#585-#581

#585. Kanye West - Praise God (#82, 2021)

62nd of 2021

We're back to regular "DONDA" programming. By that I mean it's another song that is credited entirely to Kanye West despite the fact that you'd be forgiven for not even noticing him on the song. He has a grand total of 6 bars on this song, plus another 4 if you include the repeated chorus. The intro to the song is a speech given by Donda West only a month before she passed away, and I'm pretty sure she has more words in this song than Kanye does.

So for the most part, this is a double feature with Travis Scott, who teams up with Kendrick Lamar's cousin, whose name I'm sure I'll come up with when it's more appropriate. Travis Scott does the bare minimum, you won't be shocked when I say he doesn't have a memorable line at all, but all I ask of him usually is to go along with the beat and he does his job just fine.

It really is the other guy who steals the show. Partly because he gets so much real estate all on his own, and also because it's so wonderfully weird. If you can recall that huge trap Billboard #1 hit in early 2018 by two artists who will eventually appear on this list, and remember the way the guest artist on that song's verse was remembered for how utterly bizarre it was, then that's the energy we're getting here. It's somewhat on purpose, I don't think it was intended to be an actual finished verse, but rather a placeholder for potential flows, only Kanye decided to keep it as is. I think it doesn't quite hold a candle to his other effort in 2021, the one that's singlehandedly keeping his name out of this, but his switching up of flows in ways that probably shouldn't work is very addictive. He does the same thing Kendrick does sometimes with the high pitched voice only he goes so much higher to the point of novelty. Most memorable is always going to be right near the start of the song, where the placeholder lyrics run fully rampant. Everything's getting repeated over and over again, and it's just so funny to keep hearing 'Tame Impala' in it, just the world we live in.

If there is something Kanye does get right on this song though, it's the production. Maybe it's not fully him though because there are 7 producers credited on it, but it's one of the more accomplished and fresh ways he's managed to combine gospel music with trap. It peaks early since it takes a back seat for the last two minutes, but it is genuinely haunting when it's jumping out of the background. Maybe there's a better song that can be made with all of this, but I find a soft spot for this genuinely goofy track. I would like to pretend Kanye West isn't involved, but I must admit that I don't imagine anyone else hitting publish on something in this state.

#584. Mallrat - Better (#46, 2017)

55th of 2017

I am abysmal at recognising animals in photos. It's one of those imprecise judgements that I've never been particularly good at. I promise I'm not a robot. I did however need one to figure out what is actually on the single cover for this song. I'm led to believe that it's some variety of cow. I always thought they were either dogs or horses, which in hindsight wouldn't be appropriate because Mallrat has since made songs for those animals. She does ride a horse in the music video, however. Either way, I always really liked the artwork, it's immensely cosy.

Mallrat's rise was fairly rapid in hindsight. She was about 6 singles deep at this point, but hadn't gotten major attention either. Enter this single, released in the middle of October, and it quickly gets added to triple j and immediately makes a huge impression on voters. Short of massive crossover successes like "Thrift Shop", it's very hard to think of many cases where votes get quickly amassed for a song released at the end of the year, by an artist who hadn't really generated all that buzz yet.

It makes me want to re-assess it from the alternative perspective, where "Better"'s #46 finish could be seen as an underperformance in hindsight. The years that followed would see Mallrat consistently poll very high, and it's this launching pad that got her there. Ocean Alley polled their first entry (#814) just 2 places below "Better", and they both leapfrogged straight into the top 10 a year later.

"Better" manages to be cosy as a song as well. It strikes an odd balance where I could say that it's quite light & floaty, but also comes off a little over-produced as well. It all pools up into a strange genreless mush. Mallrat comes off well on top of it though. Maybe she hasn't quite found her way to some of her stickiest melodies, but we're getting pretty close.

#583. Duke Dumont (feat Shaun Ross) - Red Light Green Light (#37, 2019)

52nd of 2019

This is probably a symptom of my annual tradition of collecting Hottest 100 entries after the fact and doing most of my listening the year after they're released. In the case of "Red Light Green Light", I'm just always immensely stuck with the obviously wrong feeling that this is a COVID-era hit song. I listened to it so much in 2020 after all. I'm inclined to say that it probably wouldn't have taken off as well a year later, but given the vast increase of TikTok's influence in that short span of time, I can also believe that it might find its own audience anyway. This misremembering runs both ways. Before I looked it up, I was certain that the Netflix series "Squid Game" also debuted in 2020 (it's actually 2021). Deep down I just want to more closely connect these two pieces of media that play around with the children's game Red Light, Green Light in slightly different ways. If nothing else, this song got immensely more amusing to me after that.

It's difficult to see this song as anything other than a deliberate attempt to manufacture some virality out of a goofy song idea. On the other hand, I still lose it every time when I see that one video about it perfectly timing up to a traffic light. It did make me wonder how the song actually works in a live setting. I liked to imagine that the whole place goes completely crazy when instructed to, but it seems like everyone's a bit tame with it. It even felt like some people didn't understand the urgency of the red light. I guess not everyone's been through kindergarten after all. Shaun Ross is a liar anyway. He says that he only has two instructions, and then about a minute later, he's giving us a third one relating to the strobe light. I can only conclude that this is a Simon Says situation and he doesn't really want us to make slow wavy motions with our arms. I only got that from a live video though; the music video only shows his head during that part so all you get is a sideways nod of approval. Also possibly a seizure. There's no warning for this on the video, so this is me politely telling you that you're probably better off not looking at it. Still, how often do you get a music video that's actually considerably shorter than the song itself? This one cuts it down to just over half the original length.

How is it as an actual song though? I think it definitely falls under the category where it doesn't really matter. It's a gimmick that's not designed for solemn reflection or being background music to a Rocket League session or anything like that. When the single cover explicitly states 'FOR CLUB PLAY ONLY', I start to feel like it's a folly to take it any further than that. I do think it's quite fun though. The drop feels a little underwhelming with how tense the build-up is, but if it's not working I still think that's everyone else's fault. It's also unfortunate that we're left in the 'Stop' position at the end of the song, unable to ever continue.

#582. Kendrick Lamar with SZA - All The Stars (#28, 2018)

64th of 2018

On January 18th, 2010, Kesha debuted at #7 with her song "Blah Blah Blah". In some respects, it could be considered the first hit song of the 2010s, its parent album "Animal" was released right at the start of January and the song debuted alongside it. A decade later and I grew into a new chart fascination. At what point does the 2010s decade end? I've been eagerly watching every single week to see how long it will take until an ARIA top 50 is released with zero 2010s singles sitting on it. Deep into 2025 and I'm still waiting, but we're getting very close. Previous stalwarts "Riptide" (#885) and "Cruel Summer" managed to be dislodged, so nothing feels permanent anymore. We've even had some lucky breaks with random surges for Charli XCX & Black Eyed Peas songs from 2020 and 2009 respectively, just missing both cut offs. At the time I'm writing this, there's just one song holding the fort right now, quite tightly as it were, and it's "All The Stars". I now publish this realising that ARIA's new chart rules are coming into effect today, mere hours from now, and "All The Stars" will be removed from the chart, we were so close to something natural, alas.

"All The Stars" benefits from an often underappreciated effect that does a lot to dictate the chart life of new and returning hits. At any given point, if you look at the charts below the top 50, you'll see numerous old songs just hovering around without any momentary boost to justify it. There just aren't enough noteworthy new songs around so they're going to share space with the most popular oldies. If one of those oldies were to get a boost though, they're going to quickly get stuck in place because the floor for the fewest possible streams they could get in a day has just been comfortably increased. Even just a little bit can make a big difference. It seems strange to say that more people listened to "All The Stars" on the 127th day out from the Super Bowl than the number of people who listened to any Beach Boys song on the day Brian Wilson died, but when tens of thousands of people were already doing that a year ago, it's a fairly hard advantage to overcome. It's also amusing in the context of Kendrick's half-time show. After he performed, "Not Like Us" actually made it all the way to #1, a clear answer for what everyone thought of the show. "All The Stars" just climbed to #8 after that, but within 11 weeks, had overtaken "Not Like Us" with a gap that's only getting bigger. Those steady listeners had the final say all along.

I've joked at times about the notion that the music charts are always shifting in search of the final answer of what the most popular songs should be. It's something that comes to mind whenever you see a flash in the pan move in and out so quickly that the longer running chart hits start to gain leverage and positions because they're never going to drop as fast as everything else. The streaming era has heightened this a lot because it frequently has me question if listener fatigue even exists anymore. It does make my joke look a little closer to reality though, you just need there to be no more new hits unearthed. At the start of June there had only been 12 new top 10 hits for the year in Australia, which includes two songs that immediately plummeted, and also the very old "Pink Pony Club" that technically hadn't gotten there before. I never would have guessed our ideal chart would have so many Teddy Swims songs in it, but that's how it goes. A funny thing happened after I wrote all this, where the entire ARIA top 50 singles chart was unchanged from the previous week. I'm glad this happened now while the chart feels completely representative, but I'm not sure how many have clocked onto the fact that the new chart, with more exclusions, is actually more susceptible to this kind of behaviour, so maybe it will happen again.

I might be exaggerating the longevity of "All The Stars" a little bit. I hope I'm not because otherwise this entry could age very poorly by the time it finally goes online, aging like negative milk. At the time when the song came out, it actually declined very quickly, a modest 22 week run in the top 50 for a song that climbed to #2 just feels like nothing these days. It's only in the past few years it's managed to gain unstoppable legs, but then again, I've thought that about a lot of songs that eventually gave way in the end.

"All The Stars" has another thing going for it, maybe something that'll hurt it in the long run depending on who you ask. We're talking about a song attached to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's no small part either because it's the main theme to "Black Panther", the one with enough credibility to be nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards. Whether you think all of those movies are a waste of time or not, that one's probably going to hang around. Chadwick Boseman's untimely passing only gives it more reason to feel like a special moment to its viewers.

Last year upon a whim that was not my own, I started watching every single MCU film. Not all of the TV series because I have limits to how far I'll push myself, but every mainline film, and many of the supplementary films that add essential context to them. I live in utter shock at just how many "X-Men" films there have been. The most valuable thing I've learnt from the experience is how you really should never catch yourself buying into stereotypical jokes as being actual examples. For so many years I've heard people talk about 'Marvel dialogue', essentially glib, facetious commentary being made by characters under dire circumstances because the studio can't go 30 seconds without a joke. This is probably true of the "Ant-Man" and "Deadpool" movies, but it's nowhere near as prevalent as it's made out to be. No one ever says 'well, THAT happened' either.

If I have anything that could be described as a controversial opinion on the films otherwise, firstly it's that I don't think the movies got particularly worse after "Avengers: Endgame", although I understand it's hard to muster up the same enthusiasm for something once you're so certain that it's past its peak. The other one is that I don't think highly of "Black Panther". The enlightened centrism of Wakanda is more politically conservative than they're willing to admit, and so when the conflict does arise, you end up with a villain who's probably justified in his motives. It's only because he kills people and is called 'Killmonger' that we have to accept he's clearly the bad guy. I also have a major trypophobic reaction to his costume design but that's just me. Really though I just don't think the film does anything to earn a greater reverence than any of the surrounding films, it's just as serviceable as most of them.

The film's soundtrack was produced by Kendrick Lamar, and basically every notable song on it has Kendrick on there somewhere. The other big ones are "Pray For Me" with The Weeknd, a top 10 hit in Australia that surprisingly doesn't figure here, and also "King's Dead", a collaboration with Jay Rock and two other artists who'll eventually appear in the list. It sadly doesn't play during the scene when T'Challa appears to be dead, the film could be elevated to great new heights if that one line from the song appeared in it.

High profile collaborations like this are lucrative because it's creating intrigue out of meta-data on its own. If you're just pumping out solo singles, you need to keep finding a new gimmick to get people coming along, and if you lose the momentum even briefly it gets even more difficult to win it back. Why should I listen to this song? Oh, it's got SZA on it? That'll do. Never mind the fact that Kendrick & SZA have teamed up so many times now, they've managed the longest running Billboard #1 hit of 2025 together so it clearly works.

Very rarely do these collaborations work out to be the dream meeting we all want them to be though. Maybe a team up can cover both artists' weaknesses and introduce variety to keep the listener engaged, but so often it ends up feeling weirdly mercenary, and without the kind of singular vision that makes someone want to follow an artist's career. You're just left with an unsatisfactory hybrid.

That's pretty much how I fall with "All The Stars". It's a song that's very pleasant to the ear, I don't think it's aged badly at all. I do think the instrumental just lacks a bit of flavour for the long haul. SZA sounds great, but can't find a satisfying statement to land on. It doesn't help that her pronunciation gets a little unusual, giving weird emphasis to say 'All the stars are CLOSER', except it sounds like she's saying 'kosher'. Generally just feels like we're padding it out for time at this point.

#581. Broods - Mother & Father (#40, 2014)

62nd of 2014

I had a lot of fondness for iTunes's free single of the week promotion they had running for many years. It's hard to say how much it helped the artists involved, but I believe there are stories of songs like "Fireflies" and "Pumped Up Kicks" getting the deal some time before getting so in-demand as to surge to the top of paid downloads lists. I got the impression that it generated a decent number of downloads though, because one week there was a Wavves single that was put up with a real price tag, and enough people downloaded it anyway that it appeared on the iTunes chart. I'll bet a lot of people never even realised what they did.

I don't know how often I did partake in the venture, but I believe it is how I came across "Everytime" by Broods. I must have trusted them enough to take the freebie, but on the other hand, I left it largely unplayed for weeks and weeks until I heard it on the radio one day and realised I already had it. Love that song, it'd be my favourite song by Broods, one that matches their penchant for catchy hooks with intense urgency. One of the more creative uses of the millennial whoop, where it sounds more like a siren of some sort, don't give KRS-One any ideas.

While this was happening, Broods had an actual proper single they were promoting, and it was "Mother & Father". Technically it's their first ever Hottest 100 hit but it doesn't feel like a breakthrough success at all, just successfully bridging from the initial "Bridges" success. It was a song I had some more time for. It's extremely Joel Little-coded, so you could easily imagine Lorde singing it instead. The one thing that does stand out to me other than Georgia's singing is the punchiness of the drums. For a producer who's sometimes considered infamous for turning pop music into a much drabber affair, this one's pretty lively!