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.
100: "Gloria" - Van Morrison & John Lee Hooker
"Gloria" is a pretty unassuming start to this series, but it grows on you. If I heard this song on the radio I certainly wouldn't turn of it - it's a smooth, unobjectionable bluesy, Chicago-y rock song that initially doesn't sound especially of its time. John Lee Hooker would have been in his mid-seventies when it was released, and Van Morrison was pushing fifty. Both had played this sort of music for decades, and Gloria feels appropriately timeless. But it also has a sort of continuity with the alternative rock music that had taken off by 1993 - it almost sound like a jam, there's a garage band feel about it. And a strong low end that you start to notice a few minutes in, which gives it some corresponding depth. I don't remember hearing it on the radio at any point around then, but then it isn't particularly distinct. It sounds like good live music at a pub. Maybe that's why it did quite well in Australia (and also Ireland) specifically. I guess it makes sense that it found its way to Triple J - John Lee Hooker and Van Morrison (especially) both have their own disciples among music nerds. It sounds good, I have nothing against Gloria.
99: "Ebeneezer Goode" - The Shamen
And now for something coming from a completely different direction. I didn't know anything about these guys before doing some background reading for this post. It doesn't look like they ever made it fully into the mainstream, but The Shamen had a substantial following in their day. "Ebeneezer Goode" was apparently controversial in the UK (where they were based), and was criticised for promoting drug use. My understanding of the club scene in most UK cities in the 90s is that any track intended to be played in a nightclub inadvertently promoted drug use, so that strikes me as a somewhat moot point. But the critics weren't wrong, its lyrics - involving lots of double entendres for ecstasy - are pretty transparent. And I'm not sure I'm getting the full experience listening to it on only the strength of a cappuccino and a glass of port. Outside of this project I listen to a lot of reggae and dub, however, and I'm not convinced that, rhythmically, Ebeneezer is all that dynamic - at the time when the Shamen were gigging there was probably a better, more danceable show on down the street (Jah Shaka was playing regularly at the Rocket at around this time).
It's agreeable, in the way I find a lot of the dance/club music that entered the mainstream in the early-mid-nineties unobjectionable. On that scale it's no "Insomnia" by Faithless - it's a bit tinnier, a bit too uptempo. The synthesiser has some interesting high notes. I'm not sure if I can remember hearing it or not at the time - Ebeneezer sounds vaguely familiar, but from a distance, and not as a cohesive whole. As a kid I think I heard it playing in a Best and Less while trying on shoes. In the background of a promo for a TV show being played later in the day. It's background music and I'm not sure that it was intended as anything more. The lyrics are pretty direct about the intended means of consumption. On that note, I'm not sure how I feel about a geezer from east London with a pixie cut rapping about ecstasy (what would you call this, Dickensian house?). There's also a small guitar solo about halfway through that sounds very Nirvana-y. It's passable. Compared to a lot of club music I've heard produced recently it feels almost quaintly intellectual.
98: "Freedom" - Kev Carmody
"Freedom" is a solid, uptempo reggae (ish) tune written by Kev Carmody while he was in South Africa. It has a strong political message, contextualising the anti-Apartheid struggle with the struggle of Aboriginal people within Australia, which gives some vitality to its folksiness (he intended to play it when Nelson Mandela came to Australia in the early 90s but this never eventuated). Carmody is another figure in alternative music who, to be honest, I didn't know much about before this, only having heard his name mentioned occasionally. Probably part of the reason he isn't more publicised is because he has always been direct in his music, writing songs about injustice and oppression, including contemporary incidents of police brutality (and in one case straight-up murder which I'd never heard about - Google David Gundy). There's a deep rabbit hole of interesting, meaningful and soulful music which is worth going down and which stands out in the landscape of Australian alternative music.
Freedom itself has some cool South African-y touches about it, and the lyrics sneak up on you ("My being's my spirit, the land is my law. The industrial savages keep the oppressed so poor. Resistance will break the stealth eagle's claw, peace is much more than the absence of war"). It's a good song, one I've heard before but never identified as Carmody's or as overtly political - its jangly, carefree tone must have infiltrated at least a few spaces that would have otherwise baulked at the underlying message. I'm glad to have listened to and thought about it - the world feels like a richer place for having done so.
97: "Rubberband Girl" - Kate Bush
It isn't hard to figure out what a Kate Bush song is doing on the list. My understanding is that Bush's mainstream popularity was on the wane by this point but, like Van Morrison, she has a core group of devoted Generation X fans and I get the impression there were enough of them to get "Rubberband Girl" onto the outer rim of 1993's countdown. That said, it apparently reached #39 on the ARIA charts of that year, so it must have received a fair bit of radio play. I barely, barely remember hearing it all, at any point in time. This may be because it feels very much of the decade preceding the one in which it came out. It could have been on the Ghostbusters 2 soundtrack. One reviewer describes it as pretty heavily influenced by Prince in its production. I respect Prince's talent as a musician, but can't think of a single song by him that I actually really like. I don't mind Kate Bush more than I don't mind Prince, but I vaguely dislike this song more than I vaguely dislike Purple Rain.
There's nothing much going on here, and I'm not going to try draw anything out of the lyrics (I guess they're tonally descriptive). Hearing the kick-drum beat in the intro was like walking into an poorly ventilated office building, so I may have been a little prejudiced from the beginning, but there are a lot of touches (mainly in the production I guess) that give it a sort of sitcom theme music patina. It kind of sounds like how a poor quality transfer from NTSC to PAL looks. The music video looks like it was filmed in 1988 at the latest. Or maybe music videos generally still looked like that in 1993 and I just don't remember - regardless, I'm going to find out soon if I'm wrong about that. One point I will give in its favour is that Bush kind of screams or wails during the verse and that feels - momentarily - raw and exciting. But during the chorus she has a group of backup singers that make everything sound safe and polished again and I'm back to waiting for the song to end. Again, this is the early 90s equivalent of a respected indie musician releasing an album after a break of a few years and being generally uninterested in following current trends, which is very respectable. It's just not for me.
96: "Candy Everybody Wants" - 10,000 Maniacs
I know next to nothing about 10,000 Maniacs apart from the name, which feels like it was selected deliberately to get a good listing in the Yellow Pages. Or the soft, upbeat indie rock equivalent of the Yellow Pages. (Apparently it was named after a low budget horror film called Two Thousand Maniacs). Honestly it sounds like a lot of other inoffensive, upbeat indie pop from the
area, I would struggle to pick it out of a lineup. The guitar sounds
really nice though - a sort of high-pitched Johnny Marr-esque jangle. In retrospect, I think the horns contribute to making it sound generic (there are so many commercials that have background music similar to this), but I'm sure it sounded fresh and contemporary in 1993. I think there's a slide guitar in the chorus too. It's short
and sweet - the song breezes in and out fast enough that I'm left
struggling to think of things to write about.
Lyrically it apparently has some general commentary on consumerism/pop culture. Not too surprising, it's right there in the name, and the music video has some ironic found footage montages. So there's depth there if you want to look for it. I guess. Actually there's some ironic juxtaposition of tone and lyrical content that reminds me a bit of Kev Carmody's "Freedom" further up - lines like "If lust and hate is the candy, if blood and love taste so sweet, then we give em what they want" don't scream 'jangly post-Smiths upbeat home and contents insurance background music.' It's hard to tell how calculated this is, probably not helped by my ignorance of 10,000 Maniacs and the genre of music they fall into generally. Maybe they just wanted to keep their options open - enough indie credibility to get a listing deep down within the lower rungs of an Australian alternative music countdown, but friendly and inoffensive enough to sell to some marketing firm if things go south.
95: "Delivery Man" - The Cruel Sea
Perkins's forced attitude has to compensate for the fact that the song is ultimately major-chord orientated and upbeat (and marketable). For all the guitar work, which gives a bit of resonance and complexity, ultimately the song doesn't surprise you. The lyrics are like a more non-committal version of the Velvet Underground's "Waiting for my Man." While Lou Reed described the process of buying drugs, down to the type of hat his dealer wore, in confessional detail, Delivery Man could be about buying drugs, or could just be about a guy delivering pizza ("I'm a deliver man, I do what I can" - the hell does that mean). Which is odd, because everything about Tex Perkins's delivery indicates that he wants to be direct, and to exude attitude (1993 was also around about the time when 'attitude' became a marketing buzzword, which only raises further questions about how deliberate everything in this song is). I want to give the Cruel Sea the benefit of the doubt here and assume that this would have sounded new, exciting and provocative in 1993. There's just been so much music released since then that sounds exactly like this that those qualities, if they were ever attributable to Delivery Man, no longer make any sense in relation to this song.
94: "Sweat (A La La La La Long)" - Inner Circle
OK I definitely recognise this one. With respect to reggae as a genre (none of the offshoots - dub, ragga, dancehall, etc. - just reggae itself), there are two variants. There's reggae, and then there's roots reggae. Just reggae is a broad church, and could be said to contain the latter category as well. There are a lot of technical dimensions to what makes a song sound like reggae, maybe the biggest being the beat on the offbeat, but also the way in which the bass is foregrounded, how the guitar is played percussively, the distinctive rolling beat, the relationship between the drums and bass, and probably a hundred other things. You can tick a few of those boxes and create music that sounds like reggae, in a broad sense, and lots of people have done that. Jimmy Barnes has probably made reggae. "Land Down Under" by Men at Work is, technically (probably), a reggae song. Roots reggae, however, emerged in the mid-to-late seventies, and (at the risk of making a huge generalisation, as someone who isn't from the West Indies, isn't Black and who lives in Australia) is the kind of reggae that reggae musicians and aficionados take seriously. It came out of a growing cultural consciousness informed by the civil rights and black power struggles in the sixties and seventies, as well as Rastafarianism and its practitioners, and developed organically (through sound system rotation and a few pioneering producers) from several existing music genres in Jamaica, influenced as well by soul, jazz, funk and other types of music trickling into Jamaica from the US. Dub came from it, and fed back into it. As dancehall and its associated 'slackness' (glorification of drugs, guns, violence and other vices) emerged in the mid-eighties, roots reggae persisted, and has remained respected and practiced by a devoted community of musicians and fans across the West Indian diaspora and beyond.
"Sweat..." is very much in the first, plain 'reggae' category. I remember producer Mad Professor, in a panel discussion on his Facebook page a few years ago, talking about how, up until the late 90s, often each year you'd get a few reggae songs that would cross-over into mainstream pop music and become big hits. This is a clear case of one of those songs, and an interesting one (to me anyway). Inner Circle made plenty of roots reggae as well, dating back to the seventies and eighties, with the late roots singer Jacob Miller on vocals. Sweat is a love song without any 'rootsiness' to it as far as I can tell, but it's one put together by a group of musicians who had been playing reggae for years, who took the genre seriously and played it well. The beat is deceptively complex (try to figure out what's going on with the percussion), and the high end and low end are very pronounced in the production, meaning that the beat is particularly strong, which makes the song infectious. The vocals are good, there are little samples of ragga/dancehall, and even some dub touches at certain points. They drop everything out but the drums at the beginning and end of the song, which is something you notice after listening to a lot of sound system recordings where the operators do the same thing to emphasise different parts of the song being played.
This is a great song, I liked it as a kid, I like it now. I want roots reggae musicians like these guys to cross over again and get a paycheck (unfortunately a lot of these guys tour extensively until they die, after getting screwed over by labels and producers their whole lives - look at Michael Prophet).
I've already gone through seven songs and each one, no matter what you might think of them, has represented a type of music substantially different from the type before. At the very least I feel like this is a good reflection on the diversity of music that was around in alternative music in the early nineties in Australia (and broadcast on alternative Australian radio).
93: "Man on the Moon" - R.E.M.
This is definitely the most well-known song I've covered on the list so far. So popular and heavily played, in fact, I wonder why it's so low on the list for this year. It reach 39 on the ALIA charts, which is high, but no higher than Rubberband Girl. I remember it being on the radio all the time, beyond the nineties and into the 2000s as well. This isn't a complaint, it's a good song, very inoffensive. I was going to say timeless (compared to Rubberband Girl), but then nothing on the radio sounds like this anymore so maybe it's had its day. It doesn't grate the same way as hearing "Under the Bridge" by RHCP played for the fourth or fifth time since the week began. Michael Stipe's voice is distinct, but he's never been obnoxious or had a forced sense of attitude or persona like other rock vocalists from the same time.
Listening to Man on the Moon again for the first time in years (at least a decade) though, it stands out as a little softer around the edges than I remember. There's a countryfied quality to it that the music video catches pretty well. Lyrically, its stream-of-conscious Americana isn't abrasive and works quite comfortably. It's all very open-ended, like a series of suggestions, or vaguely-expressed ideas. There's a lot of resonance in the way the guitar is captured by the production. Not exactly a pronounced low end, but listening to it you feel like you're in a large room. It's the opposite of the word stuffy. It isn't remotely in the same ball park as Losing My Religion, but that's true of most of R.E.M.'s other songs.
92: "I Feel You" - Depeche Mode"
This comes closer to the general sound I associate mentally with Triple J during these times than any of the other songs I've written about so far, though it may just be the fact that the guitar has distortion (and, disappointingly, only a little bit). Played at medium volume on my (decent quality - it's closer to a stereo than a pair of headphones) computer speakers, I enjoy it a little bit. But not much. Maybe if I was playing it loud enough to annoy my neighbours "I Feel You" would feel more fun. I can imagine (and, vaguely, remember) it being played loud and filling a room comfortably. It has an aggressive nineties-y sense of malaise, but not much more to it than that.
Much like the name 'Depeche Mode,' the song itself feels vague and artificial and composited together from mismatched parts, enough that I struggle to really react to it or associate it with anything of substance. The harmonics on the lead guitar sound good. The beat is repetitive and doesn't have a lot of depth, but fortunately the song is short enough that it doesn't grate. Dave Gahan is an okay vocalist, but he plays it very safe. He could sing a pop song with the same cadence. Unlike Kurt Cobain or Kim Gordon or Billy Corgan I don't get a sense of there being anything uglier beneath the surface, anything deeper motivating him to make this kind of music, in turn making the rougher elements of the song sound like artifice. Maybe I'm being too harsh, I can't think of any other Depeche Mode songs off the top of my head. I can think of plenty of other songs that sound like I Feel You, but I have no idea if they are by Depeche Mode.
91: "Happy Birthday Helen" - Things of Stone and Wood
When I was about five or six this was my favourite song. I had a Things of Stone of Wood cassette that I would play often, and I imagine this probably annoyed my parents. I'm not sure what specifically about this song would appeal to the aesthetic sensibilities of a kid that age - maybe the seeming levity of the lyrics. I've been under the impression for years that it was semi-ironically addressed to a local newsreader named Helen. In actual fact, it was meant for his then-girlfriend and now wife. Lines like "you are the voice in my heart that whispers compassion" and "when I cried for my cruel heart, you rubbed my back until I felt better" were apparently completely genuine. Honestly, I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse. The melody is pretty infectious. The chord changes still resonate with me at some level, particularly the highs-to-lows in the chorus.
It's all pretty on the nose, but I guess that's the point. In retrospect I find it too upbeat and Melbourne-y. If I saw a guy in a pub or club who looked like Greg Arnold singing in the voice he uses and generally playing this sort of music I would find him annoying. In the music video, the way him and the others in Things of Stone and Wood are mugging for the camera, exaggerating the way they're playing their instruments, and generally telegraphing how much fun they're having is kind of repulsive, and also reminds me a similar sort of happy, mannered falseness I've seen with more contemporary Australian indie rock musicians. At least these guys had the opportunity to buy a house. But it all sort of works. It's a very heartfelt love song and props to Arnold for singing some of those lines with a straight face.
Review
Overall, I think this is a promising start. While I wasn't overly enthusiastic about every entry in the list so far, there's a lot of diversity even in the first ten songs. I was pleasantly surprised at how many of them are about 'things' or ideas, or at least try to be. The culturally-received mental image I have of alternative music from the early 90s is coloured by grunge and other music with a similar tone, so I was somewhat surprised how much of the music covered so far falls outside of that characterisation. Most of these tracks are generally upbeat, happy songs, and the ones that aren't (i.e. I Feel You and Delivery Man) are making an effort obvious enough to come across as artificial. So far, an interesting mix of nostalgia and nostalgia cast in sharp relief by the cold light of reality. I'll post a link to the next entry, #90 - 81, below when it's up.
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