#475-#471

 #475. Jack River - Fool's Gold (#64, 2017)

44th of 2017

I think sometimes I might write people off too soon. We've had Jack River here before when she was working with Peking Duk on "Sugar" (#904). It's not surprising that she managed to make the cut with that one, but I remember feeling so surprised when this song made it in. Maybe I shouldn't have been, but in the previous year, she didn't really move the needle with her debut single "Talk Like That" (no relation to The Presets), and her rather good single from later in the year, "Palo Alto", also didn't make the cut. It may well have been close. I have it at #245 in my unofficial vote count, but that's a long way from where "Fool's Gold" took her just one year later. I just can't pick the draft bolters I guess.

The success of "Fool's Gold" still made a bit of sense though. This is another rather immediate sounding song that almost certainly does a better job of cueing up its hook than "Palo Alto" did. Another observation only I'll give you is that its main riff is fairly reminiscent of the one Cherry Glazerr used only about 9 months prior on their song "Told You I'd Be With The Guys", which I absolutely adore and think has a surprising amount of pop appeal. It's like Warpaint with a lot more energy, and plenty of isolated moments or transitions that could work in a TikTok snippet environment. I'll use this isolated success of Jack River to further this argument, "Fool's Gold" was certified Platinum in Australia back in 2020, and might be close to 2xPlatinum now.

In a brief chat with themusic Jack River listed a bunch of songs that helped inspire "Fool's Gold" with a focus on what she calls a 'giant f**k off chorus'. There's no Cherry Glazerr, but she does mention "Stacy's Mom", "Teenage Dirtbag", "Torn", and even a song I can't mention yet. I think the best translation I see in the list is the D Lissvik remix of Fever Ray's "When I Grow Up". I'd not known this version of the song before but it's worth checking out for just how fascinatingly transformative it is, turning the moody original tune into a surprising bop, and one that certainly does have a lot in common with "Fool's Gold".

Unless you want to make a slight reach from that list of songs before, I'll answer the mysterious question by saying I don't know why she chose Chromium as her element of choice on the single cover. There isn't actually an Fg element and on the 1/558 chance they add another element and it ends up being that, it's just too late. Jack River was 25 years old when this song came out too, so it's not that. Maybe she was just really into "Breaking Bad" at the time and didn't have a better way to do it. There isn't even a single element that uses the letter J, it's down in the dumpster with Q. Could've just made it 79 so it represents gold, that's the only complaint I have here.

#474. Japanese Wallpaper (feat Airling) - Forces (#69, 2015)

50th of 2015

It's not uncommon for less well known singers to get their break from a handy collaboration. Sometimes it can feel like a lottery from the outside. Ecca Vandal has a multi-platinum smash hit? Sure (#612), why not? But then if Jack River could make the leap on her own, then maybe it wasn't out of the realm of possibility for Airling as well. A year before this, she landed at #168 with "Wasted Pilots". It's a relatively unassuming single that's nonetheless a great showcase for her unique and alluring vocals. In any case, the priority was overtaken by this single with Japanese Wallpaper.

As far as I can tell, Airling's entire discography was written with Tom from Big Scary (he even has an engineering credit on "Forces"). He even gave one of their songs a cheeky 5 star review on Unearthed. She put out her debut album in 2017 but has been very quiet on the music front since then. All I can see is a collaboration on a song by Scenes in 2024. I adore her song "Not A Fighter" which was on her album. It's the most immediate song I've heard from her, and plays to most of her strengths again.

This is a respectable second place. For Japanese Wallpaper, we're back where we left off on his 2014 singles, but it's another evolution on what he can do with it. This is a four minute song that could probably get away with stopping after only a minute, already succeeding in its initial mission. Everything else is a bonus, as we get more variations on this immensely calm and pleasant instrumental.

Airling is without a doubt the star of this show though, and I don't think I'd want her swapped out for anyone here. She's got the timbre in her voice to sell the emotions completely, and she knocks the performance out of the park for this one. In a song about not wanting to profess feelings for a potential relationship, lest it cause turmoil in the already existing friendship, just that one delivery of the line 'I don't wanna ruin you' does so much heavy lifting.

#473. Joji - Run (#62, 2020)

41st of 2020

It feels like a long time ago because he hasn't released music in a few years (hello me from two months ago, you've got a good few weeks ahead of you), but it was a peculiar time when you could just expect a new Joji single to make a brief dent on the charts. I say this mainly because there didn't seem to be a limit on what was capable of crossing over, he had everyone in the palm of his hand and could make anything work. "Run" feels like the most unexpected of these successes. It's not unconventional in its own terms, but it's more of a rock power ballad than anything else, the kind that hasn't been successful in years. I listen to it and I feel like it could almost pass as a Black Sabbath song, who knew he had this in him?

"Run" wasn't even coasting off of his fame in the traditional sense. When it was released it actually became his first ever top 40 hit in Australia, and he's only had two more since then. I don't know if it's true, but it does imply that he won over a lot of people with this song in particular. When the Hottest 100 came around, it wasn't quite his highest, but it was pretty close. Maybe that's the earliest single buff helping out, or maybe it's just another bit of genre cosplay that's pulled off surprisingly well.

This song is also the most recent addition to the collection for the most common song title in Hottest 100 history. There have now been 6 songs with the title "Run", although one of them is in uppercase and also will appear later in this list. I'm writing this a few days after the most common score in AFL history (80-79) happened yet again. I love a scorigami as much as I love seeing the same thing randomly just happening over and over again. This record doesn't look like being challenged soon, because it was already comfortably the most common title before Joji even got to it. We recently got our 4th "Home" though. I would also like to note that if you counted up all of those "Run"s for how many times they say the word 'run', then Cog's would absolutely dominate the conversation. The 101* times they say the word 'run' considerably outstrips the combined 19 of the other 5. Congrats Flynn on the ODI century.

This particular "Run" probably wouldn't work if Joji didn't have the vocal chops to pull it off. While the underlying tune is good, it's the big release of the hook that solidifies it all. It's also why it's always all the more exciting to say that you can get ready for the next time he appears on this list, tackling a completely different genre again. This is not a spoiler in any way.

*I counted this manually myself because there appears to be a few mistakes on the Genius lyrics. You could also argue that it's really just 100 times because though the expected line calls for the last one, the song's fade out makes it inaudible to me.

#472. Flume (feat MAY-A) - Say Nothing (#1, 2022)

47th of 2022

When it came to making a voting list for triple j's Hottest 100 Australian Songs of All Time list, the station put itself in a curious position to try and capture a lifetime of popular music. There are practical limitations where you have to meet demand even if it doesn't seem necessary. A song like "Save The Day" by The Living End has some notoriety attached to it, and would make sense to appear on the list even if there's very little chance it would make the cut. At that point you might feel you have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise you'll be putting down every single Kylie Minogue song that's ever made the ARIA Charts and it'll stick out a bit.

triple j probably saw this problem in advance and nipped it in the bud. Their solution was to limit every artist to a maximum of three entries. Enough to allow some variety without feeling like it's crowding it up too much. This is inevitably going to transform the final state of the list, because there would certainly be artists capable of polling more than 3 songs (AC/DC for one), and maybe the selections aren't quite on the money. But for every artist like Silverchair, where there's a clear and obvious three (they have three ARIA #1 hits), you get an artist like Flume, whose career is so fresh that the dust hasn't settled. You can look at it from different angles and get very different results.

The particular quandary with Flume is that triple j has their own version of recorded history that says Flume has topped the Hottest 100 twice now. The first is with a song I'll discuss another time, and one that can be safely included without much room for debate. The other is "Say Nothing", something of a curiosity in the Hottest 100 canon. If there ever was a song to complete the prompt 'well SOMETHING has to get the most votes', then it's a solid contender. Obviously it deserved the #1 spot because anything else would be an even greater transgression, "Say Nothing" got more votes than anything else. It's just that not all #1s are created equally.

After the 2024 countdown, triple j announced in their stats that they had the most ever votes for a #1 song when "Good Luck, Babe!" got the job done. Not only that, but they also revealed that the #4 song ("Messy") actually received more votes than the winning song from 2023's list ("Paint The Town Red"). 2024's countdown did get slightly more votes than 2023's, but it strikes me as a significant means of comparison that puts things into perspective. 2024 was a monster year with more than enough potential winning songs to go around, 2023, and if we're being honest 2022, don't have the same legs to stand on.

Maybe that statistic is throwing Doja Cat under the bus, though I wouldn't think triple j did that deliberately. On the other hand, if they were to omit "Say Nothing" from their all-time voting list, that would be a mighty level of disrespect to the people who voted for it. If they're going to do everything they can possibly do to see it over the line, you simply can't leave it out. The fact that it only managed to land at #176 in the subsequent poll is immaterial.

I will put through the perspective that "Say Nothing" is not one of Flume's biggest hits on the whole. It doesn't even come close. On Spotify, it's outperformed by numerous other singles. Even "Insane", a non-single from his first album has more streams, and is increasing the margin at present. Just another case of newer singles having the cards stacked against them, but they're still left with no reprieve. If people aren't hearing them as much, they're not going to have any sympathy for it. I endorse triple j's voting list decision for Flume at least while also accepting that it probably cost him the chance to get more votes.

Even if "Say Nothing" was more popular, it'd be hard to escape the feeling that it's one of the biggest non-events for a Hottest 100 winning song. Flume became only the second artist after Powderfinger to manage it, but they did so with their two most monolithic contributions to Australia's music canon in back to back years. This by comparison just feels like a perennially strong polling artist getting to #1 by happenstance instead of narrowly missing it (Flume had two top 3 finishes in a row in 2019 and 2020). In the context of his career, it doesn't feel poetic in the slightest. "Say Nothing" was a modest chart hit at the start of the year leading up to an album that performed considerably worse than the two that came before it (Flume's first album charted 67 weeks in the ARIA top 50, his second album charted 32 weeks. "Palaces", the album this comes from, managed just 2 weeks, and didn't even hit the #1 spot). It did prove one of the biggest beneficiaries of the post-Hottest 100 bump though, and this is technically Flume's second highest charting single in Australia, so there's another way to deceive yourself with cursory info like a table of chart positions.

Now that I've said all of this, I want to challenge the perspective. I subscribe to the idea that significance can be there to behold even if it doesn't seem like it. If you don't agree with that, consider just how many perennially enduring songs can have their catalyst directed at something frivolous like a movie soundtrack, a meme, or simply being played so much on the radio that we're forced to acknowledge it. No song is inherently worthless just because you can't finish the prompt 'It's that song that...'. Sometimes there's something better in that, the idea that it makes its way into the conversation on only its own merits.

As for the question of 'is "Say Nothing" that song though?', I might not be the right person to answer that question. It's hardly my favourite Flume song either. There's a desire to compare it to "Rushing Back" (#619) as a similarly structured Flume song, though that's another one that's arguably more popular so I'm not preaching to the choir at all. This is probably the more maturely produced one of the two, where it feels like Flume has a better idea of how to build the tension outside of the chorus. I guess I should also say he reached out for a more unexpected vocalist.

The 2021 Hottest 100 result was not especially kind to me. It's the only time I've ever had none of my votes get into the countdown, and this wasn't a series of near misses. Only one of my votes made it into the top 200 that year. In the modern configuration where the voting list is only about 1,000 songs, someone picking at random would have a better chance than I did. Time will tell how things stack up when I get to the pointy end of the list, currently we're sitting on an utterly unremarkable count of having 47 songs left to go from that list in the top 470 here. Part of the problem there is that there's a solid ringer that didn't get a chance to bloom, perhaps unfairly so (more on that another day). MAY-A landed at #101 with "Time I Love to Waste", a song that would probably be my favourite on that list...if it were on there. In that respect, Flume did her the mightiest of solids, taking her from Hottest 100 #101 artist to the rare air of winning the whole thing. She eventually did get her own entry in 2023 with "Sweat You Out My System", so it's not all just coasting off Flume.

In general I've found MAY-A's music to be pretty great over the years. I first latched onto her song "Green" in 2020, adding her to the endless list of artists I found on Spotify who usually don't amount to much, but immediately after that single, she was signed to Sony Music Australia who've kept her career chugging along. Aside from the aforementioned, I really love "Central Station", "Something Familiar" and "ifyoulikeitlikethat". Just a gift for some of the wordiest and catchiest hooks, and capable of both singing and yelling them.

When she comes into this Flume song, she's a welcome inclusion. I wouldn't necessarily say it allows her to explore her full range, but there's a wildcard factor that makes the whole thing more interesting. If you're gonna remember anything from this song, it's gonna be either her sharp delivery on the title hook, or all the stabbing synths that surround it. Now that's what I call a successful collaboration.

#471. Flight Facilities (feat NÏKA) - Need You (#66, 2018)

51st of 2018

This is the most recent Flight Facilities song to make the Hottest 100. That's ending a run of appearing in 8 out of 9 years from 2010 to 2018, just missing 2016 (they didn't release anything that year). There was a near miss in 2019 when they teamed up with Aloe Blacc on "Better Than Ever", scoring one of their bigger hits due to an Apple tie-in, which meant that Spotify didn't give them any flowers (see also "Best Friend" by Sofi Tukker). Then in 2021 they managed 3 entries all within the top 200. I'd be surprised if they polled again, I think the vibes aren't there anymore.

I think their reputation has taken a hit lately due to stories about one of the members. You can find a lot of stories about taking advantage of fans, and a lot more about infidelity. In the past year he's had a second kid and also gotten divorced. As I write this, Flight Facilities have been on tour in America of late and he's not there. I don't think there's any internal strife, but it's just another strange thing to line up. I feel obliged to acknowledge all of this because it might not be right if I just pick and choose whose dirty laundry I'm airing.

To get back to the usual spiel, this song features NÏKA, the singer from New Zealand, not to be confused with any similarly named singers from other countries. She's pretty under the radar outside of this single, but she is actually one of the additional Broods siblings, and I'll admit some embarrassingly slow realisations when I saw multiple posts from Georgia referring to her as 'sister', which could totally be a term of endearment. She does have a remarkably similar voice to her sister too. I don't know what she's up to now because her social media has gone silent pretty much right after this song came out. Someone even took over her old Instagram handle earlier this year. It's not even a very good one, it's got multiple underscores.

For reasons that are either extremely obvious or not at all (which will no doubt reveal itself eventually), I tend to forget her contribution because I'm so used to hearing someone else sing this song. It's one of the most tasteful Flight Facilities songs though. Maybe one of the most deliberate attempts to ape "Crave You" again, with both the synonymous title and also very similar programmed drums. That's a brutally overplayed song though so I tend to prefer hearing this one.