Category: Musical Snobbery

Triple J’s Hottest 100 of the Last 20 Years – Part 2

Welcome back to the second half of my highly opinionated live blog of Triple J’s Hottest 100 of the last 20 years. We’ve jumped back in at 50 with Pearl Jam’s Better Man from 1995 – which came in at 39 in 2009’s Hottest 100 of All Time in 2009. A good start.

Oo! The lovely Florence Welsh at 49 with Dog Days are Over. Excellent! First song from 2009 and another one for the UK.

By the way, it appears my stats are off, because Triple J is saying that the majority of the songs so far have been Australian with the USA in second place. Presumably I’ve screwed up somewhere. Better go back and double check them all. sigh

The Strokes, Last Night. I have no objection.

So far, the most recent song in the countdown in Alt-J’s Breeze Blocks (how did that get in?) and the oldest are the awesome Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden and Berlin Chair by You Am I from 1994.

Ha. The Offspring with Self Esteem. That’s OK. Another song from 1994.

OK, I’ve gone through my stats again, and I still reckon songs from the USA are dominating. Don’t know how JJJ are doing their counting.

Nick Cave’s classic Aussie love song Into My Arms at number 45. I wonder if we’ll be seeing more of Mr Cave? I sure hope so.

I wonder if the other classic Aussie love song will show up? You know the one I mean.

Modest Mouse, Float On. Not bad. Not bad at all.

More Daft Punk. Looks like I didn’t have to feel bad about leaving them off my list after all!

The John Butler Trio were kind of inevitable weren’t they? Better Man at number 45.

Urgh. Matt Freakin’ Corby. People seem to love him, but to me he just sounds like a Wookiee.

Heh. It was all yellow! Another inevitability.

We’re 60 songs in and my approval is at 73.33%. Nothing to complain about! There’s already been a big upswing in songs that were featured in the 2009 all time countdown, with 6 of the last 10 being on both lists. Funnily, only one of the four that didn’t make the cut in 2009 has come out since then – people’s opinions of the Offspring, the Strokes and Flo and the Mac have obviously risen in the last four years.

I couldn’t figure out what this was until the vocals cut in. Oh! That one! Nine Inch Nails, Closer.

Nirvana finally show up with Heart Shaped Box. As the first song from 1993 this is now the oldest song in the countdown. It’s obviously a proxy for the Nirvana songs that were ineligible because of the 20 year cutoff – it didn’t make it into the 2009 countdown of all time at all.

What the hell is this? Oh, the Temper Trap. OK, moving on.

Ducked out for a minute and missed the Beastie Boys’ Sabotage, and Jeff Buckley’s cover of Alleluia. A massive fall for the latter, which came in at number three in the 2009 all time countdown, and is now relegated to 36.

Karma Police. I suspect we’ll be hearing more from Radiohead soon…

Ben Folds Five, Brick. The review of it in Tom Reynolds’ I Hate Myself and Want to Die is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.

1994 and 1997 are turning out to be incredibly strong years with 6 songs apiece.

ZAH-OM-BIE! ZAH-OM-BIE! ZAH-OM-BIE! A sixth country enters the countdown, with the Cranberries and dair tanks and dair bomms and dair bomms and dair gones.

Ah Tool! They’ll tell us what to do!

Alright! Massive Attack, Teardrop! I am somewhat surprised to learn however (courtesy of Bernard Fanning) that the opening lyric is “Love, Love is a verb, that’s a doing word”. I could never figure out what it was, but I thought it was less inane than that.

A strong showing from the 90’s has pushed my approval rating up to 75.14%. The USA is still in the lead with 28 songs, with Australia on 20, the UK on 17, France on 3 (all courtesy of Daft Punk) and Iceland and Ireland tied on one each.

The Red Hot Chile Peppers finally show up at number 30 with Californication, a song with some fantastic lyrics.

Is that the Arctic Monkeys again? Ah, no! It’s Franz Ferdinand. I can never tell those two apart. Take me out, number 29.

The Chili Peppers again with Scar Tissue. Yeah, that’s OK.

YEAAAHHHH!!! FRONTIER PSYCHIATRIST!! Second of my votes to get in, at number 27!

And from the sublime to the ridiculous. System of a Down with Chop Suey at number 26.

The Pumpkins turn up for the first time at number 25 with Bullet With Butterfly Wings. I wonder if 1979 is going to put in an appearance?

Augie March with One Crowded Hour. Yawn.

KNIGHTS OF CYDONIA! The third of my votes to make it in! Yeeeeehaw!

Blur’s Song 2 at – appropriately – number 22. It’s an OK song, but Blur did so much better stuff. It’s a shame this will likely be their only entry.

Hehe, I called it. 1979 by the Smashing Pumpkins at 21. I always wonder, is that someone shouting “Turnip” in the background?

OK, with 20 songs to go my approval rating has risen to 75.25%. Not too shabby! The USA is still in the lead at 33, with Australia at 22 and the UK at 20. The most popular years are 1994, 1997 and 2000 at 7 songs each. The least popular years are 1993, 2009 and 2012 with one each. Three songs I voted for have made it in – Kids by MGMT, Frontier Psychiatrist by the Avalanches and Knights of Cydonia by Muse.

WE DON’T NEED NO ONE LIKE YOU!! TO TELL US WHAT TO DO!! The Living End storm in at 20 with Prisoner of Society! Awesome!

Dammit! Not a comment, the song by Blink 182 at number 19. Nice!

1997 has shot into the lead with 9 songs. Will it be the first to break 10?

HEY YAH!! Shake it like a Polaroid picture with OutKast at 18! Alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright alright!!

Silverchair, Tomorrow. Just as dull as it was back in 1994.

Skinny Love, Bon Iver. Urgh. And it was all going so well!

I am being patient Bon, but you’re still singing!

The Prodigy with… I dunno, everything by the Prodigy sounds the same. Good, but the same. Ah, it’s Breathe. There we go.

I have a feeling there could be a lot of Jeff Buckley coming up. Which is annoying because the only track of his I can stand has already been played.

Banjos! It can only mean Mumford and Sons, with their song about lions biting their own necks. Little Lion Man at number 14. Only the second song to make it in from 2009, alongside Flo and the Mac.

Told you there’d be more Radiohead. The first Douglas Adams reference in the countdown with Paranoid Android, making 1997 the first year to reach 10 songs!

Heart’s a Mess by Gotye at 12. Brilliant! And a much better song than that one of his that’s almost certainly coming up in the top 10…

No One Knows by the Queens of the Stone Age. I don’t know why anyone would vote for this, but here we are. Onwards into the top 10!

The scattering of mediocre music in the teens has pulled my approval rating down to 75.11%. The top year is still 1997 with 10 songs, followed by 1994 and 2000 with 8 each. The USA has an unassailable lead at 37 with Australia second at 25 and the UK catching well up at 23. Ireland, France and Iceland are unmoved at 1, 3 and 1 respectively.

Powderfinger, Radiohead, Gotye and Kimbra, Jeff Buckley, the White Stripes, the Hilltop Hoods and the Foo Fighters all seem like contenders. And maybe even Greenday for that one song…

What did I tell you? My Happiness by Powderfinger at number 10. Next please!

Told you so! Gotye and Kimbra at number 9 with Somebody That I Used to Know. I don’t mind it so much now that it’s not being played every twelve minutes…

And now, more Powderfinger. These Days. It’s an OK song, but it’s not the 8th best of the last 20 years by a long shot.

The cure for Powderfinger overdose? THE KILLERS – MR BRIGHTSIDE!! WOOT!! Fourth one of my votes to get in!! Woohoo! 😀

Now what is this?… The Foo Fighters perhaps? I said they’d probably be along… Ah, yes, it’s the Foo Fighters with Everlong. Give me the Pixies Winterlong any day…

Bittersweet Symphony!? I’d written this one off. Oh well, no accounting for taste.

1997 is now at 12 songs. 1994 and 2000 could mount a challenge to equal if one of them got all four remaining tracks, but that doesn’t seem likely. Looks like 1997 was the best year for music in the last two decades!

The Nosebleed Section! The Hilltop Hoods finally make an appearance at number 4! Right on!

And here comes Jeff, right on time with The Last Goodbye. Call me a horrible human being, but would this be anywhere as popular if he hadn’t drowned? Anyway, wake me when we get to number 2….

Called it again! The White Stripes with Seven Nation Army at number 2. Number 1 isn’t going to be Greenday is it? I mean Seinfeld was popular, but not that popular surely?

940,000 votes, 20 years, and the winner is…

Wonderwall!? Freakin’ Wonderwall? Holy crap!

Well, it’s not a terrible result, just an unexpected one. Well done Australia. Overall you managed to keep the worst crap out of the countdown (Kings of Leon, Coolio and Wheatus excepted) and you’ve given this old curmudgeon something to do for a couple of days. 74.6% approval rating, which works out to between ‘OK’ and ‘I approve’, which ain’t bad. I’m gonna go grab something to eat…

Triple J’s Hottest 100 of the Last 20 Years – Part 1

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!

Snakes into Saints

In a follow up to my last post, I was recently quite disappointed to learn that the lyrics to the Killers’ Mr Brightside are not ‘turning snakes into the sea’, but ‘turning saints into the sea’, which is still a bloody puzzling thing to say, but somehow nowhere near as cool.

This is the second thing I got wrong about the song. When I first heard it I thought it was about seeing someone you have a thing for – but are too timid to attempt a shot at – going home from a bar or party with someone else. It actually turns out to be about suspecting your partner is having an affair.

I find it darkly amusing that my brain – even when simply considering a song – refused to construct a scenario where I have a partner, and instead cast me in the role of the pathetic, forever alone guy watching the girl he wants walking away ;D

Where will we be in 20 Years?

As anyone who cares about radio stations aimed at a demographic way younger than them should know, Triple J are doing another one of their special Hottest 100 polls. This time around it’s to find the hottest 100 songs of the last 20 years – a period they claim to have chosen because it’s the 20th anniversary of the first hottest 100, but have clearly actually selected to prevent Love will Tear us Apart or Smells like Teen Spirit from taking out the number one place. Again.

In a spirit of generosity not seen since Adam and Will were on air, they’ve allowed us punters not just 10, but 20 votes each! So, over the last few weeks I’ve spent many hours combing through my music collection and the lists of the previous 20 Hottest 100s to come up with some kind of list summing up the best music the world has produced over the last two decades.

Naturally I failed. So I just sat down today and threw together a collection of songs that seemed more or less acceptable, and which adequately covered the period in question. All are – of course – songs I love, but they aren’t “the best” 20 songs of the last 20 years, because such a list is clearly impossible. They’re just a representative sample.

So, here goes…

1994 – Bug Powder Dust – Bomb the Base
1995 – Girl from Mars – Ash
1995 – Santa Monica – Everclear
1996 – Frank Sinatra – Cake
1997 – The Cure – Wrong Number
1999 – Deeper Water – Deadstar
2000 – All the Small Things – Blink 182
2001 – Zak and Sara – Ben Folds
2002 – That Great Love Sound – The Raveonettes
2003 – Lighthouse – The Waifs
2003 – The Dresden Dolls – Girl Anachronism
2003 – The Mountain Goats – Palmcorder Yajna
2004 – Mr Brightside – The Killers
2006 – Knights of Cydonia – Muse
2007 – Det Snurrar I Min Skalle – Familjen
2007 – Gimme Sympathy – Metric
2008 – Kids – MGMT
2008 – Magic – Ladyhawke
2008 – Now – Mates of State (Only video with the full song I could find!)
2011 – Palaces of Montezuma – Grinderman (Couldn’t find a non-live version, so here’s one from Jools Holland)

I don’t know how many, if any, will get into the countdown, but we’ll see.

By the way, I linked to an alternate mix of Kids because I like it more than the official version. Deal with it! 😀

Columbia ≈ Alphaville

I was messing around on my computer this weekend just gone – probably building an apartment block in Minecraft or something – when Visage’s one and only (as far as I know) hit Fade to Grey came on iTunes…

This reminded me of Kelly Osbourne’s quite blatant rip-off re-imaging of the song from a few years back, One Word, so I fired it up on YouTube…

It’s actually not a bad song, no doubt because it steals references so many elements from the original.

In any case, the video clip reminded me that although I was fully aware of the ground breaking 1965 French Sci-Fi film Alphaville, I actually had no idea what it was about (apart from modernist Paris architecture). So I looked it up on Wikipedia and was surprised to note a number of similarities with Bioshock Infinite – to wit in both stories a man is sent to infiltrate a closed off, technology obsessed city run by a dictator with an obscured past, and becomes involved with his mysterious daughter.

Of course the resolutions of the stories are completely different, but it was just a kind of cool thing to stumble over on a Sunday afternoon.

Oh, and while on the subject of Alphaville, here’s the song you’re probably thinking of…

Crazy Bioshock Inifinite Theories Number One

I suspect that the developers of Bioshock Infinite didn’t actually want to use Girls Just Wanna Have Fun in the game. I think they wanted Time After Time, but they couldn’t get the rights.

Why? Several of the other anachronistic songs seem to contain references to the plot and general theme of the game. Fortunate Son and Everybody Wants to Rule the World in particular. Time After Time would seem to tie in with the time travel elements and the relationships Elizabeth has with several of the other characters, and hence fits the game better than Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.

It’s a theory!

Went to a Quiz Night with Justin and Marika last night. Our table came about 5th or 6th out of 30 or so, which isn’t bad. We were actually in the lead up until the last few rounds, but we had a couple of bad ones, and some other tables had some good ones. It was a good night – although the organisation was shambolic with the result that it didn’t finish until just before midnight.

Additionally, one of the questions was “What did the S.S. in the name of the S.S. Titanic stand for?”. The correct answer – as any fule shud kno – is absolutely bloody nothing, because the Titanic wasn’t an S.S., it was an R.M.S. There was a $50 penalty for challenging questions so we gritted out teeth and ran with it, receiving full points for the completely erroneous “Steam Ship”. Honestly, who vets these questions?

But yeah, stunning ignorance of historical ship designations aside, it was a really fun night and apparently raised a lot of money, so that’s good.

Hmmm, what else has been going on? Oh yes, I’ve been watching some Adventure Time on YouTube. It’s one of those series I’ve been meaning to check out for ages, and against all the odds now actually have. It turns out that it’s every bit as good as I’ve heard – here’s an episode for you to see for yourself! (assuming lawyers haven’t swept down and destroyed it…).

Finally, here’s some nice, soothing music by the Legendary Stardust Cowboy to tide you over…

Jerusalem

Imagine a train. A steel black, armoured train drawn by a massive behemoth of a steam engine which groans slowly into life, accelerating out of the station and onto the tracks, its whistle howling bleakly into the night. As far as the eye can see is a bleak, post-industrial landscape of broken earth, shattered buildings, and dead chimneys, pierced through by the rail line our train follows, its ever increasing speed turning the piles of collapsed bricks and bent girders into a blur with only the cold, dead hills appearing clear in the distance.

The cabin is occupied by two engineers, their forms concealed by greatcoats,  goggles, rebreathers and caps. One ceaselessly shovels mounds of coal into the roaring furnace while the other types cryptic codes into a worn keypad, frayed and dangling wires carrying his signals back to the carriages behind. A greasy printer mounted on the cabin wall coughs to life and starts outputting a list of towns – the keypad engineer ticks them off as the train hurtles through their broken remains.

A golden light appears on the horizon. As the train climbs the hills it becomes brighter, and brighter still until the engine rounds a curve and a vast industrial complex is revealed, occupying the valley below. The sky is lit by gouts of flame and great searchlights, illuminating the stacks and towers of the refineries and furnaces that stretch to the horizon. The train slows as it comes down off the hills, entering a brightly lit corridor between the stacks. The horns and bells of the complex sound out in welcome and the train whistles back – rolling through the great gates that open in the wall of the largest factory…

Got that? Good. Now listen to it.

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