#355-#351

 #355. Tame Impala - Breathe Deeper (#33, 2020)

29th of 2020

I don't even know how I feel about Tame Impala anymore. I can catch any song from the first two albums and it's an instant dopamine rush. After that, it's all an increasing scale of frustration, where I'll have reservations about albums that I can hold back on because of the redeeming factors. For every odd decision, there will be moments where it clicks into place, and soaring highs for it, perhaps on the future docket even. As time sails on though, those highs have not been leaping quite as high out of the page. Finding highlights out of the new album is a struggle and it gives me this sinking feeling that Kevin Parker is actively wasting my time. A long Tame Impala song used to be a point of excitement, but now it seems like a threat. I just can't believe that "Breathe Deeper" is a longer song than "Apocalypse Dreams", nothing about that makes any sense.

I think possibly what made the project work early on is that there was a distinct evolution in the sound, but it's one that's been stagnating for a while now. In "The Slow Rush", I hear a lot of clues towards where "Deadbeat" ended up going, and I'm not even sure it's moved into a much worse place, just that there's no intrigue to be tapped from it. Maybe that's why I liked the earlier singles the most, and haven't really fallen over in love with any of the tracks from these last two albums. I have to make that specific version of the comment because technically there's still a future non-album track that will appear in one of the 354 positions above this one, maybe that's my saving grace to think that I'm not capable of enjoying another new Tame Impala song any more than this one. I don't like to rag on things too much, but when I see Tame Impala having international success as I write this, it's the song in the chart that's most desperately begging me with pleas of 'You must like this one, right?', and it's just such a wasted bid.

At least for the span of "Breathe Deeper", I can meet it at its level. It's an attempt to fuse the strange odyssey Tame Impala with the pop song structure Tame Impala. I'm not entirely sure it actually works (the last 75 seconds just hits you unexpectedly like a brick), but there are definitely components on both sides of the scale that I can find myself nodding along to.

#354. Big Shaq - Man's Not Hot (#51, 2017)

36th of 2017

I wish I could selfishly re-order this list for the means of telling a coherent story, because this feels like Part 3 of the long, rippling waves that resulted from Kanye West performing "All Day" at the BRIT Awards in 2015. Maybe I'll reheat it at a later date, but the short version of it is that Stormzy was on stage for that performance, prior to him being a hitmaker of any measure. He had surprise success later that year when he managed to send a freestyle single into the UK top 20, and before long, he'd be topping charts on the regular.

This all ran somewhat parallel to comedian Michael Dapaah, the man better known to many as Big Shaq. He and Stormzy go way back, which is why you can actually catch him in the video for "WickedSkengMan 4" hyping Stormzy up. It was all setting the stage for a new era of UK grime & drill to come out firing. The early success of Stormzy indicated there was a genuine audience for it, despite it having difficulty winning over more conservative tastemaker ideals.

Something funny happened in 2017 though. Michael Dapaah was on BBC Radio 1Xtra for Charlie Sloth's 'Fire in the Booth' segment. Generally it's a space that's housed many genuine MCs, many on their road to stardom (I'm now learning Nines had a hugely popular one back in 2013). Michael Dapaah was here for novelty purposes, presenting himself as his character Big Shaq. Big Shaq is an exaggerated version of a roadman. The whole interview and the freestyle contained within it went viral, and resulted in the freestyle being turned into a properly released song. As a 4 minute music video is easier to pass along than a 22 minute radio interview, the song went even more viral with hundreds of millions of views. Check the statistics, Americans who know nothing about UK drill will know this song. It's to drill, what "Gangnam Style" was to K-Pop at the time: a blatant novelty that appears genuine once the regional context is taken away. This had a peculiar effect. All of a sudden, it became a massive hit that completely surpassed everything adjacent to its genre. Stormzy made his first Hottest 100 appearance in 2017 but he was still easily surpassed by Big Shaq (he'd do better in subsequent years). The face of the scene became a comedian making jokes about how vital his jacket is regardless of the weather.

As it tends to be the case, the studio version lacks some of the spontaneity of the original freestyle. What it does manage to retain is some of the most memorably stupid jokes, which is what mattered the most in the long run. Just being the song with 'the ting goes' would be enough to set it for life, but we've also got '...quick maths' and 'your dad is 44'. Somehow never noticed him bragging that one of his friends has a pump action shotgun, and that his other friend has a frisbee, complete with a frisbee sound effect. There's something so satisfying about all the threatening aspects of his life mixed in with the more mundane elements, as if we're seeing all the facets of someone who really doesn't have a lot going for them. I don't think it's true, but I really want to believe that this song got the ball rolling for the phrase 'got the sauce'.

The problem with anything like this is that once something cracks its initial audience wide open, it's likely to end up in front of people missing the initial context and taking it all literally. In the case of "Man's Not Hot", I'll admit I had trouble discerning how much criticism came from the novelty nature of the song, or if it was just an extension of the form it was sending up (akin to disliking "Blazing Saddles" because of either its language or if you don't like westerns). It got frustrating though because it made the song one of the biggest beacons of disapproval.

This happens during the Hottest 100 for any novelty song. I might have done it myself in the past, a symptom of taking it all too seriously. Despite the many, many hours I've put into this project, I implore everyone to not take the Hottest 100 very seriously. The whole countdown exists as an antithesis of that way of thinking. When Lawrie Zion first conceived it, it was in reaction to the tired punditry on music history that rewarded a certain perspective on it. The idea that it would be more interesting to see what the public likes the most, rather than be told again that "Stairway to Heaven" is the greatest song ever written. Public opinion can do some very interesting things that counter what would be considered good taste, and it's inherently interesting for it. I will never get tired of the fact that the first time this countdown became an annual poll, the winning song was Denis Leary's crass spoken-word track "Asshole", beating out some soon to be legendary band that I'll probably have to force some words out of myself about in the future. That's the spirit of the Hottest 100 there, and it lives through every goofy novelty song that comes through. They're entries that are doomed to be dated very quickly, but they can be a vital barometer of the times, often more so than whatever safe songs are playing to proven trends. I guess I think about "Bevan the Musical" more than I think about "Heaven Coming Down" (maybe Pete could've used that one as well). "Man's Not Hot" has just made an undeniable mark on the world. As Big Shaq would say, 'you done know'.

#353. Flume - Slugger 1.4 [2014 Export.WAV] (#50, 2022)

32nd of 2022

2022 feels like a strange identity crisis year for the Flume brand. On the surface, it's a massive success. Topping that year's poll with one of what are effectively 4 entries for Flume. "Say Nothing" (#472) is doing a lot to hide the cracks, particularly with regard to the album he put out that year. Maybe asking for more is greedy, but I'm always struck by the fact that "Say Nothing" was the only song on that album to actually poll. The rest of Flume's entries came from a novelty (#387), mercenary work (#677), and...whatever this is. There is an answer to that but I'll delay it a little more.

I think more than anything, we're highlighting the difference between 2012 Flume and 2022 Flume. Somewhere along the way, he scored massive success by leaning into the game (whether intentionally or not), but he didn't let that take over his creative decisions. Maybe he'd still release the occasional single that fed into something similar on the surface, but on the skeletal structure, we're looking at a very different collection of work. It's all those intense glitchy sounds you hear, you'd never mistake Flume circa "Palaces" for any other point in time.

It's created a situation where you've got two kinds of Flume listeners, the ones from before, and the ones from way before. Neither are really being served to the fullest with the new music, and what better way to show this than have a new Flume song that's really an old Flume song. "Slugger 1.4" was released for the 10th anniversary version of his debut album "Flume". Technically it's a little later than that, but it certainly sounds like that era of Flume. It's even got a slight bit of guest vocals from a singer you'd probably associate with that era, but it's a slightly later entry that's stopping me from saying her name.

It is an amusing circumstance when nostalgia tries to create new memories. You're probably banking more on nostalgia than you're willing to believe. It's like how there's that deleted scene from Season 8 of The Simpsons, which should be solid gold because we're in the right era, but it's just a bit weird and doesn't fit. I wouldn't really put "Slugger 1.4" in that same boat though. If anything it almost proves its own point. It might not be teeming with memorable hooks in the same way as "Holdin On" or "On Top", but it does transport you back to a time that you haven't visited in a while. It has me thinking that I like his new old stuff better than his old new stuff.

#352. Skepta - Shutdown (#68, 2015)

42nd of 2015

So anyway as I was saying, back in 2015, Kanye West performed "All Day" at the BRIT Awards. It's pretty memorable, to the point that it has more views than the normal version of the song. It's got multiple flamethrowers so you know they're cooking with gas. At first I start wondering if one of the flamethrowers isn't working, until it finally gets a turn, but then at the end of the song they seem to have run out. I want to learn more about the flamethrowers. The performance also has more cuts to Taylor Swift in the audience than the average Chiefs game. Anyway, at the end of the performance, Kanye West shouts out Skepta specifically, who is probably on the stage but in a large crowd I don't think the camera operator knows where to look. He's the one who was responsible for the large ensemble, and is another artist that has decided to speak about it on record. I too, cannot wait until I land on another Stormzy song and tell this story again from a slightly different perspective. I love the version of "Rashomon" that exists in my head.

"Shutdown" features a brief skit that references this, with what sounds like a British woman being interviewed on TV to say that she's not fond of the performance. It sounds genuine enough that I thought it might have been an actual vox populi, but it seems to have just been created for the song. I suppose it's hard to convey a bunch of angry tweets which is where the commentary mostly sat. If it didn't already live on through another 2015 song (I know I don't have to censor it, shut up), it's immortalising the moment by being part of one of the biggest grime songs of all time, from what might have been an unlikely source once upon a time.

I don't know if everyone knows about this, but Skepta's rap career goes back much further than "Shutdown". He had his first UK chart hit as far back as early 2009, with a cheesy sample of "Sunglasses At Night". He followed it up with a cheesy sample of "Born Slippy .NUXX", later on he'd do a cheesy sample of "Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)", you get the idea. You'd never think from this that he'd be a pioneer for a huge genre of the 2010s. I'm of course talking about dubstep. You'll get a lot of people pointing to the success of "I Need Air" by Magnetic Man, and "Katy On A Mission" by Katy B, but Skepta got in before both of them when "Rescue Me" became his first top 20 hit. In general though, Skepta made pop rap. He's still showing the same intensity that he'd make into his brand later on, but then some Nelly & Flo Rida raps also go hard, no one's expecting them to step out of their lane.

He wasn't gone for long, but Skepta came back in 2014 and completely reinvented himself on "That's Not Me", a song he released with his brother JME. Maybe on the surface, it's just another gimmick, but you can instantly hear an evolved version of Skepta on this track. It no longer feels like he's just dropping mindless hype lyrics, and feels like he's got something to prove. True, he used to be a bit different, but that's not him.

"Shutdown" comes along a year later and it's a bit of a victory lap (but not "Victory Lap", that's way later). You might have thought, reading that previous paragraph, that you've heard "That's Not Me" before. Maybe you have, or maybe you're thinking of all the times Skepta says the title again in "Shutdown", it's like he's evolved a second layer of the punchline. It might not be quite as inventive the second time around, but it sure is fortunate that the song goes so hard. You won't believe just how tempting it was to try and end every sentence of this entry with 'and it's shutdown', but there are limits to how many rocks you drop in the stream of consciousness before it becomes a dam.

Also I should probably mention that Drake is sampled at the start of this song, being embarrassing with his use of patois as he's known to do. On its own, it's pretty funny, but in this context, it's rolling out the red carpet for his first proper Hottest 100 appearance. He did appear as a guest artist on a posse cut in 2013, we just have to gradually lower the number of rappers who need to be alongside him for him to appear. If you can choose to ignore 2025, then the number would end up going back up again in the future.

#351. Miike Snow - Genghis Khan (#15, 2016)

40th of 2016

I'm making myself write this down so I don't forget it. Kublai Khan is the grandson of Genghis Khan, not the other way around. It's spiked me so many times in the past. My rule of thumb when trying to organise history correctly is that the further back in time you go, the more notable you need to be, in order to be remembered, and vice versa. When in doubt, I use this rule, which along with common sense, generally works, but has its shortcomings. How did I know it was grandson and not son? That's just the beauty of memory, sometimes we flawlessly remember half of the password, enough to earn modest credit, not enough to convert that Daily Double or get the coordinates from the French 75.

Miike Snow is three guys. I don't know if that's a revelation but if you're mostly used to just hearing the name, it feels like an understandable mistake to make. They're a rare band where every member has some claim to fame. Andrew Wyatt pops up from time to time on other people's songs, as well as writing some pretty notable ones as well (that song about the explosive device with a pin must get him some pretty nice royalties). Then you've got Bloodshy & Avant as the other two members, they've got a huge catalogue of hits but it tends to be best to just mention that they produced "Toxic" by Britney Spears, making them pretty untouchable. Bloodshy also doubles as a hitmaker on his own, now the sole member of Galantis. Even if this cuddly jackalope band is rarely in your periphery, you're probably hearing their music all the time.

It makes it easier to see how they won the hitmaker lottery at the time. Without all of this, you'd have no reason to think that "Animal" was a sign of future greatness. I did buy into the hype myself though, inexplicably, their album track/bonus track (depending on where you live) "Billie Holiday" is just one of my favourite songs ever. I'll keep saying it for anyone who'd listen. A song that's sinister and intense with some neat production ideas that revealed a lot more to the project than I might have otherwise thought. It's all part of a through line with 2011's "Devil's Work" and 2012's "Paddling Out", songs that feed off each other's ideas.

I'm not sure "Genghis Khan" follows suit. It was a difficult sell for me initially. Seeing a band constantly on the fringe go from that to suddenly scoring a top 50 hit will have you asking questions. For me, it was things in the nature of 'What are these weird sounds he's making between the verses and lines?' or 'Why would anyone compare themselves to Genghis Khan?'. He sounds like a very controlling person. At least he left out the bit about the eyes of the children of another man.

Over the years, I've warmed up to it a bit. There's a novel appreciation I've found with just how many conversations I've ended up in that end up quoting or referencing this song, not even by me most of the time. It might not have the grand scale and ambition of some other Miike Snow songs, but it's a punchy little treat, and it seems to be how most people saw it, given that this surprise crossover hit did very little in the way of converting to album sales. They actually performed considerably worse than the one before it.