COMMENT
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IT’S finally happened to me: I’m too old for Triple J’s Hottest 100.
I realised this sad fact on Sunday, when I was way more excited to turn on Double J and listen to the Hottest 100 from 20 years ago than I had been on Saturday when the 2017 countdown played.
1997 was the year I started high school; the first year I properly knew all the songs. I spent countless hours trying to tape the radio without cutting off the start of songs.
Aged 13, I shouted out the lyrics to tracks like the Living End’s Prisoner of Society, Blink 182’s Dammit and Jebediah’s Leaving Home without irony. I mailed (yep, in the post) my votes in for the first time, and definitely would have included the number 1 song, The Whitlams’ No Aphrodisiac.
Turning up the volume and reliving my high school days while I cleaned out my spare room (adult life can be SO exciting) this weekend, every song put a smile on my face and pulled at a little string inside me.
And that’s when I knew that – even if I like lots of the songs from this year and all the years after – I will never again feel like the Hottest 100 list is the soundtrack to my year.
That said, I can’t understand the outrage I’ve seen on social media over this year’s list, and the winning song, HUMBLE by Kendrick Lamar. I’m pretty sure people were angry in 1997 when Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping came in at number 3 – and looking back, it’s still a crap song, but it does sound a lot like 20 years ago.
I’m so out of the loop that I don’t even know how HUMBLE goes without Googling, but I can’t possibly be angry about it winning. Surely if you’re incensed, you can have the good grace to realise that it just might not be designed for you anymore?
And anyway, who needs to feel old listening to Triple J when, now on ABC local radio (ok, maybe I do feel old), you can listen to Myf Warhurst and Lindsay McDougall back-to-back every afternoon and pretend it’s the mid-2000s again!