#635-#631

#635. San Cisco - Get Lucky - Like A Version (#39, 2013)

69th of 2013

There's a magic trick to getting a lot of upvotes in any discussion about Like A Version. Depending on what the current topic is, you can probably just get away with saying something like 'I prefer when artists cover something into their own style, there's no need to listen to this when the original already exists'. Or the polar opposite of 'Why did they even cover this song? They changed it so much I can hardly recognise it.' Both sound thoughtful and measured. Putting them down but providing reasonable feedback so it doesn't sound like trolling. Variations on the two get said so often that it's all become meaningless noise to me.

At some point in time, you just hear so many cover versions that you're bound to be less susceptible to them. The older you get, the more likely you know the songs that are likely to be covered, and the more likely you're going to have specific memories tied to them that you're not interested in overwriting or adding a new chapter to. In the age of music streaming, it's also even more likely that it's not even going to be a throwback to you, because promotion metrics beg for artists to tackle songs that you likely just heard. No one's keeping tabs on those streaming numbers more than anyone who wants to make a setlist and wants proven data that says people know and like these songs. Two of the biggest Australian hits of this decade so far have just been safe house covers of '70s songs that had recently gone viral on TikTok ("Dreams" and "Stumblin' In"). You can try to object but mathematics ensure it'll get rewarded.

I'm up all night to talk about "Get Lucky". Possibly not for the last time because it's another song that I'll be talking about twice here. This isn't one of those 'oh my god, it's already a throwback' type situations. This song polled in the same year as the original song. People were pondering in real time how they felt about this cover before the original had been fully canonised. Granted, the fact that they did this goes some ways to showing what the "Get Lucky" fervour was like in 2013, but damn guys, don't try and siphon votes in one of the most hotly contested finishes we've ever had.

I should probably talk about San Cisco at some point, but they've also got lots more entries to come as we cover just about everything except their early hits (which are arguably their biggest). For a band whose success peaked so quickly, they sure did manage to coast it out for a long time, going from plucky teenagers to unexpected elder statesmen.

There's a reason I opened with that spiel about covers, and it's that I don't really know where this one is supposed to land in all of that. You could easily say that yes, this is just "Get Lucky" with all the hooks still in their same place, and hardly anything surprising will ever happen during this run time. Jordi doesn't try to put a new spin on the mystery vocalist (haha, but you know) and their inflections, just making a very competent karaoke rendition. Except that's not entirely true either, because the bridge of this cover slows things down to insert some lyrics from the song "Hypnotize U" by a rap rock band who are obviously strongly linked to this song and will also surprisingly appear in the flesh in this list. No robot voices either, just a little bit of what could maybe be considered beatboxing. Scarlett, who we've seen here before (#964) also performs double duties, constantly switching between bongos and drums. It's a cute gimmick and gives it a better dynamic shift when the chorus comes around. This is right before the era where Like A Version covers would come off the conveyer belt feeling like professionally produced studio works, so it's something that can be better appreciated in that context.

It's self-evident that I prefer the original version of this song, the degree to which this is the case will slowly reveal itself. For this sort of briefing though, you can do a lot worse. It's not so much a jump scare if this version comes up on shuffle instead. It's a really difficult task for me to find a cover version and think that it really is adding to a song's story rather than leeching off of it. This one comes pretty close. Anyway, it's a Friday, so check it out if you get the chance, sound of the summer.

#634. Kendrick Lamar (feat Rihanna) - LOYALTY. (#97, 2017)

61st of 2017

It must be strange to compete against yourself. Did you know that during the 1977 Emmy Awards, the ABC mini-series "Roots" received so many nominations that at least one category gave it a clean sweep of every nomination. Not often that you've already got a guaranteed win. I could segue into the fact that Kendrick Lamar stopped his own song from going to #1 in Australia, when "Not Like Us" got to #1 ahead of "luther" at #2, which never managed to snag a week despite eventually outlasting the former. Something similar did happen at the GRAMMY Awards in 2018 though, when "LOYALTY." sampled the song "24K Magic", from the album of the same. That album would end up beating "DAMN." for Album Of The Year. Everyone can say that Kendrick was robbed, but imagine what it would be like for that guy if he got beaten by someone who just played part of his album in reverse, whoever that guy is.

This is Kendrick's song obviously but it's really Rihanna who gets the highlight. You can put this down as one step in a long line of re-assessment that her career has gotten now that we've been able to take a step back and look at it. She was not short on having fans at any point, but her rapid release pattern meant for only incremental change. There's a point in time that she must have gone from a faceless B-lister to a genuine superstar. Some might even say that it's right around when the song "Umbrella" was released, but if you were a detractor, you never really got a chance to see it that way, or you might have even evolved into one just out of over-exposure. I know because I'm one of those people.

Rihanna released 7 albums in 7 years. There was a slight gap in 2008 but it didn't really feel like that because she released a deluxe version of "Good Girl Gone Bad" that added another year's worth of Rihanna hits to the catalogue. She was never far away from the charts, and at one point managed to overlap her cycles. "We Found Love" is recognised as a classic now, but at the time it came out when her previous album's single "Cheers (Drink To That)" was still at its peak. It was a wink and a nod to her own ubiquity to do something like that and it put me in no mindset to want to like the song. Another album cycle came and went like clockwork 12 months later and it was probably more irritating that I found myself liking the lead single "Diamonds". It's the kind of exception that proves the rule that I really wasn't having pretty much anything she was putting out in the past 4 years.

The tale of the tape after this is that she went on a long break after this. That's technically true on an album release front, but she never really disappeared. Between these two albums, she had two big #1 hits, one with Eminem, and the other with Kanye West & Paul McCartney, with several other smaller hits on the side. Her output at this time did start to show a different side of things, "FourFiveSeconds" is just about a campfire guitar song, and it was quickly followed by "Bitch Better Have My Money", a trap song co-written & co-produced by an up and coming Travis Scott, that's also responsible for an amazing quote by Mads Mikkelsen describing his role in the music video. I didn't go all-in for it at the time but it was the most I had liked a Rihanna song in such a long time.

I'd say it was a signal for what was to come but I can't really say that with a straight face. Rihanna released "ANTI" in 2016 and it's still her last album to date. It leans more heavily into dancehall and even rock. The big hits "Work" and "Needed Me" were pretty palatable to the trends of the time, but they were hiding away some real oddities, like a 6 minute remake of a Tame Impala song that's basically just Rihanna singing over the original. Just a complete script flip that left a lot of people unsure how to respond to Rihanna's trajectory. I remember liking the album quite a bit, and it's the only Rihanna album I own, but I haven't heard it in a while.

When you have left turns like this, it takes a while for popular consensus to really set in. There's a knee-jerk reaction to anything that's not what it's expected to be at first that takes a long time to get sifted out. So once everyone got used to the fact that it's a pretty different Rihanna album, only then can it be properly appreciated for what it's trying to do. If you can find yourself accepting that Rihanna made a good album, it's easier to look back and appreciate what she's always been bringing to the table. It's an easy trap with music to fall into a dichotomy of heroes & villains, or that certain artists are so clearly bad and incapable of ever making a good song. Discourse even encourages it because it's so much easier to say 'Imagine Dragons = bad' rather than say 'oh, but they have this one song that you may or may not have heard that I think deserves a pass'. There's too much emotional stake to back down even the slightest.

So it may have taken a very long time, but I'm pretty on board with Rihanna now. Unfortunately that doesn't matter anymore because she almost never releases music anymore. The past 8 years have amounted to about 3 throwaway singles that I don't think she's remotely invested it. I can anticipate the potential for a comeback one day, but if it doesn't happen, that's fine too.

There's more reason to appreciate that Kendrick was one of the last people to get Rihanna to do something, and it's no small part either. With her interjections and short verse, she manages to be all over this song. Just absolute aura farming really, and arguably a prequel to the next time I'll get to talk about her.

#633. Spacey Jane - Pulling Through (#25, 2022)

61st of 2022

Whistling has got to be up there as one of the most contentious things in all of music. Just this seemingly innocuous element added on a whim that can either define a song or horribly derail it. In my head I don't think I have strong feelings about it, but then I think of that particular famous example from 2006, by a band who will actually show up here, and how I just don't get excited to hear it anymore. I suppose there isn't much you can do to shake up the formula so every "Moves Like Jagger", "I Ain't Worried" or Telstra ad that comes along is just gonna beat the same thing into submission. Ah well.

So I hear "Pulling Through" and the first thing that's going through my head is always going to be that it's the whistling song. That's how it starts anyway. It drifts elsewhere after that but it probably is still the most recognisable part of the song. Maybe I'm trapping myself in a box but I do think it's a relatively tasteful whistle. It simply would be out of character for me to not try to weigh up even the most minor differentials.

It is a minor thing though, because elsewhere I think you get a really solid example of the kind of nostalgic meandering that Spacey Jane love to focus on. Well really, the song is about that difficult situation of trying to correctly approach someone in a state of grief, where there often isn't an answer for what to do, but sometimes it's just the act of being present that's the best thing you can do. I want to add in a joke about another Spacey Jane song that's inadvertently mentioned here but that'd be jumping the gun, and that's probably failure for me.

Something I think this song does deserve further credit for though is how cathartic it is. I don't know if you've ever flicked through the track list for "Here Comes Everybody", but I can tell you that it's almost wall to wall songs about depression and anxiety. This song that sits at the very end of the album is a welcome bit of catharsis that the band are aware of the negative energy being exerted and trying to come out of it with a bit of hope.

#632. D.D Dumbo - Satan (#44, 2016)

66th of 2016

As someone who's gotten especially lazy when it comes to checking out new albums in the last 5 or so years, my constant desire to pad out these entries by exploring the accompanying albums keeps being met with the surprising realisation that I'd already listened to the album, I just forgot about it. It's kind of why I rarely catalogue these things publicly, because I never want to put on the impression of my own opinion that ranges from meaningless to an untruth. It only serves to weaken the surrounding opinions I have that are more informed or fully formed. I can't rightly accuse anyone of talking out of their own arse but I know when to stay in my own lane. Better to just stick with what I know, like say 1,000 songs I've listened to loads of times each, novel I know.

This is the last D.D Dumbo entry so what better opportunity to (re-)explore his entire discography? Well, it's not quite everything because he did release an EP in 2014. You can see shades of what his music would become later on. "Tropical Oceans" has a sprinkling of Big Scary bombast to it, and there's even an early version of "Alihukwe" that sounds quite different to the one that ended up on the album. Alright I guess I did listen to the whole discography after all. 

Mostly only being familiar with "Satan" and "Walrus" (#750) beforehand, it's hard not to hear the album and want to put everything on a sliding spectrum for which of the two they more closely resemble. You'll just constantly hear things that resemble the main "Walrus" riff, or otherwise the general percussion from "Satan". The lesser known third single "Brother" is like a bizarre hybrid of the two, but otherwise stands out as a highlight.

"Satan" calls to mind being a young, fresh-faced music fan. You're absorbing all of these strange and wonderful ideas with little regard for if it makes sense, because you can concede not understanding how it all works and going with the flow. Maybe all you can hear in this song is a bunch of attempts at Two Sentence Horror, but it's been put in front of you, why not just go along with it? In all honesty though it took until now for me to realise the word 'Satan' actually appears in the lyrics at all, he's just a hard guy to follow at the best of times. The three big evils are definitely eating people, watching TV and worshipping Satan.

A specific nostalgic itch that "Satan" does scratch is that it calls to mind two music videos from 2007. Firstly "Earth Intruders" by Björk, and also that Australian electro-pop banger that's actually about asylum seekers, you know the one. Both have similar videos that could loosely be described as a bunch of body doubles moving from one side of the screen to the other in a slightly intimidating way that fits with the song. Did you know that's actually Björk's highest charting song on the Billboard Hot 100? I guess that guy from Weezer was right about Timbaland. In any case, that's the vibe I get once "Satan" gets going. The actual music video for the song doesn't really match that description, although it has some brief moments like that. Considering that I made this observation before I could remember anything about this video, I would be incredibly suspicious if the resemblance was any greater. But then maybe that'd just be a sign that my memory is better than I give it credit for.

#631. Dom Dolla - San Frandisco (#33, 2019)

59th of 2019

It's not particularly novel to figure out that 'San Francisco' rhymes with 'disco'. The Vengaboys figured it out, Pauline Pantsdown figured it out. It's the kind of marketing for your city that you can't buy. I don't know if anyone's previously tried to make a stronger link than that, credit to Dom Dolla for getting actual San Francisco DJ Justin Martin to deliver the spoken word part of this song that does just that. He ties it further to the hippie culture of the '60s & '70s, and while it's hard to be certain that there's any truth in it, a lot changes in the space of two generations, it's a pretty reasonable hypothesis. It also reminds me of the spoken word delivered in Kenneth Bager's "Fragment Seven (Les Fleurs)" that mentions the hippie days, and it's delivered by Julee Cruise of "Twin Peaks" association. Shout out to all my brethren who were listening to triple j obsessively in 2007.

I took a reasonably quick liking to this song I think. It's pretty common to get hit house records that aren't necessarily playing for pop crossover. They're usually simplistic and better suited for a club than me sitting at my desk, to the point that it feels reductive and pointless to even try to assess them. Still, it's a sound I can potentially appreciate even in this limited capacity. "San Frandisco" doesn't have many thrills, but what it does have is a very telegraphed drop that gets the job done. Also shout out to the programmed drums that come in and out, it all feels surprisingly lively.