#595-#591

#595. Cub Sport - Party Pill (#73, 2019)

53rd of 2019

Something I didn't mention when I was talking about "Jail" (#597) earlier in the week is that a further quirk of the album was Kanye West not allowing any curse words on it. For DaBaby's verse in part 2, he was still saying it, but it got bleeped out. You can pick your own punchline for 'I can accept ____, but I draw the line at swear words', there's certainly no shortage of terrible options on what can fill in the blank.

I say this because the most memorable thing in "Party Pill" is the inclusion of a symbolic bleep. It's not obscuring a traditional curse word, but instead the word 'shame'. The connotation of the word is relating to Tim's homosexuality and how he felt about it at the time, so the censorship is a way of saying that it's not anything to be ashamed of.

It's a good way of contextualising their story, but other than it being signposted in a very disarming way, I like that it's not really the focal point of the song. A frustrating thing about a world filled with prejudice is that you can feel as though, or alternatively just come across as if you're spending more time dealing with that aspect of it rather than getting to enjoy the thing that you're fighting to protect. This song is able to spend most of its time embracing that love and the positive effect it has, and I think that's great.

#594. Allday - You Always Know the DJ (#35, 2014)

63rd of 2014

Onto a song with a much less affirmative message, although it's one I've always had trouble fully puzzling out. This is a song where Allday is pretty fixated on a girl who goes out every night, gets into clubs without paying and usually ends up having sex. There are a couple of ways you can read this. A couple of lyrics stick out as variations on slut shaming, but it's also possible to read it all as a cautionary tale.

I lean to wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt. There's a read of this song to suggest that he's mansplaining, telling someone how to live their life. Realistically he's probably right about it in the circumstances, at least from his perspective it does sound like the people at the club are taking advantage of the girl (we don't really get her perspective on it, just a second-hand account). On the other hand, he ends multiple verses of the song with a variation on 'I don't know', implying a sense of confusion at the whole thing, where maybe he's just cautious of the slippery slope she could be on. Or that he's 'just a singer' so he probably shouldn't be your last source of advice.

I dunno though. Maybe I'm overthinking it because I haven't seen a lot of discussion on the topic. I do think there's some merit to having a fun, catchy song about the perils of having a fun, carefree lifestyle, and I appreciate that Allday at least puts some focus on the real villains of the scenario (could use a little re-write though). In looking around at this I found out that Allday made a popular TikTok video about the hypothetical of a catchy song that carelessly sneaks in questionable lyrics. It's actually surprisingly catchy, he seems like a funny dude.

#593. Allday (feat Japanese Wallpaper) - In Motion (#44, 2017)

57th of 2017

I previously enlisted the help of mathematicians to find out the odds of having my personal rank line up with the original position a certain number of times. Then after I had done this I realised that because of a mistake I made whilst initially compiling the list, it's something that actually happened a statistically reasonable number of times after all. Something I don't think I can say the same for is instances of two songs by the same artist going back to back.

What's funny about this is that I have a recollection where I once seemed to go out of my way to do such a thing. I'd make lists of my favourite songs of the year back around 2010 and it would happen every time. Then I think I heard someone say that it's something that makes them question the validity of any such lists and I probably overcorrected in the direction of not doing it pretty much ever.

In theory, when looking at all possible outcomes, a list that is filled with these back-to-back entries should be very likely. These 1,000 entries are all different, but similarities crop up, and any two songs being by the same artist is a pretty big similarity really. If I'm predisposed to liking or not liking them, that shrinks the likely range for them to fall in, and that's a good way to have them just sound similar anyway.

I mentioned the same concept when I was talking about Ocean Alley and "Double Vision" (#838). Any similarities just make you want to try and figure out what unique properties they each hold, and then they just turn into two magnetised ends of a cord that will always be nearby, but hesitate to make full contact. This is all to say that now that I've finally done this, it's with two Allday songs that don't really sound much alike.

We're looking at a Japanese Wallpaper collaboration here. It's Allday's song, and rightly so, but I feel like we're a few short instrumental interludes away from it feeling like they could swap places. Allday uses up all the available space to prevent that from happening. Still, it's a good instrumental on its own, and when Allday is in singing mode, he's right at home on it.

#592. Mura Masa (feat A$AP Rocky) - Love$ick (#13, 2016)

61st of 2016

"Love$ick" feels like some kind of fluke. Mura Masa was building a name for himself in 2016 but took a giant step forward with the help of A$AP Rocky. A handy co-sign for sure, but hardly a guaranteed hit. A$AP Rocky's inconsistent hitmaking leaves him in a strange position nowadays where he's mostly just seen nowadays as the father of Rihanna's children.

It's a little unlucky for Mura Masa though that this is his only entry. He wasn't far off a second, his earlier single "What If I Go?" landed at #122 in the same year, but he's never quite had the juice to push anything quite as strongly since. This is only partly true though because the small piece of information I've left out is that he's got a co-writer and co-producer credit on PinkPantheress's future Hottest 100 hit "Boy's a liar", which has easily become the biggest hit of his career. "Love$ick" never even made the Billboard Hot 100 so there's quite a gap between the two on that front.

There was reason to believe that Mura Masa could be a major player in the future. At a time when the streaming age was ushering in a different age of dance music, fitting in more for quiet contemplative home settings rather than explosive festivals, Mura Masa's music had a fresh twist on the formula. It was relaxing, but also expressive. I listen to "What If I Go?" and I feel like he's cracked a winning formula, a bit like Flume in his early days, he just needed something bigger to make a statement.

You can never be sure how well known these facts are, but "Love$ick" is not a fully original song. It was previously a mostly instrumental song from an earlier Mura Masa EP, and had the title "Lovesick F*ck", ironically that phrase doesn't actually appear in the song until A$AP Rocky was added. I like the quote from Mura Masa in an interview where he said that he put it together at Abbey Road studios during a brief period that A$AP Rocky was available. He says 'We hung out, smoked cigarettes, talked about fashion and Tame Impala.'. That last point will become relevant again at a later date.

It's something that just feels strange in hindsight. How could there ever have been an instrumental version of this song, A$AP Rocky fits it like a glove, like he was always meant to be there. To see a Frankensong become a hit like this becomes strange in its own way, although considering that it's the Ice Spice remix of "Boy's a liar" that took it to its heights, I guess it's par for the course with Mura Masa.

For me it's all a bit frivolous but still fun. I hear the steel drums and think about how a similar sounding beat in "Crank That (Soulja Boy)" once caused me genuine dread. I've come a long way since then and I think it goes some way to signalling a carefree vibe. Probably the aim all along. There's a lot to like in how it all comes together though, this song can get away with having 3 different melodies running alongside each other.

#591. Wet Leg - Chaise Longue (#45, 2021)

64th of 2021

By complete coincidence I'm running back to back with two artists that come from islands in the English Channel. Mura Masa is from Guernsey, while Wet Leg are from the Isle of Wight. Though it's a small constituency, Wet Leg can't even claim to be the most successful Hottest 100 artist from the Isle of Wight at this stage, as The Bees landed at #33 in 2004 with their song "Chicken Payback". I suspect Wet Leg were closer to getting a second entry given that "Wet Dream" also landed at #118, and maybe their new album could still accomplish something, but we don't have the benefit of that data in the era of The Bees so it wouldn't be fair to use it.

Wet Leg belong to the cavalcade of artists who get so much media hype that it requires chart research to determine if it's actually reciprocated by the public. I'm your person for this fact, or rather, the me of 2022 who researched it at the time. Wet Leg released their debut album in 2022 and despite having no chart entries in any capacity in Australia before that, it managed to debut at #1. With the top spot on the album chart usually reserved for either long developed fandoms, or the big who's who of streaming hits, it's very unusual to see a new artist just immediately jump in at #1 without a crossover hit. In fact I can tell you that prior to Wet Leg accomplishing this, it was a whopping two months prior when Australian rapper Huskii also did it. But after him you have to go all the way back to Susan Boyle who managed it in 2009. Before that it generally does not happen much at all. You just have to accept that either Wet Leg are an extraordinary moment in music history, or maybe that the charts are heavily distorting themselves from what they used to be like. Wet Leg also dropped out of the chart immediately after debuting at #1. A bit short of Susan Boyle scoring the 18th biggest album of the decade with less than 6 weeks on sale to do so. Funny to think that until their second album came out, that solitary week at #1 was their only appearance on the ARIA Chart, blink and you'll miss it.

When an artist does manage to soar to these heights and receive this height, the most obvious question to ask is 'Why?'. Maybe the answer is usually a competent packaging of agreed upon ideas that either explores them further or just provides ample hope that it's the return of something nostalgic. Rock criticism veers in this direction constantly, and it's easy to look at Wet Leg as just another one, but I think they managed to stick out for all the ways they weren't playing along with the understood formula.

"Chaise Longue" is probably a joke on some level. It draws in attention because it immediately forces the hand. Not only do they make a dick joke three lines in, but they also repeat it 5 more times after that. It's not quite as many times as Tom Cardy punches your dad there in "Mixed Messages" (#653), but if we're getting close to those numbers, something has to be considered about it. The rest of the song is a "Mean Girls" reference (with a solid re-write the second time around), and getting horizontal on the chaise longue.

Novelty songs of this nature don't usually get a lot of traction because when your main appeal is jokes, people don't necessarily just want to hear them retold over and over again, or at least not in short proximity. Deep down I think arriving at quoting the same jokes from 30 year old Simpsons episodes is a part of us all, a part of us all, a part of us all. But I remember when I listened to Wet Leg for the first time, the thing that struck me the most was that I was surprisingly engaged with the music. It was "Wet Dream" that stuck with me the most, but I can appreciate the pairing of deliberately lazy lyrics about being lazy when it's coupled with a surprisingly potent post-punk slow burn. They do say the title phrase exactly 46 times in "Chaise Longue" but I'm really just not paying attention to that part of it once it gets into overkill. You just don't really see genuinely popular songs that sound like this very often.