HOW THE HOTTEST 100 RUINED MY LIFE:
A Millennial Musician’s Guide to Turning 30
Written by Ben Barwick
10/02/2024
THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS EXPLICIT LANGUAGE
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“And the winner of this year’s Hottest 100 Countdown is… Zombie by The Cranberries!”
If I weren’t womb-bound at this point in 1994, I’d have been ecstatic. What a track, narrowly beating out the hugely controversial but insanely good “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails and a two-in-a-row stint by The Offspring. Such an amazing year for music, if I do say so myself!
Well... of course I’m saying that. I was born then. People like the music from the year they were born. That’s a given. Or, at least, that’s how we are raised to be. There is a serious penchant for the nostalgic that gets pushed on us right from the moment we are cognisant enough to piss in the right place. “I remember when I was a kid, I used to play with army men toys like those,” “back in my day we didn’t have computers, we had to go outside and if we weren’t home when the sun came down, we’d get smacked,” “there was none of this doof-doof crap when I was little, nobody learns the organ anymore.” Fair cop, that’s all true, as far as I know or care.
The most dangerous thought is the idea that we should do something one way because we’ve always done it that way. That leaves no room to grow, evolve, learn, become better people, like new things or come up with new ideas. Unfortunately, we’ve had this way of thinking for way too long. When Zombie by The Cranberries hit the top spot in the Hottest 100 of 1994, I’m willing to bet that someone in their 30s who grew up listening to The Beatles, Ziggy-era Bowie, and Tom Jones was looking up from their melamine dinner-plates, screaming “why?! What has music become? It’s all so sad and distorted and noisy! And this stupid voice! And who the fuck is Nine Inch Nails?”
Tom Jones got number nine that year, and to this day, you can still hear “ya joking, shoulda been higher” echoing through the last remnants of muzak-filled shopping centres that softly blow in the harsh, ever-warming winds of suburban Australia. You would then have heard the whirring hum of a cassette player hiss through a home-made tape of top-of-the-pops radio rock, emanating from the kitchen bench of a modest four-bedroom home in Ipswich, QLD that they had purchased five years earlier for $94,000.
Now, pretend that the Hottest 100 started much earlier. I can imagine my grandfather hearing Ziggy Stardust hit the top of the charts one day, and instinctively cramming 40 years of swing-flavoured wax back into his ears as a coping mechanism. It’s a funny thought. I write it in jest.
Well strap in, bucko, because this is us now.
In the year of our lord and saviour Taylor Swift, the top song for 2023 was Paint The Town Red by Doja Cat. Had I heard it before the countdown? No. Have I heard it since? No, I have in fact gone out of my way to turn it off. Is it insanely popular on TikTok? Absolutely it is, I have been informed. Did I have a knee-jerk reaction about this song being the end of good music? Fuck yeah, I did! What a crock of shit! Did nobody hear all the cool alternative shit that came out this year? Sleep Token, the new TISM material, Pierce The Veil covering Karma Police for Like A Version… Granted, Sleep Token’s “The Summoning” hit in at number 83, but that went viral on TikTok too! Shoulda been higher, right? Triple J used to be the alternative station! They never used to play that pop trash like Doja Cat and whatever a Dom Dolla is!
But here is the thing: did I calm the fuck down and get over myself? Yes. I did. Because guess what? The Cranberries were popular in 1994. So were Nine Inch Nails, Silverchair, The Offspring, Nirvana and every other band that appeared in the countdown that year. That has never changed. The bands have always been popular. When did being a musical elitist become a full-time job for JJJ listeners? Why should we be so incensed about popular dance music and pop music (fun fact: pop is short for popular) being in a countdown of popular songs? More to my point, why did it swallow me this year?
Nostalgia. That’s why.
That army man reference from before? Yeah, it was there for a reason.
Back when I was born, Nirvana was in the Hottest 100, experimentalists like Nick Cave, Bjork and Severed Heads were doing interesting things at the height of an experimental period of music, and modern punk was starting to forge its way out of the dingy football clubrooms of the small towns of the world. Back in my day, I used to play RuneScape and listen to Silverchair’s “Neon Ballroom” back before it was called Old School RuneScape and Daniel Johns went fully off his tits on whatever he got himself into.
Human nature dictates that we be nostalgic. Music soundtracks our lives. Our nostalgia has a soundtrack, and we impart those memories along with those songs onto our young. Human nature has us thrusting our, unbeknownst to us, kinda shitty music taste onto our children and expecting them to appreciate it… and we don’t cave. We know what we want to hear, even from early on. We’re certainly influenced by our parents, I got Queen from Mum and Alice Cooper from Dad, and as far as I know, perhaps hyperpop duo 100 Gecs were inspired by the progressive non-standards set by acts like Queen and King Crimson. But I can tell you with serious confidence that 100 Gecs will never be in my parent's playlists. And, I can also tell you with potential confidence that 100 Gecs won’t be in my children’s wheelhouse. “Dumbest Girl Alive” is going to sound to them the same way The Eagles’ album tracks sounded to me: absolute dogshit.
But you know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna show our kids 100 Gecs. We’re gonna show them Doja Cat, Billie Eilish and Nicki Minaj, and they’re going to be horrified. And they’re going to show their kids bands made of people who were born this year, and THEY will be horrified. And we’ll ask ourselves what is wrong with the culture we grew up with, and decide, collectively, that everything was perfect in our day. Nothing was bad about Billie Eilish! She introduced the mainstream to horror-pop, which was a big step that led to a bit of darkness creeping into the real world! “Am I out of touch? No, it’s the kids who are wrong” (Principal Skinner, 1994).
The truth is, the ridiculousness of 100 Gecs, or indeed any other hyperpop producer/s, wasn’t around when our parents were. The sonic darkness of “Bury A Friend” by Billie Eilish wasn’t a thing. Evolution happens. Did you know that our fingers get pruney in water so that we can grip things in the water, but that wouldn’t have happened centuries ago because we have genetically evolved as humans since? Did you know computers weren’t around in the 1930s? Did you know hyperpop wasn’t invented until like twenty minutes ago? It’s true! And we wouldn’t have acts like Doja Cat topping the Hottest 100 without technology being the way that it is, without TikTok allowing rapid-consumption content, without modern recording techniques and synthetic production.
If music never evolved, we’d still be listening to free jazz in dive bars. If we stopped at Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll,” we wouldn’t have The Timelords’ “Doctorin’ The Tardis” or Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead” (I don’t care if it was never confirmed, I’m calling it)... and I think we can all agree that it is a good thing that we have not have settled on letting Gary Glitter, Confirmed Nonce, be the only person to use that drum beat.
So what is to be done? “I don’t fuckin’ like Doja Cat, I like real music,” I hear you shriek out of the driver’s-side window of a rusting 2001 Toyota Camry, trying to compete with the volume of Enter Sandman by Metallica which is on it’s third play for the day. I’ll tell you what you can do. You can, with absolutely no due respect, get the ever-loving fuck over yourself.
Doja Cat is popular now, but is not the be all and end all of music. You can still listen to whatever you want. And, in the same vein, JJJ is not the be all and end all of radio stations you could listen to. Nostalgia has swallowed you, and like… that’s fine, but that doesn’t give you the right to rain on anyone else’s parade. You can choose to listen to the same shit for the next 30 years if you want, but the rest of the world doesn’t have to choose that. The rest of the world is moving on to different things like Flume and Dom Dolla while you’re out here in Facebook comments saying “JJJ just isn’t the same anymore, they never used to play any of this pop shit.”
What y’all seem to forget is that Doja Cat is number one because she was voted by majority to that position. Nirvana was number one because, and get ready to cringe in your britches, Nirvana were popular. So were The Cranberries, so was Joy Division, so was Augie March, so was Franz Ferdinand. In ten years, we could add “so was Billie Eilish, so was Flume, so was Doja Cat.” Some toddler from today will win the Hottest 100 in 2040, and Gen Z is going to be saying “JJJ used to slay for real, but now? It’s giving yuck.”
A quick aside: I worked with a Gen Z girl for a little while and I contextually learned a lot of their slang… there is no reason we should be getting all fucked up about it. Them saying “slay” is no better than when we used to say “swag,” or that fantastic period of time where we all unironically said “lol” as a word instead of laughing.
The easiest solution is to just listen to old music, right?
Wrong, but I totally get why you would think so. Old music already exists, you already like it, just listen to that… well, that is where nostalgia becomes ignorance. New music is released every minute of every day, using every song from every genre and every generation as inspiration. A brand new band could be writing your new Enter Sandman as we speak, but you’ll never find them because nostalgia is blinding you. Pink Floyd is great - so check out All India Radio. Never heard of them? Probably because you weren’t looking. They did a wonderful cover of “Set The Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” and plenty of original spaced-out psych stuff. You should really check out more of their stuff.
And herein lies the solution; nothing has to be popular to exist to you, nor does it have to be subcultural, so go and find your own new music! You can sort through everything to find exactly what you want; Spotify playlists, JJJ Unearthed, AMRAP, community radio stations, gigs... All it takes is you putting in a search term in Spotify and listening to something new on your way to work, or chucking together a playlist in JJJ Unearthed while you play a game. AMRAP is a wonderful place, because so many hidden gems are in there… a lot of shit too, not everyone can be a winner (personal opinion). But even then, I wouldn’t know half the music I do if it weren’t for AMRAP. My favourite Tasmanian artist, I Think They Hate Me, was one I found on AMRAP, and they are now one of my favourite artists in general.
I can imagine that someone somewhere is the kind of person to call trans people "pronoun snowflakes" and then get sad when a vague non-identity in an article written by some goblin with no real credibility becomes relatable, and I don't want to alienate anybody including them, so I'll start shutting up now.
I guess what I want this all to boil down to is this;
Don’t let a popular music countdown dictate what you should listen to, but don’t let your nostalgic tendencies dictate your views and opinions on new music.
Don't shit on artists for not being to your specific taste, and don't shit on radio stations or their presenters for not catering to your musical needs on a whim.
And most importantly, let other people like what they like. If that is Doja Cat, great. There is no use having a sook about it if the majority wanted her at number one… you’re outnumbered, and they aren’t listening to you.
They’re listening to JJJ: a radio station that they too will probably come to resent in 10 years, unless they decide to take reason with them into the future, and leave nostalgia in the past.
Now go.
Go forth and listen. > JJJ Unearthed
> AMRAP
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