#575-#571

#575. Doja Cat - Need To Know (#31, 2021)

60th of 2021

For most of this process, I've been writing these entries out roughly two to three months in advance. It creates the illusion of being able to relax since I'm not working with a strict deadline, while also providing few of the benefits as I'm still effectively working at the same rate until I reach the point where the writing is finished but the posting persists. That's my holy grail I'm seeking.

I always knew I wanted this buffer and so I actually began writing these entries long before I'd even finished the ranking process, because another thing I do often is give myself multiple projects to tackle at once, which lets me get things done more efficiently. Sometimes it's easier to get my keyboard out instead of my headphones.

I was thinking about this because one of the first entries I wrote was obviously "Kiss Me More" (#996), a song I think I objected to a little less the last time I heard it, but that's beside the point. The version of that blurb that ended up here is a considerably abridged version of the one I had originally written, which I no longer have a copy of, but I can assure you was the most vitriolic thing I'd written for this. While it's very funny to simply imagine a logical reason why I might have been particularly mad in October 2023 and not in October 2024, I do think this is a recurring pattern for me in the past. I'd get worked up about something that doesn't really affect me, and look back at it not necessarily from a rosier future, but a future whose concerns weren't really affected by the ultimately pointless thing I was bothered by.

I was looking at the world of cancel culture and how it related to Doja Cat & Dr. Luke. As long as I've lived (and beyond that), famous people have been facing differing repercussions for their actions, justified or not. The more famous instances tended to represent a very different influence, such as the cases of Sinéad O'Connor or The Chicks having their careers sabotaged through them standing up for their beliefs that weren't quite as accepted at the time. Nowadays these situations are more split as a consequence of a more visible gap in discourse between political sides, so if someone takes a stand, you'll get a lot of yelling about it, but not the same consequences. It's much easier to lose support when you do something that both sides of the spectrum can agree is bad. Things that can't be weaponised because no one wants to be associated with them.

Let the record show that I am not making an equivalence on transgressions here. Legally it's hard to do that anyway because from Dr. Luke's perspective, he's not been found guilty of anything, so it's just a matter of whose word you're willing to trust. If there is truth to it, then Doja Cat's history of problematic tweets clearly pales in comparison to it. I don't care much about those tweets at all, but I can never help but be reminded of them whenever something of similar severity is wheeled out as ammunition against other artists. It's a sickening experience when you know that someone has gone so far in their silly pop music wars as to look for dodgy tweets, and when they can't find them, just make them up anyway and spread them around. There's one in particular that really gets under my skin, but a story for another time. In any case, it's very enlightening when you see this sort of thing from someone who in the same breath, will support an artist whose transgressions are the same, or worse.

When it comes to Dr. Luke, the thing that was always puzzling me was the way he'd only sometimes get brought into the conversation. It seemed to work the same way, only when it was convenient. Doja Cat has worked with him many times, "Need To Know" is another one of her biggest hits with his name on it. Doja Cat signed to his label back in 2014 and possibly doesn't have much of a choice in the matter, but I've never found a satisfying answer about why she avoids the same scrutiny other artists get. When it gets down to it, the only conclusion I can arrive upon is one in which the public and the music industry are unintentionally united, which again is to say that these angles are only pursued when they're convenient.

The short version of this is that the A-List provides a lot of protections through one's hapless ability to generate revenue. If a label knows their artist is making them money, it wouldn't surprise me if they're able to control the narrative around them and keep the ugly parts out of sight, or otherwise just use the bottom line as a means to ignore it. Artists like Chris Brown & Kanye West managed to build enough of a following that they seem almost immune to consequences, having careers that truck along as if nothing untoward ever happened.

I suppose another interesting thing happened in the time after I wrote my initial post, which is that Katy Perry released an album. It's home to one of the most amusing made up sounding facts because the album is called "143" and that's also exactly the chart position in Australia that the lead single peaked at. Like most recent Katy Perry albums, it didn't do particularly well, but it received a backlash unlike usual. An outright rejection that amounted to a record low Metacritic score, and swarms of music fans outright celebrating the failure as rightly deserved. The easy way to reach this conclusion is the juxtaposition in the lead single, a female empowerment anthem written in Katy Perry's typical fashion of skirting the line of taste & decency which accompanied by the video makes it difficult to get a clear reading from it. Also Dr. Luke produced it, which in addition to his allegations, puts out a desperate emergency glass angle to the whole thing, like he's her only way back to pop stardom. The think pieces coming red hot for how the same audience who took her to the top for this schtick a decade ago were now berating her for it. If the same thing happens to Sabrina Carpenter one day, just know that we've learnt nothing from all of this.

I just could never believe the moralising when it was the same public that was letting Dr. Luke run rampant in the charts again via Doja Cat just a few years back. It fits far more easily to say that one artist is hot property, and the other is unfortunately past their use-by date. It's like the 'This is going viral because it's bad' crowd just got the first say and ended it there. Not that I think it would happen any other way, it's just so hard for an artist like Katy Perry to reverse their fortunes, but it reinforces the idea that something objective is being argued to explain popularity when it's just another case of an artist not being needed by either the audience or the industry to be at the top, and so that's the sticking post.

Maybe something will change in the next two months but I've been keeping an eye on a local version of this story recently, one that seems to be accidental. In a time when local artists have really struggled to hit it big, there have been only a handful of exceptions, and close to the biggest is the band Royel Otis. They're in a funny place because their most popular tracks tend to be covers, but beyond that they're generating very healthy figures across their catalogue. No one seems to know how to replicate this, but Royel Otis have got the sauce, so the industry needs to get behind them.

I just am starting to wonder if there's a lot of discomfort behind the scenes. I'm once again operating on hearsay, but the older member of the group has some serious allegations of child grooming behind him, and everything I see points to serious efforts to bury this story. Namely because he changed his name and hides his face, the label sent a cease & desist to Google over a Reddit thread (can confirm I've seen the document, it's real), but also people have reported getting comments deleted and brigaded. Outside of this, the band also have some very suspect lyrics in the song "Motels", and have recently made deliberate visual allusions to Nabokov's "Lolita". A lot of dots to connect without much space between them. All of this only got out because of a minor backlash to some of the band's recent lyrics that caused this to surface in response. It's actually identical to what happened with the band Rancid Eddie, where the lyrics come out as dodgy and led people to finding out something much worse that explains it. I don't want to go too deep in the weeds with it, but it did strike me as interesting just how quickly this all blew up. Months later and now whenever I see any discussion about them almost every comment is either talking or joking about it. If this is all exacerbated because their label tried to cover it up, then the Streisand Effect has struck again, but it is again perhaps telling that the response (where it comes up) is universal. So hive minded that it's almost suspicious. For the time being, the band has the industry behind them, but maybe they too will end up like Sticky Fingers, part time pariahs, part time streaming juggernauts.

The relative underperformance of Doja Cat's last album makes me wonder if we're going to see some variation on this story play out in the future for her. A public gaffe that no longer has the protection of a current bop, or just a whole new spin to rationalise her sales trajectory beyond it being a typical pattern in both pop and also pop rap. I think it would be a shame to lose her from the popular music world because she continues to operate on such a unique level. I mean have you ever heard another hit song that sounds like "Need To Know"?

I'm not even sure if "Need To Know" was ever intended to become a smash hit. It was casually pushed out as a promotional single just before the album release, quickly getting pushed aside for "You Right" (#958) a couple of weeks later, only to join the random lottery of belated Doja Cat hits that saw it climb into the top 10 a month later, higher than "You Right" could manage in the end.

The biggest strength of "Need To Know" is also its biggest weakness. The light breeze of the instrumental gives Doja Cat all the necessary room to be a force of personality (I'm not going to dock points for her being relentlessly horny at times, that's just what the song is). My problem I've had since the first time I've heard it, is that I just can't ignore the clunky way the instrumental loops itself. It's not just that you can hear it clearly, but it always feels a little early as well, like it's been cropped poorly and just carelessly chucked in. When Doja Cat is rapping and the song is picking up, it fades a little into the background, but it's such a buzzkill to hear something that sounds so wrong once per second. So when I say Dr. Luke ruins this song's potential, this is what I'm talking about.

#574. Hayden James (feat Yaeger) - Waiting for Nothing (#90, 2021)

59th of 2021

I need to tack on a relevant update to the confusing birthday saga. The last Hayden James post came just a little too early so this is the first chance I've had to point it out. I said before that I was getting conflicting reports as to whether his birthday was August 15th, or August 16th, something difficult to discern given time zones might factor. The latest chapter in this story is that Hayden James made an Instagram post for his birthday on August 18th (around 11am Sydney time, but I'm not sure where he was posting from). I'm beginning to think that Hayden James' birthday is like Easter.

A peculiar moment for Hayden James to score his last ever Hottest 100 entry. In 2021 it felt like all of the regular Australian names were getting muscled out, which on some level implies that it's no longer possible to coast by. Except this entry feels like the definition of coasting. His first album performed very well and even hung around in the charts for months. "Waiting For Nothing" is the lead single to the second album which couldn't even reach the ARIA top 50, likely because whatever worked to generate so many streaming hits on the first album couldn't translate a second time three years later. When I said a month ago that I think nearly all of his Hottest 100 hits have gone Platinum, this is the one I was uncertain of, as its streaming numbers are lagging way behind the rest, leaving it destined to fall into obscurity if it hadn't snuck in here. Maybe that still has happened regardless, because our control group is the standalone single he put out just before this one called "Rather Be With You". That features permanent Hottest 200 residents Crooked Colours and landed at #111. Despite being orphaned in the hell zone that is scrolling a DJ's 'Singles and EPs' section on Spotify, it hasn't fallen considerably far behind this one in lifetime streams. The one moment of glory for this song is that it managed to get over the line. Sometimes that's just the unpredictable whim of the voters, working to make sure no form of pre-polling can ever be certain of what truly goes on when people visit that voting page.

Yaeger is a Swedish singer by the way. She hasn't truly broken through in her home country but in the last couple of years she's had multiple songs land on the lower end of the Swedish Spotify chart for a single day, with numbers that are slowly getting bigger, so I wouldn't count her out in the future. I was amused at how much her recent single "Take It! Take It!" feels inspired by Charli XCX's recent output, maybe that's something we're going to see more of. In any case, her big challenge to prove will be if she can ever manage to knock off "Waiting For Nothing" as her most streamed song, as it currently has close to a four times advantage on the next highest contender.

I listen to this song and wonder if she hasn't quite figured out her musical identity yet. There's a world of difference from the start of her career to the present day, and this lands roughly in the middle of that. I don't feel like she puts on a star-making performance here, although that's probably not the mission brief either way. Someone's got to give Hayden James a vocal track to make it a single, and she's quite serviceable at that. It also makes me wonder if he's trying to make the humming vocal snippet into a signature sound. Pleasantly going through the motions though, can't say I've ever had a real objection with this.

#573. Spacey Jane - Hardlight (#3, 2022)

55th of 2022

A while back I mentioned Ocean Alley's performance in 2022 that saw them land 3 entries within 7 places, and how it's setting up all the successful good will to be rejected back at them because now you've unintentionally made everyone listen to a far higher concentration of a band they're already not thrilled about. That was just a prologue to the even bigger story that year, because Spacey Jane were all over that countdown. If you're just here to hear the biggest hits of the year, you might be mildly tolerating them initially, but then you get to the pointy end, 6 songs left, and half of them are by this band. They very nearly had all three of them play in succession. While there's an incidental benefit to crowding out the market if you can end up being the only thing people remember, I think all it did was just completely sour the individual merits that got them there in the first place. They don't even get to have the benefit of having one obvious song to pay attention to as in "Booster Seat" (#676). "Hardlight" was their highest entry that day, but does that mean much to anyone? It lends itself to being interchangeable, and then you've lost the prospective audience. It's a shame because I've been continually finding things to appreciate once I force myself to go through all of these Spacey Jane entries, and as far as the 2022 haul goes, I think this is the best one.

We're very much back into the world of this harmless sounding band continuing to be hiding the fact that they're the most dour and depressing band once you pay attention to the lyrics. "Hardlight" is just nothing but endless wallowing, with no light in the tunnel whatsoever. Here you've got someone who by all accounts probably shouldn't be going out, but is pressured to perform, and subsequently can't quite get it right. Maybe it's a good thing for Caleb that this is just metaphorical rather than being based on a real experience, but the general feelings of anxiety come up far too much in his lyrics for me to think that part of it isn't true.

I generally gravitated to it for superficial reasons. This is just nicely made pop rock with a good level of momentum chugging it along. You find yourself thinking that if this is as hard as they're ever going to go, I may as well accept what we're working with. It's done with a degree of competence that I can't ever imagine myself getting sick of it.

#572. Ball Park Music - Sunscreen (#21, 2021)

58th of 2021

In June 2025, something peculiar happened. "Riptide" (#885) (oh hey, I remembered the number without looking it up for once) increased its global Spotify streaming numbers by about 250,000 in the space of a single day. Two weeks later it went back down just as quickly. That might not seem like much, but multiply the amount by the number of days, and you're getting roughly 3.5 million streams out of thin air. That's roughly how many streams "Sunscreen" has in its lifetime. Nothing makes it feel more insignificant than knowing that Vance Joy pulled an entire "Sunscreen"-sized hit out of nowhere in two weeks, in addition to the bare minimum of a million more streams it's gotten every day since the start of 2023.

The most peculiar thing about this is that it coincided with a severe drop on streams isolated just in Australia at the same time. Nowadays with the whole world marching to similar drumbeats, you can usually see these movements work in unison, which serves only to make all of the charts just a little more similar. Even though these initial movements came together, the equilibrium hasn't returned at the same time. It has me at a loss regarding what the 'normal' amount of daily "Riptide" streams should be in Australia, just that 40,000 odd streams a day that seem to be able to flick on and off is an amount that most artists could only dream of. It also puts doubt into anything else running consistent numbers.

This is something that can very easily go unnoticed even if you're one of the people hearing it. There's no reason to believe your seemingly random or seemingly curated auto-play queue has any significant match ups with hundreds of thousands of other people experiencing the same thing. We can talk about songs feeling like a big hit or otherwise, but 99.99% (and that's likely not nearly enough 9's) of the facilitating experiences are going on behind closed doors.

In that regard it's interesting that Ball Park Music's relatively small audience can still come out in full force here. As I grapple with the mission of how to talk about this band so many times, it's something I want to continue looking at for a future entry, whereas for now we've got to look at them in relative doldrums. A bridging entry between two top 10 finishes. Eh, #21's pretty good, I guess.

"Sunscreen" is the lead single to Ball Park Music's 7th album "Weirder & Weirder". The album didn't come out until 2022 so it was standing on its own for 4 months. At this stage of their career it's one of their more upbeat tracks, and it does that without one of their habitual mood shifts, just energetic pace from start to finish. Pretty good, would recommend I think.

#571. Foals - My Number (#29, 2013)

64th of 2013

A big difference between the Hottest 100s of old, and nowadays, is how seriously the annual stipulation is taken. When you look at 1993's list, there's no shortage of songs that are unquestionably hit songs from 1992. After that we're subject to years of extended album campaigns where late singles get a free ride, most notably "Knights of Cydonia" by Muse which won the 2007 poll. Although in that case, I think there's an exception clause since the version of the song triple j played is from a promo CD single that was put out in Australia in very late 2006, possibly in December which makes it fair game.

I remember thinking around 2012/2013 that triple j had finally tightened their rulings on these things. One of the biggest would-be hits in 2012's list was Azealia Banks' "212" which never got a chance to get voted in because it was only on the voting list in 2011 before it got popular. By comparison, The Ting Tings' "That's Not My Name" was on the list in 2007 and went nowhere. A year later it finished at #9. The struggle of the belated hit is the cost of doing business.

I came here with the exciting point of notability, where if these rules were as strictly upheld as they should be, then "My Number" would be the oldest song I'm talking about. It was released in December 2012 as an advance single to Foals' 3rd album "Holy Fire". That album did exceptionally well for the band, taking them to #1 in Australia after their first two albums didn't even crack the top 50. It's such an off-beat result that I suspected they got there on the back of a discounted iTunes price at the time, speaking from experience as someone who only bought it because it was so cheap.

All well and good, but I have to tell you that this isn't the oldest song here. "I Spy" (#767), "Global Concepts" (#920) and a third song all predate it by varying numbers of months, because triple j either can't help themselves, or they forget, or both. The pageantry has been soiled just a little bit. Whatever it is, it's worthwhile to remember that most of the people who voted for "My Number" waited a very long time to get the chance to do so.

I had a peculiar relationship with Foals leading into this. I remember seeing their music videos on TV back in 2008 and finding them consistently too peppy and annoying for my taste. Any clever songwriting or composition got lost in these irritating singles. Things improved a bit with their second album "Total Life Forever". I wasn't a massive fan of what they were putting out still, but it was much more pleasant radio fodder. Oh and there was also the single "Spanish Sahara" that blindsided me on Hottest 100 day. As a song that could probably serve as a dramatic montage soundtrack (well I've seen it once), there's a lot to like about it. When your main experience with Foals at that point is the song "Balloons", it's especially eye-opening to say that this band is capable of more than I would have ever guessed.

I found myself further re-assessing them when they put out the lead single to "Holy Fire" just before this one, "Inhaler". A bit of a two-sided song that paired the light, punchy sound I was familiar with, with a hidden, menacing dark side that's always just waiting to tear it apart. They didn't really do it like this again, but a lot of this album works on a similar level of deconstructing that Foals template. It's the kind of album that had me questioning any kind of categorisation because it didn't feel comfortable slotting into anything, I just knew that I liked it.

"My Number" is a bit of an exception because it doesn't really break out of that first form at any point. I'd say that it succeeds in a way they previously hadn't (this was Foals' highest charting song by all accounts in any space that's capable of measuring it), just because they'd managed to rein themselves in with something that's just so much catchier than any other Foals song. Some songs just find the perfect hook and this is one of those. It probably wore me out after a while, and I guess I was disappointed it was the only representation for this album ("Inhaler" made #121, oddly nothing else was in striking range). I suppose I just wanted them to be rewarded more, and that I spent so long listening to the album that year, I just assumed more people did the same. This is where I point out that they did manage to land at #8 in triple j's annual album poll. It's always just peculiar when these things don't translate better.