#535-#531

#535. Daft Punk (feat Panda Bear) - Doin' It Right (#49, 2013)

59th of 2013

For the most part, misinformation can be a scourge on music discourse. This is brought about in combination with people attempting to push a certain narrative, but more importantly because even for the best of us, tracking popularity through record sales, music charts and the like is just a thoroughly confusing field of play that never truly behaves how you want it to. If you don't habitually check music charts, you can only base your perception of what's popular on vibes, and even if you do check them, you're probably still missing the bigger picture in many ways. It's all just so hard to define anyway. Is a popular artist one who can reliably get thousands of fans to buy their album on the week that it comes out, and sell out shows across the country, or is it the artist who can't do either of those things, but will steadily be propped up by hundreds of thousands of monthly listeners, with an album that might never make the top 20, but will spend years hovering below it? Even if you have a view on that, it's not even easy to sort these things out, as the increasingly unhelpful peak position remains the most readily available shorthand usually. I can't even stop using it and I know it's bunkum. To add a note to my entry earlier this week on Josh Pyke (#536), yes, his 5th album charted higher than any of his others, but his first album is certainly his most successful one.

I think there are good utilities that can still come from all this confusion though. For one, I think it allows artists to skip the queue into the discourse even without the prerequisite sales if enough people like them. Some have wound up quite influential as a result because what's more inspiring than getting some degree of attention while playing by your own rules? More than just that, the last decade has allowed for a giant upheaval of what really mattered in the long run. There's no universe where Mac DeMarco was one of the most popular artists going around in the early 2010s, but now he's got songs from back then that are approaching a billion streams on Spotify. Some of those bigger name artists of the time look quite quaint now by comparison.

This is a segue into talking about Animal Collective, a band who spent over a decade with a stranglehold on the blogosphere. How far did that get them? Well they never had a top 50 album in Australia, and got as high as #13 in the US, no doubt helped by signing up with Domino and reaping the association of being labelmates with Arctic Monkeys and the like. It feels like an incredulous accident that they actually achieved any level of crossover, but there they are at #70 in triple j's Hottest 100 for 2009 with the song "My Girls". I'm not an expert on Animal Collective by any measure, but what a song. You have to give them credit for taking their experimental pop ideas and churning out a genuine banger that the whole world can enjoy.

The legacy of Animal Collective lives on through this entry, as co-founding member and often vocalist Panda Bear turned up on Daft Punk's last album, and managed to get another hit. There will be more opportunities to talk about "Random Access Memories", but the short review is to say that it is filled with a mix of obvious crossovers and extremely indulgent deep cuts, and that this is not an indictment on either part of that equation. It's a little surprising that "Doin' It Right" ends up working out this way because it's right near the back of the track listing, and it probably only thrives on having a hook you're not going to forget quickly upon listening to it once.

I was a little harsh on it at the time. It's redundant to say this about Daft Punk, but it is just a touch repetitive between Panda Bear's contribution being overlayed with the classic robot vocals. I think it's best to treat those robot vocals as an instrument more than anything else, something that gets pulled in and out of the song for heightened effect. There's a brief 10 second period towards the end of the song where all the vocals are stripped away completely and the drums get to continue doing the same thing they've been doing the whole time, but with an extra synth layer that just sounds classy. In that brief moment, I think the song could be any genre it wants to and it'd still fit in.

#534. Lime Cordiale - On Our Own (#11, 2020)

46th of 2020

I really want to just say 'they nailed it, no notes' and move on, but I've been on a tremendous streak of not copping out on quick and lazy entries so it'd be a shame to revert back to that. Alas even when Lime Cordiale are hitting the mark I can't think of much to say about them. It might be worth looking into this as a means for which some artists will get blanket dismissal, because when have you ever seen someone won over by something that is perfectly competent and likeable but ultimately forgettable? When you pile together all of the dozen or so songs each by Lime Cordiale and Spacey Jane that have turned up here, "On Our Own" is the kind of song that's going to leave the least impression.

I want to make a grand statement about where this particular song is supposed to stand but I'm left with conflicting information. When Lime Cordiale had a big 5 song haul in 2020, this was the highest of all of them. Only "Robbery" (#688) has ever landed higher. On the other hand, I look at their YouTube numbers, I look at their Spotify numbers, and this is a song that gets lost in the shuffle. It's always been difficult for me to rationalise its finish in the Hottest 100 even if it is my favourite one of that lot because nothing backs it up. Maybe you're doing an elimination game where everyone has to pick out their least favourite Lime Cordiale song, I could see this one getting up, but it's a strange way to look at it as a voting result, unless everyone limited themselves to roughly 3 Lime Cordiale votes each and this one never slipped out of it.

So why does this particular song work anyway? It's gotta be that synth line. Just a small part of the bigger picture that completes the whole thing. It's like those various jingles from Legend of Zelda games when you pick up items of varying significance, just hearing it is enough to put you in a good mood. Maybe I could do without the first few lines of the song, Lime Cordiale trying to get me to picture them nude for a second time is just not doing it for me. The song also ends on what feels like a bridge that's setting up for a big payoff. It's just as unsatisfying as me leaving it off here without a final point.

#533. Alison Wonderland - I Want U (#37, 2014)

57th of 2014

It's possible that popular dance music was the genre most affected by the rise of streaming. All of a sudden, listener retention was in and it's more important to get people to come back to the hits, rather than a competition to stand out the most. I look at the best-selling dance singles for 2014 and for better or worse, obnoxious is the word of the year. Whether it's Melbourne bounce feat. Savage, David Guetta assaulting all senses or take your pick of numerous novelties. Jump forward two years to 2016 and it's nearly all gone, replaced by a new standard of chill. In many cases it's still being spearheaded by the same names, as the surest sign that this is where everyone's going.

When I listen to "I Want U", I hear a song that feels disruptive. A little more abrasive than what's around it, but not so much so that there isn't an audience. It's a strange hit but also a lucky one in that it probably wouldn't have had a chance even a year later. That's also just partly true for different semantic reasons. On the books, this is a top 40 hit in Australia, one that doesn't even look untoward because it hung around for a couple of months overall. It was probably just about out of steam on the week it peaked, because it was boosted that week by the release of Alison Wonderland's accompanying "Calm Down" EP. That alone contributed to the vast majority of the song's sales that week and it probably could have made the top 50 even if "I Want U"'s individual downloads weren't counted. I always kind of liked this element of the charts because it felt like it allowed for some largely out of character hits to flourish, side-stepping the usual gatekeepers.

I found myself drawn to "I Want U" because it felt so out of place. A remnant of a time when Skrillex seemed in charge of what was going on in the electronic music scene (in fairness, Skrillex did release a successful album earlier that year). The whole song lives as a function of its big instrumental drop. It's either clearly coming, happening in the moment, or just came through. As a performer on the song, Alison Wonderland only serves to give the song some stability, but she's also crowded out by everything around her. It meets everything together with the solid compromise of being abrasive, but not too much. You need something to grip onto in order to climb that mountain.

#532. SAFIA - Make Them Wheels Roll (#26, 2016)

57th of 2016

Most bands and artists never get to have their shining moment. It's the kind of thing that makes me more likely to show appreciation for it when it does happen, even if I just wrote a blurb slightly discrediting one. SAFIA spent a few years building up a name for themselves, and if you're willing to let me ignore the elephants in the room for a little bit longer, then I can say it finally culminated in 2016 as they scored an ARIA top 50 hit with "Make Them Wheels Roll". It spent a grand total of two weeks in the top 50 and only got as high as #45, so if you only look at it through that lens, it's basically nothing. But seeing the long journey to get there makes it feel monumental. This band just seemed a little too weird to break out of their niche before this.

I suppose that makes this song SAFIA's biggest hit, except unlike the version of this I had with Lime Cordiale, this is one that's still backed up in hindsight. That makes it easier to compartmentalise with confidence, but it's never made much sense to me on the whole. "Make Them Wheels Roll" is a perfectly sensible tune. Some quirkiness sneaks its way in but on the whole it's a tune they play straight. Very mindful, very demure. I'm torn between the title being a coolness buff or a quirkiness debuff, but success in hindsight makes me want to give the former more credit. This is a slow driving with the windows down kind of song, probably. I'm not the right person to ask about these things.

Still, I'm not really objecting here. There's a lot of trust I can put into SAFIA to make this all work together, and it makes me want to tilt the dial away from genreless slop and instead on the fine line of just nailing an array of sounds. SAFIA can do the slow R&B thing, they can chuck in a guitar solo, they can make it danceable as well. When I put it like that, then it has to feel like the peak of their powers. I just find myself gravitating to other songs of theirs that scratch more specific itches.

#531. Major Lazer (feat Ellie Goulding & Tarrus Riley) - Powerful (#74, 2015)

55th of 2015

Now we're just counting it down backwards. What could be that other mysterious Major Lazer song from 2015? What a shocking twist that I'm ranking it the highest of those, who could have ever seen that coming? In any case, this is the equally obvious partner in crime to "Be Together" (#562) that demonstrates the diminishing returns of thriving off a big hit. Major Lazer went from just scraping the top 40 a few times to having this song vaulting up into the top 10. It got to thrive as the Major Lazer song of the moment for a decent while. I suspect if the same roll out happened 10 years later, this would be one of those follow up hits that can never quite overtake the star attraction. That's the Benson Boone experience right there. Your follow up hits just need more energy; they need to be more powerful.

An interesting note to this one is that we're looking at the only time Ellie Goulding has ever interacted with the Hottest 100. She's had a long career of sitting just off to the wrong side for artists you could feasibly imagine getting triple j airplay, but otherwise don't. Maybe the timing just wasn't quite right, maybe Polydor were so focused on the UK market that they left it too long to pursue things in Australia. The early stages of her career especially are a collection of chart peaks around the world that don't remotely sync up with each other. Her debut album scored a couple of huge hits in the UK, and then a year after release, title track "Lights" is inexplicably soaring up to #2 in the US (it peaked at #49 in the UK, and went nowhere here). Truly her discography is one built on shifting sand where I can never feel confident that she has a strong fandom to back her up. In the UK she goes to #1 with nearly every album released, while in Australia she went from top 5 albums back down to nothing with lightning speed. Still, I've got to give her credit as a rare British pop star who was able to make a sustained splash on the Billboard charts for most of the 2010s. The ship has probably sailed now, but you only have to go back to 2023 to find what ended up being her longest running #1 hit ever in the UK (this is the part where I put Scottish DJ in brackets again).

When the dust has settled, she can always lay claim to having an Australian #1 single. It's "Love Me Like You Do" which comes with the dubious connection of being one of the "Fifty Shades of Grey" soundtrack hits, so it being her song might just be an afterthought. She doesn't even have a writing credit on that song, which is the work of Max Martin and various other Swedes including Tove Lo. The odd one out there is American Savan Kotecha who also worked with Goulding on some later singles, including her other song with Diplo, "Close To Me". I've always had a soft spot for that one which pairs up her mercenary hitmaker status with a genuinely engaged performance that I'm not sure another singer could have pulled off. Actually I've had a soft spot for Ellie Goulding in general, though. Even before I dove deeper into an interest in indie/electro-pop hybrids, she was an early arrival into that. I felt weirdly happy for her as an artist I didn't actually listen very much to that she gets to be part of this Hottest 100 canon.

It also helped that I was pretty into this song as well. I'm a big believer in the way that a song's title can influence its potential, provided that you stick the landing, and if there's a Major Lazer song to be called "Powerful", then lyrics aside, it's gotta be this one. It's all in those big fake brass hits for the chorus. Just feels like it's got someone strong (maybe the Major Lazer mascot?) pulling it along behind it. A lot of the credit has to go to Tarrus Riley as the main star of the show here. I'd seen Major Lazer cop a bit of flack in the past for co-opting dancehall into the mainstream and doing it largely with (mostly white) American & British collaborators. Not entirely true as they do have Vybz Kartel on "Pon de Floor" and Busy Signal on "Watch Out for This (Bumaye)", but credit can also be given to them scoring two more big hits in quick succession with this and then the remix of "Light It Up". Tarrus Riley also wrote the song's hook, and it's his performance that stands out the most. Apparently Ellie Goulding only came into the piece later down the track, and while Diplo credits her putting a spin on the bridge (which honestly sounds a lot like Amber Coffman on "Get Free"), she doesn't have an official writing credit to this one. Just being there is her best utility though. I'm not sure how readily the public would have moved into a Major Lazer phase if there wasn't the hitmaking reassurance of having Ellie Goulding on the song just months after she had a #1 hit. Normalising an artist on the fringe of stardom is just very difficult in general, which is probably why Ellie Goulding's career has been so inconsistent.