#410-#406

 #410. Eliza Rose & Interplanetary Criminal - B.O.T.A. (Baddest Of Them All) (#2, 2022)

40th of 2022

Something I like to tell myself is that even if I wasn't old enough to properly experience times of the past, music charts can be one way to imagine what it's like. The prestige of reaching certain chart heights can vary a little, but as long as you keep it in perspective, you can imagine what it might have been like when "Come On Eileen" or "Working Class Man" were fresh hits. The more I dive into it though, the muddier it gets. I can't help but think about the SoundScan era shift in the US and start wondering if I'm being sold a lie. There are obvious clues. I scan through Fred Bronson's Billboard Book of Number Ones and see patterns emerge. There were a lot of #1 hits in the 1980s, many of them lasted for a single week. After they're unseated, they're immediately out of the top 5. It's pretty similar to the system in place for the Country Airplay charts, where it's effectively rigged to make #1 hits feel frivolous. Thomas Rhett has had 23 #1 hits and counting. Only a handful have missed the top since he became a breadwinner and most of those got to #2, probably trapped behind big hits that couldn't get unstuck, or otherwise they reached #1 for a day and that sufficed. In both cases though, there are enough genuine smashes to lend credibility to the system, so you can look at the list of #1 hits and see enough that make sense that you'll overlook those oddities that don't seem familiar. Easier to just trust the system that tells you "Venus" was unseated by "Take My Breath Away".

It's interesting though to see the way we tend to look back at these historical records. Part of why we pay so much attention to it is because it is the final argument. Anyone obsessing over this is probably going to look at the #1 hits pretty early on, and that can get those hangers-on to get a second chance at credibility from people who didn't have a say on the first go around. I don't know if this actually happens, because it feels like the enduring songs tend to just be the ones people like. Often #1 hits, but often not. When the Billboard Hot 100 has so many years of slightly dubious data, it just ends up filled with a catalogue of songs that don't feel like they've stood the test of time. I've spent the time I was writing these two paragraphs listening exclusively to Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam, the group that scored two #1 hits in 1987, but probably don't illicit much of a reaction to many people. They both only spent a single week at #1, and were knocked off by much more famous songs, "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)", and then "Bad", all the makings of a stop gap.

I've also found it interesting to look at the history of Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam. Apparently there's going to be a biopic, though I suspect it won't be as popular as the current one about Bruce Springsteen, a man with no #1 hits (though I will note that Manfred Mann's Earth Band scored a #1 hit by covering "Blinded By The Light"). It's funny though because Lisa Lisa is subject to a similar experience of the charts possibly underselling her. I am constantly struck with familiarity when I'm listening to songs of hers that weren't #1 hits. The most famous one is probably "I Wonder If I Take You Home", famously interpolated by The Black Eyed Peas. You've also got "All Cried Out", famously covered by Allure, and "Can You Feel the Beat", famously sampled by Nina Sky. Honestly I'm pretty down with all the stuff I've heard tonight. The sound is undeniably stuck in the 1980s, but it's a sign of things to come with Janet Jackson & Paula Abdul a little bit down the track. Just very fun music with some great melodies (I think "Can You Feel the Beat" is my favourite, that hook just comes out of nowhere). Anyway there's one I left out. Just barely cracking the Billboard top 40 but topping the R&B chart was the song "Let The Beat Hit 'Em". The 3rd 12" release of the single had an 8 minute LL w/Love RC Mix with more of a club vibe, that's the version that's gonna sound very familiar to you if you've heard "B.O.T.A. (Baddest Of Them All)" before.

For my money, "B.O.T.A. (Baddest Of Them All)" might just be the strangest megahit of the 2020s so far. It's something that goes beyond just the fact that it was a hit, but how quickly it asserted itself. TikTok virality does tend to be the answer, but it was strange seeing something so low key just vault from nowhere to the top 5 at breakneck speed. In the UK it debuted at #45 and 2 weeks later it was up to #2, on its way to eventually topping the chart for 2 weeks. It was all just so strange, and for a short moment I caught myself resenting it. Who do you think you are, coming out of nowhere with this absolutely egregious song title & artist names combination? Eliza Rose, The Baddest Interplanetary Criminal Of All, we're nearly onto crafting a Carpenters classic here. There's an additional layer of confusion, because as an Australian, I have to point out that we already have our own DJ named Elizabeth Rose ("The Good Life" still sounds so good), though she records under the name BRUX nowadays. Probably convenient to dodge some confusion, but I won't pretend I didn't have a double take at the time either.

Still, this made the song a pretty big deal at the time, a song by a female DJ going to #1 in the UK was mostly unheard of. You have to go back to "It Feels So Good" by Sonique, and skip through two decades of guys like Basshunter & David Zowie getting it all for themselves. From what I can tell though, there's a slight caveat with this since it seems like Interplanetary Criminal (a guy) is actually the sole producer behind this track, so Eliza Rose is a producer, but she's just the one singing on the song this time. There's also the curious tidbit that this is the song that was #1 in the UK when Elizabeth II died, ending a reign that started 9 months before the British pop charts, making it the only chart reign to last across the reign of two monarchs (I am ignoring the broken reigns of Mariah Carey & Wham! for this, but that's all there is either way). Whoever made the fake meme about BBC Radio pausing a club mix to announce the death of Her Majesty really could've used this track, because when it comes to ruling Britain for the longest period of time possible, she really was the baddest of them all.

The success of this song felt like a further surprise in the Hottest 100 context. The charts keep me on the pulse, but sometimes there's just no telling which solid top 10 chart hits are #1 contenders, and which ones are also-rans. This was a hit about the size of "Vegas" (#657), from two artists with no history, not much of a profile and a song that doesn't really fit in with any established notion of what's due to pop off here. It might have just been a slow year though. "Say Nothing" (#472) winning the thing doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in it being a showstopping year, but still, there could not possibly be a less well known artist to come within an inch of winning things. I could not blame all the people who had never heard of this before, it's just not in your face enough to be that kind of novelty. After the songs I perhaps preferred fell out of the race though, I found myself rooting for this. The most interesting results open the door to the most interesting futures beyond it. Flume probably got a few less people crashing out though, so maybe the land of discourse was spared another skirmish.

Most of all though, I'm glad we got this. You'll get mixed results from when triple j are clearly just plucking out hits from the charts to put in rotation, and the validity of what ends up going through. I think songs like this make a strong positive contribution, both to the credibility of what can be a pop hit and a triple j hit. Both sets are constantly putting themselves in a battle to introduce new things to an audience that's probably pretty content with having what they're used to. Which is why Flume's second Hottest 100 winner beat Eliza Rose, and why "B.O.T.A. (Baddest Of Them All)" peaked at #4 on the ARIA Chart during a week when the top 2 singles were "I'm Good (Blue)" and "Super Freaky Girl". Interplanetary Criminal is allowed a pass from the sample Hall Monitors. To bring it around full circle, I think this is one of the isolated hits that can tell us the most about the experience of 2022. I also quite liked Eliza Rose's later single "Take You There", but gee, not a lot of people even heard it. Lucky for her, I can use the phrase Scottish DJ for the 7th time now to describe the man who saved her from being a total one hit wonder in the UK. Maybe she's got another one in her someday though.

#409. Billie Eilish - The 30th (#84, 2022)

40th of 2022

Most episodes of Six Feet Under start the same way, a short scene where someone dies at the end of it, followed by a fade to white that shows their full name and lifespan. There's some variety to it. Sometimes it'll be conventional, other times totally bizarre. Can be kind of like a Final Destination scene where it'll look like death itself is out to get someone, but then it might not be who you're expecting. Much like the show in general, it'll balance the serious moments with the macabre. You can only get so upset when an old woman appears on screen for two seconds to get killed by a wayward golf ball. On the other hand, sometimes it just puts you on edge. You see a family with children driving in the city in a car, tension has already fired up before anything happens. The inevitable happens but the scene fades before anything graphic happens. Then you just get every single name from that car ride appear with the same year of death and realise it's actually much worse than what you thought might happen. I'll likely say it again, it's a really impactful show that doesn't shy from looking at the very messy reality and after-effects of death.

Maybe that's not especially relevant when it comes to Billie Eilish. I could point out that she has a song called "Six Feet Under", but it's not gonna come as a shock to say 14 year old Billie wasn't actually writing songs about HBO dramas that are older than she is. The Weeknd plausibly could have but his song of the same name isn't either. I can't help but think of something I saw recently though when I'm presented with a Billie Eilish song that's about witnessing a near-fatal car crash. I think it's about someone she knows although she's understandably not very open about discussing the topic, and I'm not about to slow down what I'm doing to look at the details of a car crash.

This is the less popular of the two songs on the "Guitar Songs" EP, alongside "TV" (#645). I think there's some credit to be given that it's here though. Usually when an artist releases two songs at the same time, one quickly asserts itself to be the hit and the other one falls by the wayside. Remember when Drake released "Scary Hours"? "God's Plan" (#507) did the job, but look at "Diplomatic Immunity". It was tacked onto one of the biggest hits of the year and still hasn't hit 100 million plays on Spotify. It gets roughly 1% as many daily listens as its partner in crime. The ratios here are a little more respectable, "The 30th" nearly getting half as many at the moment.

This has always been the one of the two I leaned more towards. On a superficial level, it's more exciting. It's not the catchiest sing-along or anything like that, but once you get to the bridge, there's a general intensity you don't get elsewhere. It's a little mental breakdown moment where all allusions are torn down and replaced by incredibly real thoughts that are going through someone's head during a crisis. It ends with the 'you're alive!' mantra repeated which feels like an exasperated sigh of relief. Words I tend to live by are that things are never as good as they seem, but more importantly, never as bad as they seem as well. It's a way to appreciate what we've got.

#408. Skegss - Fantasising (#66, 2020)

34th of 2020

I make a weekly chart of my favourite current music. It's something I started doing back in 2008, when I was lamenting what had started feeling like a lacking year for music (I still feel that way about 2008 a little), and I wanted to specifically reinforce otherwise, because even when I was going through high school anxiety, I guess I was always insufferably optimistic. I didn't write it down anywhere though, I just thought about it in my head when I was stuck in class with nothing to do. I decided to start actually documenting it at the end of the year, on a spreadsheet that I still use to this day. By the time this post goes live, I'll probably be up to column AIC, as I've been documenting it all one week at a time for a very long time.

I've found some flaws in the system admittedly. I get locked into rigid pathways for it for my own convenience, but it probably means that I overlook some things if I don't see them straight away. I guess I'm a bit like the real charts in that regard. Some songs I absolutely adore just never appeared on this chart because I didn't think they were a right fit for it. I guess I don't pretend that it's ever all-encompassing, and it's better to just compare everything to that which they sit alongside.

A peculiar thing I noticed when I got halfway through this list is that one of the surprise winners was Skegss. Outside of their Like A Version (#740), they landed their entire set of original songs in the top half of the list, all 8 of them. There are only a small handful of artists who have more songs still to come than them, and they generally did so with much more chances to burn. I just think of this in respect to my own personal chart archive, because Skegss are just not a band with much to show for it on there. They've had just the one song to make a serious dent over the years (it will appear on this list), but almost nothing else. When I think of "Fantasising", I think about this, because it was technically the song that broke the drought. It just barely got in. I'm talking about a #77 peak on a chart that only goes to #80. If I was to take things literally, it had to be my favourite Skegss song at that point, right? Nah, I could never entertain that possibility, it's just too weird.

So it puts Skegss in this weird situation regarding how much credibility I was giving them. I could pay lip service to some past singles, but it feels a little fraudulent when I can't show live support in the moment. At that point, it's like joining in the victory party for a team you were actively hindering, making sure you stay on the right side of history. Still, if "Fantasising" can open the door for me giving Skegss a better chance in the moment, there's some value to that.

"Fantasising" is a good song! I listen to it and try to work out if it's doing anything particularly noteworthy that got me to stick with it on first listen. That might just be the effect of a few years of getting used to what they're doing, but then I hear the chord change for the chorus and start to reckon there's something in this. Sometimes it doesn't take much to get over the line, but then I guess they never exactly soared over there. I think listening to a playlist exclusively of songs that I reasonably like but never fell in love with might be a fun idea.

#407. The Smith Street Band - Surrender (#69, 2014)

44th of 2014

I grew up with the 1996 Australian edition of Monopoly. It's not one of those wacky variants that replace the streets with people or landmarks, but instead it's very faithful to the original purpose. All the streets are just notable streets from major cities, stopping off in Canberra for the two dark blue properties. This has been a monumental debuff to me when it comes to the niche world of Monopoly location trivia, something I might otherwise be pretty good at. Having to balance US & UK knowledge while most of my recollections fall onto an irrelevant one has been a catastrophic failure. I'm burdened with the gift of useless knowledge that actively counters the useful kind. I can't even really use it for Australian knowledge either because some of the names are so generic that it's not clear where they come from. There was a deli near Smith Street that I'd see very frequently when I was younger. I liked to think if I saved up $60, I could buy it. It wasn't really 'the' Smith Street, which I think is actually in Alice Springs. To make matters more confusing, there's now another famous Smith Street in Melbourne, forming the boundary between Collingwood & Fitzroy, because it's the one that's the namesake for a famous band.

The Smith Street Band have always felt a little weird on the triple j airwaves to me. Not because they don't fit on it, but because they're a band I became aware of before they hit these big leagues. It's not uncommon for triple j to be a tiny bit late to the party (looking at Ocean Alley, Lime Cordiale here), but this is one where I felt like I was witnessing a band doing their own thing and slowly becoming one of the standard bearers for what triple j music was. I guess I just never foresaw the rise in general. A lot of good buzz for sure, but I was seeing it in the circles that just don't translate to the general audience. Gareth Liddiard isn't getting a Hottest 100 entry any time soon, I don't think.

There's an unabashed Australian-ness to them that's gotten bigger in the years following, but it's always going to be strange when you first encounter it. There was always Eddy Current Suppression Ring, but they also only ever skirted with the notion of blowing up anyway. The Smith Street Band have a #1 album. I'll never forget my early experiences with the band, where I had Wil Wagner's singing pinned as an exact middle point between Serj from System of a Down and Nathan from Faker, though maybe it's a 30:70 split in hindsight. It was so uncanny that it was hard to fully get on board.

"Surrender" coming in at the funny number in 2014 was the clear indication that this band were making waves, and they certainly did end up doing so. I'll be going over them 5 more times after this. I'm not sure if this song is a deliberate push for the big time, but it feels like it in hindsight. It doesn't feel as oblique as we're potentially used to when it's all built around a catchy guitar riff and a big calling card hook. It's the kind that can cut through to you even if you haven't really been paying attention to everything around it. The song also comes with notable US producer Jeff Rosenstock, who'd produce this album, and the one after. I wouldn't necessarily call that a mainstream coup, but it does mean for some outsider influence. The band released an EP titled "Don't F**k With Our Dreams" the year before this, and here's a song to hold up that mantra as well. Seize the moment and be who you want to be, you don't have to surrender if you don't want to. There's joy to be had with the triumph.

#406. Mark Ronson (feat Miley Cyrus) - Nothing Breaks Like A Heart (#80, 2018)

45th of 2018

Mark Ronson is famous, right? I've known of him for ages, once again through the staggered approach of missing the important stage. I just knew him as the guy who only made cover versions, mostly of songs I didn't know, which sounded somewhat appealing, and then when he got to the songs I did know, they seemed wretched. But then, he wasn't the face of those covers really, outside of the memorable album cover. It was always a showcase for the performers on it. Daniel Merriweather basically launched his career in the UK through his "Stop Me" performance, and for how unplannably big The Zutons' "Valerie" got, it doesn't hold a candle to the Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse version in terms of popular impact anymore. That's basically a standard now.

With that in mind, I feel like Mark Ronson is always a background player no matter what happens. The only real exception that comes to mind is his "Record Collection" album, ironically the one that's credited as a collaborative whole, Mark Ronson & The Business Intl.. Maybe it still applies to some extent, since he didn't just pluck complete unknowns. One of the biggest songs on that album did so well because it had Boy George and Andrew Wyatt singing on it, lending some star power even if they wouldn't have gotten it off the ground otherwise. It's just that since then, the calibre of hitmakers he's been able to get from his rolodex has only gotten more ambitious. These are songs that are made to be hits because they've got performers who barely know how to not do that.

I've also known about Miley Cyrus for about the same length of time. Her Disney Channel tenure is right around on the cusp when I stopped watching it, but I did see some Hannah Montana at the time. I want to say my feelings were positive but really I didn't think much about it. When Miley Cyrus made the transition from fake pop star to actual pop star, it was at the point in time when I'd started paying more attention to the pop charts, but I was fairly negative on most of it, so I fell into negative feelings that must have outweighed my initial ones. I have a similar story to get to in the future like this. I'll admit on some level that I didn't fully appreciate the timbre of her singing, but I found myself justifying hatred towards nearly everything she ever released, like there was a part of me that never fully approved of the career shift, I dunno. She's one of the more unusual long term fixtures in the charts because she's usually waiting in the wings, but every now and then will become a main character with the right song. She had a huge career peak in 2013, inexplicably had the biggest hit song around the world in 2023, and then fell down the pecking order so rapidly that it made "Flowers" look like a collective hallucination. Either that, or it was the kind of hit that just got too big that it's impossible to follow up. It's what I'd say if I wasn't writing this underneath a Mark Ronson entry, who might be living proof that such a thing can't exist. Maybe Miley Cyrus will have another huge hit in the near future, I never seem to know who's in and out these days. My opinions on Miley's music have improved over the years. There's also a weird kinship I get out of her, as one of the famous musicians whose birthday is closest to mine. I associate "Party In The U.S.A." with my own high school graduation, and it's funny to think that she would theoretically be graduating at the same time under normal conditions (as far as I can tell, she didn't finish high school because of the whole Hollywood thing, I think they knew she was gonna be okay).

I would have hesitated to call Mark Ronson a one hit wonder at any point in time. His first top 50 hit in Australia, "Bang Bang Bang" wasn't big enough to really bother thinking about it, only it was big enough to be used as an argument once his second, much bigger hit came along in 2014 (you know the one). What a brilliant loophole he had going there. Anyway, if a song that only spent 7 weeks in the top 50 wasn't convincing enough for you, he'd come back 4 years later with a song that couldn't possibly be denied, a genuine top 10 hit that isn't just coasting off the surrounding hype. "Nothing Breaks Like a Heart" proved that Mark Ronson was capable of returning to the pop charts.

It's funny though to look at it in hindsight. For a lot of huge star performers, you can look at their chart history and sometimes find odd quirks. The song where they make a strange genre pivot, the song they make for a random movie, or the song they do with a random artist. I was thinking about this with regard to Flume & London Grammar. "Let You Know" (#672) was a hit, but the kind of hit that was small for Flume and huge for London Grammar (at that point in time). When you look at it like that, it starts to feel like the two artists are dragging each other to their own trajectory. Everyone helps make the song a hit, but I often wonder if certain crediting situations can dilute the set up for potential listeners. I think most people are more interested to hear their favourite artists on the left hand side of the 'feat.' than the right hand side. It being their song specifically makes it feel like more of an integral part of their story, rather than just being a hired hand to build someone else's star.

At the time, I wouldn't have said any of this at all. It's just something that struck me in the wake of Miley Cyrus having a considerably bigger hit that could be described as disco-influenced pop. I'm choosing to deliberately misread the subtext of "Flowers" as a moment of enjoying the freedom of not being shackled down having to sing on Mark Ronson's song. A Miley Cyrus song is gonna have an easier time being an event single than a Mark Ronson featuring Miley Cyrus song. Credit where it's due here though, "Nothing Breaks Like a Heart" was about as big as I could imagine it being. Its low ranking in the Hottest 100 largely comes down to its November 29th release date. Probably just needed another month in the spotlight. It's in that context though that Mark Ronson helps Miley, as he'd already had 5 Hottest 100 entries before, whereas the only thing Miley had done was be sampled in a peculiar fashion on a song I'll tackle in the future.

I like this song. I spoke before about my initial disdain for a lot of Miley Cyrus singles. In many cases it's been improved to the awkwardly troublesome view of 'Alright, sure, it's good. But it's not good enough to justify that level of success'. This might have been the first song of hers that I felt that way about in the moment, and it can be an odd feeling to have. I suppose I might just have a greater spectrum for 'this is pretty good' than most people, because I can't really think of anything that ever gets universally declared as such. Maybe that's what the 'mid' brigade is really fighting. Once you've taken the time to acknowledge something, who other than me is going to sit on the fence as opposed to going all in with a declaration of disdain or adoration? Is everyone even wired to do that, or are we just so inundated with the opportunities to experience greatness that anything less is a waste of time? I never had any issues with the rest of the stuff I heard from the "Late Night Feelings" album, even though I didn't like it a whole lot more than this. It's the exclusivity of success that makes me want to scrutinise the lucky few, I think.