Tag: #hottest100

Your Guide to Voting in the Hottest 100 of Australian Songs

I love a good list.  No matter the subject – I’m there.  Lists aren’t meant to be definitive – they’re meant to inspire conversation, if not debate.  Who amongst us has not reacted to a list of the ‘greatest movies ever made’ by querying the presumably accidental omission of anything from the ‘Police Academy’ franchise, before going on to debate in which order they should appear?  (Is Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol a superior piece of work as against Mission to Moscow?  It’s a line ball.)

When ABC launched its ‘Hottest 100 of Australian Songs’ I was excited.  I instantly started jotting down a list with songs by Nick Cave, You Am I, The Fauves and the Captain Matchbox Whoopee Band before I caught myself – ‘these are the artists that everyone will nominate’. 

It’s one thing to be popular.  It’s another to be stubbornly unpopular and forgotten by history.  Anyone can put their hand up to support ‘Holy Grail’ by Hunters and Collectors.  It takes someone truly special to nail their colours to the mast and push forward ‘Suddenly’ by Angry Anderson.  Sometimes you’ve got to take a stand for the forgotten no matter how much they deserve to be so.  I wanted to be inclusive and select songs that no one else would dare suggest.  It was then that I thought of soap operas.

There was a moment – albeit fleeting – in which actors in soap operas thought they should release truly miserable music.  Largely, this was Kylie’s fault.  Her peers looked on aghast at her extraordinary success and wrongly attributed it to the fact that she was in a soap opera, overlooking the fact that she had tonnes of talent and the kind of steely determination that can make tides roll back and empires crumble.  ‘If Kylie can do it, so can I’, they reasoned.  They were wrong.  Dead wrong.

I’ll be voting for ‘Don’t It Make You Feel Good?’ by Stefan Dennis.  Granted, the answer to the question is a swift and extremely firm ‘no’, but as songs go, this one’s a burger with the lot.  Slap bass, roaring guitars and plinky plonky synths supported by confounding chord sequences.  It’s peak 80s.  As for the video, it’s nothing short of a masterpiece – shadows, darkened alleyways and chainmail fencing are in abundance and people – including the singer himself – are in an inadvisable state of partial undress.  By dent of either a miracle or a software malfunction, this song reached number sixteen on the UK Singles Chart.  It’s time for a comeback.

Deep down, everyone thinks they can rap.  Including Bruce Samazan.  In soapie terms, Bruce Samazan is a triple threat, having appeared in holy trinity of soaps; Neighbours, E Street, and Home & Away.  Just as those who’ve won an Emmy, Tony, Oscar and Grammy are said to be an ‘EGOT’, Bruce is NESHA.  Or, as he forgettably once said, ‘I am NESHA’.

Bruce’s music career was much like a comet – it came blazing into view before landing somewhere in the Indian ocean, never to be heard from again.  It was both prophetic and a relief that his single was entitled ‘One of a Kind’.  The rhymes are terrible.  The video is awful.  The music sounds as though it may well have tumbled out of a cereal packet.  It peaked at number eighty on the Australian Singles Chart, presumably because all the other songs called in sick that week. 

But those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, and I feel that if we don’t recognise ‘One of a Kind’ as a disaster of Hindenburg proportions, we’re not really being honest with ourselves.  It’s time to face up to our history – the good, the bad and the Bruce.  But of all the forgotten songs of the past, my favourite was performed not a soapie actor, but a footballer. 

This feels like precisely the right moment for a Mark ‘Jacko’ Jackson renaissance.  Granted, this may be the only time that the words “Mark ‘Jacko’ Jackson” and “renaissance” have been used together in a sentence, but I strongly feel that we could all do with some cheering up.  His song, ‘I’m An Individual’ is, shockingly, unavailable on Spotify and Apple Music, which is an absolute shame.  For all its faults (and there are many) it’s a song that couldn’t have come from anywhere else.  Jacko doesn’t let an inability to sing stand in the way of a great single that’s delivered with energy and no small amount of wit.  That’s why I’m voting for Jacko as my number one pick. 

Get cracking.  By all means, vote for the great, the awesome and the profound.  I, on the other hand, will throwing my support behind the forgotten, derided and the dark recesses of the Australian musical landscape.  Why?  Well, I could give you some made up reason that sounds particularly grand and noble but I won’t.  Instead, I’ll content myself to quote Jacko and simply say, well, because I’m an individual.

For Whom the Tin Whistle Blows

This is how it works now.  You buy something, you blithely surrender your email address to facilitate the sending of an eco-friendly e-receipt and, low and behold, you start receiving emails from the company with a fervour and frequency that would embarrass Baby Reindeer.  I appreciate that I could block these missives and otherwise treat them as the spam they most certainly are, but they invariably dangle the promise that some astounding offer is just around the corner… if only you keep receiving their emails.

If I were to describe these correspondences in a word, that word would be ‘needy’.  They never ask how I am or how my day was.  They only want to talk about themselves.  It’s incredibly narcissistic and shallow.  Granted, they may say the same for me, given that all I wanted was to buy something and then move on with my life unencumbered, but I prefer to think of myself as a traditionalist rather than selfish.

The one thing these emails are not is humble.  In fact, these communiques go out of their way to be memorable.  Grandiose, even.  If Mohammed Ali wrote marketing emails, they would be nothing compared to some of the messages I receive in my inbox. 

Some time ago, we bought a musical instrument from overseas.  In December, I received an email from the retailer that saw fit to describe a CD featuring the Irish tin whistle as ‘the hottest item this Christmas’.  This struck me as unlikely.  I, for one, cannot imagine a world in which kids toss aside their Play stations and Gameboys because someone just gifted them a compact disc chock full of tin whistle.  The idea of little tykes everywhere running up to their parents and breathlessly begging for a tin whistle CD is some considerable distance beyond ludicrous. 

For starters, upon hearing the news of an Irish tin whistle CD, most kids would begin saying ‘what’s a CD?’ After this was explained to them, and having broken to them the somewhat discomforting news that, once upon a time, people paid for music, they’d invariably follow up with: ‘what’s a tin whistle?’  And whilst there’s nothing wrong with these questions, as such, and they may well denote a curious mind, they weigh against the possibility that such an artefact would ever be ‘the hottest thing this Christmas’.

The email went on, with a list of testimonials that proclaimed in glorious prose the power of the recording.  Two things were striking – the sheer breathlessness of their praise as fawning words of adulation vaulted over their tongues (or, as the case may be, through their fingers to the keyboard below).  I very much doubt that Penicillin provoked reviews that raved as much as these did.  These were the kind of testimonials that were so glowing in nature as to render lightbulbs redundant.

Part of me was sceptical.  The other part was disappointed that I was unable to muster up this level of enthusiasm for anything, much less a compact disc of tin whistle.  What was wrong with me?  Had I become so deadened to the majesty of God’s creation that I was condemned to stumble through life with barely a pulse and a dead-eyed stare?  Probably.  But that doesn’t mean I ought to accept these cult-like devotionals as being anything close to reliable.  Before I knew it, I was writing back.

Responding to a marketing email is the one thing you should never do.  But beyond incredulous, I was also insulted.  As it happens, on the same day the greatest Irish tin whistle album ever to be unveiled to humanity had been unleashed to an adoring public, we had put a record out.  Frankly, I was jealous that the tin whistle guy was soaking up all the attention.

I couldn’t say our record (Country & Western Suburbs, if you’re asking) was ‘the hottest thing this Christmas’ as all the children in my life would rather mow the back lawn with nothing but a pair of nail clippers before listening to anything I might produce, but I’d like to think that it was well regarded on, at least, the less consequential holidays like AFL Grand Final Eve.  It’s on Bank Holidays and Arbour Day that I feel we can really make our mark.

Here’s the irony.  After being pummelled with messages on a daily basis, I finally write back and am greeted with nothing but stone-cold silence.  Well, mostly stone-cold silence with the sound of an Irish tin whistle way off in the distance.  Maybe I hurt their feelings.  Most likely I confused them by replying to a marketing email.  Or perhaps I failed to notice the tiny disclaimer that so often resides at the bottom of so many such emails: this inbox is unattended.

I won’t tell you what I got for Christmas.  What I will tell you, though, is that I didn’t get a CD featuring the Irish tin whistle.  I did, however, nominate all its tracks for Triple J’s hottest 100 and was disappointed beyond words to see that it not only failed to take out top spot, but missed the countdown entirely.  Still, there’s always next Christmas to look forward to.