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.
79: "Mrs. Robinson" - The Lemonheads
This song was played to death for years after its release on Australian radio, until one point when it actually seemed to die, and then just disappeared. Maybe it was consciously murdered by Triple J? It's been long enough since I last heard it that I only had the rough outline in my head of what it sounded like, and listening to it now with fresh ears has elicited a few surprises, including a few positive qualities. For one, it has a rougher edge than I remember. It is authentically a garage rock song, and the comparison that the Lemonheads "look like a happier version of Nirvana," as one Youtube commenter put it, isn't unfair. They're talented, and had(/have) a unique sound. "Mrs. Robinson" doesn't sound like it was carefully put together in a boardroom by a group of recent marketing graduates, it's loose enough in its structure to surprise on repeat listening, and there's some texture in the way the rhythm section play together.
It's still an annoying pop song, however. It sounds like a garage band playing a cover of a jingle playing in the background of a radio ad. The melody is so saccharine that is almost feels like the contrast between the melody and the way it's played is meant to be ironic. The lyrics contribute to this sense of cutesiness - "heaven holds a place for those who pray" could be ironic Christian-ness. Actually, apparently this is Simon & Garfunkel cover, so the blame for this lays at least partially with them. The Lemonheads cover doesn't exactly feel as sharply contradictory as Cake's cover of I Will Survive, but it's the closest point of comparison I can make. The difference is that John McCrea provides some added value in his interpretation, he takes hidden qualities from the original and works on them to produce something new. These guys are just playing a Simon & Garfunkel song as garage rock, with the end result being an empty, coy ditty about nothing that's catchy enough to be almost offensive. This is like the opposite end of the spectrum from "Three Little Pigs" - alternative rock (not quite grunge) that you can play around your baby boomer parents and whose sensibilities you can be reasonably assured it won't offend.
78: "Deep" - East 17
This is the second song on 1993's countdown so far that prominently features a white English rapper, which I find to be cause for concern. Both in the sense that this was apparently a trend in alternative music at the time, and also one that Triple J's audience was apparently okay with. Was this Vanilla Ice's fault? He became a laughing stock pretty quickly after peaking in 1991, but perhaps the push-back didn't quite carry through to the UK. Even weirder, East 17 was a boy band formed by the rapper in question, Tony Mortimer, in Walthamstow in the early 90s. The Independent's profile on the band describes them as "sharper and more streetwise" than another group of better known white English boyband rappers, Take That. These guys "shaved their heads and had tattoos," and, in fairness, do seem to be authentically working-class. Maybe in the same way as David and Victoria Beckham can be said to be authentically working-class. All the available evidence suggests that they were completely serious about the kind of music they were creating, even if their image had a helping hand from the record company.
That doesn't change the fact that everything about this song, and the band members themselves, is completely ridiculous. The beat is light and bouncy, offensively inoffensive, and the way Mortimer and the other band members pose in sideways caps, camo-patterned winter gear and bandanas, all the while bopping their heads and staring down the camera like they're posing for Cosmopolitan, is surreal to behold. It honestly feels and kind of sounds like Justin Timberlake trying to play gangster rap to an audience of adoring teenage girls. These guys are doused in hair product and presumably cologne, have expensive-looking earrings (but only on one ear), and generally look like a very specific, flammable smell. A few years later this would be characterised as 'metrosexual,' and this, in turn, would gradually degenerate into general douche-culture by the late 2000s (think late-period Nick Lachey). In the music video "Deep" I think you can see an embodiment of the entire trajectory that their image represents. It feels very specifically working-class and English and London-y, but somehow also like it's attempting to gentrify the kinds of music it has emerged from. The beat sounds like Moby trying to create his own brand of G-funk (and exactly as bad as you would imagine that sounds). Like halfway between Tony Blair and the cartoon character Sascha Baron Cohen based Ali G on, Tim Westwood - the white middle-class rap DJ who's probably best known now for awkwardly telling an interviewer that he was 28 when he was really in his mid forties. Actually, I think Westwood's in the video for this song too.
77: "Lost" - The Badloves
Oh god not these guys again. This is even worse than "Green Limousine." Like Deep above, or Three Little Pigs, the fact that the Badloves have multiple entries in this year's Hottest 100 presents a disconcerting window into the lives, attitudes and culture of Australian Gen Xs in the early nineties. Their apparent enthusiasm for this breezy, feather duster country-soul - enough to make it the 77th most popular song on Australian alternative radio in 1993 - speaks to some fetish for non-confrontation. Because that's what this song is, at its core - resolutely non-confrontational, performed with pizazz by an Australian man with ginger Nick Cave hair and a soul patch. It's like a substantial part of the alternative music scene in this country couldn't get away from grunge fast enough. As a kid, I don't remember being witness to these particular elements of the culture that was developing (and I'm grateful for that). How do you go from Alice in Chains to this? Maybe via the Lemonheads, or Grant Lee Buffalo, or the Cruel Sea. Actually, so far on this list I've covered a lot of songs that could be considered gateway drugs from authentic, meaningful grunge and alternative rock to airy-fairy faux-blue-eyed soul like this. A very nineties, Third Way-esque middle-ground if you will. "Lost" is the logical end point of this process: so lightweight I can't play it in my head, even though I listened to it about ten minutes ago. The beat, the lyrics, all scattered into particulates like dust from an old couch recently sat-on. According to my notes, Michael Spiby croons at one point "Gently betrayed with a kiss..." I couldn't remember how that sounded, so I replayed bits of the music video, and then I quickly turned it off.
I saw a flyer today, while waiting for a coffee at a cafe in the regional New South Wales country town where I reside, advertising a Badloves concert at a local craft fair. It presented them as esteemed, experienced statesmen of the specific alternative music scene they were trying to promote (either soul or blues). Maybe these guys always had a stronger following in the country back in the day - they do seem to have a country-ish sound, at least in Lost, and I can see how people out this way would appreciate their upbeat, admittedly (fairly) skilled fusion of rustic-sounding genres. It just seems weird imagining any young people really relating to this. Maybe it's because the sound the Badloves are going for has been, by this point, so heavily taken over the advertising industry that that's all I can hear when I listen to them. To my 2023 ears, this isn't blue-eyed soul, this is health insurance R&B. I don't want to be mean too mean to them - the band is clearly a group of talented musicians, invested in the music they're making (it doesn't sound cynical or corporate), and Spiby is, I guess, technically a good singer. He goes for some high notes in this song, and I suppose you could say he reaches them. Though I hope by now that he's dropped the goofy mannerisms you see in the music video.
76: "Before" - Caligula
As bad as I might feel for ragging on the Badloves, those guys at least got some institutional acclaim (i.e. several ARIAs), meaning they have some prestige I can tear down. Caligula, however, is almost a complete non-entity - as far as I know they never received any awards for their music during their initial, short period of existence in the mid-nineties, have only recently re-formed, and are struggling to make any impact comparable even to the meager amount they achieved then. This feels mean, but I don't recognise their name. I'm not sure I recognise "Before" but, like many other songs in this countdown about which I've said similar things, that may be because it's such a miasma of ca. 1993 alternative music trends that it's completely indistinct. The lead singer (who I think is Ashley Rothschild) employs a staccato style of rap-singing that reminds me of the Barenaked Ladies, and which I haven't heard in popular music for a good twenty years. Wikipedia describes Caligula as "techno-grunge," which I think is more them throwing up their hands in exhaustion (and boredom) than a genuine attempt to describe the band's music. There's a looping, thumping bassline that I initially thought might be an attempt at reggae, and Rothschild's singing could be an attempt at some sort of dancehall-inspired toasting. But that's a stretch. The 'techno' part, I realised towards the end of the song, is just repetitiveness. You start to notice that the song is comprised of samples. The overall combination of these disparate elements is just another upbeat, early-nineties pop song with a veneer of attitude and just enough feedback to sound vaguely like grunge, though this cuts in and out often enough to sound like an added inflection.
I don't know what else to write about this. It's like I'm being punished by describing "Lost" above as empty and lacking any resonance whatsoever. This song feels like listening to primary colours rendered poorly after copying one VHS tape to another (credit where credit's due, this song just dredged up a memory of my parents having an appliance which did that. Though when I try to isolate that memory it shifts and I can't tell if it's real, or if it was planted in my head by the song). In tune with its music video, it is aurally garish and fuzzy. Why does it exist? There are lots of people in the music video, and I'm going to assume most were involved in the production of the song. Why get together and make something like this, and not something else? Was this played in nightclubs, was it meant to be danced to? They released a new single in 2021 and it's a bit better than this, though as far as I know JJJ didn't give it much play. Before sounds like music aimed at kindergartners. It sounds like written to be catchy and annoying, and I don't want to listen to it again in case it ends up stuck in my head.
75: "The Drowners" - Suede
This is the kind of sound I've heard amateur alt rock musicians attempt to play in bars since I've been old enough to go to bars. Not quite grunge, though there's plenty of feedback and other noise to project into a pokey venue with large amplifiers. Brett Anderson's affected, breathy, pommy delivery reminds me a bit of Blur. I remember hearing "The Drowners" played a lot on JJJ. It has a headachy tonal quality about it similar to "Your Eyes" by the Underground Lovers, something I associate with the time period. There's not an awful lot more to it than that. I guess The Drowners would be considered post-grunge, insofar as it takes all of the aesthetic accoutrements of grunge and makes them inoffensive and radio-friendly. Like "For Tomorrow" by Blur, which I wrote about earlier in this countdown, this is snarky-but-upbeat alternative rock music without any axe to grind and primed for the specific End of History moment that Gen Xes came of age amidst, and which many accepted as part of their world view. But while For Tomorrow is aimless Blairite alt rock, it also has a strong low end and a lot of other touches that give it depth and complexity, while The Drowners has none of these qualities. Anderson's affectations grate on repeat listening; there's nothing beneath the surface, so it just feels like posturing. It sounds a bit like he's going for a Generation X art student version of David Bowie, but it just comes across as annoying. It doesn't quite reach the depths of mediocre or terrible music that I've explored in earlier posts, but I don't particularly enjoy listening to it.
If I told people that I miss the kind of music that Triple J used to play when I was a kid, and then put this on, I could justifiably be accused of being blinded nostalgia. For all of the attitude, the snarky, affected vocals, "The Drowners" is still sounds and feels pointless. Apparently Suede was huge in the UK in the early nineties, and was heavily promoted by the music press. Obviously I don't know much about Britpop, and I didn't know that Suede was one of the key early bands in the genre. However, the reason I don't know much about it is probably because there's nothing about it that particularly evokes enthusiasm. All that I've heard so far just sounds like a more socially-acceptable response to grunge. You're not being transgressive or offensive in any way by playing the Drowners loudly, or at least I can't imagine it would've been taken that way then. Suede isn't what the roots reggae DJ and soundsystem promoter Joey Jay called 'reality music' - they're not trying to do anything with their music. They don't have an angle. They're not (or weren't) consciously contributing to a movement within contemporary music (though one followed them), nor were they commenting on it from the outside. They're simply exploring and promoting their own uninteresting creative interests independently from everything else, happily occupying their own niche in this version of society that Karl Marx compared to a sack of potatoes, and which might be recognisably described as neoliberalism. I can't pin it down, but The Drowners sounds vaguely like someone selling off public assets. It's the alternative rock equivalent of a means test.
74: "Ain't No Love (Ain't No Use)" - Sub Sub
"Ain't No Love" isn't exactly at the top of my personal list of favourite 90s dance tracks, but it's up there. The lead guitar is a little annoying, but everything else is powerful and exciting. The bass in particular makes this song sound harder than most of the rock songs I've written about so far. There are lots of other interesting things going on in it sonically - the bass phases in and out (and hits hard when it comes back in), the elements of 70s soul and funk it calls back to are fed through some audio filter that makes the harmonies and organ sound like their floating above the rest of the track, and the song generally shifts its footing frequently enough to surprise you. Guest vocalist Melanie Williams has a great voice, and sings with commitment, almost aggressively, and contributes significantly to Ain't No Love's dynamism. They're clearly going for some sort of 70s funk/soul callback, which provides a bit more depth than it might have had otherwise, and the elements they incorporate contrast with Sub Sub's particular flavour of EDM in such a way as to enliven the song further. I have no complaints here.
Sub Sub were a short-lived British band who released one album and a bunch of singles; I'd never heard of them, and I don't remember ever hearing this song, though (to repeat something I've said about plenty of other songs in this list) Ain't Love No Love has enough elements of general mid-90s dance music to sound indistinct. But it also sounds much more modern than its release date - bands like the Chemical Brothers and Daft Punk were releasing similar-sounding EDM a decade or so later, and this feels very much like the kind of song that would get played to death on commercial radio in the early 2000s. That said, Ain't No Love is a solid step above that particular brand of EDM in its vitality and complexity. It's dynamic and not repetitive, and the complex, almost gestural force in its rhythms is complimented by the Aretha Franklin-esque lyrics, to the point where it almost sounds angry. It has a point of view. I know that sounds vague, but I don't know how else to put it. Compared to techno-pop garbage like "Around the World," Ain't No Love sounds like it actually comes out of a subculture, and has something to say. Closer maybe to something by TISM. And far removed from the poorly-aged, sunny and vaguely pointless faux-EDM of the likes of Caligula.
73: "Mr. Wendal" - Arrested Development
I know this is intended as conscious music, it has a positive message, but I don't like "Mr. Wendal." I think this is partly because I'm contextualising it within the sound of the other tracks in this countdown so far: I have a good sense of why it appealed to an Australian alternative music audience in the early nineties. It sounds sunny and happy and upbeat, despite the fact that, lyrically, it's about a poor old man who begs for money, and how society's judgement of him reflects a system of values that facilitates oppression and racism. The acoustic guitar in the beat sounds like a Vanessa Carlton sample. I guess in 1993 rap like this might have sounded new and exciting, but there's a reason that sort of light and breezy rusticity has become almost totally appropriated by the advertising industry. Maybe going for this particular style was a conscious attempt to get the lyrics out to a broad audience, and have the message seep into the culture subconsciously? I'm not knowledgeable enough to evaluate how successful that might have been, but am I certain that the (predominantly white and non-rap-oriented) Australian alternative music audience of the early nineties would have been very particular about what they got out of the lyrics. The bits about the titular Mr. Wendal being "...free to be without the worries of a quick to diss society [...] his only worries are sickness..." could easily heard to validate a vague, apolitical, off-the-grid alternative lifestyle hippieism. A John Butler-style, positive thinking lyricism that fits with the Youtube tutorial positivity of the beat. A palliative for home-owning alternative lifestyle types who think poor people are happy and who go to blues festivals.
There's another part to the song, however, and I'm not sure if the aforementioned Australian audience wouldn't have tuned out the lyrics about racism and police brutality. "Are we really civillised, yes or no? Who are we to judge, when
thousands of innocent men could be brutally enslaved and killed over a
racist grudge?" Doesn't exactly sound like something you could (or should) have playing in a store that sells scented candles and vegan mayonnaise. Can you imagine some dude who looks like John Butler playing an acoustic cover of this around a bonfire in his parent's backyard, as part of a group of Gen X youths sitting cross-legged in a circle, with some white girl with a pixie cut throatily singing the harmonies in the chorus? It's probably happened. I went to several parties like when I was an undergrad. If they fully take on the message behind the lyrics, and are motivated to produce more socially conscious music and to look critically at the culture around them, then I guess you could say the ultimate effect of having this song in the Australian charts would be positive. But my feeling is that none of it seeped in. In the US, music like this was a response to gangsta rap, which white audiences were eating up and further capitalising in the early nineties. It was presented as an alternative means of using music to engage with the issues in the world around us. Like another form of socially conscious music, roots reggae, conscious rap has faced an uphill struggle since that time, and (as far as I can tell in my corner of Australia) seems very much to be out of fashion. My feeling is that the same is true of socially conscious music in contemporary Australian alternative rock, to the extent that there is anything in that genre anymore. I don't know if that reflects issues in the promotion of music, in the music industry, with audience tastes or in the interests of the musicians themselves. Or maybe I'm just ignorant and there's a plethora of music being produced now in that category, in this country. I'm sure I'll find out if that's true by the time I get to the mid-2010s in this series.
72: "Baby (You Got in the Way)" - Barefoot
How am I even supposed to write a paragraph about this? This is another example of the sort of light and fluffy soft Australian indie rock that seems to provide the poorly-insulated weatherboard frame for the 1993 Hottest 100. These guys are easily the most obscure band on the countdown so far - they don't have a Wikipedia article, this song isn't on Youtube, and there's barely any information about them on the internet. The lead singer and songwriter, Rowan Smith, has a bandcamp that you find here. He seems like a talented musician who's earnest about what he does, so, if this sort of music appeals to you, maybe go and patronise him a bit. Unfortunately, "Baby..." holds no appeal to me whatsoever, and now I have to try to find a way to write, at a reasonable length, about how much I don't like the music made by a guy who barely made a dent in the indie charts 30 years ago, and who is still, apparently, a committed underground musician today.
Like a few songs I've already written about in this post, parts of Baby sound about ten years or so newer than the actual time they were released. It's well produced, and filled with jangly acoustic guitars, shuffling drums and a piano, which gives it a sort of inoffensive acousticity that reminds me a bit of Evermore. The vocals age it a little, though. I'm not sure how they do that, but Smith's singing in particular sounds old-fashioned. People don't really sing like that anymore. If anything he sounds like a pop singer from the mid-80s. The female backup singer in the chorus is doing some Enya thing too, which doesn't help. The tone is cloying and stuffy, it all sounds a bit Home & Away. It sounds like how a bedding and homewares stores feels to temporarily exist within. Soft indie catalogue rock under cheap incandescent bulbs. Just pointless. I'm sorry Rowan, I'm sure there's an audience for your music, but it's not for me. I'm not sure I'd go as far as to say it shouldn't be for you either, as I would for Caligula or Green Jelly, but it's an edge case. Weirdly enough, it's hard to describe because it just sounds normal to me. Even though I know popular music doesn't sound anything like this anymore, there was so much music that sounded vaguely like this - on Triple J, on TV, in the shops, anywhere - that it's encoded in my head that this is what normal, boring, nonconfrontational music sounds like. Though now I suppose even advertising has moved away from it. This is like the sort of music you'd hear in the background of a retirement village commercial.
71: "Nothingness (Colour Mix)" - Living Colour
And finally, as if to cap off this list on a positive note, we come to a song that is actually really good. I don't think I've heard anything by Living Colour before, and this is a source of shame. Nothingness is a fantastically creative, surprising, earthy, deep fusion of multiple genres. It has a beautifully melancholy tone, which comes as a relief after writing about 8 or 9 songs that are (mostly) boring and upbeat. I guess you could call it rock, prog rock maybe ("avant-garde metal," according to Wikipedia). It has a great looping beat grounded in a bouncy, funk-ish bassline, which gives way to something that almost sounds like world music/world beat, or dance music. Funk, soul, R&B maybe? Whatever you want to call it, this song is rejuvenating and exciting in a manner I don't often experience listening to music on the radio. The lyrics are beautifully wistful and downcast, I wish more musicians were as unafraid to croon about 'nothingness': "Isolation, separation, nowhere to hide... Nothingness, all I have to feel is my loneliness..." Can you imagine Michael Spiby singing this? Soul patch notwithstanding, I can picture him being genuinely afraid and confused when this came on the radio back in the day. Corey Glover shows off a decent range in this song and makes it look effortless.
Living Colour are hugely underappreciated. These guys were genuinely trying to create something new, to do something different with rock music, which by the early 90s had already started to die (grunge was one attempt at defibrillation among many). That was true even in the eighties - I had no idea that "Cult of Personality" was by them, despite listening to it for years while playing GTA, and that's one of the gold standards of alternative message rock. The standard narrative is that they emerged at the wrong time - a few years before Nirvana and grunge, at which point they had moved into a more experimental and reflective direction, not geared towards an audience that wanted louder rock music with feedback, etc. But after going through this countdown it seems clear to me that Living Colour had a lot more in common with the first wave of grunge musicians than is popularly thought. Like Nirvana and Alice in Chains and others, Living Colour made deep, thoughtful social issues music that had a range of musical tones and themes. It stands out against the (seemingly endless) lineup of upbeat, softer indie rock that Australian alternative music fans voted for in 1993. I hope it's a sign of what's to come as I move closer to the top of this countdown.
Summary
These last ten songs put together were, on the whole, a journey through mediocrity that began to feel like purgatory in parts (until Living Colour pulled me back to the world of the living), though with a few highlights. I never quite realised how strong the contrasts were between between the actually thematically complex, deep, angry or sad or melancholic alternative music and the lightweight indie rock standards, the latter presumably given some backing by Triple J (or other forces in the Australian music industry). At the very least writing these recaps has been educational. I'm not quite ready yet to admit that nostalgia, like valium, has softened the blunter edges in my memory - many of the songs on this list are still listenable and, at some level, enjoyable. And they don't quite provoke regurgitation in the same way as much of what I heard when I tuned back into JJJ in the early 2010s. You can definitely feel the influence of EDM across the spectrum (from the bizarre - East 17 - to the brilliant - Living Colour and Sub Sub). The rock music that occupies this tier rankles mainly out of disappointment, maybe my expectations were too high. I just can't imagine listening to the Lemonheads, or Barefoot, or Suede or (god forbid) the Badloves and being satisfied, or excited. Is this really the best we could do in 1993? You go to the amount of effort to practice your instruments, gig regularly, until the point where you can record a single and get radio play, and you put out a cover of Mrs. Robinson by Simon & Garfunkel? Australians were just coming out of a recession, unemployment was higher than it had been in years, and it sounds like there was conscious effort to further depress young people with bad and mediocre music as well. Alice in Chains and Living Colour were both great though.
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