Two decades ago, youth broadcaster Triple J first launched the Hottest 100 in its current format, an annual music countdown that asks listeners and music lovers alike to vote on the previous year’s most popular songs, and to celebrate Triple J have announced they will be hosting a special mid-year edition of the Hottest 100 to mark its 20 year anniversary.
The new ‘Hottest 20’ will take place over 20 days, from Wednesday 15th May through to Sunday 9th June, and is once again turning to its listeners to vote for their favourite tunes, but this time its to decide the top 20 songs from the last 20 years.
The countdown of the best songs of the Hottest 100’s 20 years, since Dennis Leary’s ‘Asshole’ topped the poll in 1993, will then be aired across the weekend of June 8th and 9th, with Triple J once again using their full resources to celebrate.
Votes aren’t exclusive to songs that charted in the history of the Hottest 100 either, with Triple J noting, “you can vote for up to 20 songs from the last 20 years (released between Jan 1993 – Dec 2012).” Meaning for example that Queens Of The Stone Age’s 2002 poll-topping ‘No One Knows’ is just as eligible as Los Del Rio’s 1993 international novelty megahit ‘Macarena’ (and considering the Hottest 100’s potted history of #1’s includes The Offspring’s ‘Pretty Fly For A White Guy’, it’s no so far-fetched).
Triple J have also put together some memories and notes on their official website to refresh memories and help voters decide on where to even start sifting through 20 years of music for their Hottest 100 ballot.
The ‘Hottest 20’ is taking its anniversary date from 1993, when the poll first went annual following its original format where listeners could vote for any song from all time, eventually scrapped in favour of a year-to-year vote after Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ claimed pole position over its three consecutive years from 1989 – 1991. Triple J have announced they will be hosting a special mid-year edition of the Hottest 100 to mark its 20 year anniversary.
It’s not the first time that Triple J have celebrated the Hottest 100’s history, in 2009 the youth station gave a nod back to its roots by letting listeners votes for any song ever in the ‘Hottest 100 Of All Time‘, which saw Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ taking out #1. The poll also stirred controversy for lacking a single female entrant in the list, with a report by The Australian triggering Triple J’s current affairs program Hack to take an internal investigation into the ‘no women’ poll.
It seems that controversy and the Hottest 100 go hand in hand, with this year’s number one winners, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis and their ubiquitous thrift hop hit ruffling more than a few feathers, many speculated that Triple J aired the ‘Hottest 200’ – the list of songs that came in at 101-200 – on air for the first time ever as a response to the backlash over ‘Thrift Shop’s crowning for 2013.
Its likely that the voting system for the newly announced ‘Hottest 20’ will be slightly less transparant than usual in light of the Warmest 100, a list of fairly accurate predictions put together by a pair of Brisbane IT experts who managed to crack a traceable code of votes submitted through social media.
Following the Hottest 100’s airing, which saw the Warmest 100 accurately predicting all ten songs in the Top 10, including the Top 3 positions with 100% accuracy, representatives from the ABC noted they “may make a few changes to the system to avoid spoiler attempts in the future.”
To which Nick Drewe, co-author of The Warmest 100 list with Tom Knox, later cheekily suggested that the ABC were “certainly welcome to hire us to consult on it if they want.”
As to whether the pair are currently cooking up a way to put together a Warmest 20 to predict the newly announced Hottest 20? We’ll have to wait and see…
For further details of Triple J’s 20 Years of the Hottest 100 head here.
