Fire's Flaming Hot Takes

Hey guys, it’s Fire here with the monthly Chill Pick article!! I hope you guys had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are enjoying Black Friday! If you can take a minute or two of your time to distract yourselves from the discounts and read this article, I’ve got a real surprise banger for you to enjoy!! It’s not even a discount offer, it’s 100% free!! Hoang - Are You Still There Release: November 7, 2025 Genres: Melodic Bass, J-Pop, Synthpop So if you know me on Pulse, you might know that I was really into Hoang’s music in the COVID-19 lockdowns, to the point where he had many, many hits on my old personal chart haha. In the years since though, I’ve admittedly not had the same love for his music as I did back in 2020-21. Part of it is my music taste evolving, but part of it is also because one of Hoang’s worst pitfalls is that he has a really bad tendency to recycle his sound over and over, essentially making the exact same song over and over with the only real difference between songs bein...

  Happy Halloween everyone!! It’s Fire back with the monthly chill pick article!! Unfortunately I don’t have any spooky Chill Picks to highlight here, but I do have a song I think would absolutely go off at any Halloween party this year. So what’s the song? BLACKPINK - JUMP Release: July 11, 2025 Genres: K-Pop, Hypertechno, Dance-Pop, Hard Techno, Jersey Club, Pop Rap, Euro Trance, Romanian Popcorn At this point I don’t think I need to introduce BLACKPINK to you guys. You know these girls, right? They’re a K-pop girl group who have (had?) a very aggressive stanbase (as all K-pop groups tend to have, really)? I’ll be frank, I never considered myself a BLACKPINK fan (please don’t kill me BLACKPINK stans). I liked one song from them prior to this, the Lady Gaga collab “Sour Candy” from 2020. And honestly for the most part, I found them really obnoxious. But they split up on solo ventures last year, Rose easily seeing the most solo success of the members. That said, they got back toget...

  The Top 10 Best Hit Songs of 1997 Hi everyone!! It’s Fire, back with another list! Today, we’re looking at the top 10 BEST hit songs of 1997!! As mentioned in my worst list, 1997 is probably the worst year of the 90s that I looked at so far. But let’s ask the bigger question: Why? I’m not sure there’s a simple answer...there’s plenty of songs I liked so I can’t really call it a result of an absence of good and the lows aren’t really worse than the lows of 1996 or 98 (okay maybe worse than 98). Then I took a second look at the Wikipedia article that showed the YE list for 1997 and I instantly saw why: “The list is also notable for featuring 14 songs that appeared in 1996's list, repeat onto to this list.[...]Only four more year-end [lists] would repeat the same feat, that being 2010, 2016, 2018 and 2022.” As soon as I saw that line, it immediately validated my gut instinct as I was listening to this year-end list. That being that it reminded me of 2025. A lot of the songs on this ...

  The Top 10 Worst Hit Songs of 1997 Hey guys, it’s Fire from Fire’s Flaming Hot Takes back with another year-end list!! Today, we’re looking at the top 10 worst hit songs of 1997!! Time for a 90s dive? Yeah, since the 1997 Hot 100 rankdown opened up on Pulse, I guess the next decade I’m exploring for pop music is the 90s. I’m honestly kinda curious to see where this dive takes me as growing up I had two Hot AC stations in my area and they would often overplay 90s throwbacks for me as a kid resulting in me getting very sick of a lot of the songs they played. This also sorta led to me concluding that the 90s were the worst decade for pop music since my exposure to 90s music was so narrow. However, even in the two 90s years I’ve done best and worst lists for so far, I found plenty of gems; 1996 is still up there as one of the best years for pop music I’ve ever looked at and 1998 isn’t all that far behind! Now 1997, it feels like a year that’s a bit glossed over by a lot of people. I ...