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| "Dear triple j, why don't you play Eminem any more?" |
There were a lot of great songs in the 2000 Hottest 100 (and you can hear them on Monday when the countdown is replayed on Double J). But there were also some not-so-great songs (I'm looking at you, Limp Bizkit).
So what if some of those not-so-awesome tunes made way for some bona fide classics? Here are 10 songs that you won’t believe missed the triple j Hottest 100 of 2000.
READ MORE ABOUT SONGS THAT MISSED TRIPLE J'S HOTTEST 100 COUNTDOWNS OVER THE YEARS HERE!
At The Drive-In - One Armed Scissor
This song was all over triple j in the latter half of 2000 but it took some now legendary Big Day Out shows that summer and At The Drive-In's subsequent burn-out break-up to get them into the Hottest 100 in 2001. While Pattern Against User and Invalid Litter Dept made that countdown, it was too late for this incendiary first single off their all-time classic album Relationship Of Command, even though it was listed in the voting guide.
Bonus fact: Members of At The Drive-In would return to the Hottest 100 as The Mars Volta in 2003 with their track Inertiatic ESP, which snuck in at #99.
Eminem - Stan
Marshall Mathers III had a good year Hottest 100-wise in 2002, getting three songs into the countdown, including Lose Yourself at #7. But those are his only appearances in the poll. That means classic singles My Name Is and The Real Slim Shady never made the cut, but the biggest crime has to be the omission of Stan, which is arguably Eminem's best tracks and one of the greatest hip hop songs of all time.
Bonus fact: The song Eminem sampled in Stan - Dido's Thank You - made it into the Hottest 100 of 2001, three years after it was first released on the soundtrack of the Gwyneth Paltrow vehicle Sliding Doors.
Machine Gun Fellatio - Not Afraid Of Romance
Machine Gun Fellatio scored two songs in the countdown of 2000 - the surprisingly beautiful and poignant Unsent Letter reached #16 while Mutha Fukka On A Motorcycle landed in the bottom half of the poll for the second year in a row (one of the few songs to achieve this feat). But this brassy, sample-heavy track could have easily been a third. MGF had a solid run on the Hottest 100, polling nine times in six years (although two of those are Mutha Fukka On A Motorcycle) before combusting in 2005.
Bonus fact: Mutha Fukka On A Motorcycle is one of three songs that polled in both the 1999 and 2000 countdowns - the other two are Metallica's No Leaf Clover and The Whitlams' Thank You (For Loving Me At My Worst). What was going on in 2000? Were we all drunk? No, triple j mistakenly listed them all in the 2000 voting guide, despite them having already polled the year before.
PJ Harvey - Kamikaze
Though not a single, this track from PJ Harvey's awesome 2000 album Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea attracted plenty of triple j airplay. While Kamikaze missed out on the Hottest 100, the record's first single Good Fortune did make the cut, scraping in at #90. Oddly, this was Polly Jean's first entry into the poll, despite having released four critically acclaimed albums before this. For such an important artist, Harvey is sadly under-represented in the Hottest 100, with just three entries over the years.
Bonus fact: Non-single This Mess We're In, her duet with Radiohead's Thom Yorke from Stories From The City..., made the countdown the following year, landing at #23.
Queens Of The Stone Age - Feel Good Hit Of The Summer & Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret
Here's one of my favourite bizarre Hottest 100 facts - QOTSA's drug-lovin' anthem Feel Good Hit Of The Summer is including on the 2-CD compilation released to coincide with the 2000 Hottest 100 despite not making it into the Hottest 100. This has led some people to surmise that it landed at #101. Whatever the reason, it's surprising the song didn't make the cut, especially given the Hottest 100's love of a good drug song (The Reefer Song, (You'll Never Be An) Old Man River, Flippers, etc...). Perhaps even more surprising is that Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret also missed the cut. This stylish groover is a highlight of QOTSA's second album Rated R, which yielded exactly zero songs in the poll.
Bonus fact: QOTSA had five songs off their next album Songs For The Deaf in the 2002 Hottest 100. Silverchair also had five that year, which was a record at the time. The record was equalled the following year by Powderfinger and The White Stripes, and then broken by Wolfmother in 2006 with six entries - a record which still stands.
Doves - Catch The Sun
Triple j's listeners voted Doves' album Lost Souls in at #8 on their best albums of 2000 poll. But that generosity didn't extend to the Hottest 100, with not a single song off that acclaimed album making the countdown - not even this summery head-bopper, which got a substantial amount of airplay at the time. In fact, Doves have never made it into a Hottest 100... except for 1993, back when they were called Sub Sub and their track Ain't No Love (Ain't No Use) made the countdown.
Bonus fact: Sub Sub turned into Doves in 1998 after a studio fire destroyed all their equipment and the bulk of an album they were working on. The disaster led the band to completely change tack, switching from an electro-dance outfit to an indie-rock group and renaming themselves Doves.
Kinobe - Slip Into Something More Comfortable
Remember those Cafe Del Mar CDs that were big in the late '90s/early '00s? If you have no idea what I'm referring to, this mellow mix of strings, flutes and waves is a pretty good indication of their chillout ambitions. British group Kinobe are still around, though they've not reached the heights again of this first single, which samples an Engelbert Humperdinck tune and got a lot of triple j love in 2000.
Bonus fact: Cafe Del Mar is a bar in Ibiza that starting releasing CDs in 1994 inspired by the chillout sets of resident DJ José Padilla. The first Cafe Del Mar compilation featured Underworld, who made the Hottest 100 two years later with Born Slippy, a decidedly un-chill tune.
Outkast - Ms Jackson
Outkast's Stankonia hit the shelves in October 2000, with this and the other singles B.O.B. and So Fresh, So Clean hitting radio around the world about the same time. It wasn't until January 2001 that Ms Jackson finally got a single release in Australia - a little too late to help it into the 2000 Hottest 100. The song bubbled away on radio, finally breaking through on the ARIA charts in the middle of March and spending 14 weeks there, including four weeks at #2. But for some reason it didn't make the 2001 Hottest 100 either, despite being a hip hop classic. Go figure.
Bonus fact: The Vines' cover of Ms Jackson reached #30 in the 2002 Hottest 100. Meanwhile, Outkast has only made the countdown once - Hey Ya! hit #2 in 2003.
Len - Steal My Sunshine
This summery bop was released in October 1999 - just in time for the Aussie summer. By Xmas it was in the ARIA top 50 and by the end of January 2000 it was sitting pretty at #3. Someone in marketing deserved a pay rise for that level of perfect timing. Canadian band Len are regarded as a one-hit wonder on the strength of this song, which spent almost half a year in the Aussie charts yet couldn't crack the Hottest 100. While triple j initially played Steal Me Sunshine, they soon tired of it, happy to leave it to the mainstream stations to play.
Bonus fact: A lot of Canadians have made the Hottest 100 - from kd lang to Drake - but only one has ever cracked the top 10 and that's The Weeknd. He reached #9 in 2015 with Can't Feel My Face and #10 in 2016 with Starboy.
Peaches - Fuck The Pain Away
Fair to say this was way ahead of its time. Watch Cardi B's WAP go high in the 2020 countdown and then listen back to this and tell me Peaches wasn't hitting in the same ballpark 20 years earlier with her femme-forward sexuality. You can practically hear Peaches grinning as she sings lines like the title of this track. I guess it was too much for triple j listeners at the time.
Bonus fact: Peaches has never been in the Hottest 100, despite releasing such killer tracks as Set It Off, Kick It, and Boys Wanna Be Her.
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