Dean Lewis - Waves

This song makes me think about a silly thing I used to do as a kid. At school there were all sorts of pathways that were just made of small, marble-sized rocks, often of alternating colours to indicate pathways. I'd scoop up a whole bunch of them with both hands, and then lightly throw them all into the air, catching all the ones that could stay in range. I would do this repeatedly with an ever decreasing amount of rocks until only one rock remained. I would marvel at this one remaining rock as if it had a remarkable quality about it, even though its status was purely arbitrary and had nothing to do with the intrinsic abilities of the rock.

You get where I'm going with this right? There's nothing overly remarkable about this song that designates why it is *the* song of its kind to receive such a push. Dean Lewis just happens to be signed to a major label who have done their standard business of making this song become that big thing.

What truly stuck out to me was hearing this song in the supermarket, the kind who have an ultra-gentrified, un-adventurous playlist that has no interest in thrilling their 'audience', but inevitably adds to the...waves of reference pools that are necessary to sustain this song's success. What this means is that there could potentially be 10 different opportunities to hear an Australian light acoustic-pop song, and rather than them all being different ones, every single one of them will be this song. There's every chance that if Dean Lewis and/or Universal doesn't get his hustle together, that 5 years down the track, there will still be places playing this one particular song, that have never once played a single other song of his. Does this make the song special? Of course not, it's just a stupid rock! 3.7