#600-#596

#600. Paul Dempsey - Edge Of Town - Like A Version (#88, 2017)

58th of 2017

The question that was on everyone's lips after the 2016 countdown came through: Where was "Edge Of Town"? Maybe not, but it seems like whenever it comes up, I see a lot of surprise that it never impacted the Hottest 100 at all. I don't think people realise the extent of it though because Warm Tunas only goes down to #100. When I was counting votes independently, I had "Edge Of Town" finish at #146, maybe that's not much, but there were only two songs above it that also didn't make the top 200. One was an Architects song, a band prone to being overestimated in these things. "Edge Of Town" must have been so close to the top 200 but I'll never know, I'll just reserve the right to judge everyone who didn't vote it because I definitely did. Oh and by the way, "Edge Of Town" is a song by a band who will eventually appear in this list, really screwed myself up here again.

Or rather I should say that Paul Dempsey screwed me over for the second time. He's the lead singer for Something For Kate so this is the second time in quick succession that I've had to deal with him trying to spoil the list by covering an artist I'm yet to talk about, after doing so with "Sweet Nothing" (#630). That one's still contraband obviously. But it is ultimately interesting that for someone who's prone to covering major noteworthy artists, he would also extend the favour to a much less famous band. For a brief period of time they had no Hottest 100 entries, just this cover that partially helped stop them from making the list in 2017 (this band reached #127 in 2017, they would reach the poll properly in 2018).

I am a very big fan of the song "Edge Of Town". It was a bit of a slow burner but grew to be one of my absolute favourite songs of 2016. This is around the time that it became increasingly more likely that my favourite songs were ones that are not especially noteworthy, which has a hint of feeling arbitrary, like my stamp of approval is so random to the outside observer that it doesn't mean anything. I gotta say though that Paul Dempsey deeming it worthy of his time is a remarkable compliment.

I already spoke about Something For Kate last time, but I have very high reverence for Paul Dempsey's solo music as well. When he's playing the starring role, it's not a whole lot different to Something For Kate. I got very familiar with his first album when triple j played it a lot in 2009. I have a lot of love for "Have You Fallen Out of Love?" in particular, and even lately he's been teaming up with Bernard Fanning in the ultimate '90s nostalgia fest which I'm all about apparently.

A big draw in "Edge Of Town" for me is the frenetic energy. Here's a new band with their own ideas that don't really play by the rules. You get a chorus that intensifies to match the chaos portrayed in the lyrics. Apart from a brief burst near the end, I don't really get any of that from this cover version. It's mostly just because this is a Paul and one guitar affair, so there's only so much he can do with it. I respect the hell out of him and I love that he covered this, but it's hard for me to ever pick this over the original version.

#599. Hilltop Hoods (feat Montaigne & Tom Thum) - 1955 (#4, 2016)

62nd of 2016

I'm not sure if anyone has ever figured out how or why this song managed to be as popular as it is. To the outside observer, maybe it's just another hit song, but in reality it's just about the biggest hit Hilltop Hoods have ever had. It runs remarkably close in streaming numbers to "The Nosebleed Section", but managed to crossover on release in a way that song could never have hoped to imagine. When I wrote this, "The Nosebleed Section" had thus far peaked at #75 in Australia though it's since had the stars align for it to reach #31. "1955" peaked at #2. If it was just a spur of the moment hit, it should have crashed out by now, but it still puts up very solid numbers to this day. A silent achiever, where nothing about it particularly screams out 'This is the one'.

On the other hand, there's another opportunity for "A Whole Day's Night" (#919) to cop a stray as that other Hilltop Hoods song featuring Montaigne & Tom Thum. Maybe this one has the head start advantage, but it clearly feels like the one that has more merit in terms of intrigue and utilising its guest stars.

The song's old-timey presence comes from a Dylan Moran comedy set where he said that he always wanted to visit Adelaide so he could know what it's like to live in 1955. Side note: absolutely love "Black Books" although I haven't revisited it in many years. Suffa wrote the song embracing this ideal as an Adelaide native. It actually makes for a curiosity where there's another comparative point with "The Nosebleed Section". Whatever you think is the Hilltop Hoods' biggest hit, you can safely say that Pressure doesn't have a verse on it. It's actually even more extreme here as I'm not sure he appears on this song at all. Even in Tom Thum's interludes, he mentions 'Lambert's Sniffing Salts' [Suffa] and 'Barry's Brylcreem' [DJ Debris]. Pressure does have a writing credit but there's nothing to see for it.

I feel obligated to mention that Tom Cardy also parodied this song multiple times as part of his Song Sequels series. I'm technically also learning this because I feel like I've encountered them multiple times and never realised there's more than one. He's got a "1355" version that might work as a history lesson although I've not checked if all the lyrics are historically accurate, and the easier to get away with "4055". If you're reading this in the very distant future, you can check for yourself how it went. It's all pretty funny and worth showcasing fellow comedian Julia Robertson with a very impressive Montaigne impression. I also like to imagine that there are a lot of people who might only know these parodies and not the original song they come from.

I think the song works on the odd premise that it's trying to do, and having two guests to divide the attention and do what they do is a good part of it. I wouldn't say it's a favourite for me because I tend to prefer Hilltop Hoods with a bit more tempo, or at least some higher stakes. I guess though as I say this, I'm running out of them at this point, luck of the draw.

#598. Glass Animals - Gooey (#12, 2014)

64th of 2014

I'm a very vocal advocate for defending so-called one hit wonders. The tag gets thrown around so hard and fast that you can't help but feel the prevailing criteria is less about something that can be statistically challenged, but just the sheer will power to create them. Whether it's out of dismissive malice or just that vague sense of 'It just feels right' because it's a fun way to categorise artists that people are aware of and don't feel invested it. It's not like anyone could take offence to it.

For me there's a certain arrogance to it that I can't abide. It's extrapolating from the initial thought of 'I only really know/like one of their songs' to 'Everyone only really knows/likes one of their songs'. Except 'everyone' very rarely means everyone, just people like them with similar backgrounds. It creates pecking orders between charts, and by extension, countries. Or I'd say that if it actually was treated as such. It's a bit like what I was saying a few weeks ago with "Seventeen Going Under" (#627). The only reason I hesitate to see it like that is because all those smaller countries just no longer even have an agency. Finding out that someone actually had a top 10 hit in Belgium is an annoying case of the truth getting in the way of a good story. Even if the artist in question is from Belgium, it doesn't count. America and its charts that allow very little outside of its pet genres to make an impact get to call all the shots.

That's where it starts to irritate me a little bit. I think that the sometimes small and sometimes large differences in musical culture around the world are a wonderful thing. Maybe there's more credibility lent to something that can be popular everywhere, but those isolated pockets are what makes us who we are, although ironically I tend to find nowadays that charts differ more for their rules than their constituents a lot of the time. In any case, discrediting these aspects is tantamount to discrediting the lifestyle that produced it. When someone says that Gotye is known for only one song, it's telling me (and many others) that my high school years spent worshipping so much of his music are irrelevant, even though those early successes are what set him up for his world domination. All I'm saying is that a lot of people are missing out on a lot of great music by being dismissive in this way. In any case, I suspect Glass Animals have a similar upbringing.

Was "Gooey" a hit song? I'm inclined to think so. Without much of anything to come before it, it managed to clamber up to the ARIA top 40 for a single week before descending back down. In some regard it might be the bare minimum for hit status, although I think there's a world of difference from that to something that debuts at the same position from release and immediately tumbles. In any case, by the end of the year it'll have reached 400 million streams on Spotify, quite a lot for a song that only barely snuck onto one official chart in the world at a time when the threshold for doing so was just about at its lowest.

So it becomes a point of curiosity when that bar of success is so thoroughly exceeded to become an afterthought. I don't have access to official sales figures from when "Gooey" peaked on the chart, but I can make a reasonably accurate approximation (it'd be around 2,500-3,000), and it's probably only barely higher than what "Heat Waves" (#741) is still managing week by week 5 years after it was released. It might be tempting even from an Australian perspective to rescind Glass Animals' first hit since it's so far off the new benchmark they set. If you're looking at chart positions, you can't give Glass Animals a second hit without also giving second hits to Lou Bega & Chumbawamba. The only difference is that "Gooey" is certified 3xPlatinum. Now that would be an excellent tool for weighing up artists' discographies if they were ever reliably updated. Maybe Chumbawamba have crawled their way to Gold with "Amnesia", except their label suffers from long term memory loss, and won't remember to ever check.

Fundamentally though, it is very interesting that Glass Animals managed to be more successful in Australia than anywhere else. The line is a little blurred in the 2020s, but I do think it might be a lingering remnant of this local popularity that helps "Heat Waves" be *the* biggest hit of the decade in Australia compared to being just *one of* the biggest hits of the decade everywhere else. At the time I likened them to alt-J, a similar phenomenon just a couple of years earlier, leaving a similar impression of 'this is a little bit weird for something so popular'.

I felt like "Gooey" was an easier proposition than alt-J's "Breezeblocks" at the time as well. The alt-J song is jagged and filled with strange hooks that jump out of nowhere, while "Gooey" is more interested in setting a vibe and staying on that same level. It came out before streaming was officially included in the chart, but it does feel more streaming friendly.

It also feels strange to say this though because when you do focus in on "Gooey", it also reveals itself to be more spacious than you might think. Long stretches of it are held together by light drums and a distracting dripping sound. There are a couple of synths that come in and out but not much else. I think what keeps it all together is the way Dave's vocals are produced. I'm not sure if there are backing vocals outside of the last chorus, but it feels like there's more of him before that as well, and it keeps the song from ending up like the trainwreck it feels I just described.

#597. Kanye West - Jail (#50, 2021)

65th of 2021

The thing about a new Kanye West album is that you really never know what you're going to get. He's not one to just coast on his previous successes, probably more likely to deliberately sabotage them if anything. I can't exactly add a 'to present' to this notion, but it was all true for a long time, and it's a big part of why he generates so much fascination, a true wild card for better or worse.

So it's often a mixed bag that you're gonna get and that's something I learnt to embrace. It makes that first listen so fascinating because you can be on a ride with no brakes, and the bounds of 'What is he gonna do?' and 'What is he gonna say?' are so much harder to see than pretty much anyone else in popular music. You just hit play and wait for that 'Oh my God, we're so back' moment that usually comes in early. A song that doesn't necessarily sound like anything he's done before but just immediately clicks into place as a moment of hype for what's to come.

It doesn't seem reasonable to say it anymore, but if I'm being perfectly honest with myself, this was that moment for me initially. A strange, borderline hard rock riff to sit alongside your regularly scheduled ego check. It's also hiding a Jay-Z feature on it, which admittedly is more exciting the first time you hear it, less so when you come back to it and start to wonder if maybe he should have taken a better crack at it. It's actually the only time Jay-Z appears on this list. He had a handful of entries before 2013, mostly alongside Kanye West, but he remains an odd outlier with how triple j handled his output. He didn't get any recognition until after his initial 'retirement'. 2006's "Show Me What You Got" ended up on a voting list and seemed to lightly open up the floodgates, but triple j weren't really playing his big hits like "Run This Town" or "Empire State Of Mind" so he doesn't have much to show for it. I'm sure they'd do it differently if they could run it back.

Somehow this ends up being the optimal version of the song anyway. Part of the overstuffing of "DONDA" means that there's also a "Jail pt 2", a version that replaces Jay-Z with DaBaby and Marilyn Manson. This happened so soon after the DaBaby homophobia scandal that it's hard to tell if it was a deliberate act of needling from Kanye. He's famous for pushing work on his albums right up to the deadline so it's not impossible. Supposedly though he was always supposed to be on the original version but Kanye was getting pushback from his label, and his words, dubious though they may be, were that he wanted to give DaBaby a feature as the only artist who said in public that they'd vote for Kanye during his presidential campaign. Marilyn Manson on the other hand, it's very hard to escape the obviously deliberate choice and timing, coming out in the same year that he was facing abuse allegations from Evan Rachel Wood, and many other women. In 2025, the investigation finally ended and he got off with no charge but you still can't make me want to have anything to do with him, and his inclusion on this song just feels like more of a sneering mockery than it already was.

On the whole I still find the song somewhat interesting. It's built on a sample from The Boomtown Rats, which is a really curious listen going in only knowing one song of theirs. It ends Side A of their 1979 album; Side B begins with "I Don't Like Mondays". The song sounds strangely like David Bowie and in that sense, it's impressive how different it is when it's repurposed for this instrumental. Is it all a bit uncomfortable now? You better believe it is, but I also am still stuck in that mindset of the genuine thrill I felt with this song at the time. Kanye West just lives to be conflicting.

#596. The Chats - The Clap (#82, 2020)

53rd of 2020

We've got three helpings of The Chats in these parts and I'm not entirely sure how much point of difference there is to acknowledge in all of it. The subject matter may vary on a superficial level, but on the whole you're getting fed variations on the same thing: An overly detailed look at Australian life with the principal joke being 'I can't believe someone made a song about this'.

It's something that I can already superficially appreciate. For a lot of people, just the notion of it hits way too close to home and lands squarely in cringe territory, but I've always thought that we should be allowed to express our unique identity. I've seen so many American and British movies where much of the draw comes from people leaning into their accents, phrases and way of life, usually in the gritty sense. The 1993 film "Naked" feels like an afterthought alongside a young David Thewlis who is just in love with the way he talks (I won't pretend I wasn't either). So rarely do we get that over here. It's probably just that the Australian accent lends itself more to a more relaxed vibe through a comedy, but I did see the psychological horror movie "Talk To Me" a while back and I felt like the most compelling part of it was the setting, and just hearing people talk like people I know, but under more stressful and agitated circumstances. It can be highly effective if done right.

That's probably not what The Chats are doing, but if nothing else, they've proven that there's at least a niche market internationally for people gazing in on an updated version of Australian stereotypes, some three decades after "Crocodile Dundee". Well, they're not international stars by any stretch, but they've got global recognition that a lot of far more successful Australian artists will never get, because they're the band that made "Smoko".

If you are looking at this internationally, you might be surprised to know that "Smoko" does not appear in this list. It was a viral breakout hit in 2017, but something of a novelty. triple j may have acknowledged it early on but they were not pushing in all their chips. It wasn't until 2019 with a new single (and a major label signing) that they started getting behind this band. I can't remember exactly when I first heard the song, but I definitely joined in on the fascination with the novelty, something you'd never think would be more than a funny YouTube video. It's an excellent distillation of their energy though. Utterly confronting in a 'trying so hard to make it look like we're not trying' way, but succeeding through the bluntness of the minutiae. Just the vivid image of a tradie sitting on a milk crate and getting hostile at anyone who comes near him is such a realistic portrayal expressed with poetic brilliance.

I don't think "The Clap" fires on quite the same cylinders, but I'm very sure it's intentional. You could argue that it's doing the complete opposite by providing as few details as possible and just hammering home the specific thesis statement that it's a song about someone getting gonorrhea. It's undeniably a very punk rock thing to make such a narrowly focused song like this. On that level I can embrace it, though I do still end up having more fun with their other songs.