#350-#346

#350. Skegss - Under the Thunder (#27, 2020)

28th of 2020

Sometimes these things write themselves. Not talking about my own part in it (though it does apply), more about the songwriting process. I like to look at things and try to unravel the mental process of how you get from one point to the other. You probably can't solve the whole thing, but maybe you can crack a small component. Something like 'thunder' rhymes with 'under', thunder is associated with lightning. Don't think too much about which one you see and which one you hear, you've got a catchy hook. Then 'lightning' rhymes with 'exciting' and you can genuinely see the gears turning to fill out the next line. It's a process I'm familiar with. If you've ever played the rap battle Jackbox game, you're stuck with a first line, then you have to think of a rhyme first and work backwards from it. Syllable control is an important skill, but sometimes you've got too many to work with, and that's how you end up with 'This world makes me wonder, yeah, it all seems so exciting'. Not the greatest poetry, but it gets you from Point A to Point B.

The one tidbit of information I have about this song is that it started as an AC/DC parody. Maybe not the one you're thinking of, because Benny was jokingly singing like Bon Scott at home, and Bon Scott never sung "Thunderstruck". This turned into a bit with his girlfriend, and he tried singing it in his own voice. This became "Under The Thunder" and allowed them to succeed on the basis of setting the initial bar incredibly low. If you're not at all impressed by Skegss, then this is going to do nothing to change that, especially as it's become one of their bigger hits.

It's a remarkably serviceable song. I think it gets by with one neat trick, its rollicking guitar riff that grounds the song in a playful way. The vocal melody also follows along with this, and you get this unique oscillating feel to it, slow, then fast. It's an endearing element that's taken it a long way for me, even if it really might be Skegss by the fewest necessary numbers otherwise.

#349. Peking Duk (feat Elliphant) - Stranger (#9, 2016)

39th of 2016

Back when there was an ARIA Award for Single of the Year, it had one important criterion, where the single had to have reached the ARIA top 100. If you look at the list of nominees, you'd be forgiven for thinking that top 50 is actually the requirement, as they so rarely included singles that peaked in the lower region. I can spy "No Aphrodisiac" by The Whitlams, "The Captain" by Kasey Chambers, and "How To Tame Lions" by Washington. Maybe it is harder to get that recognition, which is why they so rarely did it, but when I look at nominees like "Dark Storm" by The Jezabels, and "Heart It Races" by Architecture In Helsinki, you get the feeling that the top 50 exposure is important and they'd be overlooked otherwise. I guess it's funny to think about all the voters going through the list of eligible singles, filtering through a whole bunch of entries that would surely never appeal to them, and picking from a much smaller set of praiseworthy entries.

I wonder if this is why ARIA changed the award in 2012. The nominees are now selected in an objective manner of being the highest selling singles, and chosen in the subjective manner of a public vote. There was a growing sentiment that the ARIA Awards were getting heavily influenced by the triple j crowd and creating a hegemony where it was difficult for anyone else to be observed. Only incredibly successful pop artists had a chance of being nominated and it was increasingly unlikely that they'd win. The last year's nominees look like a logical extreme. Birds of Tokyo, Boy & Bear and The Jezabels taking up half of the nomination field with singles that barely cracked the top 50. No room for huge hits from Zoe Badwi, Jessica Mauboy, Havana Brown, The Potbelleez, Justice Crew etc. They just had too many people like me on that board zooming in on their brand. The only funny thing about the timing is that the last ever winner of the award was "Somebody That I Used To Know", perhaps the greatest no-brainer winner of the award in all history, Nasiah Wanganeen-Milera in Round 20, 2025 type stuff. If Gotye isn't winning that award, something broke.

It's been a truly fascinating award to follow in the years since then. In part for the nomination process, something that's gotten a little off the rails as Australian hit songs have gotten harder to come by. 2025's initial field of 10 nominees included just 4 songs that cracked the ARIA top 50, with two of those 4 being a very brief fling. As the streaming economy doles out success in more peculiar ways, it starts to even less resemble something that looks like the top of the field in popular music. Multiple entrants that are just rehashing international hits of the past, including Royel Otis recording a quick cover for an American radio station, while there's an inexplicable inclusion of the modern remake of "Somebody That I Used To Know". Mostly it's just inexplicable because it was released in February 2024, has '(2024)' in its own metadata, but by the way charts work, accrued more sufficient points in 2025. The winner ended up being The Kid LAROI with one of only two songs there that looked like genuine crossover hits (the other one was "Somedays" by Sonny Fodera, but hard to imagine he has the profile to get votes).

So voting can be weird because sometimes the public is given a strange task, but it's also weird because it's really not clear what this public really is. ARIA doesn't have a significant amount of reach to the broader public, so when they ask people to go onto their website and vote, you can't imagine you'll get much of a response. There are social media fan accounts with more reach than ARIA, which is why initially One Direction, and now Taylor Swift essentially is a guaranteed victor every year in the Best International Artist category. It's possible that depending on how the voting is set up, drive-by voters for that category actually have the greatest sway at times. In any case, it still ends up being a little weird. 5 Seconds of Summer won the award three out of the four times they were nominated, and that makes sense to me (they lost to Guy Sebastian once, another artist whose early career was predicated on getting people to go out of their way to vote for him). It's every other year where there isn't a vote magnet, those are the ones I get confused by. Often it just looks like they end up voting for whatever the biggest ARIA Chart or Hottest 100 hit was in the previous year. 2017's field was odd though. It was the first time since 2010 that there wasn't a #1 hit to pick from in the field, and not much jumps out of the page. "Stranger" by Peking Duk won that award. It's one of only two ARIA Awards the duo have ever won in their career (though Keli Holiday won one for Best Video last year) and it's never felt more like a write-off year. I don't begrudge it though. If not for another one of the nominees sneaking into the field, I probably would have voted it as well. Very much a 'by default' kind of vote, but we don't exactly weight our vote based on how strongly we feel about it.

Of course, I think the success of "Stranger" stands out a little more in hindsight. At the time it was just another cog in the standard machine, where Peking Duk have a huge hit every 12 months or so. It's looked upon less favourably because it wasn't quite as big as the ones before it, not meeting the previous KPIs. Now nearly a decade later, Peking Duk have never had a hit this big since ("Fire" (#377) might be catching up though). If Peking Duk getting smash hits was destined to be a brief fling, then it was the sheer might of "Stranger" being as good as it was that kept it afloat a little bit longer.

Elliphant is an important part of this equation. She's a Swedish singer who's been making music since around 2012. She does pretty well but has never really burst out of the gate even in her own country, so "Stranger" is actually the biggest song she's had her name attached to ("Too Original" by Major Lazer might be a close second, what a banger). If you haven't heard it, or haven't heard it in a while, "One More" featuring MØ is another worthwhile cut that's aged tremendously well. Just a prime example of getting a singer who doesn't have the star power on their own, but has an undeniable presence if given the opportunity. Peking Duk have that profile in Australia, they lend Elliphant the spotlight, and she absolutely nails it. Her quirky, warbling voice gives a new sense of character as Peking Duk pound us with another overblown drop.

I do think on the production side of things though, this is a good song. I'm not sure why they released the song heading into summer because all of the synth stabs sound extremely icy. Still, I do come back to it for the drop. It stands out a bit for Peking Duk because it's their first big single that tries something new with it, turning it into an ascending melody rather than just a blasting monotone siren. I've often thought that it has an unintentional 'This is what an elephant sounds like' bit to it. Really though, it's the sound of a duo that has the country eating out of their hand, as they solidify themselves as the reigning champions in this particular brand of electro-pop.

#348. Lizzo - About Damn Time (#7, 2022)

31st of 2022

I've always found myself a little bit frustrated about the way hit songs, or otherwise, are spoken about. It might just be a product of me overanalysing some things, but it just seems like a natural conclusion to reach. It's this idea that the songs that make it have an element of randomness to them, which makes it hard to give them special credit. Lately the GRAMMYs have gotten very afraid to nominate anything for Song or Record Of The Year without it being a huge chart hit, finally giving in to popular demand after decades of their own flavour. It's just that when I look at those lists of nominations, I see songs that feel lucky to be there, and it makes me question the credibility that it's really the best that's on offer. Or alternatively, that whoever missed the cut, did so not because they weren't good enough, but because they didn't have that chart clout. In the 2020s, this can mean artists are scoring nominations for TikTok trends, how odd.

There's another funny angle to it, which is that these hits can get a higher level of scrutiny put on them once they're everywhere. Fair enough, I suppose, but it's interesting to see the way people react to them. It's this looming notion of the pop machine that's choosing which songs become hits. They don't earn it, they're just inevitable. It can cross my mind when I see artists fly in with songs that chart high instantly. A new Billie Eilish or Taylor Swift song would have to be doing something very unusual to not immediately burst out the gate, but that's the trust they've earned with their audiences. These are also the kinds of artists whose labels are going to work day and night to make the song stick, and hide any cracks in the armour from even the most ardent chart watchers. When we get to "About Damn Time", there's a very different picture to what we're used to.

Maybe it's the same for you, but when I see "About Damn Time", I see one of the biggest hits of 2022, a song that was made to cruise Lizzo's moment through from 2019 and into the new decade, and it did succeed. It became another Billboard #1 hit for her, and it even won that GRAMMY Award for Record of the Year. It was completely inescapable because of course it was. Just listen to that infectious disco groove, while Lizzo's back on her quotables again from the very first line. This is a hit song that was written by someone who knew they wrote a hit song.

Anyway did you know that "About Damn Time" was a massive flop when it was first released? This might not have been a complete surprise at the time, I can defend "Rumors" (#683) to an extent, but it's hard to deny that it fell short of Lizzo's previous performance, and that can be a huge waving flag to either music fans or the industry that your trajectory is washed and everyone can move on. When "About Damn Time" was released, it got to #50 in America thanks to decent opening sales and streams, but it looked like it was on a fast track out of there. Here's what its daily US Spotify numbers looked like for the first two weeks: 36-82-150-130-151-163-184-176-171-196-186-115-82-52-35. On Tuesday, a week and a half after the song was released, it finally got that shot in the arm with TikTok virality, and it was off to the races after that point. A bunch of people started dancing to the song's second verse, and Lizzo won a GRAMMY for it. Now, maybe the whole thing is an astroturf, it's something you tend to get suspicious of when the same artists keep winning this mysterious lottery every time and they're the biggest names in music. I just find that first week and a half to be so interesting, this idea that one of the biggest hits of the year was just left to its own devices and wasn't really catching on. It's the sort of thing that makes you critical of the whole process, or the idea that the biggest hits are special in any way. How many potential hits have missed out because they didn't get a second chance, or because the artist in question wasn't even big enough to get a first chance? It makes the whole notion of flops or non-entities just meaningless to me.

At least this one, I was willing to get behind. I think Lizzo is an interesting artist to market because in many ways, she's a bit too unusual to really fit in. Just her whole image flies in the face of what we're used to, and it's hard to work out what her actual market is as someone who could loosely be described as a pop rapper. Maybe "About Damn Time" is sanding down those edges a little bit, but I think the fun side of her personality shines through here. Mainly I've always loved that one of her more interesting background traits is that she's a flautist, and here she is topping the charts with a song that has an actual flute solo she plays in it. That's absolutely nailing the brief and giving the people what they want.

#347. Denzel Curry - RICKY (#45, 2019)

25th of 2019

For quite a while now, Australia has had difficulty latching onto rap music if it's not either a monster hit, or by one of the handful of big names we all keep an eye on. I think there are a lot of self-professed rap fans who know there's a lot out there, but might need word of mouth to decide what to sample in that avalanche of 'Oh yeah, I've heard good things about that one, their new project's probably pretty good'. Hottest 100 results have followed a similar suit. Every now and then, you'll get a seemingly random surprise, but for the most part, it's just the artists we've chosen to be invested in. Sometimes that collective expands a little beyond the obvious, and you'll get a huge showing for the otherwise niche BROCKHAMPTON, and then for a while we just went all in on Denzel Curry.

There might be a good reason for this, I'd go so far to say that a big part of it is looming in the future of this list, but here I am talking about an American rapper who struggles to make the Hip Hop Bubbling Under chart coming through with one of 3 entries he had in 2019. Maybe those first two could be explained by their attachment to more trusted properties, but what do we make of "RICKY", a Denzel Curry song whose gimmick is just that it doesn't really have a gimmick, the most peculiar one of all.

How did we get here anyway? Well, I am like many people in that I first heard of Denzel Curry through the song "Ultimate". It's a song that had difficulty clearly distinguishing itself outside of being a meme, which might have held back its full potential. I always think of it when I used to think about what music might be like when people my age start making it, with all our cultural touch stones in line. It's extremely young millennial coded, in that he mentions both Senzu Beans and Broly in unrelated bars, we're so predictable. It didn't really click for me until 2018 when he released "TA13OO" in 2018. I think I was more primed to listen to hip-hop at that point, and I started to appreciate what he was doing. "BLACK BALLOONS | 13LACK 13ALLOONZ" has a ridiculous title but it's just elite pop rap. He's still making DBZ references then, of course.

After this, I need to bury the lede, but obviously Denzel Curry got to be on a lot more radars in 2019. That can have some overflowing effects. No one was campaigning directly for "4ever" by The Veronicas to make the Hottest 100 Australian Songs countdown, but when you've got enough people voting for "Untouched", it's gonna have some splash back. Maybe though he just picked up enough new fans that were further impressed by what he was doing on his own, and they channelled it through "RICKY". I was more into "SPEEDBOAT" myself, but this one still works in a pinch.

"RICKY" is a tribute to Denzel Curry's father, much of the song is quoting advice he'd given out, which mostly boils down to being cautious around strangers and not to abandon those close to you. As a bonus we also get some of his mother's advice which is much more specific with talking about unprotected sex. The juxtaposition with the previous line is very amusing. The whole thing just never lets up though, so if nothing else, it's proof that he was able to compartmentalise his aggressive flow into something with some semblance of crossover power.

#346. Post Malone - Better Now (#33, 2018)

38th of 2018

One of the biggest dead heats I've ever seen following the charts was actually a competition between two songs from the same artist. In 2018 when Post Malone released "beerbongs & bentleys", he dominated the charts and looked pretty likely to go to #1, the question was what song would do it. The well-perched "Psycho" (#563) looked a good chance as it was operating with a big head start, but the underdog was "Better Now", not released as a single but becoming an instant hit. In the end, "Psycho" did cruise to #1, but it's the Spotify chart I find most fascinating. In Australia that week, "Psycho" managed 1,739,382 streams, while "Better Now" got 1,739,247. That's a difference of 135, or if you will, less than 0.01%. The kind of margin where it starts to matter how streams are counted when they take place across midnight between days.

You wouldn't get any of this heightened drama coming out of the actual ARIA Chart for that week though, because "Better Now" only debuted at #4. It's something I've thought to be very suspect ever since then but unable to actually prove it. When I see the actual numbers involved, it just looks to me that "Better Now" hasn't been fully counted, though I can't be sure of the degree, just that it's something that seemed to pop up a bit at the time.

If you follow charts, you probably know this, if you don't, it'll sound ridiculous without context. In many parts of the world, if you listen to music on a Thursday, it probably won't count to the charts. This is due to a slight delay in reporting streaming figures (largely from Spotify), and an eagerness from chart companies to put the charts out promptly. I think I can see the rationale behind it, because honestly if you just have 6 days of charts, it's hardly going to change a lot after that, so just a reasonable estimate can get the job done. How do they do this estimate? I genuinely don't know, but I'm convinced something was going wrong with it regarding new debuts back in 2018, they just always seemed to land lower than I expected, only to slightly course correct the week after. It makes it seem like they just got the previous Thursday's data, but I dunno. Maybe in the long run it didn't matter, because "Better Now" would eventually climb up to #2 where it belonged, and get stuck there for a very long time, but I do remember thinking it had the slightest chance to debut at #1 which just didn't pan out. Not that Post Malone is desperately wanting for more #1 hits, but this would be one of the better ones I think.

I want to talk more about the album when I get to the remaining song from it, but I had a lot of trust in Post Malone at this point in time. "Better Now" is a pretty good example of this. It uses all the tricks in his arsenal to craft something that's just incredibly catchy. There aren't many songs that have better managed to use trap production to make something so radio friendly. Part of why it succeeds is that it doesn't really just rest on one mode. Every time we transition from verse to chorus, bridge to chorus, chorus to second half of chorus, there's just a little tweak to it that makes it feel more urgent. One of those ways you can get away with just saying the same two words over and over again.