TRIPLE J’s Hottest 100 has concluded for another year … and cue the outrage.
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It’s a time-honoured tradition that the announcement of the #1 song (and indeed the whole 100) will stir up all manner of vitriol, disgust or a general shrugging of the shoulders and scratching of the head.
This year is no different, with the Sydney Morning Herald’s Bernard Zuel snarkily lamenting that the countdown was free of risk, surprises or controversy.
The winning band, The Rubens, quite rightly responded that the result was merely the will of the people and not meant to be surprising.
So it might not be a controversial or risky compilation list, but there are still lessons to be learnt from the 2015 poll, which featured more than two million votes.
The Standard’s Hottest 100 enthusiast and music journalist MATT NEAL – who predicted eight of the top 10 – looks at what we can take away from the 2015 countdown.
Australia loves Australians on Australia Day
Firstly, an apology to The Rubens – in my predictions article, I wrote “there’s something about (Hoops) that feels top 10 as opposed to #1”, although I also did write “there’s no real reason why (The Rubens) can’t win”. Anyway, as is typical of the poll these days, Aussie acts rated highly, taking up 54 spots in the poll (the second most ever), including five and a half in the top 10 (Chet Faker teamed up with a Brit). The Rubens’ Hoops is the third consecutive Aussie song to win, and it’s the 13th time Australia has won out of a possible 21 countdowns.
The sound of 2015 is…
… that higher-than-normal pitched vocal sampling trick, where a (usually female) voice is run through a synth or a program and pitched up and chopped around. You know the one, right? It’s in Major Lazer’s Lean On, Hermitude’s The Buzz, DJ Snake’s Middle, SAFIA’s Embracing Me, Snakehips’ All My Friends, Tkay Maidza’s M.O.B., Jai Wolf’s Indian Summer, Purity Ring’s Begin Again, What So Not's Gemini, Golden Features’ No One, and it’s also potentially in Vallis Alps’ Young, Chrvches’ Leave A Trace, Alison Wonderland’s Run, and MØ’s Kamikaze, but it’s hard to tell. You can also count the sped up vocal sample in Urthboy’s Long Loud Hours. We are at the peak of this trick – expect it to disappear in the next few years. And I’m not saying it’s a bad trick, but it seemed to be everywhere in 2015.
This song is probably the best example of what I’m talking about:
Golden oldies
The Hottest 100 is increasingly a young man’s (and woman’s) game. So it’s nice to see some old dogs getting amongst it. While it’s a bit of technicality, 71-year-old Rod Stewart made it into the countdown – he’s listed as a featured artist on A$AP Rocky’s track Everyday, which came in at #80. Stewart’s performance is actually a sample from Aussie band Python Lee Jackson’s 1972 track In A Broken Dream, which is sung by Stewart, who was brought in as a session singer for the track. Not counting samples, the oldest person ever to appear in the countdown is John Lee Hooker, who was 76 when he played on Van Morrison’s Gloria, which scraped in at #100 in the inaugural 1993 countdown. Next best is William Shatner who was 72 when his cover of Pulp’s Common People came in at #21.
But this year the real veterans were The Chemical Brothers, who have been active since 1991 and who first appeared in the countdown in 1996 when their track Setting Sun reached #26. They teamed up with Q-Tip (who’s been making music since 1988) for the #46 song Go this year. This pairing previously hit #65 in 2004 with Galvanize.
There are a few other veterans in this year’s mix, but the granddaddys of them were Grandmaster Caz, Kool Moe Dee, and Grandmaster Melle Mel, who have a combined 120 years in the rap game. They guested on Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ #18 song Downtown.
Metal is big in the Australian states
Metal is not traditionally a big part of the Hottest 100. Back in the ‘90s the likes of Tool, Metallica, Marilyn Manson and Korn made semi-regular appearances – they all appeared in 1997, with Tool reaching #2 that year. But since then, fans of heavy music have only delivered a smattering of “brutality” into the countdown. The 2015 was a pretty solid year for metalcore though, with six tracks making the 100 courtesy of The Amity Affliction (#25), Bring Me The Horizon (#45, #86, #99) and Parkway Drive (#48, #58). However, if you used recent Hottest 100s as a guide, you would be forgiven for thinking they were the only three metal bands triple j cared about as they’re the only metal bands (oh and Karnivool) to poll in the past five years.
Women
Equality between the sexes is always a big issue in the wake of the Hottest 100. And yes, it would be nice to see more women in the countdown, but triple j listeners are voting for their favourite songs of the year, nothing more. In terms of female representation, 37 tracks in this year’s countdown featured a woman on vocals, including three in the top 10. The highest placed female solo artist was Meg Mac (#11) while Courtney Barnett had the most songs in the countdown with four – a feat she shared this year with Tame Impala.
So much for the swarm theory
The swarm theory goes that the winner of the Hottest 100 tends to have a numerous songs in the countdown – ie. if you put all your eggs in one basket you’re less likely to win. The Rubens is the first band since Augie March in 2006 to top the poll without having any other tracks poll. It’s only the fifth time that has happened, hence the emergence of this so-called swarm theory. But the really strange thing this time is that The Rubens were probably expected to have more than one song in the top 100 – it’s more than likely they’ll have a couple of songs in the 101-200 countdown when that’s played.
This is one of the other Rubens’ tunes that was expected to poll:
Featured
One of the most common words heard during the countdown was “featuring”. A staggering 24 tracks – that’s almost a quarter – were songs “featuring” a guest artist or two or three. I don’t know what this means, but it’s a thing.
And why wasn’t this song higher than #74?
Previous winners
The three previous winners – Vance Joy, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, and Chet Faker – popped up in the countdown, all in the top 20. That’s the most since 2009, when four previous winners returned to the countdown. From ‘99 to ‘05 there was usually two or three past champions back in the poll, but from 2006 onwards this became less common (2009 was a statistical aberration), with only one or two (or zero) previous winners making the poll. There could be a number factors behind this, including the fact triple j tend to move on from bands they have previously championed when the station decides the band is past its used-by-date (see Coldplay, U2, The Offspring, Green Day, etc.).