Take me to numbers 61-70...
71. New Noise - Refused
For years, the story of Refused was almost mythical. After releasing a pair of albums and spending years toiling away in the Swedish hardcore punk scene, Refused broke into the mainstream with the release of The Shape Of Punk To Come, an album described by some as an instant classic due to its daring, stylistic change. Unfortunately it was a commercial failure. Then, following the cancellation of a poorly-received US tour halfway through, the group announced their breakup in an open letter, bluntly titled ‘Refused Are Fucking Dead’.
The ensuing years would see fans and critics begin to appreciate the group and their work (thanks in part to the mythos of their final shows), with tracks such as New Noise becoming an influential, if overlooked, classic of the genre. With the track decrying the state of popular music and proclaiming that “We need new noise/New art for the real people,” it’s hard to believe that the alternative music-loving audience of triple j at the time didn’t embrace the tune and its message.
While the slow-burning nature of Refused’s legacy may play a huge role in this track being overlooked at the time, it undoubtedly remains one of those tracks which hindsight allows us to look at differently. - TJ
There are several reasons why a track is omitted from a Hottest 100 and ends up on this list of celebrated no-shows. Oblivion upon release but has since gained prominence (Everlong and New Slang), released too late in the year to make the cut (Loving Is Easy and Raingirl, which don’t even make our cut!) and criminal negligence (Sweet Disposition) are three explainations. When it was time for me to choose my picks for best/worst omissions, the commonish thread for my picks was simply that triple j didn’t play that song specifically, or the act more broadly.
Although some songs somehow slip through the net and place in the countdown despite not being on the playlist (Feel It Still and Rockstar are two recent examples), for the vast majority of blacklisted songs, there is no hope of inclusion. That’s the case with We Are Young by Brooklyn ultra-hipsters fun. (note the lower case and period in their official band name for extra authenticity) & Janelle Monae.
It’s almost impossible to listen to triple j (or commercial radio, for that matter) without hearing Jack Antonoff’s enviable talents - he's right there on the works of Lorde, Amy Shark, Grimes, Sia, St Lucia, Tegan and Sara, Banks, St Vincent, Lana Del Rey or MO. The guy is like Max Martin but with just enough credibility to get his production and co-writing works picked up by Artistic Merit FM. Why then won’t triple j play either of Jack’s bands, fun. and Bleachers? Surely it’s not Nate Ruess’s beautiful, perfectly enunciated vocals?
We Are Young rode the Glee/Apple keynote/Super Bowl commercial wave to global success and near ubiquity through 2012. They even got to play Splendour in the Grass. Is We Are Young any more poppy than Sweet Nothing (Cal + Flo), I Love It (Icona + Charli), Feel The Love (Rudi + John) or Silhouettes (Avicii (vale))? All those tracks made the j-grade for the Hottest 100 of 2012; had We Are Young been played on triple j I am certain it would have challenged Thrift Shop for top spot. — PA
The Music is one of those bands that did not foresee the rise of search engine optimisation as an important tool in music research and discovery (others include Live, The The, Lamb, Even and Air). Originally from Leeds, The Music combined elements of soul, Madchester, post-Britpop, grunge revival and that rock-electronica pioneered (?) by Radiohead on OK Computer and Kid A, to forge a simultaneously distinctive and derivative sound. Robert Harvey’s stretched vowels definitely helped.
The People smoulders with a dark intensity constructed around the image of a woman out walking alone — an anxiety that hasn’t been soothed 15 years on — that builds to a yearning asseveration to change the way we are living.
In an alternate universe, The Music would have been at the vanguard of guitar-driven alternate sensibilities alongside The Strokes, Queens of the Stone Age, Arctic Monkeys and Bloc Party, but the band’s relatively slow output and obfuscated sense of purpose meant it ended up more like The Bravery. Or maybe it was the lack of SEO? — PA
One of the most critically-acclaimed bands of the last few decades, Wilco have won over countless fans thanks to their country-tinged alt-rock, yet for some reason, this success has never really translated to Australian audiences. When Wilco released their fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, back in 2001, the group were in prime position for storming the Hottest 100 charts.
Backed with the wistful Heavy Metal Drummer, which featured the nostalgic chorus “I miss the innocence I've known/Playing KISS covers, beautiful and stoned", the group had arguably released one of the best summer songs of all time.
Sadly, for many Australian music fans, this track probably didn’t gain much traction until it was featured on the accompanying compilation album for the 2004 Big Day Out festival. Of course, by then it was too late for the track to crack the charts, leaving fans only able to wonder what could have been. - TJ
One of the great mondegreens I experienced first-hand was my school pal Jonno enthusing about the song Desert Masquerade by Everything But The Girl. What was that Jonno? I think the lyric is “And I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain”; who the hell misses a desert masquerade? The Phantom of the Oasis?
My memory is a little hazy on this but I’m sure triple j played Everything But The Girl tracks through the late 90s, especially off the Hull duo’s 1999 LP Temperamental. Why they chose not to play the original version of Missing or its stratospherically popular remix by Todd Terry, is an unknown. This was an era of triple j playing eerily similar casual house from new wavers like Deep Dish, White Town, Blue Boy, Morcheeba, Moloko and heritage acts like Massive Attack and Faithless. Maybe the powers that be thought this remix was just too cynically commercial, a sure-fire hit after years of toiling with barely any Australian cut-through (Don’t Leave Me Behind apparently charted at #85 on the pre-ARIA Kent Report), that it didn’t need the artistic merit imprimatur that came with playback on the js.
Missing (Todd Terry Remix) stalled at #2 for six weeks in Australia; kept off #1 by One of Us (Joan Osborne) and How Bizarre (OMC). It was the seventh biggest selling song of 1996. Those numbers guarantee that this song was hanging around like a hung up ex-lover outside your old address, so tell me again Jonno how the hell you could hear that lyric wrong? — PA
Back in 2001, Elbow’s Asleep In The Back managed to not only crack the ARIA top 100, but also scored the #3 spot on triple j’s yearly album poll. Fast-forward seven years, and the group’s Mercury Award-winning The Seldom Seen Kid was nowhere to be found on any variety of Aussie chart, much to the confusion of fans around the country.
Drawing listeners in with its slinky, smoky blues-rock, Grounds For Divorce was seen by some as a warning against the dangers of drinking, yet the verbose nature of its lyrics, and the impassioned delivery with which frontman Guy Garvey presented the track put this song into its own league. Despite this, the immense popularity this track saw, and the frequent appearance of its accompanying album on year-end best-of lists, was not enough for triple j listeners to embrace it. - TJ
Rather than the kitschy ‘80s nostalgia glamorised by contemporaneous films like Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion, 200 Cigarettes, Wet Hot American Summer and American Psycho (yes, really) — big hair, shoulder pads, smoking inside, the nascent popularity of CDs, cocaine on every table, Wang Chung on every stereo — the glory Tori Amos recalls from the ‘80s is darker, foreboding, sad but not maudlin; a reminder that, yes, this was an era of excess, when pockets bulged with greenback pilfered off Reaganomic deregulation, but it was also a time when AIDS rent through the last generation of inner city bohemians and a quiet desperation started to descend: more The Last Days of Disco than The Wedding Singer.
Indeed, the opening lines of Glory Of The 80s talks of Tori being electromagnetically sent back to a party going on in 1985, as vivid a scene-setting as you are likely to hear for a time-traveling tale of drug abuse, cross-dressing, presumed immortality, insanely high levels of self-confidence and a delicious reference to Bette Davis Eyes (the US #1 song the day I was born). And then, just when it all seems real, it disappears.
Few artists of her era influenced indie pop more than Tori Amos. A true auteur who infused her prolific and uncategorisable music with a fearless playfulness — viz labelling Courtney Love the titular (shamefully low) #98 Professional Widow — her Hottest 100 candidacy likely took hits for at times being too inaccessible for mainstream-ish audience. Her power lives on, though, in the guise of Meg Mac, Vera Blue, Fiona Apple, Lorde, King Princess and Billie Eillish, among countless more. — PA
Here’s a fun challenge for you. A cleverer wag than me has created a 10-hour loop of Tom DeLonge’s verse and the refrain from Blink-182’s punk ballad I Miss You, which was the boys’ first hit of their Hottest 100 wilderness years, between #53 Feeling This in 2003 and #54 Bored To Death in 2016.
Unlike the furiously upbeat pop punk songs happily littered with good natured and often hilariously ribald lyrics, I Miss You was a much more serious piece of break-up music, home to evocative lines referencing Halloween at Christmas and sick strange darknesses. Impressive stuff from the band that once invited listeners to take off their pants and jacket.
There’s been a lamentable dearth of crafty lyricism in contemporary skater and pop punk, with themes of alienation, depression and anxiety permeating with sincerity rather than gallows humour. Bored To Death encapsulates that sentiment though the rot had set in with I Miss You, somewhat showcasing how Blink-182 was at the bleeding edge of a second punk movement, even when being shunted aside for finally growing up.
Your challenge: listen to this mesmeric loop till you can name the three acts to have placed at the same number three separate annual Hottest 100s. One of them is a solo artist who also gets around in a band. — PA
Here’s one for the trainspotters: in 2014 when debate raged over whether Shake It Off should be including in the Hottest 100, one of the perceived truths scuttling about was that to be eligible for the countdown, a song had to have been played at least once in full during the year (which is actually the 12 months to 30 November).
Because Shake It Off had not been played, it was not eligible, was one of the prevailing dissents. Firstly, this isn’t true. Erstwhile station supremo Ollie Wards has confirmed to me that this is an urban legend: significantly more (new) songs are played on triple j each year than are included on the list (he said roughly 6,000 to 2,000), though of course there are also write-ins, which is how Shake It Off was hoping to shake it up. If being played doesn’t necessarily qualify you for being on the list, how come some songs get on the list despite not having been played?
For example, the very same year Shake It Off did not come in at #12, Sia’s Chandelier was on the list and at #9 despite not being played on triple j. This raised the question: is this the first time a song has charted despite not being played? Crafty responders responded in the negative, citing Alanis Morissette’s three entries in 1995 — #39 You Oughta Know, #85 Hand In My Pocket, #90 All I Really Want — as placements that came despite these songs and Alanis in general not having been played on the station during the year.
And to some extent that is true, but here is where is the trainspotters can lick their pencils and prime their notepads: back in 1995, Triple J would simulcast rage on Friday and Saturday nights, including rage’s countdowns of the ARIA Top 50 singles chart (a practice rage has shamefully discontinued), meaning those prenominate Alanis hits would have been played. Using Alanis’ attenuated definition, that could qualify as ironic.
Her biggest hit in terms of chart placement, you would expect the iconic Ironic to have been one of the three rogue Morissette songs to have creepy Peted their way into the Hottest 100, but no. The song filled with bon mots everyone loved to point out were not actually ironic, meaning the song as a whole was ironic, was kept off #1 in Australia by OMC's How Bizarre (itself a crossover Hottest 100 hit at #78) and George Michael's Fastlove, and kept out of the Hottest 100 by, to some extent, sexism.
72. We Are Young - fun. (feat. Janelle Monáe)
There are several reasons why a track is omitted from a Hottest 100 and ends up on this list of celebrated no-shows. Oblivion upon release but has since gained prominence (Everlong and New Slang), released too late in the year to make the cut (Loving Is Easy and Raingirl, which don’t even make our cut!) and criminal negligence (Sweet Disposition) are three explainations. When it was time for me to choose my picks for best/worst omissions, the commonish thread for my picks was simply that triple j didn’t play that song specifically, or the act more broadly.
Although some songs somehow slip through the net and place in the countdown despite not being on the playlist (Feel It Still and Rockstar are two recent examples), for the vast majority of blacklisted songs, there is no hope of inclusion. That’s the case with We Are Young by Brooklyn ultra-hipsters fun. (note the lower case and period in their official band name for extra authenticity) & Janelle Monae.
It’s almost impossible to listen to triple j (or commercial radio, for that matter) without hearing Jack Antonoff’s enviable talents - he's right there on the works of Lorde, Amy Shark, Grimes, Sia, St Lucia, Tegan and Sara, Banks, St Vincent, Lana Del Rey or MO. The guy is like Max Martin but with just enough credibility to get his production and co-writing works picked up by Artistic Merit FM. Why then won’t triple j play either of Jack’s bands, fun. and Bleachers? Surely it’s not Nate Ruess’s beautiful, perfectly enunciated vocals?
We Are Young rode the Glee/Apple keynote/Super Bowl commercial wave to global success and near ubiquity through 2012. They even got to play Splendour in the Grass. Is We Are Young any more poppy than Sweet Nothing (Cal + Flo), I Love It (Icona + Charli), Feel The Love (Rudi + John) or Silhouettes (Avicii (vale))? All those tracks made the j-grade for the Hottest 100 of 2012; had We Are Young been played on triple j I am certain it would have challenged Thrift Shop for top spot. — PA
73. The People - The Music
The People smoulders with a dark intensity constructed around the image of a woman out walking alone — an anxiety that hasn’t been soothed 15 years on — that builds to a yearning asseveration to change the way we are living.
In an alternate universe, The Music would have been at the vanguard of guitar-driven alternate sensibilities alongside The Strokes, Queens of the Stone Age, Arctic Monkeys and Bloc Party, but the band’s relatively slow output and obfuscated sense of purpose meant it ended up more like The Bravery. Or maybe it was the lack of SEO? — PA
74. Heavy Metal Drummer - Wilco
Backed with the wistful Heavy Metal Drummer, which featured the nostalgic chorus “I miss the innocence I've known/Playing KISS covers, beautiful and stoned", the group had arguably released one of the best summer songs of all time.
Sadly, for many Australian music fans, this track probably didn’t gain much traction until it was featured on the accompanying compilation album for the 2004 Big Day Out festival. Of course, by then it was too late for the track to crack the charts, leaving fans only able to wonder what could have been. - TJ
75. Missing (Todd Terry Club Mix) - Everything But The Girl
One of the great mondegreens I experienced first-hand was my school pal Jonno enthusing about the song Desert Masquerade by Everything But The Girl. What was that Jonno? I think the lyric is “And I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain”; who the hell misses a desert masquerade? The Phantom of the Oasis?
My memory is a little hazy on this but I’m sure triple j played Everything But The Girl tracks through the late 90s, especially off the Hull duo’s 1999 LP Temperamental. Why they chose not to play the original version of Missing or its stratospherically popular remix by Todd Terry, is an unknown. This was an era of triple j playing eerily similar casual house from new wavers like Deep Dish, White Town, Blue Boy, Morcheeba, Moloko and heritage acts like Massive Attack and Faithless. Maybe the powers that be thought this remix was just too cynically commercial, a sure-fire hit after years of toiling with barely any Australian cut-through (Don’t Leave Me Behind apparently charted at #85 on the pre-ARIA Kent Report), that it didn’t need the artistic merit imprimatur that came with playback on the js.
Missing (Todd Terry Remix) stalled at #2 for six weeks in Australia; kept off #1 by One of Us (Joan Osborne) and How Bizarre (OMC). It was the seventh biggest selling song of 1996. Those numbers guarantee that this song was hanging around like a hung up ex-lover outside your old address, so tell me again Jonno how the hell you could hear that lyric wrong? — PA
76. Grounds For Divorce - Elbow
Back in 2001, Elbow’s Asleep In The Back managed to not only crack the ARIA top 100, but also scored the #3 spot on triple j’s yearly album poll. Fast-forward seven years, and the group’s Mercury Award-winning The Seldom Seen Kid was nowhere to be found on any variety of Aussie chart, much to the confusion of fans around the country.
Drawing listeners in with its slinky, smoky blues-rock, Grounds For Divorce was seen by some as a warning against the dangers of drinking, yet the verbose nature of its lyrics, and the impassioned delivery with which frontman Guy Garvey presented the track put this song into its own league. Despite this, the immense popularity this track saw, and the frequent appearance of its accompanying album on year-end best-of lists, was not enough for triple j listeners to embrace it. - TJ
77. Glory Of The 80s - Tori Amos
Rather than the kitschy ‘80s nostalgia glamorised by contemporaneous films like Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion, 200 Cigarettes, Wet Hot American Summer and American Psycho (yes, really) — big hair, shoulder pads, smoking inside, the nascent popularity of CDs, cocaine on every table, Wang Chung on every stereo — the glory Tori Amos recalls from the ‘80s is darker, foreboding, sad but not maudlin; a reminder that, yes, this was an era of excess, when pockets bulged with greenback pilfered off Reaganomic deregulation, but it was also a time when AIDS rent through the last generation of inner city bohemians and a quiet desperation started to descend: more The Last Days of Disco than The Wedding Singer.
Indeed, the opening lines of Glory Of The 80s talks of Tori being electromagnetically sent back to a party going on in 1985, as vivid a scene-setting as you are likely to hear for a time-traveling tale of drug abuse, cross-dressing, presumed immortality, insanely high levels of self-confidence and a delicious reference to Bette Davis Eyes (the US #1 song the day I was born). And then, just when it all seems real, it disappears.
Few artists of her era influenced indie pop more than Tori Amos. A true auteur who infused her prolific and uncategorisable music with a fearless playfulness — viz labelling Courtney Love the titular (shamefully low) #98 Professional Widow — her Hottest 100 candidacy likely took hits for at times being too inaccessible for mainstream-ish audience. Her power lives on, though, in the guise of Meg Mac, Vera Blue, Fiona Apple, Lorde, King Princess and Billie Eillish, among countless more. — PA
78. I Miss You - Blink-182
Unlike the furiously upbeat pop punk songs happily littered with good natured and often hilariously ribald lyrics, I Miss You was a much more serious piece of break-up music, home to evocative lines referencing Halloween at Christmas and sick strange darknesses. Impressive stuff from the band that once invited listeners to take off their pants and jacket.
There’s been a lamentable dearth of crafty lyricism in contemporary skater and pop punk, with themes of alienation, depression and anxiety permeating with sincerity rather than gallows humour. Bored To Death encapsulates that sentiment though the rot had set in with I Miss You, somewhat showcasing how Blink-182 was at the bleeding edge of a second punk movement, even when being shunted aside for finally growing up.
Your challenge: listen to this mesmeric loop till you can name the three acts to have placed at the same number three separate annual Hottest 100s. One of them is a solo artist who also gets around in a band. — PA
79. Ironic - Alanis Morissette
Here’s one for the trainspotters: in 2014 when debate raged over whether Shake It Off should be including in the Hottest 100, one of the perceived truths scuttling about was that to be eligible for the countdown, a song had to have been played at least once in full during the year (which is actually the 12 months to 30 November).
Because Shake It Off had not been played, it was not eligible, was one of the prevailing dissents. Firstly, this isn’t true. Erstwhile station supremo Ollie Wards has confirmed to me that this is an urban legend: significantly more (new) songs are played on triple j each year than are included on the list (he said roughly 6,000 to 2,000), though of course there are also write-ins, which is how Shake It Off was hoping to shake it up. If being played doesn’t necessarily qualify you for being on the list, how come some songs get on the list despite not having been played?
For example, the very same year Shake It Off did not come in at #12, Sia’s Chandelier was on the list and at #9 despite not being played on triple j. This raised the question: is this the first time a song has charted despite not being played? Crafty responders responded in the negative, citing Alanis Morissette’s three entries in 1995 — #39 You Oughta Know, #85 Hand In My Pocket, #90 All I Really Want — as placements that came despite these songs and Alanis in general not having been played on the station during the year.
And to some extent that is true, but here is where is the trainspotters can lick their pencils and prime their notepads: back in 1995, Triple J would simulcast rage on Friday and Saturday nights, including rage’s countdowns of the ARIA Top 50 singles chart (a practice rage has shamefully discontinued), meaning those prenominate Alanis hits would have been played. Using Alanis’ attenuated definition, that could qualify as ironic.
Her biggest hit in terms of chart placement, you would expect the iconic Ironic to have been one of the three rogue Morissette songs to have creepy Peted their way into the Hottest 100, but no. The song filled with bon mots everyone loved to point out were not actually ironic, meaning the song as a whole was ironic, was kept off #1 in Australia by OMC's How Bizarre (itself a crossover Hottest 100 hit at #78) and George Michael's Fastlove, and kept out of the Hottest 100 by, to some extent, sexism.
It was much harder for solo female artists to get a decent run on triple j back in the 90s. For the earliest year that records are publicly available, 2000, only two of the feature albums that year were by female artists, both of whom were already established stars: Sinead O’Connor and PJ Harvey. In 2009, there were seven — Fever Ray, Lily Allen, Bertie Blackman, Sarah Blasko, Lisa Mitchell, La Roux and Florence (yes, I am counting those final two as solo artists) — of which five were debut albums. In 2018, to mid-October, there already been 10 female solo feature albums, seven of them debuts: Tia Gostelow, Tash Sultana, Laurel, Odette, Amy Shark, Florence (fourth album), Jack River, Courtney Barnett (second), Kali Uchis and Alison Wonderland (second). There are upstream reasons for this upswing in solo female representation but my understanding is that the real reason is that triple j is making a concerted effort to improve its ratios. Had this happened 20-odd years ago, Ironic probably would have made the cut, and on merit, not as some curio. — PA
Nine years after their last appearance, The Killers returned to the Hottest 100 in 2017 with the damned impressive track The Man. In fact, their ability to pump out hits over the past decade and a half is somewhat under-acclaimed, although it hasn’t gone unnoticed by triple j listeners. When you look at the singles they’ve released over that time that have cracked the ARIA top 50, all of them have made it into the Hottest 100 … except two.
This is one of them (and have a look at #88 for the other, which I would humbly suggest is their magnum opus). Read My Mind is classic Killers, with a chorus to match their best stuff and everything that makes them great - the driving bass, the bed of synths, the hooks, and Brandon Flowers’ intoxicating mix of frailty and bravado.
So why didn’t this one make the cut? It was the third single off their 2006 album Sam’s Town, and not officially released as a single until March 2007. It’s a familiar tale of timing, which you’ve already read a dozen times in this overly long article. Because you’ve read every word haven’t you? Haven’t you?
If you’re still reading at this, congratulations and thank you. - MN
80. Read My Mind - The Killers
Nine years after their last appearance, The Killers returned to the Hottest 100 in 2017 with the damned impressive track The Man. In fact, their ability to pump out hits over the past decade and a half is somewhat under-acclaimed, although it hasn’t gone unnoticed by triple j listeners. When you look at the singles they’ve released over that time that have cracked the ARIA top 50, all of them have made it into the Hottest 100 … except two.
This is one of them (and have a look at #88 for the other, which I would humbly suggest is their magnum opus). Read My Mind is classic Killers, with a chorus to match their best stuff and everything that makes them great - the driving bass, the bed of synths, the hooks, and Brandon Flowers’ intoxicating mix of frailty and bravado.
So why didn’t this one make the cut? It was the third single off their 2006 album Sam’s Town, and not officially released as a single until March 2007. It’s a familiar tale of timing, which you’ve already read a dozen times in this overly long article. Because you’ve read every word haven’t you? Haven’t you?
If you’re still reading at this, congratulations and thank you. - MN
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