In the years since I've moved to Melbourne, I've become invested in three beloved Australian institutions, the latter two of which came to a head this past weekend: the Melbourne International Film Festival, the Australian Open (also held in Melbourne) and the Hottest 100 countdown from radio station Triple J, which actually has no home city and is broadcast around the country. I didn't get to go to the Open this year -- have not been since 2021, in fact -- but Saturday night we watched the thrilling three-set victory of nice American Madison Keys over villainous Belarusian (and consecutive two-time winner) Aryna Sabalenka, who stomped around in a fit and trashed her racquet after losing. Stay classy, Aryna. We also watched the men on Sunday, though that was not as thrilling, and I turned it off after two sets won by Jannik Sinner, Novak Djokavic's successor in terms of never making mistakes. He ended up winning the third just as easily. Yawn.
The Hottest 100 countdown, an event preceded by untold amounts of hype that is a true representation of how much people care about it, also is revealed on the long weekend associated with the January 26th Australian Day. Since they always do it on the Saturday, this year it occurred on the 25th, the same day Keys won her first-ever grand slam title at age 29. It's actually a big day around Australia, which I've had friends confirm for me. Though I've never attended one of these parties myself, people do throw listening parties that allow them to get "loose" (an Australian term for whatever form your insobriety may take) over the course of the afternoon.
The way the Hottest 100 works is that starting in early January or possibly even late December, Triple J listeners are free to submit a ballot of ten qualifying songs from the previous year for placement in that year's countdown. The eventual ordering of these songs is determined entirely by fan voting. I can't remember the precise ways the voting works, although I did submit a ballot myself at least once. But if I'm not mistaken, you give preferential status to one of the ten songs, so your vote for that song counts more than the rest. This system may have also changed slightly over the years.
The system may make it similar to how Oscars voting works, though I know that has also changed. There are some songs that everyone likes a little bit, even though it may be no one's favorite, so if that song shows up on a plurality of the ballots, it has a chance to finish very high in the Hottest 100 -- even at #1. This actually happened a few years ago when, of all things, a cover by Australian kids band The Wiggles of the song "Elephant" by Australian band Tame Impala became the #1 song of the year. That's absurd and it leads into what I want to say about this year's Hottest 100.
The 2024 Hottest 100 was not won by this year's version of a cover song by The Wiggles. The 2024 champion was the much deserving Chappell Roan, who had only one song technically released in 2024, so only one song that fans could vote on. (In the voting, you are limited to songs entered into the system as eligible.) Her 2024 song was "Good Luck Babe," which I would have put on my 2025 mix (also finished this past weekend) if this past year I had not also discovered, and liked more, her song "My Kink is Karma." We've listened to a lot of Chappell Roan in my house, and she's the best thing to come along in some time.
However, the #2 song was one of these songs.
Another Triple J institution is their series "Like a Version," in which bands -- usually Australian bands -- will come into the studio for the morning show and play a cover of a well-known song. Some of these covers -- like, I suppose, "Elephant" -- are quite good and have some reason to endure as their own distinct entities, beyond the confines of the morning show.
That does not, however, mean I think they should have a chance to win the Hottest 100.
The #2 song of 2024, as voted by fans, was by Australian band Royel Otis with their cover of Sophie Ellis-Bextor's 2001 single "Murder on the Dancefloor," which was having a moment about a year ago as a result of its prominent placement in the soundtrack for Emerald Fennell's Saltburn. (Now you understand the poster above.)
I listened to this song as I was listening to the Hottest 100. I listened live to about the last 35 songs of the countdown, having been up to other business for the first 65. (They start at noon and finish at 8.) It was fine. There is nothing particularly interesting about their cover. It is essentially a straight cover of the song.
Not, I would venture, worthy of nearly being enshrined as the greatest song of 2024.
As you can tell from Chappell Roan winning, the countdown is not limited to Australian artists. That would be a way to go about it, but it would likely make it less interesting. It would also justify someone like Royel Otis winning with a song that they did not write and that they did not even interpret in a way that was very challenging.
I guess that never came very close to happening. The DJs -- or "presenters," as they call them here -- said something about "Good Luck Babe" getting more votes than any other Hottest 100 victor ever, which seems strange to me. I guess the song was a bigger part of the zeitgeist than I thought, having a life on TikTok and itself being covered by a number of prominent artists.
But let's just say there had not been such a strong contender for #1. You take "Good Luck Babe" out of 2024, and suddenly, for the second time in a couple years, the winner of Triple J's most august of traditions is a band who covered a song that was only having a moment because it was in a movie.
Talk about stolen glory. That's like two levels of stolen glory.
What put me off further was Royel Otis' reaction to getting the #2. In order to fill time between songs and continue to goose the hype, the presenters would regularly interview bands who had just earned a spot in the Hottest 100. I don't want to know how the interviews with the lower bands might have gone -- awkward -- especially if the interview with Royel Otis was any indication. Although they were certainly appreciative of the spot, they kept on making jokes about feeling "silver" -- as in the silver medal. Like they thought they really should have won it all with their arbitrarily conceived stolen glory. (I say "arbitrarily conceived" because they acknowledged they had initially been planning to cover a different song for their appearance on "Like a Version.")
That wasn't nearly the only "Like a Version" song in the Hottest 100. I didn't go back and parse the 65 songs I missed, though I did scan the list for titles I recognized, but in any given year there might be a dozen "Like a Version" versions of songs that don't otherwise have anything to do with the year in question -- just because the Triple J audience was allowed to vote on anything they wanted, as long as it did not exist before the year in question. Which I think is a flawed system indeed, and one wonders if they would even do it, if not for the narcissism of supporting their own series of morning show cover songs. Another spot in the top ten was also taken out by a "Like a Version" song, as Australian singer/band G Flip covered Taylor Swift's "Cruel Summer" this past year, landing her the #9 spot.
Me saying these songs should not qualify for the Hottest 100 is not the same as saying they are unworthy to exist. I love a good cover, and there are certain songs I have learned through cover versions, meaning I vastly prefer the cover to the original. But that doesn't mean I think a countdown that analyzes the music of a particular year should have them anywhere near it.
Let's take this out a step and see how we can translate this to movies. It would be like if a bunch of people made Sweded versions of movies -- to use the term coined by Be Kind Rewind -- and those movies ended up making the shortlist of best picture nominees. We'd all cry foul, wouldn't we?
This is not my only complaint about the Hottest 100.
Because this is a purely democratic system -- which in principle I support -- there tend to be other sorts of chart trends that I consider in violation of what a good countdown should look like.
Any song from an artist who released an album in 2024 is theoretically eligible, though I suspect there are some artists who are too far afield from Triple J's playlist to be worth entering them in the database. The artist had to get some sort of play on the station for them to think it's possible for enough of their own listeners to vote for them. There are some strange entries, though. I would not have thought a song I despise because I despise Morgan Wallen would have made it into the list, but there was "I Had Some Help" at #25. (The song is actually credited to Post Malone, who I like better, but it's got Wallen's stink all over it from his feature work.) I was gratified to see "A Bar Song (Tipsy)" by Shaboozey, another surprise for this station, beat it by a couple slots at #19.
But what it means for all the songs from an album to be eligible is that it seems like the sheep in the Triple J audience do vote for all the songs. Something happened this past weekend that shines a light on the shortcomings of this system. Not only did one artist break the record for the most singles appearing in the Hottest 100 in one year, but two broke the record -- in the same year. That's right, both Charli XCX and Billie Eilish scored eight entries into the countdown -- which in some cases was the same song since they worked together. That surpassed the record of seven held by the aforementioned G Flip. (The same names seems to appear year after year, which is another thing that makes my eyes roll a bit.)
I can't get a movie equivalent to this phenomenon, but I can get a TV one. Let's say there was a countdown where fans were able to vote for their favorite TV shows. But instead of just voting for the show, they'd vote for individual episodes. So in one year, 13 of the top 20 might be episodes of Succession, just because it was a year where everybody watched and loved Succession. That's not only stupid, it's insular and boring.
So it sounds like I have a lot of complaints about the Hottest 100. Why, then, am I so invested in it?
Ah, but the complaints are the proof of my investment.
It can be hard to pick up new things when you move to a new country. I have yet to really care about the biggest sport in the state of Victoria, Australian Rules Football, and only understand slightly more about cricket than when I first got here.
But when you see something that you think is very close to being great -- close enough that you do pick it up and you do hold it close to your chest -- you want to make it a more perfect version of itself. For me that's the Hottest 100.
I suppose if it were just a countdown of the biggest hits on the Billboard chart, or whatever the American equivalent would be, that would also be boring. I like that it's a little quirky and that Australian bands are disproportionately represented. I like that it means that Australian radio listeners have a pride in the cultural output of their country, one that translates into genuine love that causes them to give Australian bands one of the cherished ten spots on their list, when an international artist might seem more "deserving" according to the actual quality or prominence of their work.
When you have a system like this, though, there are weird things that happen, weird things that seem to undermine the validity of the whole thing. Weird things like a cover song being enshrined as the best song of a given year. Weird things like two artists taking out nearly 20 percent of the countdown all by themselves.
Maybe some year, this list will more closely resemble what I think it should look like, and that will make me happy.
The whole conversation, though, feels fairly academic. The truth of the matter is, though I do listen to Triple J, it's one of only a few different ways I spend my time driving, and almost never when anyone else is in the car because no one else seems to enjoy the station like I do. And though I do Shazam Triple J to get songs for my mix each year, the fact is, I am pretty out of sync with what's getting played most and, more to the point, what people younger than I am actually like the most. Out of this year's Hottest 100, I was probably only really familiar with about that same 20 percent of the songs. And the majority of the songs in the top 35 that I listened to were not songs I would have Shazamed if I came across them in the wild. In fact, I only jotted down one song as a candidate for next year's mix, and I did it belatedly, not one of those hurried Shazamings in the moment for fear of losing the song and never finding it again. Which maybe should not come as a surprise. I listen to enough Triple J that I had probably actually heard many of these songs before, I just didn't consider them worth Shazaming at the time, so would not now either.
In the end, I am a 51-year-old trying to make sense of what teenagers and twentysomethings like and want to reward. That task is doomed to fail in any year.
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