Voting closes tomorrow – Hottest 100 of Australian songs

16 Jul Voting closes tomorrow – Hottest 100 of Australian songs

Submitting my votes in the Triple J’s Hottest 100 Australian songs has been challenging to say the least. At this 11th hour, I have changed at least four of my top ten songs.

If you are still sitting on the votes, my advice would be to go through your short list and work out (via streaming data), who is most likely to win a place. It is probably a pretty controversial tactic. We should vote for the songs we REALLY love best, right? I guess. Except that when they have 70K plays it is not so likely that they are going to place, so it feels like it would be a waste of a vote.

That was my second tactic, after collating the long list of songs from the nominations, then a short list of 60 or so songs that I love best.

Then I wanted to vote for people who deserve it. To begin with there was hardly any women on my list, maybe one or two. So, I deliberately downgraded a couple of other songs to include Sia and Thelma Plum. It wasn’t such a hard decision. I love The Nosebleed Section by the Hilltop Hoods, but I have developed the opinion that the Hilltop Hoods are misogynists over my time listening to them, so I didn’t FEEL GOOD about voting for them.

I also included The Cat Empire, which only has 25 M streams or so, but they are probably one of my favourite bands of all time, so it felt like I should include them. Gotye was a glaring omission, which I probably would have rectified if I could press the ‘back’ button on the submission, but I would have voted for ‘Hearts a Mess’ and it is a bit sad perhaps. I wanted to stick to upbeat songs if possible, to keep the energy and vibes high.

I also included The Presets as a kind of political vote for their song about the plight of refugees.

You can see my votes, short list and long list in this playlist:

It is a fun playlist to listen to. And it is in reverse alphabetical order for ease of organising later (when the rubber hits the road and the countdown is played out).

It is going to be an interesting day. Given that there are about 350 songs on my long list and it was so incredibly hard to narrow it down to just 10, I can imagine that the Hottest 100 is going to be full of surprises.

And now I am going to do the unthinkable and press ‘submit’. I know that I will have voting regret (as I always do), but I will know that I tried my best. And I have an awesome playlist of Australian music out of it. There is so much of the stuff. And so much of it is so, so good. Thanks Triple J for shining a light on this body of work!!

I would love to hear about what songs made it into your top 10!! Please share your thoughts in the comments.