#34

#34. Baker Boy (feat Yirrmal) - Marryuna (#17, 2017)

8th of 2017

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This is some boring statistical stuff, but I always feel compelled to note that data is always far more complicated than it appears on the surface. Part of the difficulty in analysing trends and identifying sources is that you have to contend with multiple distractions tugging in every which way at every moment which serve only to distract you from the other ones. Music charts of late feel boring because it appears that people are content to listen to the same songs, week in week out, but in reality, they're always jumping around and it's just the songs that have the most possible people to pool from that do the best. You could say that such and such is benefitting from a playlist or an algorithm, but when it boils down to it, everything is, and it's just a matter of the difference in severity of it that claims the difference. If you could tangibly break it all down and look at it from day to day and week to week, it might start to look more interesting.

I bring this up because Hottest 100 predicting tended to happen in a single fashion: collate all available data and then infer from past behaviour how to extrapolate it to a full voter set. You'd learn things, like Bring Me The Horizon fans being very eager to post their votes online, Drake fans not as much. Carefully putting together those gut feelings along with hard evidence of what has been voted for will allow you to pretty accurately predict what the whole list ends up looking like, even if there are some two million votes you aren't privy to.

The main thing this has also done is that it's occasionally turned the mystery of the top spot into a foregone conclusion long before it's aired. Artists will have multiple entries and you'll be inclined to extrapolate all their entries just based on how their first song goes. If it's higher than you expect, then that's probably true of the rest of their songs. Ocean Alley possibly had the whole thing sewn up in record time when they surpassed expectations right away with "Happy Sad" (#784) starting at #100. Seems safe to think that their already predicted #1 "Confidence" (#521) had it in the bag.

It doesn't always work like that. Sample data largely works best when there isn't any good reason for the full data to differ too much from what you have. Given a large enough amount and a decent percentage, there's a case to be made that any 1% sample will end up looking pretty similar to another one. The main problem is that it's far too simple to extrapolate on the most basic of terms, you're going to inevitably simplify a far more complicated system and come up short. Case in point, Baker Boy landed early in the countdown with "Cloud 9" (#384). The appearance of that song was considerably higher than I had projected it on my own stats (although I see that Warm Tunas had it spot on). From that, I'd reasonably infer that "Marryuna" would also outpace its expected position, except that it didn't. Both my stats and Warm Tunas have it landing quite a few spaces above where it ended up, which is odd I suppose. I think at the end of the day, you just have to conclude that the supposedly shared effect where an artist's songs move away from the projection in the same direction does exist, but once you get to the pointy end, it gets drowned out by so much similar noise that you might not notice it. The offline majority support Baker Boy a lot, but just not quite as much as those big hits that landed higher up.

I'm sorry, that's a lot to lead into the entry for "Marryuna". The truth is that I've found it hard to find much to say about this song. It's fantastic, of course, but at the end of the day, it's a song that doesn't require much to be said about it. The title translates to 'Let's Dance' in English, and it's yet another feel good Baker Boy song that absolutely thrives on its permeating vibes. It's pretty much the song that made him a star because one listen is all it takes to immediately get on board. I understand the desire to want to release more music, but it's really a mission statement that sums everything up right away. Baker Boy swaps between English and Yolŋu and never skips a beat. He's aided by Yirrmal who has lineage in Yothu Yindi (Dr Yunupingu is his grandfather). He's the one who provides the pre-chorus, the title lyric, and the most universal lyric of all, with his healthy dosage of la's.