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.
So, in response to that particular criticism of a criticism, I've decided to figure out where it all went wrong and revisit every song on every Triple J Hottest 100 countdown in chronological order. I grew up in the 1990s, and I guess alternative music from that era has some nostalgic value for me - the adults in my life usually had JJJ on the radio, in the car or at home, and they owned a few Hottest 100 CDs as well. At some point during high school, put off by the omniscient level of play (in shops, cars, school venues, on TV) given to early-to-mid-2000s pop music, I drifted into niche musical interests and almost forgot Triple J existed for about a decade. In the early 2010s, as an arts undergrad, I was forcibly exposed to it again ('rediscovered' doesn't feel like quite the right word), and struggled to find anything I related to in any marginal way amidst the morass of hipster-y, off-key, stomp-clap-hey alternative music that seemed to emerge at about that time - think Bon Iver, Imagine Dragons, Angus & Julia Stone, Animal Collective, etc. As much as nostalgia may have played a role in my figurative loss of Triple J innocence, you can still see a pretty clear change in the type of music that got radio play from even the early 90s to the latter part of that decade. Compare Nirvana to Limp Bizkit and you'll see what I mean - compare them to Silverchair, even. Depth and anger and passion and consciousness of the world seemed to get flattened. Maybe commercialised would be a better word.
For me, then, that narrows it down to a fairly specific time frame - I like a lot of the music on the 1997 Hottest 100 release, and I remember listening to Triple J while at uni in 2011 and wanting to curl up and fall into a coma. The occasional perusal of countdowns in more recent years, with the odd exception, hasn't been been encouraging either.
The first three Hottest 100s, from 1989 to 1991, were more 'voted best songs of all-time' compilations than specific to the years in question, so I'm going to jump straight to the first 'songs-of-that-year' Hottest 100 in 1993 (they skipped 1992). That said, those three broader countdowns are all beautiful selections of alternative music from the two-to-three decades up to that point, and which are worth checking out in their own right, all providing an interesting insight to the tastes of JJJ's Generation X listenership during that time (bands like The Smiths, Joy Division, Hunters & Collectors and the Jam are all well-represented, and Smells Like Teen Spirit won the top spot in 1991 regardless). I'm already on a melancholic, somewhat grey and rain-filled cloud of nostalgia going through these earlier entries, in the next post I'll tackle the first 10 songs - from #100 to 91 - of the 1993 Hottest 100.
The posts so far:
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