How to start? I'm an incredibly enthusiastic observer of triple j's Hottest 100. When I first heard about it, I was thrilled. I had just gotten hooked on triple j at the time through the JTV Saturday countdowns they were doing at the time. It combined an unrealised fascination I had with music charts with an unrealised fascination I had with styles of music that had been eluding me for so long. This incredibly nerdy method of democratically ranking the year's music and presenting it in the format of a suspenseful countdown was something it turns out I needed. A cathartic way to cap off a year in music. It would settle the dispute of who was more popular than who, in a definitive way that the weekly JTV Saturday charts couldn't quite do. It provides a great time capsule, one that from my experience when I was at the peak of my engagement with the station, feels very accurate.
It was in 2006 that I first started listening. In 2007 I voted for the first time, and I have done so every chance I've gotten ever since. This still left over a decade of history for me to sink into. So many lists of songs I'd never heard before, that just had to be good. In 2012 I resolved to do something about it, and started collecting all of the songs. I did it slowly, in part to not burn my iTunes wallet, but also because I wanted to give every song a chance to sink in with me. Though I can't always help it, I'm not a big fan of mindlessly consuming content for the sake of it. I didn't want to just say I'd heard every song, I wanted to make sure I knew every song.
Eventually I managed to complete said task. I had heard every song that ever made the Hottest 100, and many times at that. I felt I needed to mark the occasion with a ridiculously ambitious project, ranking all 2,000 (at that point) songs that had made the list. I didn't take it lightly either. I spent over a year meticulously weighing up song vs. song to hand pick every position one by one. Not the most efficient way to do it probably, but I wouldn't be happy unless it was done properly. It's become my own time capsule. A monstrous assortment of musical opinions that don't especially line up with my present day opinions, but one that can certainly set me straight if I ever find myself pretending to have it all figured out from the start.
That's where this comes in. It's been over 10 years since I last did this. That means 10 more Hottest 100s, and 1,000 more songs. I've still been keeping my collection up to date, so rather than this being a scrambling together of fast-tracked opinions, it's entirely an era I've lived through and experienced. I feel far more equipped to tackle this material.
So basically, I've done it again. Using largely the same system as before, I took every Hottest 100 entry from 2013 to 2022 and ranked them all. This is not a ranking that is based on artistic merit, general significance or anything like that. To do something like this right, you can only measure on one scale, and that's simply how much I enjoy listening to the song. I'm not brash enough to call this an official declaration on what is and isn't the best. I could never justify a lot of the rankings if that were the case. I listen to music because I enjoy doing so. Whether because something's catchy, it pumps me up, it makes me laugh, or it reminds me of something that does those things. I might not always be able to properly explain it, but I know what I do and do not like, and this is me sharing that.
If there's any problem with this system, it's that I have to inevitably start from the bottom. That's potentially a lot of constantly negative opinions in succession before getting to the stuff I like. That's a lot of opportunities to bother anyone and everyone with my subjectively bad takes only to then rub it in their faces with something akin to 'This is what you should be listening to'. That's not what I'm about though. I may not like the songs that are going to appear early in this list, but I could never hold it against anyone who does. I also don't find it very cathartic to just unleash huge amounts of rage towards something that is ultimately both harmless and easy to avoid. I'll still have negative feedback, but it's proven a writing exercise to try and approach these songs with a level of understanding. Or alternatively to just go off on semi-related tangents whenever I get the chance. I spend way too long looking at music charts and thinking about these things in my own way to not want to talk about it.
I'm a long time reader of Tom Ewing's Popular column, and more recently Tom Breihan's The Number Ones columns, detailing the chronology of UK and US #1 hits respectively. Highly recommended reading on both counts, where I'm simply envious of the ability to make astute observations I'd never come up with. The best I can hope to manage is to lift some of the occasional silliness that comes along with both of them. I always find the relationship with the chronology interesting in both of them, as they're dealing with known quantities. Sometimes over a decade of known material in the pipeline. The version of this that I enjoy the most is one that's somewhat lifted from the former's comment section. A sort of self-imposed rule that you're not supposed to mention future column subjects by name. It's bad luck to name the Scottish DJ. But it's a rule I intend to follow for my own amusement, if only to see how many times I can slot in the phrase 'who will eventually appear on this list'. For some, this could mean a very, very long tenure of indirect mentions. For others, the opportunity might be used up very immediately.
In any case, it's all just for a bit of overly elaborate fun anyway. So whether you're intently aware of what's in this list, or you've never even heard of that song that won the countdown in 2015, I hope I can make this somewhat worthwhile to read along through. I plan to post 5 entries each Monday and Friday (doubling up this week because it's taken so long to get off the ground), so this will be going for quite some time. That song you hate will probably also not show up for a very long time. Sorry about that.
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