#380-#376

#380. Joji - Gimme Love (#59, 2020)

32nd of 2020

I think the state of music streaming has me attempting to poke holes in the ecosystem out of pure habit. It's all harmonious, you jump from artist to artist, song to song, you get a carefully curated experience that gives you what you want but also exposes you to new things. It's all just too good to be true. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, or maybe the previous bar set by the radio and associated platforms was so dreadfully low that we didn't even realise until something new came along. You lose that communal experience, but you no longer have to spend every day of the next couple of years hearing that song you're already sick of, so I know what I'd choose if pressed.

If my cynicism came from anywhere in particular, it was seeing the kinds of songs that would be propped up by this new system. When the two forms were running concurrently, it was easy to spot what a radio song was, and what a streaming song was. The radio favoured quirky earworms and familiar voices, streaming favoured something more relaxed. Maybe to some degree it's answering the previously impossible to answer question of what radio airplay charts would look like if you could accurately factor in people switching stations in their car to find either a good song, or one that's less annoying. Usually on streaming platforms, you have to get 30 seconds into a song for it to count as a play (generally once people hit 30 seconds, they're pretty likely to get to the end). We're not privy to the data that Spotify might get with this, but it's pretty safe to say that they started balancing their playlists and algorithms around this, and we're more likely to see the artists whose music is primed for this. It's not about giving us the best music, it's about giving us the music that we're least likely to skip before the 30 second mark, or least likely to just bounce off completely. Similar principle to Netflix doing everything in their power to invoke the binge.

I quickly became aware of this, and started trying to notice it. We weren't using the term 'slop' at the time, but the feeling persisted. You'd hear a lot of music, often quite popular at that, which seemed like it was created with the same mindset. It never evoked much, it just sounded pleasant in the background and that was enough. I've said it before, but in 2016 I saw the way tropical house music engulfed the charts, and suddenly I started looking at everything else that was successful, and how it worked in that context. It became guilt by association. The likes of "Treat You Better" by Shawn Mendes, "We Don't Talk Anymore" by Charlie Puth, "Needed Me" by Rihanna, all important microcosms of sameness in Mike Perry's ocean. The years went by and things started to change a little. I think TikTok, even though it feels more explicitly background music coded, has gone some ways to put priority into songs that stand out, and that chart free-for-all has made things more interesting. Before we get there, we get that cynical version of me who's judging everything in that lens. "Gimme Love" maybe barely got a passing mark.

It's something that was on my mind with previous Joji entries. Yes, he's eclectic, and yes, he has a strong following beyond his music career, but he has to play the game as much as anyone else. When "Your Man" (#609) initially asserted itself as a hit from his album, it felt like a concession to this idea. He can be as weird as he wants, but the most assured response is going to come when he plays things as straightforward as possible. It might not be what you, the individual wants, but it's what the fewest number of individual people don't want. No matter how interesting our Joji takes are, it's all going to blend together into one soupy story.

I went through all of this to compliment "Gimme Love" upon an unexpected realisation. I never thought I'd put it down as my favourite of all of his entries, because in my head it's just that song where he says the repetitive hook over and over again. On that level, it's not especially interesting, it's just a hook that's doing the bare minimum to get stuck into your head. If you haven't heard this song in a while, it might sound like a fair assessment. What we're actually dealing with here though is an unexpected pivot that makes up most of the song. Joji's tired of just making totally different sounding songs from each other, what if he made a song that itself feels like two different genres. I do think there's some potency at the start, I just fall for anything with a drum & bass buzz to it. Everything afterwards though is just a nice surprise. I don't know if I'd call Joji the most accomplished singer, but he knows how to get the most out of what he's doing. Putting these life or death stakes into the emotional direction of it all. Maybe he's re-heating the "SLOW DANCING IN THE DARK" formula, but it sounds nicer this way. Even the brief guitar outro just sounds beautiful. I was listening to Beach House's "Modern Love Stories" the other day and I think they both do something similar, just completely overwhelming you so the gentle guitar can hit so much harder as emotional relief. Now, I don't think it's the kind of sound that is especially streamer friendly, but it doesn't matter at that point because you've already been listening for 30 seconds, checkmate.

#379. DMA'S - Everybody's Saying Thursday's the Weekend (#85, 2022)

36th of 2022

One of the most interesting things I have read recently was a decade old article talking about the worst songs of the 1990s. I don't want to link it but to give you the basic cliff notes, they're not shy about including big hitters. This isn't a hit piece about how they dug up some abysmal Bryan Adams deep cut, or if there's a particularly offensive Rednex song out there, they went for the jugular. "All The Small Things", "Everybody Hurts", "Smells Like Teen Spirit", they're not afraid to take everyone's favourite bands to the sword. The closest thing to an obscurity on the list was "Wynona's Big Brown Beaver", but otherwise it wouldn't look much different to a list asking people to name a quintessential '90s song.

What interested me the most about the article was just how dismal it all was. They got me with the preview image because I wanted to see writers who came to make a big stand against universally beloved songs. Once you start with the targets they've got, you've got to work really hard to prove why millions of music fans are wrong. Instead we just get a limp attempt at rationalisation every single time. Nearly every entry could be summed up as 'What's one or two quirky things everyone knows about this song? That's why it sucks'. Remember when "Angel" by Sarah McLachlan was used as stock sad music for commercials? Absolutely the worst because of it. Kurt Cobain says something about a mosquito? Gibberish lyrics you can't understand. There are better Nirvana songs out there but the writer won't name them, lest they have a stake in it beyond being Statler or Waldorf.

It's said that the best way to avoid being labelled an idiot is to not speak up, lest it be confirmed. I think it goes both ways though, because if you leave too many things unsaid, it can quickly become clear that you've got nothing else to offer. When I was reading this embarrassing word count chaser, I was trying to put myself in the perspective of whoever was writing each section, and thinking about what they might have decided to omit because it wasn't necessary, or if it's instead plumbing the depths of their knowledge on the subject.

Two entries in particular took me to thinking about this. Firstly the attack on "Song 2" by Blur, which is two paragraphs to say that it's a send up of grunge music, it's the 'woo hoo' song, and that it's used in car commercials. The first point is always a red flag for me, a myth purported so often that it simply must be true, even though it makes no sense if you stop and think about it for a moment. Why would anyone be making a parody of grunge music in 1997? Hit me up with your "Tiger King" parody, it'd be roughly just as on time. I've not seen anyone from Blur ever suggest it to be the case. Maybe it wasn't an overly serious song, but back in 1997 there's an interview Graham Coxon did with triple j that suggests it really was just Blur looking to try out a different sound. I also just found myself wondering with this article if the author even knew that Damon Albarn was also the Gorillaz guy, it's an easy thing to riff on ('the song was so embarrassing that next time he re-emerged it was as a cartoon character', something like that), but perhaps easy to miss if you're American and both of these bands are at best a fleeting curiosity. This entry also uses a similar line to the Nirvana entry, noting first that Blur have good songs (although they also put 'good' in parentheses afterwards as if to mock the notion), like it's someone who understands they're a big deal elsewhere in the world, but not wanting to do their homework on the subject.

The other entry that comes just before it is about The Verve's "Bitter Sweet Symphony". This one is mostly making fun of Richard Ashcroft for having written this perennially uncool song, but also takes a shot at Britpop, calling the genre 'the limp hand shake of music genres', with The Verve's song being a particularly clammy rendition of it. They compare it to "Wonderwall" and "Song 2" (though they also call it the Blur 'Woo hoo' song, talk about bad editing). They make fun of the fact that Keith Richards gets all the royalties (I won't hold it against the article for this, but The Verve have since won those royalties back), and how much it sucks for a song they can't get paid for to be the only memorable thing they've done. Putting aside The Verve's other hits, I just wondered if the author blew their whole load on what they knew about Britpop in a single sentence. If you're American, what reason would you have to know anything other than those 3 songs (and maybe "Champagne Supernova"). Basically nothing else made it over to the United States, so unless you're willing to do your research, you're probably not going to know anything else. If you did, you'd probably want to prove it because of how gruelling that process must have been.

It got me thinking about where DMA'S fit into this dynamic. Just mentioning them is going to immediately conjure up some combination of words that have the same effect as 'Britpop cosplay'. Australian band decades late to the sound but probably were inspired by it to make music. They went to private school but dress like they just put out "Definitely Maybe". They sound like Britpop...or do they? I'd like to believe I have an above average knowledge of Britpop as a vagrant who wasn't listening to it in the mid-90s, but I fall under a similar trap where there are a lot of names I recognise, but otherwise I just fall into a slightly above average knowledge of the inner workings of Suede, Pulp and Supergrass. I wanted to take this further and find out which band actually epitomises Britpop, and maybe even sounds a bit like DMA'S, so I decided to dig deep into many of those also-ran bands and see what it really was like to have a radio in London in 1995.

After several hours of permanently ruining my Spotify algorithms, I came out of it a little unclear. With one exception I'll get to, I didn't find much of the DMA'S DNA anywhere. The best I could say is that Sløtface absolutely sound like a modern equivalent of Kenickie, just with a reflective look on that era, rather than being part of it. Generally there's a '90s sheen that can't really be emulated. I've always felt like British folk and Australians have a different perception of what's considered 'indie', while with Britpop, you're meeting conflicting ideas when these bands are writing songs to be part of the forefront.

The one connection I did find is that Tommy O'Dell has a similar singing style and voice to Ian Broudie from The Lightning Seeds. Maybe they can almost count as an artist that has broken out of the forgotten pile just because "Three Lions" has an excuse to return to the conversation every couple of years, but I imagine it's not something most people think about unless the football is on. Does England have an ETA, by the way?

I find this particular DMA'S song difficult to place as well. it's got this one little guitar riff that immediately asserts itself and steers everything in its shape. It all sounds very modern, that is, until the chorus where my distant call back can only go as far as Ben Lee's "We're All In This Together". Everybody's saying 'Thursday, what a concept'.

#378. Bring Me The Horizon - Ludens (#96, 2019)

26th of 2019

Video game music has an unusual position with regard to how it flirts with the mainstream. It's the same with video games in general, just this cultural monolith that largely keeps to itself. An ungodly number of people are playing Dota 2 every day but if it's not in your periphery, would you even realise? When it comes to music, once we got out of the 8-bit era, it's been pretty common to see licenced music find its way into video games. There's an enormous but intangible benefit that probably comes with the exposure of getting a song onto a FIFA game, the kind that can turn a niche song into a generational anthem.

As time has gone by, it's also become common to see musicians put out songs specifically for video games, and we're not short on notable artists for that. The National have a song in "Portal 2", Eminem released a song to promote "Call of Duty: Ghosts". They're not often especially noteworthy songs, so you won't find chart watchers pulling up entire video games just to contextualise a hit song (okay maybe it's just me who does this). When it comes to Hottest 100 history, we've got just two I believe. Firstly one I mentioned recently, The Rapture's "No Sex For Ben" from "Grand Theft Auto 4", and more recently, "Ludens" by Bring Me The Horizon (I guess shout out to U2's "Elevation", with a mix of the song put out for the soundtrack to a movie based on a video game). "Ludens" is of course from the 2019 video game "Death Stranding", another cultural monolith unless you've barely heard of it.

I've never played a Hideo Kojima video game. He's mostly famous for the Metal Gear series which I've known about for a long time but have never been compelled to jump into, so I just have a cursory experience that amounts to watching other people play some of the games. I might do some more work on this in the future given there could be some future relevance, but for now, the closest I get is the Metal Gear inspired game on "UFO 50". I don't enjoy stealth sections anyway.

"Death Stranding" is something completely different. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where the surface world is full of deadly hazards, you're tasked with being a courier who re-connects the isolated communities that have formed. The main gameplay loop is going from one place to another and taking extreme care about maintaining balance and integrity (we can't escape these pandemic appropriate releases from 2019). It's the kind of game where a gentle slope becomes a genuine concern. It's a Kojima game so it's full of crazy dialogue and characters whose names sound like a joke if you're not familiar (Die-Hardman is my favourite). I've also never played this game but I've watched a whole playthrough years ago. You might also remember this game for the amusing gaffe by IGN when they made a video about defeating a BT, a thumbnail they had to change shortly after

I'd love to say that "Ludens" is a crucial, diegetic piece that plays during a climactic scene of the game, but it isn't the case. They do have these kinds of songs, you'll likely remember "Don't Be So Serious" from the introduction to the game, and I'd be remiss not to mention the CHVRCHES song that plays over the credits, but you could likely go through the whole game and never hear Bring Me The Horizon. It's just a song you can play in-between missions when you're knocking back ludicrous amounts of Monster energy drinks.

"Ludens" has the band diving into more electronic influences, something they've been doing more and more over the years. It makes this song a little unbalanced at first, as it spends a long time waiting to deliver the cathartic hook. Maybe I'll admit that when I'm listening to it, I spend more time than I'd like waiting for the exciting parts, but when they're on, they're on. One of the catchiest songs they've ever put out. I will not make any statement on what a luden is.

#377. Peking Duk - Fire (#29, 2018)

43rd of 2018

A while back I was talking about the unique position of EPs on the ARIA Chart, and how they tended to slightly distort the bigger picture as they can disrupt how we look at the singles chart. Which song is more popular than the other one at a given moment? Well, maybe one of them gets a handicap and you can't really tell anymore. It doesn't really happen anymore and I was unable at the time to figure out what might be the last time this was a relevant factor. Now that it's staring me in the face, I think it might be Peking Duk's legacy. Well, this was true until a couple months ago when Stray Kids scored a top 10 single thanks to EP sales. Let's call this a slightly different case, the difference between a flash in the pan and a song that looks to be 'one of the hits'.

"Fire" would be one of Peking Duk's biggest hits, a slight return to form after an underperformance in 2017. It'd be their last top 50 hit even, except technically it never charted at all. What we got was the #12 hit "Reprisal", a two track release consisting of "Fire" and also the song "Distant Arizona", a collaboration with Cloud Control. I'm not particularly familiar with that track because it's never really been a notable entity. "Fire" has it beaten on global streams by a factor of 50. I don't know what the ratio was like when the 'single' was in the chart, but even that amount would be tantamount to a 2% boost, nothing that's gonna change the world, but might win some slight position tussles on a weekly basis. Still, it's a weird thing to see, it'd be like if Drake had one of the biggest hits of the year and the chart just said "Scary Hours".

This is a reprisal for me, simply because I've gone out of order. This is the second Peking Duk song to appear here that features Sarah Aarons on vocals, along with "Chemicals" (#390). When "Fire" was around, I didn't have "Chemicals" to compare it to, so instead I was looking at "Keeping Score" (#817), both songs seemed to chart similarly well, though the brand value of Peking Duk may have helped this one in the charts.

It wasn't a song I was particularly drawn to at the time, as it felt like Peking Duk were regressing to style over substance. My first thoughts are to notice all the compositional factors and read them like a checklist. The guitar riff worked in "Fake Magic" (#561), so let's do it again. The blast of sound chorus? Wouldn't be a Peking Duk song without it! Sarah Aarons has also gotten to be quite a star in recent years too, probably don't need to shop around for another vocalist. I couldn't really rationalise it as a hit other than them managing to trim down the fluff and put out something direct and effective. "White Noise" never felt like an instant classic for The Living End, but it has a simple point and it gets to it quickly, so it's not surprising to me that it's one of their most popular songs. Simple messages and images, just does the trick.

I am once again reporting that one of these many cases has grown on me with persistence. I think it's a song that excels at stringing you along to get the place you know you're destined to go. The song actually starts with its chorus lead-in line and I think that's a good choice because it's the strongest part of the song. I wonder if they knowingly realised what they were competing with when they emphasised the line 'if that's the way it's gonna be', but then they went riding with the ducklings so no harm there.

#376. King Stingray - Camp Dog (#27, 2022)

35th of 2022

It's hard to leave this bit out so let's get it out of the way. It sounds like Yirrŋa is saying 'CatDog, please don't bite me'. Now, I watched my fair share of CatDog as a child, and while the idea of making dark and twisted versions of children's entertainment is not something I'm usually interested in (and it's usually the only time the show gets brought up), I think there's something amusing about imagining a ravenous CatDog chasing someone down. Dog probably has a very good reason for it in his own head, while Cat once again has to face the punishment of association. Oh boy, I can count the number of times I let all those unruly students have it when I had to be held in for recess at school for it, I'm holding up every finger for it as I shake my fist at the screen.

If you're unfamiliar like me, but had to make an assumption based on what's happening in this song, then you'd probably be right. The titular camp dog refers to dogs that patrol the streets in Arnhem Land. Unlike me, when King Stingray reminisce on something potentially traumatic from growing up, they do it with a nostalgic love. Maybe that comes with growing up, or maybe it's because most people just tend to like dogs. Even as someone who doesn't generally, I'll at least concede that the music video is very cute and amusing.

I've still got a few iterations of the King Stingray hit streak to come, and the fact remains that you generally know what you're gonna get with them. Is it a rockin' good time? Of course it is. Is there some quality didgeridoo? They use it to make it sound like there's a dog barking in the background, what more could you want? This is actually their highest ever ranking song in the Hottest 100, something I didn't remember at all until making sure I hadn't made a typo at the top of this entry. One can only concede that they have correctly deduced the needs of their target audience. Everyone loves dogs, no one loves getting bitten by dogs. Finally, we have a song for that.