographical raps, like putting out a last word you can't really rebut.

The short version of it all is that when this landed in the Hottest 100, it re-asserted to me that a lot of people do really hitch their wagons up to these so-called flop songs and we shouldn't put them all down to a binary status. As well as that, I feel it really represents a shift in the Hottest 100 paradigm as far as top 40 crossover hits go. Normally a certain level of ubiquity would net you a chance of getting a look-in, but "Rumors" proves that the bar for that notoriety is so much lower than it was before, especially when it comes to artists who are in most people's good graces at the time. Of course, that's seemingly ended up being a short term deal for Lizzo, whether or not the rumours were true.

#682. Thundamentals (feat Hilltop Hoods) - 21 Grams (#61, 2017)

66th of 2017

This song feels like it would've been forgotten over time if not for its role in one of the greatest philosophical debates of all time. I'm not talking about Duncan Macdougall's study from 1907 about trying to weigh the human soul's depletion upon death, which is where the song gets its title. If you haven't read into that, it's probably not worth it unless you want to learn about sample size and methods of scientific study (the short version is that he didn't do a very good job in this and it's all pretty meaningless despite its ubiquity in pop culture). No, this is about the immortal discussion of how much emphasis we put on feature credits when we're acknowledging achievements and milestones in music lists.

As it stands, Hilltop Hoods have the equal most Hottest 100 entries ever. It might change in the future with the rate that a small handful are racking them up (Billie Eilish just tied them). They became outright leaders in 2022 when they polled "A Whole Day's Night" (#919) and "Show Business" (#897). Arguably they were tied for the lead before that, which is a question of whether or not "21 Grams" counts to the tally, but at the very least, by polling two songs in the same year, they managed to let everyone agree on it for the time being.

This is where it gets increasingly messy because triple j published an article this year congratulating Billie Eilish on breaking the record, when she secured her 25th entry to date. All good for her but it's including a questionable leap in logic where this song does not count, but the Charli XCX song "Guess" counts to Billie's tally. When the actual meta-data of the song includes the word 'featuring' in it, it's a reminder that all of this is splitting unnecessary hairs. You should probably either count both of them, or neither, and it'd be a tie either way in the end. On the other hand, maybe Billie deserves it because she also has an uncredited appearance alongside Labrinth on "Never Felt So Alone" in 2023 that isn't insubstantial. I think what probably happened is that because Hilltop Hoods landed this entry back in 2017 when it didn't mean anything, no one raised noise about it, and it doesn't actively appear under their name in triple j's own archive. If it was the record breaking entry, there's a stronger case they'd get the same treatment.

I used to be very much against counting these sorts of cases. It might stem back to my own biases of the past (I can recall writing something dumb about it at the time) where it was so far afield of my own listening most of the time that it was at no expense to me to leave them out. At the same time, you'd get a bunch of other artists I didn't listen to, who were double dipping and so I felt like the only logical solution was to either not count them, or split the kudos in half (where applicable).

A key reason why I don't think this way anymore is because not all feature credits are created equally. For ever feature that feels unnecessary, there are always going to be some where they're the driving force behind the whole track, probably more worthy of the lead artist status than the one who's there. Sometimes they're not even credited at all and I feel like I want to shout them out. I may be doing this a lot for various Kanye West songs in the pipeline given how rarely they're properly labelled. At the end of the day though, it's still their work to an extent. They're part of it, and it wouldn't be the same without them. The word 'featuring' might feel like it's putting them to the side, but when it's used so interchangeably with other credits like '&', 'vs.' or 'with', it just doesn't feel worth it to make an arbitrary split. A good philosophy in general is that when in doubt, just give out credit.

In the case of "21 Grams", it always feels pertinent because I just don't think I'd be talking about it if Hilltop Hoods weren't on this song. Thundamentals are certainly popular on their own, and this is from the same year that "Sally" (#861) got to #8 with a much lower profile collaboration (actually, Mataya can be heard on this song too). We're talking about a feature credit where the Hoods get two whole verses, and no one's voice comes out louder than Suffa & Pressure during the hook. You could easily flip the names around and feel justified in doing so. In another world, it's just grouped up as a posse cut, and to be fair it's a pretty good one.

#681. DMA'S - Lay Down (#77, 2015)

68th of 2015

You'll have to cast your mind back to last year because with three entries in the first 20 slots, DMA'S really turned into the main character for a while, you may have forgotten about them because it's been over 5 months since I last dived into them. I'm doing so just in time to deliver them some misfortune because they were one and a half weeks away from having an above average selection of entries remaining to go. Now they'll have at most 7/12 entries making it into the top two-thirds, a pretty solid outcome given where we started.

"Lay Down" is very solidly back in time to baby DMA'S. They hadn't even put out their first album by this point. It's in this period of their career that they were not even trying to break the allegations. While it's in a completely different gear to "Delete" (#994), it's just a slightly different brand of Oasis worship. More "Morning Glory" than "Stand By Me" in other words.

I suspect I wasn't overly impressed at the time. The last way you're ever going to succeed to naysayers is to do the exact thing you're accused of, even if there's validity to the approach. That's where I've found myself landing in hindsight. I don't want to just say the same obvious thing that everyone else says, I'd rather ask myself if their version of this is worthwhile. I think the best endorsement is that I really had to stretch my thinking to even think of an Oasis song to put in that last paragraph because (at least in the capacity I'm familiar with them), they really don't have big up-tempo songs like this. In hindsight it's probably why I'm so fond of their late career single "The Shock of the Lightning", which sounds quintessentially Oasis but I can't really point to specific examples.

Maybe it's worth exploring how much of this is self-imposed and how much is a potentially solved game of knowing what the audience wants. I say that because in the years since, DMA'S have seemingly been stuck in that same situation as Oasis, so be prepared for a long of slow jams to come. It's not all DMA'S can do, but it's all that seems to get them the votes. Anyway, "Lay Down" is a pretty nice change of pace. Maybe not the most exciting of choruses, but the guitar & drums both sound great.