#145. Flume & Chet Faker - Drop the Game (#5, 2013)
29th of 2013
They're calling it the most obvious collaboration ever. It's a collaboration that's so obvious, it had already happened before this, and depending on how you measure these things, was certainly a success. Chet Faker appeared on Flume's debut album, on one of the more popular cuts, "Left Alone". This was around the time that Chet Faker's debut EP was getting some strong traction, and the song "I'm Into You" landed at a pointy #24 in the 2012 Hottest 100. Chet Faker started releasing music with Future Classic, the independent label strongly associated with Flume. A few months after "Melt" (#621), he's interrupting his own album campaign to release a collaborative EP with Flume. Flume had been operating on a huge, gradual word of mouth campaign for much of 2012 and 2013, and this was the first new material he'd put out since his album. It was primed to do fairly well, and it did fairly well. It was something of a stopgap for both artists who'd go onto much bigger things in the near future. This is a rookie collaboration between two artists who'd eventually top the countdown individually (#862), (#472), (#400). For Chet Faker though, this was new ground, and a taste of how his moody electronica could actually work in a top 40 context.
"Drop The Game" was thusly one of those funny chart runs. A new release designed to break Australian broadband that was able to debut reasonably high on the charts (at #21), before settling into a steady baseline as it grapples with the competing concepts of 'It's actually worth the hype' and 'It's serving a pretty niche audience'. With a mid-November release date, it almost feels purposely planned to fit this success model, because like many before and after it, the song reached its final peak position (#18) after it became one of the least surprising Hottest 100 hits of all time. Maybe it's a little surprising to see it so high, just because very new releases do slip in the margins, and 2013 is not short of very potent contenders. I look at that list and it's odd to think an even better timed "Drop The Game" drop could have slid up the rankings even more. Rubbing shoulders with the giants.
"Drop The Game" is mostly just two hooks, one sung by Chet Faker and the other hummed by Chet Faker and matched behind it by Flume. These two hooks are played over and over again just in case you somehow missed them, and layered on top of each other, played in counter, whatever's on the menu for the moment. There's only a brief reprieve during the song's one regular verse, because the second verse is just the chorus again, and then the bridge is the chorus again. I've been seeing 'ooh ooh ooh', I've been seeing your 'ohoh, ohoh, oh, oh, oh'. Still, repetition can beat you down in a good way, and I can't help but leave it thinking that it's the most compelling and engaging that Chet Faker has ever managed to sound. For Flume, it's another day in the park of generally having an ear for what works. For me, the best moment is when he pitches it up in the middle of the song in a way that just sounds unnerving, but also doubles as a satisfying transition when he brings it back. This one weird trick to play the same thing back to back and make it work.
#144. Hockey Dad - Join the Club (#18, 2018)
15th of 2018
In the pop music world, there's a meme that developed in the mid-2010s that as far as I can tell is still going around now. I'm just interrupting this paragraph here to provide more space for reading so you don't catch where I'm going with this and get some time to ponder 'How on earth is this going to make it back to Hockey Dad?'. Honestly I try to do this whenever I can but the medium doesn't always allow us to control the way someone else's eyes might dart towards things that stand out. Anyway, the term 'skinny legend' took hold as a way to compliment someone's favourite artist. It's most associated with Mariah Carey thanks to one tweet that succinctly expresses their thoughts on both her, and the police. It's a knowingly silly term of endearment that makes for some funny looking photoshops, and I'll admit that I get a chuckle out of someone throwing shade on someone's toddler to say that Mariah is skinnier. I'd probably have largely forgotten about it all if not for "Join the Club", which in all of its aspirational goals set in the song's chorus, has the most memorable one being 'You better be skinny'. I don't think Hockey Dad were trying to evoke that side of Twitter, but it's all I think about.
That's the core tangent for "Join the Club", a song about living with unrealistic expectations mounted on you on all sides. It's enough to make you feel particularly inadequate especially if you think someone else is getting through it all more effectively, as if we're all fighting to get an A+ evaluation on our death bed. I think about a TV show I've been watching lately. I won't say the name of it for just a little while longer but if you scroll down about 2 entries from here you might see what I'm putting down. It's a TV show with a lot of different people from different backgrounds forced to face adversity together and coming at odds with their different perspectives & skill sets. Yet ironically, in all of this, it's those very differences that keep them operating, because it's just not feasible to do it all. You need someone who specialises in a different area because you just can't do it all yourself. Every time a problem emerges and there's one person who knows what to do, maybe it feels contrived, but I think finding those key specialties that everyone has, even the seemingly useless, that's just a core tenant of life, getting along, loving thy neighbour and so forth. It's not a competition, it's a collaboration.
As far as the Hottest 100 goes, this is as big as it gets for Hockey Dad. I don't know if I'd call it their biggest hit (one of their earlier songs, "Seaweed", has it beaten on Spotify). It does feel like the song that came out at the right time for them though. They'd just properly put themselves on the map with another song, and here's the nice, shiny follow up in the new year. It's not too hard to like this one because it gives you all the fun energy you expect from the band (though it's surprising just how many of their hits have been more slow burns). Just a sign that they received momentum and capitalised on it thusly by putting out a very agreeable, and likeable song.
#143. Billie Eilish & Khalid - lovely (#17, 2018)
14th of 2018
When I was in Year 7, we'd get weekly quizzes to do for homework each week. A lot of it was straight-forward and I did pretty well, but the one question that's stuck with me over two decades later was something like 'An egg is hatched by an i_______'. I might have the wording a little wrong, but I was so confused by this. It felt like it should be something simple like 'bird', and that the initial letter 'I' was an error. It turned out to not be an error at all, but the word they were looking for was 'incubator', a word I was pretty certain I'd never encountered in my life. Maybe not a big deal, but I felt that common feeling many people have in these situations, 'How was I supposed to know that?'. A couple of years later, I also mixed up a quiz that was looking to match words to definitions. There was 'low ranking army officer' and 'high ranking army officer', and that was the day I learnt that colonels considerably outrank sergeants, despite every vibe I'd encountered previously seeming to indicate the opposite. Again, it wasn't something I'd been formally taught, so it felt like I was just shooting into the breeze.
Despite not being especially attuned for it, I developed an interest in trivia growing up. I don't know if I could be considered especially good at it but that's because I'm so often surrounded by the best of the best, people who'd potentially go on very long winning streaks if they got onto Jeopardy!, and people who have done just that (a couple of weeks ago, three people I've known for a good while were all on Jeopardy! on the same week by coincidence, I haven't seen their episodes yet so I don't know how they went). Generally though, it's hard to properly weigh my own knowledge against others because so often, trivia falls into a range of regional bias, where one person's obscurity is another's day to day life. American bias is the most common instance.
Getting more actively involved with the trivia scene has taught me a lot about the craft of trivia itself in ways that weren't remotely clear to me for a long time. Initially, I might have seen all trivia equally as a collection of knowledge that you may or may not have acquired at some point in your life. Maybe some things (world capitals, famous wars, definitions) might come to mind as something worth studying. Once I was out of school, it felt like everything was fair game. As long as the information is accurate, the quiz master is free to ask anything they want.
This is not how the trivia world sees things. I was having a discussion the other day about the use of the term 'canon'. It's a shorthand for trivia's Overton window, the broad, but ultimately shallow reach of what could be expected to get asked about. It'll vary in different institutions, but it basically turns into a game of trust between both parties. One of the most satisfying things a player can do is to correctly interpret the difficulty of a question, and start using contextual deduction to pull out an answer that they don't actually know. Which composer conducted the Karelia Suite at the Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki in 1893? Well I didn't know that piece but Jean Sibelius is the only Finnish composer I've ever encountered in trivia so it's probably him, and now I've learnt something new about him. Once you understand this concept, studying can be a breeze and suddenly you'll look like a bottomless pit of information through your A to B associations. I memorised all the US state capitals in a few hours (some with very specific links & mnemonics) and to anyone who knows I'm not American, it looks impressive.
For the same reason I cried foul as a child, this is a subject of great scrutiny and controversy. People like to know what they're getting into, and if you stray too far out of that as a quiz master, you can be derided for your deeply unserious trivia. Pop culture for instance is an endless well of threads that is a struggle to keep up with on even the most famous examples. It'll be derided as trash by people who do not have the desire to learn more about someone else's obscure favourites, or the obscure details of any favourites. You'll learn everything there is to know about the Roman empire only to stumble on not knowing which Paul brother is which. I'll admit that I lost on a trivia night because I lacked enough knowledge on Jersey Shore, but I'm content with that result, and I've never forgotten 'gym, tan, laundry' ever since.
Music trivia specifically is a huge net that can go in any direction. Even the most avid music fans I know always have big gaps somewhere because the wide range of genres, eras and ranges of measurable popularity just make it all completely impossible to cover. You might need information that can only come to you if you're actively listening to the music multiple times in order to get it to stick, and even then, you don't know what you're gonna get and you'll miss it still. I like doing music quizzes on Sporcle but I'll almost never get a perfect score because it's largely potluck. There are many ways to keep up to date with music. You can just experience it in your life, maybe actively listen to a relevant radio format. Maybe you'll do what I've done in the past and listen to literally everything that spends even a single week on the charts, or otherwise just keep up with what everyone else is talking about. Everyone goes down their own rabbit holes so the realistic result is a mix of multiple ideas.
I've said all of this not to actually talk about music trivia, but about the way I've seen music fans talk about music that falls out of their own periphery. It's very common to see people hole up, the same way hardcore trivia fans do so, even without the same intent. On the most basic level, it's a 'Who??', but it can manifest more rationally as someone who disregards any evidence of importance just simply because it hasn't met their arbitrary standards. This can happen across international lines, where not everything is on an equal level, but the most common case I've seen is one where top 40 is literally the word of God, and nothing that hasn't done the little dance there for at least a few months is ever worth considering. Certifications can offer an accurate weighting over time, but without that communal feeling of everyone learning about the song at the same time, it feels like it's extra-curricular.
"lovely" is one of the biggest hits of Billie Eilish's career, and possibly the biggest of Khalid's. It might not feel like this, given that it's competing with some monster hits from both discographies, but if you look at the raw figures, it's absolutely in elite territory. By the time this post goes live, it might get overtaken, but as I'm writing it, this is Billie Eilish's most played song of all time on Spotify. It did very well in Australia at the time, but wasn't a top 40 hit in the US or UK. It's just been accumulating popularity for 8 years now with no decline in momentum. It's strange to be glued to the complex deductions of what's a hit, when in reality, it's largely being decided in closed spaces that you're not privy to. You might not have any reason to know which songs have fallen out of favour, and which other ones have just been continually discovered by complete strangers you'll never meet. Technically this is what we're supposed to be interested in, but it so quickly derails, like trying to walk in a straight line with your eyes closed. It's not going to resemble your version of events at all.
Like most of the long screeds I go on here, this all comes from witnessing it first-hand. Seeing "lovely" be brought up as one of the biggest songs of the past decade, and seeing UK music fans be dismissive of the facts. Disregarding it completely (and probably liking the song less) just because the song wasn't a major part of their life in 2018, regardless of the strong reality that this early hit was a foundational moment for her growing popularity. It'd be like disregarding Cold Chisel's "Khe Sanh" because it's not one of the band's multiple top 10 hits. It's a lot easier for me to buy into all of this just because "lovely" was a big hit right away in Australia. I'd like to believe I could do the same even if it wasn't, but then I suppose I don't ever have strong feelings about her even earlier song "ocean eyes". I know it's a big deal, but I wasn't part of the moment and it means very little to me.
As for "lovely" though, it's always been a song I've liked a lot. I was pretty on board with most of what I'd heard from Billie Eilish at this point and found her approach so refreshing, possibly something to tackle more with another entry. "lovely" is a little more conventional in the way that it needs to be. I still find it very interesting though, the way the song builds up only to completely drop it all for the hook. It feels like it's playing for the big sweeping dramatics, but wants to have a second calling card that's completely detached from it. I've no idea why it has endured as strongly as it has, other than the fact that big collaborations like this can help land you in two artists' Spotify top 10s, giving you two fanbases to pool streams from. It can be the kind of thing that just grabs a lot of people at the same time without them realising it. That 'accidentally on everyone's playlist' vibe. I consider it to be very important in the long term.
#142. Camp Cope - Lost (Season One) (#74, 2016)
18th of 2016
Depending on who's reading this, this is either my secret, not-so-secret, or blatantly-obviously-at-this-point-mission. There's a song here called "Lost (Season One)", of course I'm going to watch season one of Lost. You know, that TV show from the 2000s about a bunch of people trapped on an island after a plane crash. I've told several people that I'm explicitly going to do this, just that I never wanted to say when I would, lest I make it too obvious when this entry is coming. I've been spending the last couple of weeks dipping out of voice calls for exactly 42 minutes at a time, the perfect crime. How else am I meant to contextualise that title? It's one thing to just say you're watching the popular media property (#224), but the specificity brings all new questions. Namely, why would you specify the season like that? Well, if you didn't have your head in the sand in the late 2000s, maybe you can figure that out yourself. But I like challenging perspectives.
I am a strong believer in the regularity of coincidences. There are just too many things happening at once and too many ways to observe them that sometimes, we're going to find some strange commonality that sounds like fate. This sounds like I'm riffing on the events of Lost but I'm not, rather, it's the events of me starting to watch Lost. I sat down at my desk and started to watch the pilot, which is named "Pilot", and is possibly a pun on the fact that the plane's pilot makes a brief appearance. As I'm doing this, I get a DM from a friend who hasn't messaged me in months, but someone I know is a big fan of Lost and perhaps in some small part has indirectly convinced me to give the show a proper chance. There's no way they could possibly know I'm doing this but in the brief moment before I checked, I got a little paranoid about it. That's not much, but then later that same night I end up watching an episode of The Simpsons. I've very slowly been going through the show from start to finish, well entrenched into episodes I've mostly never seen before. I'm pretty irregular about watching the show at the moment, what with all the secret Lost watching I'm doing, as well as various other things on my plate, but I decide to watch an episode that night. Little did I know that it ended up being an episode in which Homer gets deeply obsessed with watching (a thinly veiled reference to) Lost on demand, years after the show has finished. I'm watching this in a group and I have to stay completely silent about the fact this has happened, and all the minor details I'm now familiar with, while also hoping I'm not inadvertently spoiled of something major. I got out of it okay, but this is exactly the kind of strange, quirky thing that would turn up in a flashback on the show, raising more questions than it answers as Homer might say.
I find it all interesting to look back at 20 years later because Lost really was one of those huge TV phenomena. An early incarnation for global theory crafting in the online world as the show would continue to unravel little threads that get more unusual as they went. What starts as a simple premise of a plane crash leaving people deserted on an island, left to put aside their differences and work together, becomes this truly bizarre tour de force of science fiction & fantasy. It felt like pretty much the most important thing to watch, and I did watch it at the time. I don't remember very much aside from a handful of characters and plot devices with only the broad strokes of a modestly invested teenager who was likely second monitoring the show to play video games.
It's been fascinating to go back to season 1 of Lost, in part because I know some of the things that are going to happen, but also just to put myself in the mindset of someone watching it for the first time, without being bogged down by how supposedly complicated and unfulfilling it may end up getting. It's a very watchable show. Somewhat slow paced because what 25 episode season wouldn't be, but also because they have to go to great lengths to develop so many different characters at once. Most of it is done through relatively self-contained episodes showing flashbacks to that particular episode's character in focus, revealing their greater motivations, things they might be hiding, and how they ended up on a plane from Sydney to Los Angeles. That's another thing I hadn't remembered about the show actually, just how Australian it is. Not in terms of authorship, all the creators and most of the actors aren't, but so much of the show takes place in Australia, going lengths to include that characterisation, rather than just be America with different accents. If someone told me that the show was disproportionately popular in Australia, partly because of this, I might believe them. likewise I could probably believe that Camp Cope's affinity comes from this as well. In general though, I do find the cast of characters to be fairly likeable, even when they're clearly doing bad or selfish things. That complex code of ethics that we all have, and how it doesn't necessarily undermine us, that's one of the main things I've taken away from the show.
Recently, I've been watching the Dropout series Game Changer a lot. It's built on the premise of being a game show where the rules are fluid and the contestants are thrown into the deep end without a paddle every episode. A lot of fun to be had, but the thing I've taken away the most from it is the show's ability to always go one step further than expected. Playing a game with both the contestants and the audience by having them potentially expect a twist, only for that to be exactly part of the plan to distract you from the even bigger twist. I don't think it's a coincidence that the host also habitually does magic tricks.
I don't necessarily have that level of showmanship in me, but I do find the process to be very fascinating, and something I'd love to emulate if I too had those kinds of resources. If I've succeeded on one level, it's that if you go back and look at the earlier entries on this blog, I'm shocked at how quaint they are. Where I started and where I ended up are two very different places. What I'm really trying to say is that if anyone ever caught me saying that I was planning to, or had already watched Season 1 of Lost for the purposes of writing this entry, I was not being entirely truthful. No, no, I didn't just lie about it and get a bot to write all that previous stuff (gross), I did the only thing that felt right which is going an extra step further. I watched all of Lost over the past three months. The first four paragraphs of this entry were written right after I finished Season 1, on my normal posting schedule. I spent the next two months going about my usual business but also watching Lost almost every single day, because I needed to fit in 5 more seasons of the show in that time. The show has 121 episodes, it's a lot. I was able to use the time lag effectively though because it allowed me to get it done in time, and write more of this closer to the date it goes live. You are normally reading my thoughts from months ago, but this is me on a Monday night mere days before I hit publish.
The reason I went to such lengths is mostly pretty simple. I do not trust popular consensus when it isn't positive. I'm often times pretty easy to win over, because if a movie is widely acclaimed, I'll probably like it. All those old comedy movies that are extremely dated? I love them. It's so interesting to look back at such a long time ago and seeing the way it's approached, the similarities and differences to now. Whoever decided that the movie Arsenic and Old Lace needed a man who's convinced he's actually Teddy Roosevelt probably thought it was hilarious at the time, and it is to me as well, if only because I've never seen anything like it. Jack Lemmon mentions offhand in The Apartment that he keeps a tennis racquet around so he can strain pasta, and then later in the movie he's casually doing just that and I can't stop thinking about it. I think a big part of this all is trust. If you get yourself in that headspace of being above the media property, or above the people who are hyping it up, you can quickly fall into cynicism, which is something I'm just not interested in. My perspective of Lost was that of a show that was once must-see television that slowly descended into its own head with sprawling plotlines and mysteries that were never resolved. I heard enough in the defence of the show that challenged this that I just felt unsatisfied to let myself remain perpetuating a consensus without actually forming my own. I want to think for myself, don't tell me what I can't do.
If there's a lesson to take away from all of this, it's that short form content really does rot the brain. I don't mean that in the way that it tends to be seen with things like Skibidi Toilet or other nonsensical dystopian children's content that doesn't feel like a human has made it. I mean the normal stuff. The way longer videos are cut down for viral clips designed to shock, entertain, or outrage. There's a certain necessary calm that's being cut out for us when we jump from highlight to highlight. It spikes emotional reactions and has us acting up irrationally because everything just has these large stakes. I can't really say that it's shaped these perceptions of media or Lost in particular because these things go back further, but I do find it hard to broach these kinds of topics without feeling like I'm just doing the same thing, loudly proclaiming an opinion to get a reaction, or just get people looking at me.
This is all to say that rumours of Lost's decline are a bit exaggerated. I will be frank with this and say that I can understand a rational reason for declining interest in the show. The show's pilot and much of the first season sets up an expectation for what the show is about that is largely not where they end up going in the long term. You're initially gripped because these people have been put in a difficult survival situation and have to deal with all sorts of challenges that the setting provides. You might even consider what you would do if you were in their situation that isn't too unrealistic a scenario in the first place. It's just that the further you go, the more threads unravel and it stops feeling like random people who were in a plane crash, and more like a decades, centuries long planned out sequence of events all for the purpose of fulfilling destiny. Those strangers on a plane that had to come together to survive start to seem less and less like regular, everyday people as it turns out pretty much everyone has something to hide, and also maybe they all crossed paths at some point or another. What was once a show squarely focused on a specific, principal cast, seems to keep finding new ways to bring in more groups of people (often times ones who were already on the island), who inevitably are also always keeping their cards to their chest. You've got multiple characters who act as an agent of chaos, including one who is nonchalantly introduced in season 2 and just seems to stick around forever. They finally manage to leave the island but there are still several seasons to go, so now they need to go back to the island. There's time travel, bootstrap paradoxes arrive, and it's been a long time since survival from the elements of the island has ever been a going concern.
I just don't really see this as the issue that's put forth when the show gets brought up. It just feels like an increasingly disinterested audience gave up, came back to the show for the finale, and got mad at that for either its hokey ending or that it didn't give us a scientifically plausible answer for why any of this stuff ever happened. One of the more specific memories I had when the show was still airing was hearing someone spill the beans that the show had been figured out online. The island was purgatory. That's why all the children disappeared early on, and why all the main characters seem to be harbouring dark secrets all the time. You're constantly seeing religious imagery, and it's a perfect fit. It's something I kept in my mind the entire time I was watching the show because I had my doubts. As such, I kept running into problems with it that just didn't work out. All those kids do come back at one point or another, after all. It's another thing that might trip you up too if you just watch the finale. The purgatory thread is canon...just not in the way you think. Rather, it's relevant for a parallel storyline that runs separately to everything on the island. All those characters are in fact dead, and the last season gives them an opportunity to find closure in limbo. In the timeline where the island is real, all these things happened.
I just feel like an inattentive audience has done the whole show a disservice by spreading a poorly formed understanding of the whole thing. It feels clever to reveal that the show that felt like it was too smart for you actually didn't, or that you were justified to lose interest because the end result wasn't rewarding. I just found the whole thing compelling. The way they could continue to introduce new things and not have them feel tacked on. The more you learn about the characters, the more compelling they can be, and they don't even have to be plot important or anything like that. Hurley probably is one of the most important characters but at the heart of it, he's just a chill guy who wants everyone to be happy, and has multiple episodes dedicated to fulfilling that role, plot be damned. Desmond is an ostensibly normal guy who keeps getting thrown into ridiculous circumstances that fry his brain and then some, but he's believably motivated by the woman he loves. The same could be said of Locke who is probably insane all for it, but he remains steadfast in his convictions. I just love being along for the ride with these people as the universe seemingly is out to get them, but seeing the humanity shine through overall. I think there's a lot to like about the show from start to finish, and I wouldn't say it drops off much either (although Season 5 is a little harder to follow).
This is also core to my experience of watching the show, which was not one of constant joy and wonder, but isolation and despair. As time went on, I felt like I was experimenting on myself. Finding out what would happen if you forced someone to spend an incredibly long time watching a show like Lost, which is meant to provoke discussion and intrigue, but introduce the notion that they can't talk about it. It was maddening. So often I'd have to hold myself back from my autistic need to talk about the tangential thread that I just picked up, filling the void with nothing. My attempts to keep it all secret meant that there were necessary steps to cover as well. My trivia well of 'Oh actually I saw that actor on another show' just being barricaded over and over again. A couple of times I actually broke, responding to a very specific trivia question I saw, and then also writing and sharing one I'd thought of (because it was pertinent to current events). I think I got away with it, in part because as far as secrets go, secretly watching a popular TV show is pretty limp, but these past two months, where I've also been at home alone far more often than usual, have been strangely oppressive. Obviously I've known the finish line is around the corner, but sometimes it just makes you want to will it a little closer. It's like walking home and just wishing you were the first house on the street because then you'd be home already. I feel a little like this with this whole list in general, but the sheer amount of time I spent going through this entire TV show just upped the stakes tremendously. I've never been more relieved to hit the publish button.
As for Camp Cope, my story begins in 2015. I'm not certain the band had actually formed at this point. I just distinctly remember someone retweeting the triple j airplay account because they'd just played a new song called "New Phone, Who's This?" by Georgia Maq (it's not on YouTube for free, I can't link it). It stood out to me just because a version of that particular phrase had just caught on (or at least, I'd just become aware of it) and it seemed novel that triple j were playing a song that leaned into this. I probably didn't think much of it again until I was counting Hottest 100 votes and saw it come up again. I'd later learn that Georgia was the daughter of Hugh McDonald from Redgum of "I Was Only 19" fame, and that same year that she'd started the band Camp Cope, who'd very quickly rise to prominence next year.
I was a little late to getting properly on board so I often forget how quickly Camp Cope released their self-titled debut album. This particular single was released in January 2016, and the album in April, which set the stage for the band being all over the airwaves for the whole year. It was once again memetic phrases that caught my eye, because I first noticed them via the curiously named "Jet Fuel Can't Melt Steel Beams". I can't fully recall my former mindset. I tend to do a small write-up on the weekly album chart but the week "Camp Cope" entered at #36 was the same week Beyoncé released "Lemonade" and Prince died, so I was a little pre-occupied. I am fully imagining that I saw the title again as a joke and didn't really take the band seriously for a while. I don't know if anyone else gets it, but there's this strange, intangible instinct that sometimes tells me not to pursue interest in something. Whether it's for good or otherwise, it's difficult to shake that feeling that I should stay within the walls I've constructed for myself. It can ease the mental overload of focusing on everything.
It's for this reason that I wouldn't get invested until November. By that point I'd just had a moment that clicked for me with Georgia's singing style. It's hard to describe but difficult to forget. In particular, I cottoned onto the song "Done", which felt like the easiest one to get into. No funny, distracting song title, absolutely killer bass, and a big, cathartic rush of a hook. It wasn't a big thing for me, and I nearly moved on from it by the end of December, until it clicked for me again. Riding that second wind, it became a big favourite of mine, and I ended up buying the album and getting pretty obsessed with it, including all those previous singles that had just mostly passed me by previously. It's very tough to match the first five tracks on it, although it's a tale that continues when I get to their second album on a later entry. As far as triple j airplay goes, "Done" and "Lost (Season One)" got similar shares of airplay and "Jet Fuel Can't Melt Steel Beams" was a bit more sparing. It probably reflects the result of the poll, where "Done" got pretty close to making the cut, but I guess people just liked the first single the most. The first single tends to get the most buzz, the most attention. When people look back on the thing, they probably think most fondly of the first single.
"Lost (Season One)" is very good, nonetheless. For all I said about "Done", this is probably the one that gets the point across most conventionally. It's played up a little as a lyrical trick, which they do on both songs, where the title lends itself to being read in different ways. "Lost (Season One)" has it both ways, where it's used as both an adjective and a proper noun. If you haven't been spoiled by meta data, it might come as a surprise when she uses the TV show as comfort food post-breakup. It's good, it works, and it makes for a satisfying bow on what's otherwise just a sensibly enjoyable song.
#141. Doja Cat - Boss Bitch (#67, 2020)
18th of 2016
It doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, but I can't help but focus on the way the TikTok machine has been weaponised by major labels in an attempt to forge the appearance of organic discovery and artist development. I'll always raise suspicion at the way it all seems to work in the favour of already thriving major label artists, as if there's a theoretical risk that these artists would be out of a career if they don't get a viral hit that always just seems to accidentally happen. Doja Cat was probably the most flagrant example of all of this. At a time when the transition was still coming along, she was the artist who seemed to just always go viral on TikTok, every few months. It appeared as though her charisma and evident stardom was either just speeding along an inevitable process, or it was uncovering a new breed of pop star that we weren't getting via the original channels.
The clue to me is usually just how quickly it's all acted upon. Music release and promotion is a step by step process that takes months if not years, with rollouts carefully planned. A genuine fluke of a crossover is not something that can be prepared for, and it'd be foolish to plan around it. Like, can you guess how long after Doja Cat's previous single "Say So" blew up that this new single was ready to capitalise on it, and also promote the big budget Hollywood film "Birds of Prey"? It's a trick question; this came out at pretty much the same time. Maybe that can be a haphazard strategy juggling multiple hits at once but it turned out fine when this one took a little longer to get going, and wasn't really a major force anyway. It's just that the funny thing about this delayed gratification means that while she'd get major flowers the next year, this was Doja Cat's only Hottest 100 entry, for a time.
I could potentially have decided to watch Birds of Prey for this entry but it has come in at an inopportune time re: the previous entry. It would also be an act of betrayal for me, the person who has been watching a Marvel movie just about every week for nearly 2 years now to suddenly jump ship to the DC Extended Universe. I've probably just blown my shot with Margot Robbie by saying this, alas. Amusingly, Doja Cat actually mentions Barbie in this song a few years before Margot also got that role. My affinity for this film only goes as far as the brief bites of soundtrack that I got around to. I'm obsessed with that one other song that I will needlessly hold onto for a later entry even though it's not actually one that'll appear on this list.
This song can also share those flowers though. The fact that "Boss Bitch" became a top 40 hit in Australia, and an entry here, feels like delayed gratification for Azealia Banks' "212", which did neither of those things. It has the belated bonus feeling that no matter what you feel about Doja Cat, I'd rather her have the success even if the song isn't quite as potent. It's all pure cacophony though. Maybe I'm too easy to please but once she switches up her flow, I'm just all over it. Maybe that's the real reason she had those two hit songs at the same time. It's one thing to have a hit song that's riding on its catchy pop hook, but if you want people to stick with it, you need to do something that shows what sets you apart from everyone else who could've recorded it.
