#500-#496

#500. Drake (feat Lil Durk) - Laugh Now Cry Later (#86, 2020)

43rd of 2020

When I make music lists of this kind, I have a habit of going in with a vague feeling about how something might be placed, something that's trained on me through decades of doing it. Something that constantly happens as a result of this is that it just takes a few extra contenders to throw everything out of order. The existence of a high placer that might otherwise go overlooked means pushing everything else down a spot. I'm used to this, but I find without fail, every time I get to a major milestone, suddenly there's just not enough space. I'm looking for a loophole that can get around it, but it immediately gets a lot harder to pick a loser, because you're picking the biggest loser, and you've gotta lift if you want to make that emotional decision.

When I was making this particular list, I had that 'Get out of jail free' card all along, because I agonised on it and then put "Laugh Now Cry Later" in the 501st slot. It was just short of the top half of the list, the absolute indignity. Then I realised I was just counting it incorrectly and had to pull everything up a spot, and suddenly the song I had sent to the dregs was now living amongst kings. If Drake was watching me while I did this, he'd have the opportunity to cry now, and then laugh later. I say all of this knowing that for many, it would've been a no brainer since it's Drake, but I always find that kind of discourse tiresome. Not liking Drake & making fun of those who do is easy social capital, but I find it more interesting to look at it all on individual merits. I think talking to anyone who makes those kinds of blanket statements without nuance is a fruitless affair. For me, there's a giddy thrill when it comes to talking about the Drake songs that are probably most likely to get filtered out into the wash. Someone's gotta do it.

Back in 2019, I flew over to America because I'd spent the previous 2 years getting very good at speedrunning a video game, and I was accepted into Summer Games Done Quick. Very wholesome affair and it rose over 3 million dollars for Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders). I spent a whole week getting confused by those little differences in America and also being inundated with American accents in a way that I never thought could disorient me. It turns out that my own accent is jarring enough that everything takes a second attempt to say out loud in conversation as they recalibrate.

I don't remember many conversations I had when I was there. Mostly it was a lot of small talk. Meeting people on the shuttle bus from the airport and then being surprised to bump into them on the elevator a few days later. Talking to one of the only people who were there to play a game more obscure than mine who was getting excited about doing their run, and throwing the whole thing into disarray when I found a miscommunication on the email that got sent out to runners which had me worried one of my commentators wasn't going to make it. It was a very strange coincidence when I met someone at the airport not knowing they were working at the event and that they were the person who applied my make-up before I went on stage, small world.

The most mundane thing I remember is what's almost relevant here. After the event was over, I spent an extra day there which was probably the wrong decision, but it did result in me getting time to go to the Mall of America, and being bewildered in new ways. At some point in time, I was sitting around, waiting at a shoe store and I overheard two employees talking, where the conversation topic was 'Have you heard the new Drake song?' It got me thinking about the difference between Australia and America. Drake being a bit more popular in America and so it's more natural to see this kind of conversation I've never encountered before or since in Australia, which I just thought was weirdly fascinating. Again, it's all those little things that you don't think about that make our countries different.

Anyway that particular Drake song was "Money In The Grave", the song he released in celebration of the fact that the Toronto Raptors had just won the NBA Playoffs. I'll always struggle to associate years to champions in US sports, but all these connections have made it impossible for me to forget the Raptors' 2019 win. The Chicago Cubs winning in MLB in 2016, a year after "Back To The Future Part 2" predicted they would, is another memorable one. I've seen Americans talk about 2016 as a crazy year in sports for this kind of out of nowhere success stories, and I so badly want to tell them about the Western Bulldogs who fit in perfectly with it. Anyway I'm amusing myself greatly because I've been planning for over a year to bring up that same movie for a different Drake entry, and I still plan on doing that.

I will readily mix up "Money In The Grave" with "Laugh Now Cry Later". That's more understandable I think because they occupy a similar space as pretty big Drake hits that didn't go to #1. Mainly though, if you listen to both of these songs, you tell me which one of these feels more like an NBA victory lap. "Money In The Grave" feels like Drake just had this song lying around and was looking for an excuse to put it out. "Laugh Now Cry Later" feels like a celebration, and he & Lil Durk are even holding basketballs on the single cover.

I've had a habit of calling Lil Durk my son as a joke, but he's actually older than me. He belongs to that odd subset of modern rappers who took their sweet time getting their big break. The more interesting subset to me though is that he's big enough to dominate the American charts, but not really do the same here. Australia really doesn't seem to be interested unless you can get Drake, Kanye West, J. Cole or Kendrick Lamar involved. That small group accounts for all but one of Lil Durk's top 50 hits in Australia. It's still a better innings than Rod Wave who has never charted in Australia, but I feel it shows that lack of any interest to make these artists into household names over here. We'll stay at an entry level interest unless there's a goofy viral hit.

Lil Durk is a good fit for this song. He's only there briefly but stops the song from just being 4 straight minutes of Drake in his two elements of rapping and also 'baby'. I don't know who's parasocially listening to Drake at any stage, but he's here for you when he says 'baby'. Lucky for me, the horns sound triumphant enough that I can ignore it. By landing at #500 with this, Drake is the spitting image of that podium celebration meme.

#499. The Chats - 6L GTR (#53, 2022)

50th of 2022

A few years ago in preparation for this polling in the Hottest 100, I took it upon myself to figure out what a 6L GTR is, and concluded that it doesn't actually exist. The GTR is an upgraded version of a Holden Torana with an engine that's much smaller than needed. Going back to it, I'm led to believe that it is actually possible to swap it for a bigger engine that would get to 6 litres, but I'm not sure what the rules are. Is the Holden of Theseus still a GTR? Do I even know enough about cars to not be just posting gibberish?

What this odd tangent makes me think about is the strength of fantasy in hypotheticals. Once you anchor something down in reality, you're stuck dwelling on shortcomings. The Flash can be as fast as is deemed necessary, but if your chosen star is a real human, they're just not going to be able to run 100 metres in less than 9.5 seconds. These human limitations can be potentially bested, but then it's back to the world of fantasy until it happens. I find myself thinking about these sorts of things as a way of encouragement if I'm ever in a competition, nobody's perfect, everyone is beatable. I just can't decide if for the purposes of this semi-novelty song whether it works out better if the 6L GTR is a real, tangible car or not. I suppose contextually the song admits to not seeking out the highest standards, but maybe the sheer novelty of searching for something both imaginary and utterly mundane is the beauty of it. It's funnier to me, but I can see the argument on both sides.

Where the song does succeed is in the presentation. Compared to their earlier releases, this feels like a different band, one that's seen the heights that their persona can take them, and has decided to lock in. Right from the get-go, it's just a very pleasing guitar tone that gets us from point A to point B. Maybe it works as a driving song, but as a non-driver I'll never know. And on that bombshell, it's time to end the blurb.

#498. A$AP Rocky - Sundress (#91, 2018)

53rd of 2018

When an artist has a particularly big hit, you can see all the interest and conversation circle around that one. It's not always clear how much of that attention is about the artist in particular, or if it's just a one-off fling that everyone's going to move on from. It can be nice to have that additional hit that comes through successfully enough to lend that extra credibility. For the 2018 countdown, I was expecting a big hit for A$AP Rocky, and that's what I saw, but I didn't see this one coming, an extra non-album single that snuck through under my radar.

At the time, "Sundress" felt like a bit of a hanger-on. Time has done quite a lot to change things. I've gotten used to older songs being arbitrarily plucked from pseudo-obscurity to the big time, and it became a point of amusement while making this list knowing the inevitable likelihood that one of the songs I was ranking would end up in a run of virality by the time I got through things. This somewhat happened with Bakar's "Hell N Back" (#772), but much better timed was the second ascent of "Sundress", a song that was oddly popular in Latvia for years before everyone else got the memo. It's now one of A$AP Rocky's most popular songs, and is closing in on a billion streams on Spotify.

There's a slight novelty factor to this song in that it's built around a sample of Tame Impala's "Why Won't You Make Up Your Mind?". We're sitting in a peculiar timeline for this where the success of 2015's "Currents" has increased the Tame Impala profile immensely, but we're not quite at the point where a string of virality not far away sets a new standard for what the really popular Tame Impala songs are. Much like with Rihanna covering "New Person, Same Old Mistakes" in 2016, you can imagine more obvious songs being chosen years after. The bold arrow of time blunts everything. If nothing else, A$AP Rocky can claim credibility by getting in early. I mentioned regarding "Love$ick" (#592) that he was talking about Tame Impala with Mura Masa at the time, so maybe that sewed the seed that led to this.

What we've got is a curious result. The sample completely overpowers everything and I've scarcely ever been able to remember a single thing Rocky says here. Everything about it strikes as a mixtape cut or loosey, especially the short run-time. When it lands somewhat contemporaneously with the still going Tame Impala career, it can serve as a fascinating reminder of how much things have changed in that camp, and just having me conclude that "InnerSpeaker" was a pretty special de-butt album. It's thanks to this that we get a little bit of every Tame Impala album (except the new one, obviously) on this list.

#497. The Amity Affliction - Show Me Your God (#89, 2022)

49th of 2022

As every year goes along, I find myself thinking about the next Hottest 100. The rigid rules of release date eligibility create a temptation to do an early stocktake. If it's the start of June, then you're halfway through the eligibility period and theoretically, about half of the year's entrants have already been released. As you're reading this, it's likely that nearly every entry for 2025's list has come out. These things don't work out perfectly though. There's definitely a priority towards the mid to late section of the year, and it's always possible that a hit has already come out and just hasn't been found yet. The only thing you can be sure of is that on December 1st, they're all out there (well, usually...), and it's time to start thinking about what will make the next year's list because they're potentially starting to pop up.

"Show Me Your God" has some notoriety here because I believe it is the newest song that will appear on this list. It was released on November 30th, 2022, meaning that The Amity Affliction waited until the very last day to hand in their assignment, and made certain they'd continue doing what they do best: sneaking onto the bottom half of the list with a song that's completely divorced from any of the surrounding trends on the list. At the same time though, I don't think they would continue to land on these lists for a solid decade if they were just coasting by for the whole time. You've got to serve up something with an extra spark, and I think this is just that.

Depending on who you ask, the phrase 'pop music' can mean either a particular genre of music, or otherwise it applies to any kind of modern music of the rock & roll era. It's something that usually sits a bit strangely for me, maybe because my desire to use more specific sub-genres comes into the fold, but also because that juxtaposition is significant. Calling The Amity Affliction pop music feels like completely missing the point and yet it's something I see surprisingly often.

Sometimes though, I find it interesting to engage with the mindset. The other day I saw Black Sabbath described as pop music and in the space of a few seconds I went from my initial knee-jerk reaction that describing the godfathers of heavy metal as pop being jarring, to having a realisation that I'd been hearing their music since I was quite young and never really been repulsed. One of the truly fascinating things about pop music in general is that it can draw in so many disparate sounds that under the right circumstances can fit into a general audience. Sometimes they get so normalised that you don't even question just how long AC/DC's bagpipe solo goes for, or why The Veronicas were rocking harder than most of the actual rock bands they were sharing chart space with in 2005.

I find myself approaching The Amity Affliction with this mindset and the results are interesting. While they're never finding themselves on the top 40 airwaves (and even triple j sometimes is a bit of a tough sell), they do have the makings of fine pop songwriters. That's where I think "Show Me Your God" (and perhaps some others I may talk about in the future) excels. This is a song that takes the confronting soundscape of metalcore, and a particularly sensitive topic around gun violence, but package it in a strangely inviting way. This might just be the loudest and hardest of all their entries here, but it's never overbearing. The soundscape is consistent enough that it settles in quickly and gets you locked in.

The song it reminds me the most of is "Sorry You're Not A Winner" by Enter Shikari. That's a song that genuinely terrified me the first time I heard it, I think in part because it takes a more surprising route to lay things on thick. The more electronic elements come across as distorted and creepy when they make way for the pulverising drums. When The Amity Affliction bring in what I think is a choir, my mind goes to Enter Shikari's outro, where the guitars are suddenly at a contained tempo that makes you long for things to go back to normal. Or it's just a rejected boss theme from a FromSoftware game, who can say? I always want to bring up "Sorry You're Not A Winner" because it's a song from my early teens that can't really be replaced by anything. The scattered comparisons I can make with "Show Me Your God" just highlight further just how different they are on the whole.

I don't claim to know what the full mission statement is when making metalcore. Maybe it is supposed to be confronting to anyone outside of its own sphere, in which case it's failed immensely. But if for some reason it is just a veiled attempt to write pop music with a different coat of paint, then I can look back at this one as a success.

#496. Lorde - Tennis Court (#12, 2013)

58th of 2013

Back in the early 2010s, before streaming was part of the global music charts, there was a peculiar pattern I noticed. Everyone was aware of the Billboard Hot 100 being uncharacteristically slow compared to other charts, largely due to its unique attribute of including airplay, slowing things down not just through meeting its form, but in the way that any increase in components will create such a set up. It meant that US chart runs were long, drawn out campaigns while Australia and the UK were considerably faster. It left room for more singles to chart, and things were possibly planned around this convenience. Look at the run of singles from the early 2010s by that Scottish DJ and you can feel out which ones weren't made the be pushed in the US, but instead as the stop gaps between them. Americans don't know who Example is after all.

When you're watching from both perspectives, it can make you question if it all means anything. With the US being the centre of pop culture, all these stop gap singles that feel significant to me in the moment are just going to be pushed aside in the conversation, left out of nostalgic posts and end up faded into the background. The squadron insisting that something is only a hit if it spent approximately 6 months getting played on the radio in America at some point in history win again. "Tennis Court" lives its days as just another Lorde song at this point, even though it was a relatively big hit in Australia, and that's probably the most interesting thing about it.

"Tennis Court" was Lorde's second single, and was released not long before she properly blew up. I look at the chart movement around this time and it shows a feeling of genuine fatigue for hit songs, because there was a brief moment when Lorde's previous hit song (you know the one) had slowed down its ascent. It was on its way to breaking into a much larger audience and bursting out the gate, but it had been charting for months already with a tougher task of sticking around. If not for that song being bundled with Lorde's EP, which was helping it push higher on the chart than otherwise, "Tennis Court" would briefly have been Lorde's highest charting single in Australia. That other song was doing far better on streaming though, which is a big indication to me that it wouldn't have gone down like that nowadays.

That's all just very weird to me, because "Tennis Court" is a song that I feel thrives on buying into the Lorde brand, rather than being a standalone breakout hit of its own. Maybe I'm wrong on this, but I just find it hard to believe there'd be much of any way for this song to get a foot in the door on its own. Maybe that's just the clearest sign that Universal Music were onto a winner with Lorde. I think labels are always looking for artists with that indescribable spark that irons on more listeners, and once they've got it, they go all-in.

I suppose it's inevitable. Lorde was arguably at the peak of her career in 2013. I'm not sure if that meant the most people invested in her at any given time just because streaming has really inflated those numbers. I doubt she had 30 million monthly listeners back then, but it's hard to do that when you only have half a dozen songs released. Anyone who is interested in Lorde as a concept is going to flock to what's available. It's only now that it's split across 4 albums that it's harder to see all the listeners in action. Maybe it just makes more sense that "Tennis Court" has been overtaken by songs that just didn't exist at the time, only we can't re-write the history books to account for that. This is the 4th highest polling of 14 songs by Lorde in this countdown, and I guess the only one to appear twice. (#955)

I know I got swept up in all of this, ready to put all my stocks into the future of Lorde, which I suppose has still turned out pretty well. If you're still scoring #1 albums over a decade into your career, I think it's in good stead. But I am also one of those people who got on board with "Tennis Court" only for it to continue to fall behind more and more options, tossing it into the 'I don't wanna play with you anymore...well, maybe sometimes' box. It's another one of those peculiar singles that seems to hint at a future direction, but in hindsight feels just as unsure as we all are. You wind up with a solid bit of synth pop that's also making things up and filling the gaps as it goes along, yeah. Not without its merits, but still better things on the horizon.