#640-#636

#640. Courtney Barnett - Pickles From The Jar (#51, 2014)

67th of 2014

A phrase to live by is that if you find yourself baffled at something's popularity, then it probably holds that it's popular for the very thing you don't like about it. Well, there might be a more succinct way to get it across, but it's probably also appropriate that I deliver it in a sort of clumsy way when I'm talking about Courtney Barnett. We're looking at her first time entry here, so there's no better time to address that aspect about her.

You can probably tell immediately upon listening to her music that it's divisive. She's the kind of artist that didn't even need to fully blow up to get that sort of reaction. It could be years before this point and you don't even have to ask. Just get inundated with a deluge of 'Am I the only person who thinks this is the worst song on triple j?'.

In many cases it's the biggest thing that separates triple j from most other radio stations locally and abroad. It's a complete hesitation to shy away from Australian music that embraces our local accents; there's just an all-in approach to embracing the chaos. I wouldn't say Courtney Barnett is the first, there's quite a lot of Australian hip-hop and even bands like Eddy Current Suppression Ring that come before her, but once she did break through, we did see a wave of more artists in that vein follow suit and garner similarly Marmite reactions.

I felt like this for a while myself. It wasn't necessarily just the way that she sung, but how it was accompanied by a brand of rock that didn't necessarily explode out of the gate. It was like you were being punished to listening to this distracting stream-of-consciousness that didn't even provide a form of catharsis. I'd say it was the natural reaction of hearing something I wasn't used to, except it really did take quite a while to get over that step. I think largely of her song "History Eraser", not her first song to get played on the national broadcaster ("Lance Jr." got there first) but one that was hard to ignore with its constantly building tension that seemed to only partly get disarmed by malformed punchlines. It also has what might be one of the most skewed aspect ratios I've ever seen for a music video on YouTube, just another aspect of her going out of her way to disarm and discomfort me.

"Pickles From The Jar" is a slight step forward to more popular appeal. I think the general lyrical conceit is easier to follow. It might still be off-putting for its low stakes and odd tangents that don't really follow the pre-established pattern of 'You say X, I say Y'. Or rather, they do, but not in a way that makes any sense. I do admire a shameless brand of Australian rock namedropping. On "History Eraser" she mentions The Triffids, and here she manages to sneak in You Am I. It feels honest, and I love it when Australian music reinforces and canonises itself like this. Given her international popularity, she might be reaching a lot of listeners who've never heard of these bands, so she's doing more for them than any dismissive gatekeeper ever has.

I do come back to this with the perspective of her having multiple albums under her belt now, and having her general aesthetic click with me quite a bit better. Maybe the me of 2012 would be mortified at the degree to which I've grown to admire a lot of her music. Well, the low budget sound hasn't gone all the way for me either, so a lot of her earlier music does still have a scrappy quality to it that I can't fully ignore. I can still mostly appreciate this song for what it is though.

#639. ZHU x Skrillex x THEY. - Working For It (#54, 2015)

64th of 2015

I think I alluded to ZHU recently in an entry for his big breakout hit that felt like it came out of nowhere. Whenever I think about that song, I constantly forget that ZHU actually did have a second, pretty decent-sized hit after it. One of those unlikely things like when Baauer had another minor hit in Australia after "Harlem Shake".

Maybe it helps that it's not entirely a ZHU song. We're also coming face to face with Skrillex, an artist with a few big hits both just before and just after the cutoff of this list, so it's just this one song for him here. As for THEY., I know so little about them. They're a duo, and one of them had a minor hit with The Chainsmokers, while I also latched onto one of their songs in 2024 called "Diamonds and Pearls", a song that sounds absolutely nothing like this one and made it even more difficult to determine where they come into this song.

I think of this as a ZHU song more than anything else though. Not just because his name comes first, but because it felt like an establishing shot of what his music really sounded like beyond the first hit. That initial hit felt like the work of an electronic producer who was just singing for lack of mercenaries to hire, but so often since then it's become clear that ZHU does just want to sing on his own songs. His voice is pretty unmistakeable because of how distracting it is, sounding oddly childish and high-pitched.

"Working For It" is a very clear example of this. I can't always tell with some of the pitched vocals whether it's THEY. or him, but there's a certain telltale register that comes through so clearly as ZHU that just makes me wonder what he's trying to go for here. It's a catchy vocal melody but it really goes overboard sometimes. It's a fun song still, I think musically there's an alluring bounce to it that makes the general appeal clear. It just ends up with a 'too many cooks' vibe sometimes that can be overwhelming.

#638. Lil Nas X - STAR WALKIN' (League of Legends Worlds Anthem) (#49, 2022)

62nd of 2022

Lil Nas X can have his turn later, why don't I talk about League of Legends? I've never played it, and luck willing, I never will, but it has inundated me for many years. There's a case to be made that it's one of the most enduring video games of all time. We're not talking about franchises here, just a singular video game that was released way back in 2009, and through constant updates remains remarkably popular to this day. Only really Minecraft competes on this scale.

If you fall in the range of not knowing, but wanting to know, League of Legends is a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA), where teams of 5 work together to traverse a map, killing minions, towers & their opponents to get stronger so they can traverse all the way to the enemy base and destroy their nexus, the winning condition. Players initially select from a list of around 100 champions who all have unique pros & cons. To play around with the meta, players also initially ban champions during selection, potentially forcing players to think on their feet. Back when I was more prone to writing Jeopardy! boards about music, I toyed with making a category about hit musicians who share their names with League champions, because there are quite a few (Annie, Ashe, AURORA, Jax, Lulu etc). Games take around 30 minutes, give or take. It's a reasonable investment and so quitting, poor play, and 'intentionally feeding' the opposition is highly frowned upon.

This is all to say that the game has a persistent reputation as one of the most toxic games around. For years I used to see ads for the game with a cheerful disposition that tried to encourage people that they would immediately have a fun time with this game and I never believed them. I've been within earshot of so much League gameplay that I comfortably know the accuracy of the reputation. There's a version of me who got in earlier with the game and got really hooked on the gameplay loop I'm sure (I remember really enjoying a multiplayer mode in a Ratchet & Clank game that pre-dates League, but is conceptually very similar), but I just have no interest in getting involved with it now. I think my time is better spent doing things that bring happiness to me, and it's not something I can believe can come for me from League.

It's also a video game that's popular enough to have its own TV spinoff, "Arcane". It's a show that's touted so highly that you can enjoy it even with very little knowledge or experience with the games themselves. There is no crossover between the soundtrack and the Hottest 100 (oh, the misery), but they did include the Ashnikko song from season 2 on the most recent voting list.

I binged the whole show late last year. It's been so long that I can't remember if I did it for the purpose of writing about it on this list, or if I could finally vanquish the great foe of being told to watch it over and over again. I thought it was alright. I never felt incredibly invested in the plot or the stakes of it, but it usually managed to fall back on looking gorgeous (or, gritty in a very pretty way). Quality animation is something that's not often appreciated, as it very rarely seems to turn the success needle, as if to encourage lazy work. I have to give kudos when it's done well, there's something aspirational about seeing things come to life with artistic intent. It's very funny that one of the most acclaimed series of all-time also has "Enemy" by Imagine Dragons as its theme song, but you won't hear a bad word about that from me.

But hang on, that gratuitous parenthetical says "(League of Legends Worlds Anthem)". Worlds is simply a major e-sports tournament for the game. It might just be the biggest e-sports event in the world. It's so big that even I'm across it, and I know that the Korean team T1 has won it two years in a row. You might have heard the story of how BTS became so popular that they got the South Korean government to change their laws on mandatory military service to keep eldest member Jin out for a little longer. The same also applies here, with perennial e-sports champion Faker (from T1, not the "This Heart Attack" band) was able to avoid military service, because he's so good at this video game.

This is all to say that in case you thought any different, the two notable League of Legends-related hit songs in the early 2020s are not actually cut from the same cloth. One promotes a TV show, the other, a tournament. I remember looking to try and find any evidence that Lil Nas X had any interest in League before this song came out and I had no luck. I could readily believe his online persona was forged on Summoner's Rift, but in the promotional video Riot put out for it, I got an even heightened impression that he'd never heard of the things he was talking about. The funniest thing about it all for me was when the game itself started showing incredibly immersion-breaking ads for Worlds and the song.

Also "STAR WALKIN'" is a song. Just another moderately big hit for Lil Nas X at the time but currently it's his last song to make any sort of major chart impact. It's possible he won't get another one after this, which is not very becoming of the song's boastful nature. It does show that life does in fact come at you fast though.

At its best moments, the song is pretty great. It languishes a bit during the verses, but it certainly builds to an anthemic chorus. Given his musical origins, it's striking to hear something from him that sounds so big and imposing, even passing the 3 minute mark which is rare for him. Great little outro too, a 20 second piano reprise that recalls "Epic" by Faith No More. Even if Lil Nas X's stardom turns out to be brief, he's certainly made the most of it, but he's still breathing, so I shouldn't ever say it's over.

#637. Flume (feat Andrew Wyatt) - Some Minds (#24, 2015)

63rd of 2015

I want to do an extremely laboured bit that isolates examples and suggests that Flume is very good at picking collaborators on their way up. After all, he teamed up with Chet Faker back in 2012, and more recently, with Ravyn Lenae in the wake of her commercial breakthrough. The most laboured of all of these is to suggest that he made Andrew Wyatt a star. Now, he may have already written a #1 hit back in 2010 (whose artist will show up here eventually), but on the other hand, his yet to be named band will also show up here when they belatedly scored their biggest hit in 2016. Also he won a GRAMMY and an Academy Award in 2019. That's right, since working with Flume, this unlikely musician is now halfway to an EGOT, like a lizard in a chair.

But also check out this unlikely song! Flume was still yet to reach his big commercial peak, but he had enough clout to take this spacious song with a delayed and incongruent payoff to be a reasonable hit. What is it doing at #27 on the ARIA Chart, what is it doing at #24 in the Hottest 100? The Flume fans were fiending temporarily before truly eating about 8 months later.

It's probably the most unconventional hit Flume has ever had. Maybe he's had some that are more outwardly playful and off kilter, but he has a certain general formula that can be trusted. There's a reliable structure and a payoff when it gets to the chorus. Either the chorus precedes the release, or it is the release. "Some Minds" leaves you hanging on its 'old air conditioner in an empty room' feeling for a whole 3 minutes, basically the whole song. It shifts a bit during the chorus but there's no release, just an awkward return. I say the payoff is incongruent because it holds very little resemblance to its starting point. It's just an extra minute of Flume playing around with bleeps & bloops. It's a fun extra minute, and the YouTube analytics make me believe it's the star of the show, but it's so rare to see songs get singled out for sections like this when they have to be considered a full package. I wish I could see similar information for "Spaceman" by Babylon Zoo because it's the closest comparison I can think of. A peculiar two-for-one package.

#636. Lil Nas X - THATS WHAT I WANT (#29, 2021)

67th of 2021

I didn't have much to say about Lil Nas X in the last post. It was very easy coverage for the fact that I knew this post was coming so soon after, but also because I wrote the post very soon after Stereogum's The Number Ones column got to tackling "Old Town Road", and anything I could possibly say on the subject is so thoroughly swamped by it in both depth and detail. It doesn't help me knowing that Lil Nas X's other two entries will also be covered there, possibly before I get to them too.

Then again, maybe the most interesting part of this side of the story is how that doesn't figure into it. Depending on when you come into the story, it might not be obvious of the extent at the time that Lil Nas X was an outsider to the whole pop process. Every now and then you'd get some fluke viral hit that sputters out without enough mass appeal, or just not the right marketing to fully capitalise on it, but Lil Nas X had something special on his hands, a goofy country-rap hybrid that was irresistibly catchy.

I suspect nowadays, it's something that triple j might even latch onto, as they seem more in tune with what's making waves on TikTok, "Old Town Road" was a harbinger for the future of pop music but we just weren't fully ready for it. It was the biggest hit of 2019, but there are no Hottest 100 kudos for Lil Nas X in that moment. That changes in 2021 when suddenly he backs up his initial success to briefly become one of the most bankable stars in the world and triple j do take notice. He landed two songs in the top 10 that year, and a little lower down he had this song, an unlikely contender to break his Hottest 100 virginity, considering it's technically his last top 10 hit in Australia.

"THATS WHAT I WANT" feels unassuming, maybe even forgettable compared to Lil Nas X's other hits, but it was undeniably huge. It spent so long hovering around the top 10 in Australia that its chart run with a Christmas dip makes it look like two hit songs stitched together. Maybe at the time it felt like he was just running on his own fumes, but the fact that he hasn't really been able to do it again since then, it suggests that he was onto something here.

(Remember the remix that made it a hit again? Wait never mind)

A notable part of the "Old Town Road" story is that at some point during his long reign at the top of the charts, Lil Nas X came out as gay. That's not very common prior to this and speaks some volumes to how much society has progressed in several decades. It's become an inescapable part of his identity, largely because of songs like this that don't even pretend to hide it. The entire first verse is him telling us how much he needs a boy to cuddle, again, very unusual to hear on a song that would get blasted on the radio everywhere. Representation like this is good, and a song like this can go a long way in proving how little it will affect the cis straight folk like me if it becomes part of the cultural tapestry.

Helps that the song is just undeniably fun and catchy once again. I only dock a few excitement points because it's always stood to me as a slight retread of the sound of another song I'll eventually get to here. Maybe some people voted for both songs, but for canonisation, you hate to have it feel like something's been overwritten and forgotten in place of the new and shiny model. I want the deep cuts to live on, that's what I really and/or f**kin' want.