#645-#641

#645. Billie Eilish - TV (#32, 2022)

63rd of 2022

Billie Eilish's popularity soaring the way it has leads to a lot of unwarranted generalisations. It just gets a lot easier to sift through popular media if you can sum it up like that, but it's wrong so often. She'll have a crossover hit with a poppier number, and all the cynics will point to that as the only side of her that exists. It's impossible to be considerably popular without drawing in this viewpoint. Whether it's a worthwhile one or not, the need to prove an aversion to the mainstream is a personality trait. But there's a certain irony that you can't do it justice without having fully done the work to prove you're not talking out of your arse. It's why often the greatest criticisms come from former fans, who have both the investment and requisite knowledge to hit the mark.

In July 2022, Billie Eilish released "Guitar Songs". It's billed as an EP but it's just the two songs, a light showing compared to her first EP that runs anywhere between 8 and 14 tracks depending on where you get it from. That first EP was released in 2017 and her music has made significant strides since then. For the purposes of blog continuity I can only highlight "Happier Than Ever" (#716), but that same album also has songs like "Oxytocin" and "Lost Cause" which also don't sound anything like the "ocean eyes" singer-songwriter many may have been introduced to before that. "Guitar Songs" feels like a concession to that notion. Beyond the bigger budget and the increased gimmicks, at the core of it, she and her brother are still musicians with something to say that can do it without artifice. "Guitar Songs" is what it says on the tin, two gentle songs delivered mostly just on guitar (well, there are bass & drums that come in at times). In a relatively lean year with nothing else out to her name, both of these songs polled and so I'll talk about the second one at a later date. For now it's the bigger hit, "TV".

I'll admit that I'm someone who is drawn to Billie and Finneas's brand of artifice. I also think though that you can't keep getting away with that if you don't have songwriting chops to back it up. "TV" never seeks to thrill, but it also doesn't sit around. There's a genuine feeling of emotion stirred up in it and it runs for a surprisingly brisk near 5 minute length without feeling tedious.

If you remember "TV" for one thing, it's probably the lyric in the second verse where Billie compares the relative attention given to the Depp v. Heard defamation trial, compared to the simultaneous US Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade. It's easy to look at it the same way we might about New Radicals' "You Get What You Give", where the back end of the song's lyrics purposefully sparks a pointless celebrity feud to prove that it'll get more people talking than the political issues he lumped together next to it. I think it has a bit more poignancy nowadays when so much celebrity drama nowadays is steeped in a socio-political lens, even on the shallowest level of punditry. Much of the discourse around that celebrity trial boiled down to a debate on misogyny, where in a messy spattering of information, it became easier for a lot of men (and women) to believe in the idea of an opportunistic woman trying to defame the funny pirate man. The Supreme Court decision didn't go down quietly, but the relative attention given does speak to the fact that this sort of online chin-wagging will use the gravitas of feminism and the countermovement against it, all while not living up to it amidst serious implications for bodily autonomy. It's hard to tell if these discussions have gotten more cerebral, or it's just the latest in a line of swapping out terminology once it's no longer potent.

I want to highlight the rest of the song, because surrounding that line is a lot of personal reflection on depression. Maybe on some level we don't need to hear it from rich celebrities, but it does also serve as a reminder that there isn't necessarily a quick fix on mental turmoil. Money can help but it doesn't just magically make it all go away. It can actually create a new layer of anxiety, where you feel like your value as a commodity outweighs your value as a person. I get the feeling in this song that Billie's increased celebrity has created a distance from any friends she had previously. It's framed as being about a relationship but I think it works both ways. If you get drawn in by something like this, you'll find a conflict between what you think is best for you, and what others think. You'll probably trust your own judgement until it comes back to bite you. It's summed up succinctly with a lot of repetition of the same few words, starting with 'maybe I'm the problem', and ending up at 'baby, I'm the problem'. It's not necessarily my viewpoint (I think we all have our struggles and if you come across people who think they've figured it out, they're just better at hiding it), but it is a valid form of soul-searching. It can be a real struggle to figure out how the world works when we're simultaneously trying to recalculate ourselves, to both understand and to be the best version of ourselves we can be. I can't help but admire the fact that Billie is such an influential voice in music because how often do we get something as raw and honest as this?

#644. Horrorshow - Dead Star Shine (#98, 2013)

70th of 2013

A tragic loss brought about by algorithmic content pushing is that by aggregating all of the most shared opinions, you very safely reinforce those ones and shut down the fringe viewpoints. I don't mean that in the usual meaning of the term, but rather that it's very rare I see nostalgic posts that are so highly specific. We've had them all beaten out of us. If I wasn't writing this blog, it's really hard to justify even mentioning them a lot of the time, but my life is full of those ultra-specific touchstones.

You know what's a song that I've not seen mentioned in a decade but think about constantly? "The Rain" by Horrorshow. That's because it's a song whose popular culture imprint is merely that it was played a lot on triple j around 2009-2010. It didn't make the Hottest 100, so it may as well have disappeared after it stopped turning up on the radio. It's like a core memory being deleted, it can't come back unless someone of prominence brings it back with the right intonation of 'Remember this?'. Well, I guess I have to be that person sometimes.

I hated "The Rain". I struggle to think of another song that riled me up from hearing it on the radio so much at that time, and it was sharing airtime with "Home" by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros. It was something to dread. Packed in its seemingly endless 4 and a half minutes, it reeked of pseudo-profound religious spirituality and a narrator who was too easily impressed by someone who looked like an older version of them saying it's gonna rain, and then it does. I don't think I realised it at the time, but it's like looking into my own attempts at creative writing, just an inability to pace things and put anything in between the forewarning of an action and then the action itself. Just hearing the phrase 'Hush child, from the joy to the pain, it'll all wash away in the rain' would be enough to set me off, and then the song has the gall to refuse to even end after all that.

It's the perfect sort of nostalgia packet because even if they don't remember, a lot of people heard this honestly kind of memorably bizarre song over and over again for a period of time. triple j have not actually removed it from rotation, but it's strictly in the realm of getting played once or twice a year in the middle of the night. I also don't really hate it anymore, because the sheer recollection of this moment in time 16 years ago is too profound to have a negative relation to it. That and I've become more accepting of Australian hip-hop in general, and when we're talking about the big names, it's hard to not give Horrorshow props.

I frequently forget that Horrorshow isn't a super group. It's just one rapper and one producer. That rapper is Solo, and he's showed up on this list before with Thundamentals on "Got Love" (#813). Horrorshow are in fact part of a super group, but that's a story to tell later. Still, they felt ahead of their peers in terms of production value. A lot of Australian hip-hop at this point thrived on a blatant DIY feeling, but wherever he got his inspiration from, DJ Adit really succeeded with modern production values that could easily fit right in with American counterparts. When they first started out, one of the honchos at Elefant Traks (who will also show up here in rapping capacity), drew a comparison to Atmosphere. I definitely hear a bit of Slug's inflection when I hear Solo doin' his think (note: this is a reference to a Horrorshow song called "Thoughtcrime (Doin' My Think)", now pretend you didn't read this part and appreciate my clever reference).

It was a slow rise for Horrorshow. Whatever acclaim they were getting wasn't translating to an audience. This all changed in 2013. I can only concede that "The Rain" must have won over a lot of listeners because their next album came 4 years after and it debuted at #2 on the ARIA Chart, just behind P!nk in the middle of one of her two and a half month residencies on tour in Australia (this is not an exaggeration, June 25th to September 8th, 46 shows, all sold out). That's the sort of success that would have you believe they're Hottest 100 bound, and they were, just barely, and never again after this song.

At the time I was a bit peeved. My feelings about "The Rain" had not yet washed away, and I felt that I just barely landed in the range of having to acknowledge this group when I didn't want to. I'd hear "Dead Star Shine" and hear the worst version of it in my head. I'd hear the way the title gets repeated over and over again and just see it as a lacklustre hook, something they should've tried harder on.

This one grew on me too. There's a bit of similarity to "The Rain" in this one, building its central thesis on a 'woah' moment. This one's talking about distant supernova. Once you start looking at things on a cosmic level, the speed of light isn't quite everything, and it's possible that you could be looking at a dead star without even realising it. If you look at the sun, you're just seeing what it looked like 500 seconds ago.

Either way, it's about recognising your brief time on this world and realising you should make the most of it. It doesn't matter how you come to this epiphany as long as it works. Does the song drag on just a little bit? Sure. But I do find Solo's stream of consciousness flow pretty compelling as well. Who am I if not a person who will start a topic with no clear sign of the end goal? Their name always made me think of Horrorshow as being abrasive in some way or another, but they can be pretty pleasant when they so desire.

#643. girl in red - Serotonin (#40, 2021)

69th of 2021

At some point in time, girl in red got really popular. Google trends point me to the middle of 2020 which pins it to a TikTok trend that suggested listening to girl in red was a shorthand for being a lesbian. I'm here to ruin that statistical data point because I was listening to her music quite a bit at that time. Her song "rue" in particular which dresses up her usually light sound with an unexpected layer of intensity. She was on a bit of a rock tear at that moment, the song "You Stupid Bitch" was also released as a single around then.

I first heard of her back in 2019. One of her earlier singles is called "dead girl in the pool." and trust me that you won't forget that fact after you hear it. By this point in time, her most popular song had already been released and I just wasn't aware of the fact. That one I'm talking about is "we fell in love in october", a song with a staggering total of about 1.4 billion streams on Spotify. It helps that the song has definitively entered the canon of songs that get an annual excuse to surge back up the charts and into our minds, but it persists strongly for the other 11 months as well.

Still, girl in red's popularity has a curious turn to it. For most artists there's a clear pecking order in their catalogue that more or less stays the same over the years, but looking through girl in red's last.fm stats on the Wayback Machine during these formative years, you get peculiar shifts. "we fell in love in october" was her most popular song back in 2020, until it drastically got pushed aside and then came roaring back. Just in the space of a few months in 2021 it more than doubled in listeners while the rest of her catalogue didn't move very much. So many of those initially popular songs just got pushed to the wayside to make way for the new standard, which still includes some of them. "bad idea!" another 2019 single and one of the first I knew, lives on as possibly her second most popular song. I should also note that this is all a largely Spotify contained bubble. Her YouTube views are usually roughly a tenth of what she does on the streaming platform.

One of the songs that got pushed aside was "Serotonin", to date her only Hottest 100 entry. At the time it made sense as a capitalisation on her general popularity pooling together on this recent hit. Her recent singles aren't coming close to re-capturing her prior numbers, so it might end up being her only entry. You get the feeling that if the virality machine ever feels like doing its thing again, it's more likely going to prop up one of her older singles that won't be eligible for voting. She did manage a #183 finish this year with "You Need Me Now?" but that's a last gasp that had Sabrina Carpenter's name attached to it, so it doesn't bode well for future momentum.

You won't catch me thinking too deeply about "Serotonin". It is nice to see a second neurotransmitter song in here after "Dopamine" (#896), but it doesn't do me any good in trying to distinguish them in a trivia context. This one's a nice upbeat track. I mostly find myself recalling it for the verses that briefly takes the song in a trap direction, though it's never quite as long as it feels like it is. It's probably a good depiction of the mental health struggle she's talking about. Maybe my intrusive thoughts aren't quite as intense as her's, but that sort of mental anguish often does just flick in and out at the drop of the hat. Sometimes the best thing you can do is just be aware of it and don't let it consume you.

#642. The Weeknd - Take My Breath (#53, 2021)

68th of 2021

I think deep down a lot of people have the desire to be Commodus, watching over the Colosseum of music and having the final say on what is a hit and what is a flop. You tend to need an arbitrary case by case ruling because you tend to find holes in the system if you try to make a strict ruleset. Platinum sales is enormous success for one artist but a dismal failure for another, and even then, it might feel like a success down the track with the benefit of hindsight.

I remember reading an article years ago that was trying to mathematically determine the biggest flop albums, using a measure of decline from their predecessors. You do find some genuine examples in it, but some of the leading examples tend to be funny cases, like Fleetwood Mac's "Tusk", or Michael Jackson's "Bad". In fairness, it probably was the sentiment at the time, but it's so funny nowadays given how successful those albums were.

I mentioned when I was talking about "Arabella" (#748), where hit singles and chart positions have a habit of masking the reality of the situation. Chart analysts are probably guilty of leaning into it because it shapes our perception and we'll look back on it and think that it just feels right. Once that sets in, you're probably just going to see audiences self-perpetuate it, reinforcing a status quo that might have been shakier than initially perceived.

It has been funny over the years to see the threshold for flop albums change over the years. I remember 15 years ago when Christina Aguilera's "Bionic" was the flag-bearer for this, considerably missing the high mark that her first 3 albums achieved. In hindsight it didn't do too badly, hanging around on the chart for a couple of months, and even getting to #1 in the UK, while also having the curious trivia nook as a starting point for Sia's future pop dominance as she co-wrote several songs on it. Christina's next album "Lotus" was probably a better sign of this as it was pretty much dead on arrival, with the indignity that her next album 6 years later managed to out-chart it.

One of the more recent albums I've seen receive this treatment is The Weeknd's "Dawn FM". It followed the monster success of "After Hours", the album that housed two of his biggest hits, and two of everyone's biggest hits with "Blinding Lights" (#786) and "Save Your Tears". "Dawn FM" by comparison housed none of his absolute biggest hits, cranking the ubiquity down to less than zero, to the point that it was even overshadowed by a revival of an even earlier single in "Die For You". If that's not enough, then this is the only time I talk about the album, with a single that came and went before it had the full stink of association.

That's the prevailing narrative anyway. In reality, it was a fairly successful album that stuck around a lot longer on the charts than you'd probably think. It landed at #10 for the year in Australia, arguably outperforming The Weeknd's 2016 album (whose title track will eventually appear here) within the same time frame. The overall streaming numbers are lower, but outside of the lack of monster hits, not catastrophically so. A few tracks on it have accumulated pretty decent streaming numbers too, "Is There Someone Else?" has racked up close to a billion on Spotify now.

I think "Dawn FM" was just a solid, likeable album even without big standout tracks. Perfect study fodder from start to finish. Or maybe the best compliment I can give is that it feels like a better realised version of what "After Hours" was trying to do. It does have occasional narration from Jim Carrey and I would prefer if it was someone with just a slightly shorter rap sheet of stupid things to have said or done, but I can do my best to focus on the positive.

You don't have to think about it for "Take My Breath" at least. I can understand being a little worn out and not having much time for The Weeknd doing this again in 2021, but coming back to it with a bit of time apart and it is...I really apologise for saying this...a breath of fresh air. Love the dark synth breakdown on the bridge, just all crafted within an inch of its life.

#641. The Amity Affliction - Ivy (Doomsday) (#94, 2018)

69th of 2018

So in 2017 we missed out on getting Architects' song called "Doomsday" but it took only one more year to get a different metalcore band's song of just about the same name. It feels a little bit on the nose but I don't know the politics of the situation and no one seems to care about it. Maybe it's hard to find a Venn diagram of paying close attention to both a British band and an Australian one. The Football Club also released their song called "Ivy" in 2017 but I understand everyone forgot about that one. This is definitely one of those [Cool Title (Real Title)] situations although we do get a brief 'Ivy' in the first lyric of the song.

You know what you're getting here. It's a little bit back to basics in that it's less theatrical than they'd started getting on the last two albums. On the other hand, they adopt all of the chopped up vocal effects on the bridge that call to mind Bring Me The Horizon. Gotta do something to dress up the breakdowns and keep them fresh.

I think Ahren & Joel are both pretty good on this one. Mostly a case of restraint winning out, but it all rounds out as a pretty catchy radio single.