#325-#321

 #325. Glass Animals - Your Love (Déjà Vu) (#51, 2020)

25th of 2020

I have to wonder if Glass Animals knew they had a hit on their hands. They'd probably say no, and I'd believe them. The single release order suggests a lack of confidence in their hand. The first single from "Dreamland" was "Tokyo Drifting" (#968). Potentially it gets attention for the obvious reason: the divergence from being a straight up Glass Animals song. "Your Love (Déjà Vu)" comes in next as a means of re-assurance. It's the song on the album that reminds me most of "How To Be A Human Being". The big twist in this whole arrangement is that they were sitting on something that could be described as the biggest hit of all time (in Australia) in "Heat Waves" (#741), and it was the 4th single. If they did have some faith in it, it's a good strategy. Bring it in for the middle order in case the early wickets fall too meaninglessly, keep the momentum up. Or maybe they just thought the same way I did, "Your Love (Déjà Vu)" had to be the hit because it's self-evident.

Maybe this is something that doesn't really come to mind with this band. They're in the middle zone where they have hits, but aren't a chart band (one exception aside). It's in their best interest to work this angle, and they have managed to do it covertly. Their previous album is the perfect example of this. It never really had a chart hit, but has amassed over a billion streams thanks to a series of low key hits, some I might even talk about here. This might change over time because nothing feels set in stone anymore, but going into this album, the surprise packet for Glass Animals was "The Other Side Of Paradise", a deep cut that overtook all of the actual singles. It probably didn't make sense as a single, coming close to 5 and a half minutes, but it's very adaptable to a short snippet based economy. I could make the case that it's the catchiest hook they've ever written, even in a sea of "Baby Blue" songs that have done the rounds.

That's why I think "Your Love (Déjà Vu)" was pushed early. When I listen to it, I hear a band (well it's mostly just Dave) trying to isolate what they had working before and trying to make it into a radio single. The whole chorus is trying to hammer in a whimsical instrumental hook. The only thing it's missing is a big confident performance on the vocals, which you think you're gonna get on the bridge but it falls a little short. This should be where I lament that the luck of the draw with hits is a cruel mistress and that this fell devastatingly short, but actually it's done pretty well for itself. As I write this, it's making ground on all the other singles from this album (apart from "Heat Waves", naturally), which is occasionally the sign of a random surprise hit bursting out the gate. That's a slow and ungratifying process though, I speak through having spent the last several months tracking a song that's slowly been climbing but still not really breaking through. More likely, "Take A Slice" is the band's ticket at the moment. Either way, I did always like this one. I guess I have to pay some thanks to "Heat Waves" on it because seeing this poll as well as it did, just reeks of the typical splash back you get when one song is tremendously powerful. I did not think this song had the momentum to make it in back in May 2020.

#324. Desiigner - Panda (#81, 2016)

34th of 2016

Something that I don't think is fully appreciated when looking at popular music is the sheer magnitudes of difference we can be dealing with. Right now as I write this (yes, in 2025), Bad Bunny just had 69 million streams on Spotify yesterday. In the same space of time, Khalid had 6.9 million streams, Nate Smith had 0.69 million streams, and Broken Social Scene were close to 0.069 million streams. I think we're tempted to bunch everything closer together when we're familiar with it, but the reality is so different. If you ever feel tempted to fall into the trap of being shocked at unfamiliarity with something that's being hyped up, think of just how easy it is to fall into the 90%, or the 99%, or the 99.9%. Not everyone listens to Bad Bunny either, so those numbers are being extremely generous. It also means that when something blows up, those early stories that may have formed are no longer part of the narrative. Most people missed the early parts of the careers of Post Malone, The Weeknd, Lana Del Rey, take your pick. Most people never saw the weird ascent of "Panda" before it already happened, so you might not know the story and it gives me an excuse to reiterate it.

In February 2016, Kanye West released his 7th album "The Life of Pablo". We've tackled it here once before (#659) and we'll do it again. For now I want to focus on an album cut, "Pt. 2". It follows "Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1", the 'bleach my asshole' song. It goes through without much to remark upon, until you get to around the 30 second mark, and you hear a different MC on the track. He's a new guy, but everyone thinks it sounds like a certain Atlanta rapper (and he apparently has broads there). That rapper will appear on this list at a point in time I'd describe as the opposite of the past. He had just released his most acclaimed album 7 months ago so he was getting a lot of attention. Eventually we find out that it's Desiigner, who was just signed to Kanye's GOOD Music label earlier in the week. It also turns out that his verses are actually being sampled from his own song, "Panda" which had initially been released online, but was re-released a couple of weeks later. It debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 in March, and reached #1 in May. Now this song is being heard all over the world, and reaching far more ears than a TIDAL exclusive Kanye West album track ever could. It's also a giant slap in the face to that rapper I haven't mentioned, a copycat wunderkind getting a #1 hit before he could even get close. Put a pin in that one because the story continues long after Desiigner is consiigned to irrelevance.

I just find the whole thing interesting because it's a much weirder timeline than you'd think, one that isn't generally documented properly. Anyone who's coming into this after the fact is likely going to misunderstand that. Listen to "Pt. 2" now and you might think it's just a rip off of "Panda", a sample that looks incredibly lazy in the already absorbed new context of "Panda" being a smash hit. In general though, "Pt. 2" will never sound the same as it did on the day that it came out, unless you've managed to completely avoid "Panda". Maybe you have, it's not like they thrashed it on the radio or anything.

When I first started to notice "Panda" getting a proper push, I marked it as a potential #1 hit (in America at least). It had the right pace of ascent, and there was a nice opening as Rihanna & Drake's "Work" was just waiting for the next #1 hit to come along and replace it. If the timing wasn't right, Desiigner might have been stuck behind Drake's "One Dance" (#796) which shot to the top 2 weeks later. In Australia, it was a low top 10 hit, which is pretty good given how trap music tended to perform here. Even in America though, "Panda" feels like a harbinger of the future. It wasn't the first trap song to top the Billboard Hot 100, but it's the first one that didn't feel like it was a pop song with trap elements. For many years to come, this became the default sound of rap, as everyone would start coming up with dark, menacing beats. Many like to attribute musical trends to presidential eras, and this one would be perfect since Rae Sremmurd got to #1 with "Black Beatles" right when Trump was elected for the first time, but Desiigner singlehandedly ruins it all by being half a year early.

Seemingly by accident at barely 18 years old, Desiigner became a pioneer. He flamed out pretty quickly after that, decide if it's bad artist management, or just a gimmick that didn't have many legs. I adore his later single "Tiimmy Turner", but I think it captures everything I could need from Desiigner (it also snuck into the Billboard Year End list, so keep that in mind if you're tempted to call him a one hit wonder). That and the fact that there's a better artist still going around who already sounds the same. Like many pioneers, the intrigue is there, and there's reason to be interested. If you're looking for something deeper than talking about cars, drugs & money, then you'll probably be left disappointed. "Panda" works best for me from that initial "Pt. 2" context because the whole thing is a strange fever dream. One where half the song is ad libs, and the main hook is just the word 'panda' repeated over and over again. I wouldn't want it any other way, but if it feels like a new depth of denigration in popular music, I get it.

#323. Lorde - Mood Ring (#62, 2021)

26th of 2021

"Solar Power" is supposed to be Lorde's flop era, and I've already gone into that (#526). The narrative doesn't work when I end up with 3 songs on my plate. They're far lower, but it's still just as many songs as "Pure Heroine" has here. I'm not about to go through the whole album again for content. I still think "Fallen Fruit" is a gem. How about I go off tangent and say that the latest album, "Virgin", is actually really good. The lead single never sparked my interest but now that I'm hearing it all, it's all locking into place. I may have to revisit it when I do my own End of Year business, although if you're reading this now, I probably already did that, good on me.

"Mood Ring" was always the song that made me feel a bit strange regarding the reception of this album. For anyone who doesn't like the album, while the arrangement might be off-putting, it's pairing it with the lyrical content that takes it a bridge too far. It's an odd thing to talk about because it's spirituality mixed with pseudo-science in a way that's generally pretty female coded, and will have men loudly proclaiming superiority over anyone duped by it. "Mood Ring" turns it all up to eleven. Saluting the sun, meditation, astrology, crystal collecting. The song is called "Mood Ring" after all. Even if it's a bit of an exaggerated joke, it's just a reminder that adult Lorde is distracted by snake oil.

At the heart of it though, I've never been able to get caught up in this because when a melody clicks into place, it can disrupt your judgement. The whole thing is hooks upon hooks, and I think Lorde's breathy delivery of the song's chorus is a fresh side of her that really works. Just a really strong single and I'm not surprised it managed to get some attention.

#322. Tkay Maidza - Switch Lanes (#100, 2014)

37th of 2014

Voting for the triple j Hottest 100 of 2014 kicked off on December 15th, 2014. I decided to try and count up all the votes I could see on Instagram manually. Just an utterly laborious ordeal but I truly had nothing better to do over the summer. As a bonus, it gives me otherwise unsearchable answers to questions about some of my lesser known favourites, there's one tidbit I want to share in the future to add to what I suspect will be a fairly long entry when I get to it (longer than this one, I fear). I also shared my findings regularly on Twitter at the time, which gained me some followers, a couple whom I still interact with from time to time. Something maybe obvious in hindsight you learn is just what the pace of voting is like. New votes come in every day for sure, but it's the first day, and the last day where they really come in. That's the point in time when I'm not physically capable of keeping up with the load, but it's especially the last day that does it. Things changed for me just a little bit on January 13th, 2015.

You probably know the basic story, but in 2015, BuzzFeed published an article written by Mark Di Stefano titled 'Why Isn't Everyone Voting For "Shake It Off" In The Hottest 100?'. When I call it an article, it might be more accurate to say that it's a series of GIFs and images with single sentences captioning them. I get what this is for and I'm not trying to disparage it (I also generally quite like what Di Stefano does nowadays and generally agree with a lot of his opinions). I just want to make it clear that the monumental grenade that set off an absolutely heated bit of discourse that still ripples through today, has considerably less words than this entry does so far. To summarise it to be even more brief, it's an article that suggests triple j's snubbing of Taylor Swift from the voting list is an injustice, but one that can be fixed due to the poll's write-in function. The final line says 'Let's teach those music snobs a lesson. Get around #Tay4Hottest100.'. It's clearly a bit of fun, but it started to take off and get a serious push from there. Voting was 5 days away from closing and a new horse had entered the race with some serious consideration that it might disrupt the institution. People genuinely thought Taylor Swift might win the whole thing. We're talking $10,000 being put on the line on Sportsbet (to skip ahead, it was refunded).

I noticed this pretty immediately one night. Up until this point, I had seen 5 votes for "Shake It Off", not too bad for a write-in, but far shy of the roughly 500 of the frontrunners. Votes for it suddenly swept the count. I actually had trouble counting it because I had a self-imposed rule for consistency to only use a single hashtag in my search, meaning that anyone who used Buzzfeed's tag and only that one would fall outside of my range. So while there were a lot of votes for the song, I only counted enough to have it land at #106, about a quarter of the posts I should have been seeing. If it was just about 100 extra votes for Taylor Swift I saw, this wouldn't really be any issue to write home about, but my main observation was just a huge sweep of posts left, right & centre for days. If you've ever felt inundated with discourse, let me make it clear that I was fully in the trenches for this one, as I subjected myself to every pro-Taylor Swift post, and ever anti-Taylor Swift post, as well as a whole lot of people who didn't necessarily comment on it, but probably were reminded to vote due to all the buzz(feed). As someone who generally liked the song and album at the time, it made me grow very mad at it all for consuming my day. There probably was a lesson to be learnt from it all, but when all you see is rows of people mocking you for your interest in music, it's hard to take it in.

Do I think that triple j had an elitism problem? Potentially, but not anymore than most other radio stations (everyone has some kind of 'other' group that they can toss aside to feel better about themselves), and not really by the 2010s. To me, it's pretty clear that everyone fosters a certain audience and then caters to that. triple j will occasionally play music that's arguably just as pop as Taylor Swift, the same way another station might arguably play an artist that's as indie as Chet Faker. It doesn't have to be a big gotcha to point this out, and it doesn't have to be acted upon. Music isn't a competition, if you think it is and you're trying to pull a fast one on everyone else by proving they're doing it wrong, then you're probably losing that one. At the end of the day, Taylor Swift doesn't need triple j, and triple j doesn't need Taylor Swift. The available variety is what's great about music.

This is not the nuanced discussion I was really seeing. To me, it felt like a long bubbling sense of contempt to the triple j crowd. A sorely awaited point of attack to a station and audience that have been flexing their superior influence on music. The way one station had complete control over festival line ups, ARIA Award distribution, and could single-handedly make a hit. I'll admit it was a hyperfixation of mine that I probably drove to an irritating degree and I'd do it differently if I had a second chance. Nevertheless, here was the opportunity. triple j were obligated to follow the results of their beloved annual poll, even if they went against the original intentions. Just a superb opportunity to make all those hipsters mad.

Except it didn't really happen. In the days leading up to the countdown, triple j had declined to make any comments on the campaign (though something about it did air on the station, another entry, another day), either through neutrality or not wanting to stoke the flames by acknowledging it. The silence was broken at the top of the countdown broadcast on Australia Day by Lewis McKirdy, who revealed that Taylor Swift won't be on the list, and that the reasons why can be found on triple j's novelty website they whipped up, triplejfeed.com (it immediately crashed but was saved by the Internet Archive). In BuzzFeed fashion, triple j lists 8 reasons why the song was not included in the list. I want to stress that there are multiple because after all of this has happened, every discussion I ever see about this will take a simplified conclusion to this all. This idea that KFC singlehandedly spoiled the campaign. They ran a frivolous ad campaign on the back of the hashtag asking people for their favourite Taylor Swift song for a chance at a $19.89 discount. One promoted Facebook post and she's out just as easily as she was in, even if it likely barely moved the needle on the campaign. I've never subscribed to this idea. While it is one of the things mentioned on the webpage, it feels more like a scapegoat, one that didn't change any minds internally. To me, the more telling part of the article is all the different ways they talk about trolling the poll. Ever since this happened, triple j's How To Vote page has always included a section where they clarify they want genuine votes from genuine listeners, and that 'any campaign that undermines the Hottest 100 may result in that artist or song being disqualified'. With that in mind, I'm certain that a future instance of this would be possible (in fact you can draw comparison 10 years later to Sabrina Carpenter landing in the top 200 with "Espresso"), but it was the whole smug 'we're better than them, let's ruin their day' angle to the campaign that soured it all.

One other point that I want to focus on is one that I don't think had much of a leg to stand on, but is nonetheless very important. They highlight that if Taylor Swift were included in the countdown, it'd be bad luck for rising Adelaide MC Tkay Maidza whose debut appearance at #100 with "Switch Lanes" would be demoted to #101. They included the hashtag #Tkay4Hottest100 which I greatly enjoyed. This isolated example is the heart of why I felt so strongly about the whole thing. To me, the Hottest 100 was a wonderful ecosystem that allowed bands and artists that don't really get much of a foothold anywhere to thrive. My favourite part of the countdown was often the lower end, where you're treated to a menagerie of songs you've been hearing on the radio all year and get that delightful feeling of 'Oh cool, a lot of people also heard that song and liked it'. That's par the course for a radio station but have you ever turned on a radio, heard a song, and thought about how tens of thousands of other people are also hearing the song right now? It's all so distant, but this countdown puts it in front of you. Part of why I run this blog at all is because I look through these lists and look at all the interesting and occasionally unusual entries that on some level are given the same credibility as the extremely popular ones. Pretty soon, this whole thing is going to just be a series of gushes as we dive into the music that's especially important to me.

I'll admit that sometimes the higher profile that artists like Taylor Swift can provide can also serve a positive purpose through attention by association, I'd rather let the station themselves control how they dole that out. It runs the risk of destroying the credibility of it all and wrecking it for everyone. I'll admit it's amusing in hindsight that one of the joke campaign ideas that triple j mentions on the webpage is one where everyone votes for Rebecca Black's comeback single, an artist who's been getting increasingly more airplay on the station since then. Taylor Swift's "1989" really is a turning point for poptimism in general. I think about this in tandem with Pitchfork's End of Year albums list including it despite the website never reviewing it in the first place (because the list was a staff aggregate and there were enough Swifties there despite the site's disposition). It never felt weird that they weren't reviewing her music, but now it'd be mighty weird if they didn't. It's those artists like Tkay Maidza though, that's what triple j is about to me. Artists that this government funded station exists to propagate, who would otherwise be carelessly tossed aside.

With that in mind, let's look at it finally. This is a very young Tkay Maidza who had previously released one single, her odd, somewhat novelty song "Brontosaurus" which achieved minor notoriety (it actually made the ARIA Chart for a week), but couldn't quite crack the Hottest 100. Actually there was another single in-between in 2014, the irresistible "U-Huh" that properly put her on my radar. That also missed the Hottest 100 so it was just this song that started a brief hit streak. This wasn't quite the same hit for me but I did like it enough to purchase it, amusingly just a week before the Hottest 100. Normally I spend the day simultaneously collecting the list, so it's a funny twist to pre-empt the first song like that.

"Switch Lanes" is still a fun song. If Tkay's earlier singles were loud and obnoxious, this one dials it back a bit. A cute little instrumental on the hook, and some fun crowd vocals near the end that sound like late '80s dance music. I should probably point out that Paces is sometimes included in the metadata as a producer, and it's a worthwhile acknowledgement because everything about the production elevates this. I especially like the drums. Otherwise it's still Tkay's show, and she's still running it as one of the most enjoyable rappers going around. This is just an early proof of concept.

#321. Ball Park Music - Cherub (#4, 2020)

24th of 2020

This feels oddly appropriate to me. In the 2014 countdown, Tkay Maidza was immediately followed by Ball Park Music (#421). We're 100 spots off it being the same song, but they're nonetheless here to complete the tradition. I can't promise a Bombay Bicycle Club song next week unfortunately, that ship has sailed (#778). In any case, we're trading Ball Park Music's lowest ever Hottest 100 finish, to their highest one. Me, I'm just excited to finally close all those internet tabs I opened for the last one.

Is this the big one though? That's hard to say. I don't think it's actually their most popular song, and while I might want to say that it most efficiently built up an audience in time for the vote, that doesn't feel true to me either. All I can take from it is that it's the song that most readily capitalised on the band's ascended performance. They went from regular middle carders to the main event, and with that arrived the mighty peak of "Cherub". They'd get another top 10 finisher 2 years later (#568), which makes this one feel a little less notable. More than anything, it reinforces the idea that we're entrenched in the era where voting for the band is greatly prioritised. Not in the traditional sense where all their run of the mill singles get a chance, but the modern, laser focused one. Let's all agree on which song we want to vote for and pool our collective numbers together. It's something I find can infect my own way of thinking though I haven't really acted upon it. Maybe if your loyalty is strong in the first place, it's easier to make the leap, but I don't want to vote for the more popular song I only kinda like, unsubscribe from that.

What makes it all the more unusual is that "Cherub" is the 3rd single from Ball Park Music's self-titled album. The lead single, "Spark Up!" fell way short of making it in, but this lengthy dirge just shot ahead of the pack, who could've possibly predicted that? Well, I might have done something like that. I'm not sure I'd have pinned it for this kind of success, but this was the first Ball Park Music song in a long while that I heard once and immediately got on board.

I think it's something that's difficult to pull off. When you make a song that starts softly but builds to a monster climax, you've potentially got two tasks to consider. Firstly it has to justifiably stand out. Be the kind of thing that gets the listener taken aback by something they weren't ready for. After that, it just needs to be something that retains its charm on subsequent listens. It's not always easy to do. In fact the whole song was such an unusual departure that the band were hesitant to even release it. They're the fun, sunny band from Brisbane, how can you be certain anyone was here for this? Evidently, it caught on.

I'm hesitant to commit to it having succeeded on both tasks. The first one, I'll give it without issues, but I find it hard to re-capture that spark 6 years on. It's certainly close to the mark, but I think if I was still fully under the spell then we'd be a lot higher on the list as I write this. I want to give it bonus points for reminding me what a cherub is, but I never quite manage to recall that fast enough in trivia settings. Just think of that smiling face on the artwork, could it be any more angelic?