#61

#61. Milky Chance - Stolen Dance (#4, 2014)

9th of 2014

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A big regret of mine is misplacing a February 2008 edition of JMag, triple j's on and off print edition. I liked getting the Hottest 100 editions because they'd go extra deep into the countdown I worshipped, and maybe you'd get some tidbits you wouldn't otherwise know about. Mainly I wish I had it because there was a comment from Richard Kingsmill that I'd love to confirm, where he said that "Knights of Cydonia" is the longest song to ever win the Hottest 100, but the length he cited was not the song's 6:06 length, but that of the shorter radio edit that triple j would exclusively play. This is an important distinction, I believe, because it's key to the song's legitimate eligibility. This radio edit didn't arrive until right around December 2006 making it squarely fair game despite having arrived on an album in the middle of 2006. Of course it doesn't really matter given that triple j were never tending to clamp down on it that much back then (Silversun Pickups' "Lazy Eye" also wouldn't be eligible that year, among others), but it's the boring, rational response to the controversy that even holds up by today's rules. We will later deal with a notable radio edit situation, but before that, let's deal with one that's even more obscure.

The case of "Stolen Dance" is one that I suspect I wouldn't be able to tell if I weren't extremely fortunate to have come across the song when I did. I believe it was either a direct or indirect recommendation at the time that put me across to the song and I very quickly grew attached. It was something of an in-thing for me and about two other friends who also saw the light. No one else seemed particularly interested in it but we were all-in and having a good time as a result. The catch is that I'm talking about November 2013. That's when I downloaded this song on iTunes and I still have the metadata to prove it. Milky Chance's album "Sadnecessary" was just all there though I don't think I listened to anything else from it at the time. I don't think they necessarily intended to promote it in Australia at the time, it was just a quirk of iTunes, which was often region-locked with its available material, but tended to just release things in every country for a period of time before clamping down. A lot of Australian albums would be available in the US for a day or a week, or something like that. "Sadnecessary" was released in May 2013, so it was there for a long time, but at some point after I downloaded "Stolen Dance", it was gone.

They had a good reason for this as it turns out, because "Stolen Dance" had started becoming a hit. It was a real shock to the system for me to see it on the iTunes chart, and to hear the song on triple j, the only catch is that it was not my beautiful wife, nor my beautiful "Stolen Dance", but a radio edit. The original song is a bit over 5 minutes long, while the edit cuts nearly two minutes off of it, as well as generally tinkering with the mixing. The edit feels a little faster, a little lighter, and very different all up. The way the guitar comes back in on the song's second chorus and the extra guitar bit at the end of the song are wildly unexpected portions to me, but maybe to someone who came up with this one are just regular pieces of the puzzle. I actually feel uniquely unqualified to judge this radio edit because the original version was just burned into me from months and months of repeat listens. "Stolen Dance" is a song that receives sometimes very strong reactions and I just can't really confide or disparage any of those because they almost always came from a different place than I did. I find myself wondering if I would have the same feelings I do now for this song if I hadn't heard the album version first, and also spent a very long time accustomed to it being forever just an obscure song on my playlists. As I've said before, new artists just emerging with a hit tends to breed cynicism, and I'm not entirely immune to it either, so who's to say I'd welcome Milky Chance into my life. More than that though, I just feel like the album version hits harder for me in general. It feels warmer, and most importantly, gives everything space to breathe. Rarely does a radio edit feel more like it's rushing to get things done than in this case.

The irony in all of this is that in the long run it just has not mattered. As has often happened in the age of streaming, the album version finds its ease of access winning over the lazier parts of the public and their memory before it just becomes the default. It's a bit like how more people listen to the original version of "Missing" by Everything But The Girl, rather than the Todd Terry remix that made it a hit in the '90s. If it sounds enough like what you vaguely remember, before you know it, it'll just supplant those previous memories. Actually, the radio edit that was big in Australia is a little hard to come by now, because it's not on Spotify. I can't find it on YouTube or iTunes anymore. I only have a copy via a friend who bought it on iTunes back in early 2014, so now I can't help but wonder if anyone who heard the song a lot in 2014 has noticed that the song never feels quite right anymore. The 'new' radio edit that's available feels more like the original version production-wise. I'd be very surprised if someone who felt strongly about the song back in 2014 and suddenly changed their tune via the added prominence of the album version, which is so popular that it's actually been spotted in the Spotify chart of late. I guess in the long term I've gotten my wish, so now I'll go back to reminding everyone that the version of "We No Speak Americano" that triple j played is probably not the one you remember. In any case, "Stolen Dance" is another "Knights of Cydonia" case, where the song was only eligible because triple j played a newer version of the song, but admittedly I'd have never known any of this if I hadn't come across the song 6 months early.

Sometimes I think what made the song work most for me is that I never felt inclined to put it in a box. The song just didn't really fit in with anything and I bought into it on the melody that drew me in. It's a folktronica song so it straddles the line, but it seems to often get derisively dismissed for being some variety of an acoustic guitar guy song, or just another one in the line of tropical house influenced songs that the charts were going crazy for at the time. I feel like it always reduces the song to less than it is. I hear people talking about whether or not the chorus is good and for me I'm just grooving to the intricate guitar picking. Milky Chance just weren't remotely close to being a mainstream entity to me at the time so I never had to consider what would happen if suddenly the whole country had to forcibly be put onto the song. It was an enormous success, nonetheless, even getting to #2 in Australia despite lagging behind considerably in most English speaking countries. Maybe triple j latching onto it early managed to convince enough people of Milky Chance having some sort of cool indie cred. In any case, the fruits of deleting the album on iTunes meant that they were able to put it back up for pre-order when "Stolen Dance" became a hit and it managed to debut in the top 10 in Australia, which possibly never would have happened if they just left the album sitting there available the whole time. A classic story of artificial scarcity.

I'll admit that I do also enjoy Clemens' unique singing style. It's very abrasive and cuts right through the generally chill demeanour of the song. He loves emphasizing random words out of nowhere but I think it makes the song stick in your head a bit more. The song's chorus has at least 6 different lines that are memorable non-sequiturs. It's been very fun to watch the rest of the world catch up on a very old in-joke we've had, where the chorus inexplicably suggests bringing it on the floormf. He's clearly saying 'I've', and if you try to mash those two words closely together, you might be surprised at what happens. It's very boba though, much like this song in general. No, I don't remember if I ranked this song based on the album version, radio edit, or some sort of all-encompassing vibe, it was simply so long ago. Now that the radio edit is so completely obscure and forgotten though, it's managing to give me back the feeling that listening to "Stolen Dance" in 2013 was like.