I’m currently listening to the countdown for Triple J’s Hottest 100 of the Last 20 Years. I’m running my usual obsessive analysis and while so far I pretty much approve, I do have to say
GANGSTER’S PARADISE!!!??!?!?!? HAS THE WHOLE WORLD GONE MAD!??!?!?
More to follow…
Not only did Common People get in, they played the full version with the really vicious second verse. Awesome!
TEENAGE DIRTBAG!!!??!?!?!? YES THE WHOLE WORLD HAS GONE MAD!!!
I tell ya, Pretty Fly for a White Guy better not be number one again…
I’m keeping a running average of my own personal approval rating for each song. It was looking good at 82% for the first ten songs, but Coolio and Wheatus managed to knock a full 11 percentiles off in the second ten for a total of 71%. Here’s hoping it gets pulled back up soon…
Some stats – we’re at number 74 and so far there have been 12 songs from the USA, 9 from Australia, 5 from the UK and one from Iceland. The most popular year so far is 2007 with 4 songs. Following up are 1998, 2005 and 2006 with 3 songs each. With 2 are 1995, 1997, 2010 and 2011. Years with one song are 1994, 1996, 2000, 2001, 2003 and 2008.
Can’t say I expected Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros to get in, but I am well chuffed!
Hmm, well, the averages were looking up until Wolfmother crashed the party, I couldn’t stand them back in ’06 and I can’t stand them now.
Aha! The Gorillaz restore some sanity! I got sunshine in a bag!
And Regurgitator fight a valiant defence to maintain the average at 71%, thirty-one songs in.
As of number 66, there have been four songs that cross over with the Hottest 100 of all time from 2009. Wolf like Me by TV on the Radio, Common People by Pulp, Bulls on Parade by Rage Against the Machine and Berlin Chair by You am I.
And a fifth country joins the list with Daft Punk.
Woohoo! The mighty Kids by MGMT at 64 – the first one of my votes to get in! 😀
Spiderbait’s Buy Me a Pony at number 62 hauls Australian artists equal to American Artists at 15 songs each.
At 40 songs in my average rating has risen to 73%. Good.
Glycerine?! I suppose grunge fans had to vote for something with Smells Like Teen Spirit out of the running.
Waitaminute – Bush are British!? You learn something every day!
Well, we’ve obviously hit the British 90’s dance section of the broadcast with Underworld’s Born Slippy followed by Fatboy Slim’s Praise You. Not bad, although did they really have to play the 20 minute long version of the former?
Urgh! One of my most hated songs of the last 20 years, the utterly dismal Sex on Fire. Limp guitars, vocals jumping from mumbling to wailing with barely a tune to be found between them, just urrrgh! Bring back Wheatus!
For a second there I thought we had Regurgitator’s Black Bugs, but no, it’s just Placebo. That’s cool.
Woohoo! More Gorillaz at 52 with some extremely creepy laughter.
And the Dandy Warhols finish up the lower 50. Let’s have a look at our stats…
My approval rating for the first 50 songs of the countdown is 73.20%, which equates to between “OK” and “I Approve”. So that’s not too bad. There were ten tracks that also appeared in the Hottest 100 of all time back in 2009, and they were heavily clustered in the lower numbers, so we can probably expect a bunch more to appear in the upper 50.
There was a good spread of songs over the 20 years, with peaks around 1996-97 and 2006. No songs rated from 1993, 2009 or 2013.
The majority of songs were American (18) followed by Australian (16), the UK (13), French (2) and Icelandic (1).
Tune in tomorrow for more inane commentary and inept statistical analysis!
