#66

#66. BENEE - Evil Spider (#51, 2019)

4th of 2019

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One of the benefits of incessantly cataloguing your music listening and taste is that it gives you the chance to look back and see harbingers of the future. My taste has shifted quite a bit over the years but music itself doesn't necessarily work by my whims, so whatever it is that appeals to me now was likely circulating in some capacity in the past. The main curiosity here is investigating at what point it became clear that my primary focus shifted away from alternative rock on the heavier side to quirky indie pop of little to no consequence. It's something that's a little hard to define because there aren't clear bounds to what this really represents.

Much like how a lot of early hip-hop successes in the Hottest 100 are anchored around a rock skeleton, what you'll likely find is some edge cases that straddle the line both ways. Ali Barter is one such example, where her music is in every sense part of this world, but she's still fundamentally making rock songs, with often loud guitars and satiating that part of my interest. You can go back earlier, to artists like Sia and [redacted] who are certainly more apparent in shaping my taste, but I don't think their particular brand matches the aesthetic. We're looking at extremely obscure music without any particular star power to drive it out of its niche. We're looking at music like BENEE's early career.

In this regard, I think BENEE arrived at the perfect time for me. Right around the time when I was most susceptible to her music, as well as likely to hear it. Before her music really blew up, it looked primed to just sit in my corner, because there was nothing to suggest she was hitting the big time. As a result, we've got a brief period where it was open season, and we've got this quirked up song about being a spider sitting here.

I can't genuinely say that this is the most inconsequential song still to come on this list because I believe some are objectively less popular, but it really feels like it on vibes alone. I'm self-conscious about putting it so high up here because it just feels completely unnoteworthy next to all of its company, and yet here it sits as a representative for a specific niche of music I'm especially interested in. Like, there are so many other songs I could totally disrupt the list with if they were on the list, this is just the one that got a chance.

Maybe the most historically interesting thing about this song is that it's the single that was out when BENEE decided to change her name. I don't believe this was ever explained, and my only guess is that it needed to be easier to draw the connection between pronunciation and spelling. For a couple of years I knew her as 'Bene' and while I didn't do it myself, I can imagine some people wanting to say 'bean', and then on the other end of it, having trouble finding this 'Benny' artist they're hearing so much about. As someone who tracks play counts very ardently, it's a little bit annoying, but then last.fm finally got released from their corporate shackles lately so maybe they can fix this all up.

Much like I said about "Find An Island" (#88), "Evil Spider" does feel like a slight change of pace for BENEE compared to the two songs she released before it. It answers the mystery of whether she was ever going to make something a bit more upbeat. Change is gradual though, so it's still intrinsically a moody song. It means she gets to use both sets of tools though, so there's a genuine sorrow you feel out of the song's chorus that I don't think would come naturally to everyone. Otherwise, the fact that this song polled higher than her previous single just goes to show how much her profile increased in 12 months.