#660-#656

#660. G Flip - Waste of Space (#96, 2022)

66th of 2022

This is the part where I appear to be leaning into the very obvious observation. Oh look, it's another G Flip loosie that just barely made it onto the list, one that's a prologue for the obvious bigger hit coming up higher ("GAY 4 ME" (#783)). G Flip's had no shortage of entries, talk about a waste of...nah I'm not gonna do that.

G Flip identifies as non-binary. As I've been going through writing these I've done my best to recognise artists who identify as such and to try and be consistent about it. It's always possible that I've made a mistake here or there, as I can't always keep up to date on everything, and sometimes I don't think enough about it and slip up. If I do make the mistake, it's never out of disrespect or denial. I'm not saying this to puff up my own ego, but because I can understand that you can't always be sure where everyone stands. I'm not someone who usually speaks on greater societal issues because it's not my area of expertise and it's usually better to leave that for people who know what they're talking about. In a time when so many of the richest and most powerful people in the world take time out of their day to try and legislate people out of existence, there's no justifying sitting on the fence. Trans rights are human rights.

That's the core of this song right here. The kind of inspirational song that would otherwise be something we're all very familiar with. The video has about 20 other people sharing screen time with G Flip and reveals at the end that they all identify as trans or non-binary. It's all a lovely sentiment that doesn't need to be subtle at all. Just the fully belted out 'Not a waste of space' towards the end gets the intent across. It'd be nice to have more like it.

#659. Kanye West - Famous (#72, 2016)

68th of 2016

"Famous" is undoubtably one of the most memorable songs on "The Life Of Pablo". I don't know who to credit for the production because there are so many names attached and the further into Kanye's career you go, the less confident you can feel he's fully behind the helm. Still, it gives the whole thing a powerful sting. Rihanna's hook is a highlight of course. Not quite up there with "All Of The Lights" but it's hard to compete with that. Swizz Beatz is a less recognised part of the puzzle but his ad libs do a good job of filling in the gaps and keeping it lively. There's good use of resources towards the end, sampling the dancehall outro from Sister Nancy, and then getting a reprise of the hook from its original source in Nina Simone. All the glamorous excess you've come to expect.

#658. Bring Me The Horizon - Drown (#68, 2014)

69th of 2014

Chart literacy is a difficult thing to get right. Often times it'll just get crowded out by your own personal biases, where the desire to write history yourself will make you put more preference on whichever of the many conflicting pieces of data suits your narrative. I generally try to consider as many perspectives as I can, and rather than pick out an all-encompassing winner, accept that it's all pretty arbitrary and credit can be given across the board. Well I do like streaming tallies because they're very easy to compare across magnitudes, but it's not the whole story.

#659. Kanye West - Famous (#72, 2016)

68th of 2016

Alright we've got to talk about Taylor Swift. We've got to talk about the VMAs. We've got to talk about the sliding doors moment in pop culture that's gone on to have an immeasurable impact on our world that nearly 2 decades later we're no closer to seeing wind down. I could talk about the 2014 Hottest 100 fiasco, but it's easier to save that for later. Some things are bigger than all of this, and this definitely qualifies.

In case you need a refresher, during the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, Taylor Swift won an award for Best Female Video. This was early on in her career where she was quickly developing a strong following and was ripe for US, if not global domination, the kind that inevitably happens when you've got recognised star potential. I wouldn't call her a household name however, she was very much in that building stage where anyone who just wasn't tuned in with the pop hits of the last 12 months wouldn't reasonably be aware of her. She beat some more established names in the process, like Kelly Clarkson & P!nk, but probably none more notable than...an artist who will eventually appear on this poll. That artist released what might arguably be their most recognised and dare I say, iconic hit song and video. The VMAs did not fully recognise this and instead gave the award to Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me". That other artist ended up winning Video of the Year instead which is probably some consolation, but you don't know that in the moment before. Just as an aside, the Breakthrough Video nominees that year are utterly fascinating, nearly every artist or song choice is interesting and incredibly out of line with the rest of the docket.

When awards happen, many people are primed at keyboards to express their disgust when their expectations are betrayed (or when they're met), often with the sort of antisocial language that no one would ever be brave or stupid enough to say in public. As I'm sure you're aware, Kanye West is at the very least one of those things because he went that extra step to go up on stage and tell Taylor Swift and the world what he thought about this democratic injustice. This is not the first or last time he's done something like this. 3 years prior, he invaded the stage after his super high budget video for "Touch The Sky" lost out in the MTV Europe VMAs to Justice vs. Simian's "We Are Your Friends", a very tightly edited conceptual video with a considerably lower budget. He got up on the stage that time and accused the awards of lacking credibility for not recognising what he poured into making his video. Then in 2015 when Beck won Album Of The Year at the 2015 GRAMMY Awards ahead of...a familiar name, Kanye briefly walked up before sitting back down, possibly recognising the punchline of his own behaviour, but managing to take some of the attention anyway. I could possibly touch more on some of this stuff when I get to that particular artist but it is a touchy subject anyhow. In any case, one of Kanye's most memorable speeches he's given was early on in his career when he won the GRAMMY Award for Best Rap Album in 2005. At the end of his speech he's already onto this when he notes that people have been wondering what he might do if he didn't win, maybe he'd do something crazy. He ends the speech by just saying 'I guess we'll never know'. As a theoretical mic drop in the moment, it's pretty unmatched. Doechii took it a step further early in 2025 when she used her own GRAMMY success to immediately drop the song "Nosebleeds", effectively turning Kanye's line into a whole song, the best kind of victory lap. In any case, the moment has been lost now because we're all too familiar with what Kanye does when things don't go his way.

I try not to take music awards too seriously. Certainly not the VMAs with their dubious nomination and voting process that's severely lacking in transparency. It's supposedly a fan voted contest, but clauses on their website seemingly give them the right to overrule this if perhaps it's not going where they want it to go. I'm not accusing this of being rigged in Taylor Swift's favour. If anything it's early proof that she had this kind of extremely diligent fanbase ready to spread the word of their god when she was still in her teens. What I do think is that it's not something that warrants input from Barack Obama. I suppose though Kanye West just finds a way to make sure every sitting US President chimes in to say something about his antics.

The sheer amount of attention this received, with most people thinking Kanye West was out of line...including the artist he was defending, just overwhelmed the trajectories of both Kanye West & Taylor Swift. It's understandable, when you've got so many people talking about this, you're inevitably going to hear some of it and it's going to shape your worldview in some way. Kanye West was already pivoting hard with his music. His romantic break-up and the death of his mother both strongly influenced the drastic shift from 2007's "Graduation", with its glitz and excess, to 2008's "808s & Heartbreak", a much more mellow affair. That album itself proved to be highly influential and paved the way for the direction of popular rap music steered heavily by Drake, but it was just a stopgap for Kanye (in fairness, it was also very divisive at the time).

The most direct result of the VMAs gaffe is Kanye West taking it upon himself to fly over to Hawaii to get away from it all (or rather, to get himself away from everyone else). That stay in Hawaii is what brought out the most acclaimed album of his career "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy". That's an album I didn't fully appreciate at the time but grew to immensely adore. I've even seen people who aren't usually into hip-hop praise it because it's just undeniably one of the most stacked albums that's ever been made. Hit after hit after hit...in the theoretical sense, once again Kanye moving away from making big pop hits like "Gold Digger" or "Stronger" meant that it was another album that didn't move units as effectively as you'd think. The album loses me just a little towards the end but there's no filler, every track is essential to the piece.

The centre of all of this is the song "Runaway". If someone told me that it was Kanye's magnum opus, I wouldn't be able to talk them out of it. It's possible that a lot of the songs on "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" come from fragments of ideas that were already stewing, but "Runaway" is not that case. This is the 9 minute colossus where Kanye recognises his faults, lays them out on full display and encourages us all to get as far away as possible. Between the iconic intro that does for a high E note what "Welcome To The Black Parade" does on G, Pusha T's brazenly hedonistic verse, and the mesmerising vocoder outro that's 3 minutes long and still feels perfectly planned out, it's a masterpiece. You don't get this song without the VMAs and that sure is a conflicting thing to come to realise.

For Taylor Swift's side of the story, it's not quite as detailed, and it's probably fair to say that her career was destined to truck along as if none of this ever happened. At around the same time Kanye West released "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy", Taylor Swift released her next album "Speak Now", an album that proved her star power once again as it sold truckloads alongside only one particularly notable hit in "Mine". On the album she wrote the song "Innocent" in response to the situation, for which you could nearly miss any reference outside of her saying '32 and still growin' up now'. I don't think she owes anyone anything out of the whole debacle, but it was seen as an opportunity for many to take a dig at her squeaky clean image. In any case, she cemented herself as just about the most successful artist in the world with her next two albums, and it all could have just been a footnote in the past.

Kanye West releases the song "Famous" in 2016. It's the song where he solicits sex from Taylor Swift on the basis that he 'made that bitch famous'. If that's not enough, the music video features a bed filled with naked wax sculptures of various celebrities, including Taylor Swift right next to Kanye West. The VMAs leapt onto this and nominated it for Video of the Year, but it lost to...funny how a certain name just keeps coming up. It's all just incredibly tasteless and part of an increasingly common trend of Kanye West banking on shock value, and provocative lyrics that outweigh the interest in the songs themselves.

It could have stopped there but it became the subject of greater public scrutiny when the question of Taylor Swift's consent arose. At the time all we knew was an excerpt of a phone call where Taylor Swift was generally okay with it, understanding it as a joke. The only reason we have this is because her camp initially denied this. It was all pretty ambiguous since it was clearly not word for word the lyric in question and so arguably Kanye took the initial approval as a means to dig even further. Opinion was pretty divided but there was a lot of criticism levelled at Taylor Swift for this, giving birth to the avalanche of snake emojis directed at her. I was a bit like this myself at the time, naturally siding with the artist whose music I preferred and finding any excuse to drag down the ultra-successful artist for attempting to seize the narrative to her own advantage. Nowadays if anything, I feel like they're both a bit to blame, but that on the whole, it's just something that exists to benefit both as they continue to generate headlines and intrigue. Given what I said earlier, I have to reassert that while there might be some credibility to the notion that Kanye West really did make her famous, I still lean to the idea that her continued success was so inevitable that it's a moot point anyway. I think the same thing about Morgan Wallen. Anyone who thinks he got popular because TMZ caught him saying a racial slur just isn't paying enough attention to the Billboard charts, probably just hanging onto an irrelevant stat about iTunes downloads from four and a half years ago.

After this point, Taylor Swift leaned hard into this topic with her 6th album "reputation", released in late 2017. She went for a full heel turn, to give the media the wicked persona of her that they'd already been painting. Reception was initially mixed, although not enough to stop it from being one of the most successful albums of the year, and it seems like it endures as a fan favourite to this day. If I'm not mistaken, I believe it's the longest charting album right now in Australia that's never fallen out of the top 100. If it ever does, it'll probably be because she'll be releasing "reputation" (Taylor's Version) sometime in the future and that will usurp its weekly chart position. Or now I realise, it'll fall out because ARIA are changing the rules in a couple of months, bit of a buzzkill, that.

Though she still makes introspective songs (it's kind of her wheelhouse), I like to think that Taylor Swift has largely gotten it out of her system. I do not feel the same about Kanye West. There's something to be said about his long career of public gaffes, whether he's in the right or not, and how much they've affected his mindset. The problem is always that for all the valid criticisms of his behaviour, he's always been receiving stupid criticisms as well, the kind that comes with the parcel of being a successful black celebrity who isn't afraid to speak his mind. Generally speaking, once people get enough of that, it becomes impossible to even consider appeasing to such a crowd. They're never going to accept you. So now, Kanye West just answers to no one and says every unfiltered thought he can. We've ended up with him just spouting consistently deranged thoughts about certain ethnic groups and just saying anything he possibly can to get people to pay attention to him. It's so miserable to see someone I still think is one of the most important musicians of the 21st century just sink down the toilet like this, with no feasible way of coming back (though I hesitate to wonder if I'd even want that, I can't get myself to listen to his new music). I don't think the VMAs incident is the sole factor in all of this, but it definitely feels like the most important one. If I'm weighing up "Famous" on what it's done for the world, I'm shoving it right around the bottom of this list, but this is just a question of how much I enjoy the song, as irrelevant it feels to the bigger picture.

#658. Bring Me The Horizon - Drown (#68, 2014)

69th of 2014

When it comes to Bring Me The Horizon, I feel like context is very important. If you look at their chart history in Australia and the UK, you might quickly conclude that this is their biggest hit. It charted the highest, and though it fell off quickly, that's par for the course for them. It sounds like it should be their biggest hit anyway, a more pop-friendly pivot on their sound with a big hook. It's not even particularly far off the mark either in terms of streaming numbers. Realistically, it looks like "Can You Feel My Heart" will probably hold the title for some time. That's from just one year earlier on their "Sempiternal" album, but not one of the songs that polled at the time as its popularity has proven very belated.

"Drown" may have earned the kudos in the long run, but I feel obliged to say that it's somewhat forced in the moment. It's a song that comes in the tail end of the era of digital track pre-orders. They're technically still around but the idea of iTunes sales dictating the charts is considerably less relevant than it was 10 years ago. The last noteworthy example I can recall is KDA's single "Turn The Music Louder (Rumble)" with Katy B & Tinie Tempah, the last UK #1 debut to employ this tactic in 2015. Nowadays if you've heard a song before, it's already out on streaming, with the exception of TikTok snippets that are making some amount of effort to restore a similar ecosystem.

It's not quite the same though. Pre-orders work magic on the charts. On any given week, the #10 song is probably doing about half as much as the #1, how cruel fate is that they couldn't manage to pool together all their impact onto one week instead of spreading across two, they could have hit #1! Pre-orders solve this issue by powering up a song like a Spirit Bomb across weeks, even months (shout out to "Flutes" by New World Sound that did it for a year to peak at #67). As far as I can tell, people don't even need to complete the download for it to count, you just see them instantly vault towards the top of the download chart the moment the release date hits.

"Drown" was one of these songs. Another song from 2014's list was also a beneficiary and I'll surely mention that down the track. It did exactly as I described, slowly building up pre-orders after already being out in the open, and smashing out the gate on day 1. It eventually debuted at #27 on the ARIA Chart and is the band's only song to ever break the top 50, apart from "maybe" (#826), I just really think that in the moment it was juicing up its best possible chart position and it's not a realistic depiction of how big the song really was. This polling shows it because with an ostensibly very hyped release to radio in October, just about the perfect time for voter attention, its performance in the Hottest 100 leaves a bit to be desired. It has all the makings of at least a top 50 finish.

The reception has improved over the years but this song was a bit of a tough sell at the time. In 2014, Oli Sykes mentioned during an award acceptance that after getting out of drug rehab, he didn't really want to scream anymore, and that's something that's come through in his music. If you don't get that stop gap in "Sempiternal", it's very jarring to hear what Bring Me The Horizon are bringing to the horizon on "Drown". I wasn't a diehard fan or anything like that, but I was extremely disappointed by it at the time.

Now that I'm coming to it with a decade of hindsight under my belt, I feel like I can assess this song more properly for what it's worth. I do still think it's fairly straightforward coming from a band who have some truly odd songs on the pipeline of this blog, but that's not necessarily a bad thing either. If it serves as a gateway, then it's doing its job fine. For that matter, it's really not quite the limp rock that it's often postulated as. The guitars in this are pretty relentless for that, particularly during the chorus which I see sometimes gives it an element of shoegaze. I feel like it'd go down an absolute treat in a live setting. So yeah, not my favourite by any stretch, but I don't think I have any beef with this song now. Great video too, love the jazz rendition of the song they sneak in.

#657. Doja Cat - Vegas (#22, 2022)

65th of 2022

Historical accuracy is difficult. Everything changes over time so gradually, while everyone's memory of events is shakier than they like to admit. Ironically you can get something absolutely perfect and still have it come off as a mistake because it doesn't fit the re-built version of events from people who were around to see it. It can be very demotivating to put in the extra effort when it's never going to be properly acknowledged.

Last night I was watching an episode of "The Rehearsal". It's one of the most unhinged shows I've ever seen. Blending scripted TV with reality all in the means of constructing social experiments for trying to prepare people for difficult life situations. This usually comes in the way of painstaking recreations of real life locations for set pieces and actors trained in the art of impersonation. The episode I just watched delves into the life and background of Sully Sullenberger, the pilot who in 2009 successfully landed his plane in the Hudson River, saving the lives of everyone on board. The topic of music comes up and there's a sequence about the captain obtaining his first iPod and finding a source of comfort in it. During this, we're shown footage where he's portrayed as using the iTunes Store, circa late 2003, with a computer set up and everything. But the best they can do is doctor in a screenshot that was posted on Reddit 6 years ago, even the most dedicated recreationists just can't possibly be expected to remake the iTunes Store in perfect condition two decades later. You just have to be content with doing enough for the least discerning 90% of your audience. This was all building up to a legendary needle drop for Evanescence's "Bring Me To Life", just monumental television.

I watched "Elvis", the 2022 Baz Luhrmann film. I would think with his relatively small filmography that's largely out of this time frame, it'd be the last time I'd have to do this, but I do not think that's actually true. What an unusual side character he's become. In any case, I did it fighting not my own feelings on his oeuvre, but on this particular artform: the dreaded biopic.

Biopics are something I generally avoid. I used to be a bit more into learning about the ins and outs of music history, and in terms of covering the basics, they can do the job. Once you're satiated on that front though, there's only so much more of it you can take. In the wake of seeing the respective chart fortunes of Elton John and Queen lately, it's been difficult for me to escape the real driving force behind movies of this nature, to re-take the narrative and reinforce the brand. People love a story, and any sort of story that's worthwhile, can do a great job of making you be the artist that gets highlighted in everyone's minds when they think of who to listen to. It strikes me as something Colonel Tom Parker would realise as well.

Real life is always far more complicated than any fictional portrayal, or recreation can ever hope or want to depict. It's a series of players of seemingly understood importance that jump in and out of the script on a whim. It's a series of plot threads that run concurrently despite little cohesion, and any narrative you want to spin out of it is just going to run into some bumps along the way because it's just never quite as clean cut as we want it to be. These portrayals iron down everything to the lowest possible number of dimensions, enough to be understood, but rarely fitting the complexities of the truth. You're not going to make a movie about Queen and bring up the fact that a year before Live Aid, they played 9 shows at Sun City during the apartheid boycotts. It's easier to ignore grey morality, and done enough times it might even escape the public consciousness. There's a brief moment towards the end of "Elvis" where the media's portrayal of him towards the end of his life as an out-of-shape has-been is acknowledged. At this point the image of fat Elvis impersonators has made it too difficult to cut that part out of the story.

In general though the portrayal is very positive. We get an Elvis Presley who's always in it for the love. Any mistakes he makes are generally the result of vicious influences trying to make their mark on (or get their cut out of) this undeniable star who simply excels at everything he sets his mind to. Even his marketing advantage of being a young, handsome white man cashing in by selling black music to a white audience is (albeit mostly through Parker) seen as a natural move of brilliance. You'll come out of it thinking that he's a victim who was exploited by the less talented people around him, because that's what every biopic is. Of course we want to side with the people who made the music we love, rather than those evil, greedy executives, and by gum that's what those executives are going to green light when these things get made.

I did find the movie reasonably enjoyable, nonetheless. A big chunk of that credit goes to Austin Butler in his starring role. A more perfunctory performance would have kept this in the realm of mediocrity but the moment he takes the stage to re-enact his muse he absolutely just steals the show. I bordered on becoming one of those screaming fan girls because I can't help but marvel at someone who has not only understood the assignment, but decided they want to get full marks and extra credit. You start to feel like you're seeing and hearing the real thing.

In any case, this is a Baz Luhrmann film, and also one of my blurbs, so eventually we have to slot in contemporary music as an obligation. I mentioned it before when talking about "The Great Gatsby" and "Young and Beautiful" (#841). There's once again a massive juxtaposition between the earlier 20th century and the year we presently live in. This movie has a Denzel Curry song in it, and earlier on, a Doja Cat song. This Doja Cat song, in case it's been so long since you scrolled past it that you forgot.

It's not just a regular Doja Cat song however, it's one that's built largely on a sample of "Hound Dog", as performed by Shonka Dukureh in the movie playing the part of Big Mama Thornton. It's a little amusing to make this choice given how the movie portrays Elvis's cultural re-appropriation, as if to remind everyone that this song you hear him sing in the movie so many times isn't really his. Shonka Dukureh passed away just months after the movie came out, while her voice was still being heard everywhere as this song crept up into being a worldwide smash hit.

It's such a strange one with that in mind. I'm reminded of Pitbull's 2012 hit "Back In Time" from the "Men In Black 3" soundtrack. That song also based its chorus around an old '50s sample (a real one that time), but it was in a big blockbuster film with a rapper on a hot streak so it was also able to overcome the strange reaction one might first have to it and become a hit. Actually both of these songs peaked at #4 for 2 weeks in Australia, and nearly matched their time spent in the top 50 (20 weeks for Pitbull, 21 for Doja Cat), how oddly appropriate.

It took me a little while to get used to it but I've fallen for the charm of the song myself. The biggest challenge is overcoming the juxtaposition of eras, which can be tough to stomach for some. Getting past that, there's some fun to be had with Doja Cat just doing her thing. Wouldn't say she has any particularly memorable bars here but it's an engaging performance.

#656. Halsey - Nightmare (#63, 2019)

61st of 2019

I've spoken before about the run of releases Halsey had in 2019, after having their biggest solo hit ever in "Without Me" (#931). It's a fascinating hodge podge of ideas and we can finally get to the last piece of it. Technically speaking, this edgy & abrasive single was the follow up to "Without Me", and it used that launching point to perform far better than it otherwise would. I love it when artists do that.

The band this song reminds me most of is Phantogram. Their career has run concurrently with Halsey though they never quite hit the big leagues after a notable breakout 2014 single in "Fall in Love". I wasn't fully into them in that moment but I found a lot to like in their next album "Three". Or rather just before that in 2015 when they teamed up with Big Boi under the name Big Grams. When I'm in the business of gravitating to the most random of choices, I'm inclined to say their song "Goldmine Junkie" is genuinely one of my favourite songs ever. Wanna talk about all-time greatest bridges in music, you're looking at it.

Funnily enough, "Nightmare" doesn't really sound like any particular Phantogram song I know. They're a band that can lean into the rock side of things but usually stay on a more mellow electronic side of things. Actually the closest they probably got was in 2024 with the song "Attaway", but Halsey still beat them to it by half a decade.

My instinct is always to scream pale imitation and be dismissive. I probably was a little bit with "Nightmare" at the time. I wasn't really ready to give Halsey many flowers after recent output. It's another unhealthy pattern of working harder to try and pick out faults just so you don't have to re-assess any artists. If we are talking about faults, I'm not really in love with the verses. The line about punching the mirror 'to shatters' always sounds like a misfire, and just the general edginess is probably trying a bit too hard. The assonance on the chorus sounds good though: 'record', 'wreckage', 'recognise'. I wonder if they wanted to keep it going but couldn't think of a good way to do it. I hate figuring out how to end these things too.