Hottest 100 winners throughout the years

[tommo]

So, in my last post I said "Sex on Fire" was the least interesting #1 since "My Happiness". After posting, I wondered if it deserved to rate lower than Alex Lloyd's "Amazing", Jet's "Are You Gonna Be My Girl?" or Bernard Fanning's "Wish You Well", three more truly snore-worthy tracks. That got me to thinking "Jeez, is the number one ever particularly good?" Well, lets have a look:



2008: Kings of Leon - "Sex on Fire"
2007: Muse - "Knights of Cydonia"
2006: Augie March - "One Crowded Hour"
2005: Bernard Fanning - "Wish You Well"
2004: Franz Ferdinand - "Take Me Out"
2003: Jet - "Are You Gonna Be My Girl?"
2002: Queens of the Stone Age - "No One Knows"
2001: Alex Lloyd - "Amazing"
2000: Powderfinger - "My Happiness"
1999: Powderfinger - "These Days"
1998: The Offspring - "Pretty Fly for a White Guy"
1997: The Whitlams - "No Aphrodisiac"
1996: Spiderbait - "Buy Me a Pony"
1995: Oasis - "Wonderwall"
1994: The Cranberries - "Zombie"
1993: Dennis Leary - "Asshole"

Hmm... really not too crash hot, is it? Personally I think the Muse and QotSA tracks are pretty awesome, and Franz Ferdinand and Augie March are decent. There's some nostalgia-value in Dennis Leary, The Cranberries and Spiderbait, but that's about it. I'd say out of those 16 songs, at least 6 just plain suck.

What do other people think of these choices?

Comments

[tommmo.livejournal.com]

The "downward slope" thing you mention is a good point. I'd have to agree with most, if not all of the cases you've given. Muse are an exception, since I think the music on Black Holes and Revelations was a significant step up from Absolution, and something of a revitalisation of the group's style. It all pales in comparison to Origin of Symmetry, though.

Hmm, I used to like "These Days" quite a bit back in the day, but now I'm totally apathetic about it. I definitely prefer it to "My Happiness", though. Powderfinger definitely had some solid singles before that, though - "D.A.F", "The Day You Come", "JC" and "Hindley Street" are all pretty decent, imo.

I agree with what you say about the song with broad appeal winning, although I think there's been more of a trend of "selling the artist" on triplej recently that's also having a major effect. I get the feeling from the older H100s that voters were more concerned with the best/most popular songs of the year. I dunno, it could be a shift in how I perceive it between then and now, but I keep getting the impression that triplej listeners get a bit too fannish about the demographic's "cool artists" these days. Hence the predictability of expected big names making the Top 20 every year.

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, I liked Show Biz. I must have a thing for first albums, even when they're not very polished or arguably not as good as their successors.

They do make a point of promoting albums on JJJ, I've noticed that. Not that I listen to it much, but they mention their feature albums a lot in their song breaks. But broad appeal ==> rock ==> rockism ==> albumism / artistism, you might say.

I actually heard some typical rock fan (think the type of person who goes on about the Arctic Monkeys' creative new direction) say "well, Kings of Leon are the Best Rock Band on the Planet at the moment" (capitals mine) as if they had formally received the title from Oasis or something.

On "promoting the artist", I dimly recall that when QotSA won the H100 they had pretty much the entire tracklist of Songs for the Deaf in the top one hundred.

[tommmo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I remember that ridiculous run of QotSA tracks. Not quite the entire album (which is something like 17 tracks long, after all!), but there were about 6. And only 2 were singles, iirc. Now THAT'S voting for the artist!

Actually, that was the year that Dave Grohl featured in over 1/10 of the countdown, between QotSA, Foo Fighters and the late-release of Nirvana's "You Know You're Right".

Ignorant, ridiculous, sweeping statements like the one you've mentioned always bring a smile to my face.

[ataxi.livejournal.com]

Damn! I'd forgotten the Foo Fighters existed until you mentioned them. Fuck Dave Grohl.