Triple J Hottest 100 Countdown Countdown: 1993, #60 - 51

Welcome to another entry in my JJJ Hottest 100 Countdown Countdown series, in which I attempt to put both my own personal nostalgia and our collective nostalgia under a microscope, with the intent to see when exactly the titular Triple J flew the coop and became the subject of general hate and mockery that it is today (amongst many of its former listeners at least - I assume there are a few people who still listen to it and enjoy the music they play). To do this, I plan to review every single song in every JJJ Hottest 100 from 1993 until the present day. My hope is that this will prove to be, at the least, an educational experience for anyone who wants to know about the development (or chronic spiral, depending on your perspective) of alternative music in Australia over the past thirty years, and to provide a means to clarify why exactly so many people complain about the countdown each year. You can find the previous entry here, in which I review songs #70 to 61 in the 1993 countdown.

So far, I've been pleasantly surprised by the variety of interesting, thoughtful, dynamic alternative genres represented in 1993's countdown, including many smooth genre-fusion efforts. It has been a sort of rediscovery of music that made an impact on me personally during that decade, but which I never kept track of (probably because I was in kindergarten and Napster didn't exist) and which disappeared from my conscious mind until resurfacing now. However, there has also been a lot more mediocre, up-tempo soft indie rock that I remembered, often so absent of weight or solidity that I struggled to commit it to memory immediately after listening to it - which is a problem when you're trying to write a couple of paragraphs about the songs in question. At the very low end (and not the good kind of low end) I have identified - taxonomically, you could say - a sub-sub-genre of attitude-over-substance loud, overtly offensive but subtextually barren alternative rock music, and each post so far has dealt with a few of these. It's clear that the Limp Bizkit impulse - to react against the popularity of grunge by taking the anger and removing its target - was well and truly bubbling away by 1993, well before Fred Durst had emerged from the swamp. Needless to say, I'm hoping the latter two categories recede and the first moves forward in greater prominence as we get closer to the singles that the alternative music-listening Australian public actually voted for in 1993.

60: "Distant Sun" - Crowded House

 

I feel like my standards, when it comes to music, have definitely been lowered over the course of this series. After listening to boring, upbeat, depthless indie pop-rock single after single anything remotely deep and thoughtful brings forth an immediate sensation of relief. It's still lightweight upbeat indie-rock (at the Things of Stone and Wood end of the spectrum), but there's a bit more nuance, more tonal complexity. Which is what you would expect from a band like Crowded House, which has a fair amount more critical respect and cultural cache than many of the nameless one-hit (or not even a hit) indie wonders I've covered in this countdown. Lyrically, despite the fact it is, at it's core, essentially a mopey love song, it's complex enough to not be off-putting. "Seven worlds will collide whenever I'm by your side, dust from a distant sun will shower over everyone" strikes me as pretty impressive poetry. Today, it's easy to imagine it being oversold by the vocalist - imagine the Killers singing this - but Neil Finn undersells it and the song doesn't sound overly dramatic. I'm not going to compare Finn or this song to grunge, he was a good ten or so years older than most of the grunge musicians who were his contemporaries on the charts at this point, and he was clearly doing his own thing, borrowing bits and pieces of what made it into the charts along the way.

Triple J Hottest 100 Countdown Countdown: 1993, #70 - 61

Now on to entry #4 of my attempt to review every song in every Triple JJJ Hottest 100, from 1993 to the present day (not counting the first few, which were beautiful catalogues of classic alternative music taken from multiple different years, and which tended to repeatedly leave the same songs clustered toward the top each year). This is is a response to the cyclical whinge about the Hottest 100 having lost the plot at some vague point in the distant past (usually since the mid-90s - my vote would be between 1997 and 1998). The idea is that by actually examining each song in detail, I would learn more about the cultural moment and general range of music when many of us believed the Hottest 100 to be actually good, and also about my own tastes and the degree to which they may or may not be informed/affected by nostalgia.

So far in this series, I have been both positively surprised by the depth and variety of music in 1993's countdown, with more reggae than I remember being on the radio during the period and a lot of interesting alternative rock (like #71 on the last post). However, there has also been an unfortunately sizeable contingent of unpleasantly of-its-time pop-EDM, and a Cruel Sea, if you will, of soft, upbeat alt rock, comprised of various shades of creamy beige mediocrity. What exactly did twenty-something Gen Xers get out of this, I've often found myself thinking, while trying to regurgitate a couple of paragraphs about some proto-indie R&B-rock zephyr that blew in and out in less than three minutes, like a splash of acid rain on a carpark somewhere in Adelaide. And also: will anyone actually read this, apart from the struggling indie musicians from the list in question, who are now in their fifties and sixties and have a bandcamp, trying to remind contemporary audiences of their existence while probably working as a SOSE teacher in high school or something?

 

70: "Sleepy Head (Serene Machine)" - Ed Kuepper

 

This is a good, deep, melodic indie rock song. I would put it a couple of notches ahead of the standard indie rock I've covered in this series so far, mainly because its tone actually has depth and isn't completely flat and upbeat, and also because (perhaps as a consequence) I actually enjoy listening to it. I've never heard much by Kuepper before, or from the Saints, and Sleepy Head is a pleasant surprise. His slightly off-key singing voice reminds me of the affectations in a lot of indie rock from the early 2010s, but there's more depth and heart-feeling in his delivery here. It doesn't feel put on. Lyrically, there doesn't seem to be much going on here, just some embittered ruminations directed at an ex, maybe some vague sociopolitical commentary. He sings about "sweet talkers with gems for eyes" and "two cent friends with their pretend faith." There's enough cynicism to give the song depth, but it's vague enough to keep the general tone of the song cerebral. 

Triple J Hottest 100 Countdown Countdown: 1993, #80 - 71

 And now on to entry #3 in my attempt to go through and review every song on every Trip J Hottest 100 Countdown, from 1993 to the present. The intent has been to find the exact point, if possible, where alternative music in Australia started fall into vague, atonal, apolitical, syrupy irrelevance - or when JJJ started to push it in that direction (you can read more about the rationale here). So far, it's been an interesting step back into nostalgia, while also casting a sharp light on my preconceptions of what alternative music was like during this time. I'm hoping the general eclecticism continues - there's been an decent sampling of non-mainstream genres of music so far - and I'm hoping the run of generic, middle-of-the-road alternative rock (with strong Australian representation) gets a bit more interesting and more vital than it has been so far. I'm also curious to see if there are any more entries that are just outright bad in the same vein as "Three Little Pigs" by Green Jelly. You can read my previous entry in this series, which covers #90 - 81 in the 1993 Hottest 100, here.

 

80: "Rooster" - Alice in Chains

 

This is solid grunge from the period, with a strong, meaningful subtext. The music video has plenty of graphic violence, and perhaps the lyrics are also slightly on the nose, but the passion and general directness give these other qualities a justification. This got plenty of radio play back in the day and, until I started looking at the song in preparation for this post, I didn't have any conception that it was a social issues song. Maybe at some level it seeped in. Jerry Cantrell based "Rooster" on his father, who was a Vietnam War veteran and whose trauma had contributed to a rift in the family that led Cantrell to be temporarily homeless. As Yates notes in the Louder Sound article, when you realise this, it makes the ambiguity of Cantrell's perspective in the song interesting. He approaches the subject matter sympathetically, but with a certain amount of critical distance. I wonder if it was weird for him to play this in front of large audiences while touring, or if it was therapeutic. He does trot out the popularly believed (and promoted) narrative that Vietnam veterans were spat on and insulted by anti-war protestors upon their return, which apparently has little basis in reality. You could read into that more ambiguity, or maybe it has something to do with culturally-mediated perceptions past events. Lots of material here for the sort of essay a high school English teacher might dole out to get the student body interested in textual interpretation. I see enough Gen Zs in town wearing Nirvana t-shirts for it to be conceivable that some teenagers today might have heard of Alice in Chains as well.

Musically, "Rooster" is strong and appealing, though a little too crisp. When Layne Staley (who performs the song - Cantrell wrote the lyrics) yells during the chorus he sounds like he's going for something like what Kurt Cobain does, but he ends up sounding more like Axl Rose doing an impression of Eddie Vedder. I never really thought much about how much the trashier arena rock of the eighties bled into or influence the alternative rock of the early 90s. Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins both developed their own sound, and drew from a lot of other sources to do that, so listening to them makes it sound like there was a clean break. But Alice in Chains sounds more of its time. The feedback, the lyrical content, the quiet-to-loud Nivana/Pixies thing, the more drawn out and thoughtful pacing place it comfortably within the alternative rock of the period, but they don't totally escape the kind of music that was charting a few years earlier. Cantrell himself started in a local Seattle glam rock band, then moved into the kind of music being played by his contemporaries in the city. None of this is meant critically. It's a good, powerful, personal song (and it's nice to have something with enough depth to write paragraphs about with ease). The backing vocals are nice as well.

Triple J Hottest 100 Countdown Countdown: 1993, #90 - 81

 This is entry number 2 of my attempt to go through every song of every Triple J Hottest 100, starting with 1993, in the process figuring out exactly when Triple J died on its arse (figuratively speaking). For at least ten to fifteen years now this particular countdown has elicited a lot of criticism and general negativity among the public, and this year has been particularly bad. I started writing this series as an attempt to do something more than just complain, to better understand what alternative music used to be in this country and what it has become. You can see the previous entry in this series here, and a general overview of the rationale behind it in this introductory post. In this entry, I'll go through the songs that came in from 90 to 81 in the 1993 Hottest 100.

So far, I've been pleasantly surprised. The glasses I was wearing to view the past turned out not to be especially rose-coloured - though the general run of songs covered so far were, overall, more upbeat and generally happier than the mental image I had of alternative music in the early 90s (comprised of grunge and EDM, mainly). None of the songs I've covered have been ones that I completely hate (though some definitely inspire more cynicism than others). There's been a good range of genres, including a lot of light indie rock, some folksy or bluesier numbers, and more reggae than I remember being in the charts at that time. Looking ahead now, I'm hopeful that this diversity of musical styles is going to continue for the next ten songs.

90: "For Tomorrow" - Blur

 

Finally, something with a more pronounced low end. Apparently "For Tomorrow" was one of several songs Blur wrote as a reaction to grunge, which was enough of a trend amongst alternative rock bands that it became its own genre (post-grunge). If you can get past Damon Albarn's accent, the awful chorus (Albarn just singing 'la la la la la' on repeat), and the absence of anything else of significance in the lyrics, this actually quite a good song. The beat is good, I like the string section that chimes in and out. A song like this should sound more vacuous and corporate than it does. The lyrics are just vague and London-y, like they were going for something that sounds like it could have been written by Paul McCartney, with maybe just enough hints of subtext and metaphor that it could have been used by Tony Blair's election campaign a few years later. I think that's the most fitting way to describe it: New Labour post-grunge.

Triple J Hottest 100 Countdown Countdown: 1993, #100 - 91

 

Welcome all - this is the first entry in my attempt to review every song on every Triple J Hottest 100 Countdown (apart from the first three all-time countdowns) and, in the process, figure out when exactly it started to fall off a cliff. The rough format I'm going with is a general response to each song, attempting to draw together some collective insights along the way, followed by a general overview of what I've discovered along this journey so far. There is enough nostalgia for this period of music, even among Gen Zs today, that I don't completely feel like I'm blinded by nostalgia - things in the world of music, much as in the world of everything else, have gotten distinctly worse in the past thirty years. This series of blog posts is intended as an exploration of that decline. And also an exploration of why I've come to feel like there is a decline in a first place. Maybe I just have a chip on my shoulder, who knows. Let's dive into it.

 

The Triple J Hottest 100

 

In the wake of this year's ongoing, cyclical discussion about Australia Day, I've been revisiting the JJJ music countdown that has traditionally accompanied it (and which, for a lot of millennials, has been the only part of the day that's worth any amount of celebration). It has become a cliche to make fun of people who think the the Hottest 100 (and Triple J generally) went downhill at some indeterminate point at the past. For what it's worth, I'm one of those people with that belief, and I also happen to think said criticism has its roots in one of the worst Australian millennial cultural pathologies: that having strong opinions about any form of popular culture - music in particular - is pointless. It's just music, everyone has their own tastes, art is subjective, I'm very mature, etc. There are other commentators who think that more good alternative music is being produced now than ever, and who feel strongly about that. I don't particularly agree, but at least they're not elevating superficiality to the level of a virtue. If you're not passionate about music and you don't have hours of spare time each day to spend contemplating specifically what you want out of it, to construct your own philosophy of what music should be and what you want to hear, that's fine, but please do not stand in the way of the fanaticism of those of us who do. Being agreeable isn't moral, it's just a coping mechanism. Do you disagree with me about this? Good. Send me an email, it looks like we have some common ground.

Madoff: The Monster of Wall Street (2023)

 I'd heard this guy's name in the news from time to time during the financial crisis, and as a point of reference by political commentators I follow since, but I'd never looked into exactly who he was and the substance of what he did wrong. Joe Berlinger, who has taken a sea change from creating high-profile serial killer documentaries for Netflix, has put together a slow-burning, ultimately enthralling overview of Madoff as a person and the crimes he committed. In addition to a lot of entertaining, colourful commentary provided by a range of interested parties (including biographers, FBI agents, former employees and a mathematician who can hold a grudge), Berlinger also does a solid job of making Madoff's crime's comprehensible to the layman. There is something intrinsically satisfying about this: genuine educational content that strips away layers of artificially-imposed complexity and reveals the simple truth about a broad abuse of power. 

The con itself was actually just a very simple Ponzi scheme - Madoff always ran a legitimate business, but from early on would take on unofficial consultations for private investment portfolios. At one point, he simply stopped investing the money, and kept it for himself. At its peak, this led to Madoff managing billions of dollars belonging to clients from a broad range of backgrounds. When occasionally pressed for proof of financial transactions and investments, he would get people who worked for him to forge evidence. Most of the time, however, he leveraged his own prestige to attract clients and the associated exclusivity of his portfolio to ward off scrutiny. In one particularly damning example of this kind of manipulation, Madoff essentially took one of the few country clubs in Palm Beach, Florida that was open to Jews in the 1960s and '70s. (One interviewee entertainingly notes that success in Wall Street is measured by one's ability to spend half the year playing golf in Florida. He didn't mention Trump and he didn't need to.) In turn, he cultivated a sense of trust amongst its members in a place and time where they couldn't trust many others, and exploited that to get clients and enhance his own exclusivity. If you asked questions you were out. He used his personal magnetism to avoid serious scrutiny at various other points, at one point boldly making himself available, sans any team of lawyers, to a group of young forensic accountants appointed to audit his company by a regulatory agency, as the sole point of contact. This apparently had the effect of scaring them off from finding any serious indiscretions, though his prominence in said regulatory agencies and his ability to rub shoulders with their directors probably played a role as well.

The aforementioned admixture of personalities, both those profiled and those interviewed, adds a layer of richness to the documentary's proceedings. One highlight that stands out in my mind is the FBI agent who first approached Madoff's office and fancied himself an amateur art critic - the Lichtenstein prints of a bull by his desk, ostensibly referring to a bull market, he confidently describes as symbolic for 'bullshit,' and a large sculpture of a screw by the window means 'screw you.' This same guy channels another Bernie at the series's finish and unequivocally denounces the lack of consequences for the banks and other Wall Street institutions that profited from Madoff's ponzi scheme as unfair, as do most of the other interviewees. A Madoff biographer guides the series along with an impressive amount of detail about the man, from a surprisingly sympathetic perspective, but without losing sight of the seriousness of his failings. Harry Markopolos, a religiously committed nerdy forensic accountant and mathematician, discovered Madoff's ponzi scheme early on and pressed the regulatory agencies to do something about it for more than a decade, and remains bitter about the lack of accountability after finally been proven right. The unfiltered honesty of Markopolos and others interviewed, and the unvarnished honesty of the documentary's conclusion about the ecosystem that facilitated Madoff's crimes, makes the series watching in and of itself.

Some elements do not work particularly well, but I'm willing to be lenient given the number of terrible documentaries I've seen recently that do the same thing but worse. All re-enactments for documentaries are terrible, but there now  seems to be an expectation that they have them, and the ones produced for Madoff aren't as bad as they could have been. The silent, slow-motion shots of Madoff waltzing through his main floor on the Lipstick Building in Manhattan, magnanimous and supercilious, cigar firmly suckled, make the much more interesting real world feel sterile and Hollywood. The chosen actors look more like actors than real people, and ultimately less interesting, though with some interesting quirks of their own that don't quite fit. Joseph Scotto's sparkling white hairpiece, for instance, is much like an abstract sculpture you might find in the lobby of an office building in Manhattan. As Madoff gets older, it grows, in turn, more buoyant and luminescent. It looks like a unicorn's tail. Scotto is an odd choice to play Madoff - playing the man as though he's the lead in a biopic and, a la Al Pacino, seems to have decided to use the opportunity as an excuse to play to his own eccentricities and beats as an actor in lieu of truth to life. His Alan Rickman-esque acerbic self-possession and smugness doesn't quite match up with the Madoff we see in documentary footage, who came across as more charismatic, more gregariousness, his long-term con maintained behind a convincing, more personable veneer. If this was a movie about Madoff and Scotto walked into the frame I would immediately know he's the bad guy. If I was investing twenty million dollars in some behind-the-counter portfolio and this guy greeted me at the door of his office I would turn and run. And in reality that obviously wasn't what happened. People seemed to genuinely like Madoff - many of the investors and employees interviewed made efforts to separate the man himself from the crimes he committed, unable or unwilling to fully reconcile the two. 

 On the balance, however, Madoff was surprisingly entertaining - and insightful. Berlinger could have done more, and there's clearly a much broader world of corruption, which facilitated Madoff's ascension and took care of him until 2008, that isn't deal with by the series, but what it sets its eyes to is interesting enough to be worth a look.