There was no cricket at Adelaide Oval (or anywhere else, for that matter), our country’s highest honour was bestowed on a gaffe-prone British royal and to top it all off, Taylor Swift was ROBBED, dammit! Was this the Worst Australia Day of all time?
But putting aside the faux-outrage over the failed social media campaign to anoint US superstarlet Swift the queen of Triple J’s Hottest 100, the episode has inadvertently tapped into some interesting questions about the role of our national youth broadcaster. As Triple J’s own cheerleaders might rather loftily put it: it has tapped into the ‘zeitgeist’.
Somewhere amid the Government’s indelicate bid to rip funding from the ABC, online media site Buzzfeed’s unsubtle attempt to crash the hipsters’ party and the J’s own 40th birthday ruminations, the question has loomed large: just who does Triple J represent? Not me, that’s for sure (as it shouldn’t). I’m of an age for which listening to the annual countdown still feels like a ritualised rite of passage, but it is increasingly more an obligation than a pleasure, a bizarre experiment in diminishing returns as I try in vain to identify more than a handful of tracks by name or artist (punctuated by occasional bursts of the Play School album when my three year old tires of the incessant barrage of Aussie hip-hop and neo-synth-pop).
So Tay-Tay wasn’t invited to the Triple J party. The broadcaster shook off social media entreaties (and, evidently, enough votes to have landed her ubiquitous track in 12th spot) to ban her from contention, a move unprecedented in the history of the count.
If you take away the ‘alternative’ badging, much of what constitutes Triple J’s playlist these days sounds eerily similar to the stuff mainstream radio was playing in the mid-1980s. Reconstituted Duran Duran, amped-up Tears For Fears, neo-a-Ha.
Triple J explained on a hastily-constructed website (quickly overloaded by outraged Swift fans) that if #Tay4Hottest100 had worked, the precedent would have hijacked the competition year in, year out. Further, the song had received precisely ‘zero’ plays on the station in 2014, and the inclusion of a mega-successful pop star who wouldn’t care less about the Triple J audience would have unfairly pushed 18-year-old Adelaide rapper Tkay Maizda out of the poll altogether. Moreover, “it became pretty clear a lot of people just wanted to prod some hipsters for the lulz”.
And there’s the rub. Because the Hottest 100 is a hipsters’ party, and as such its guest-list is heavily scrutinised by the self-appointed arbiters of cool in Triple J management.
Last year Justin Burford, former frontman of now-defunct Perth band End Of Fashion, claimed that having been once built up by the broadcaster, his band was subsequently killed off by the whim of station mogul Richard Kingsmill. Fashion, it turned out, hadn’t ended; merely moved on.
“A band that was fully supported by the station, earning a top ten place in a Hottest 100, was dropped like a sack of hot potatoes upon the second album’s release. Our lead single, Fussy was even openly derided on air,” Burford wrote on his Facebook page.
So it turns out the “World’s Biggest Musical Democracy” is as pure as any other exponents of the democratic tradition, and the result is less a reflection of the people’s will than it is a conjuring trick. Sure, you may pick whichever card you like, but it will still be the one the magician intended you to pick.
I’m not sure why any of this should be controversial though. If the Hottest 100 was indeed a reflection of the will of the people, it would be peopled by the likes of Swift, along with far more trite offerings from the pop spectrum. And it would be terrible (even more so). Because in reality, the world’s biggest musical democracy is the marketplace, reflected in the billboard charts. Triple J’s ‘alternative’ countdown is, rather, the most popular of those tracks deemed hip enough to be worthy of rotation on one iconic radio station’s playlist, a very different proposition.
I can’t say I was heartbroken that Swift missed out; I listened to the song for the first time last week, as ‘research’ for another column in these pages, and it’s been awkwardly stuck in my head for most of the time since.
Unlike many, I wasn’t angry at the injustice of it all. Objectively though, listening to the countdown, I couldn’t hear much intrinsic difference between that catchy slice of sass-pop and much of yesterday’s content. If you take away the ‘alternative’ badging, much of what constitutes Triple J’s playlist these days sounds eerily similar to the stuff mainstream radio was playing in the mid-1980s. Reconstituted Duran Duran, amped-up Tears For Fears, neo-a-Ha.
Which makes it all a bit peculiar that the arbiters of cool were so sniffy about keeping pop corruptions away from their pure indie countdown. After all, the Hottest 100 has long been an unwitting haven for mainstream pop. The first annual countdown featured the likes of All That She Wants by ABBA-esque Swedes Ace of Base, though it’s possible the J’s DJs hadn’t cottoned on that the lyric “all that she wants is another baby” referred to an absent paramour rather than a lost child. The same year’s list also included UK boy band East 17 and US R’n’B divas Salt ‘n’ Pepa, which makes the poll’s defenders who feared Swift’s inclusion would open the door for the next Take That single in 2015 a tad redundant.
Despite the site-crashing outrage over Taylor’s disqualification, and amid the teeth-gnashing about the perceived blow to that great democratic Australia Day tradition, it’s worth noting (as Triple J does) that Swift’s tune was played 13,511 times last year by rival “mainstream” radio stations. So don’t cry for Taylor Swift; she can afford to shake off Triple J’s snub. Save your sympathy for the genuinely independent artists that aren’t doing the brand of nouveau-pop the Triple J gatekeepers have deemed ‘hip’ this week.
Not only will they never get a look-in at a Hottest 100; they’ll never even get a social media campaign drawing attention to the fact.
Tom Richardson is a senior journalist at InDaily.
