The Hottest 100 Votes I didn’t get to…

Ok, so, I didn’t quite get to finishing my 10 votes for the Hottest 100, and then Michael Jackson died and then I went to Melbourne and then everything is about to change…but I will get to that.

Where did I get up to?

Oh yes, I have 3 more songs to reveal, which if you’d seen my facebook you’ve already found out.

Song 8 – Lovesong – The Cure

Out of all the dozens of Cure songs it is hard to pick a favourite. I love the ‘Wish’ album, but of course ‘Disintegration’ is amazing, which is where this song comes from.

It has achingly beautiful lyrics, a mad bass line and a soulful melody. Just the perfect Cure song.

Whenever I’m alone with you
You make me feel like I am home again
You make me feel like I am whole again
You make me feel like I am young again
You make me feel like I am fun again

However far away
However long I stay
Whatever words I say
I will always love you

Whenever I’m alone with you
You make me feel like I am free again
You make me feel like I am clean again

I will always love you

Song 9 – One – Metallica

Metallica are a band that I didn’t quite ‘get’ until the ‘Black ‘ album in 1991. You could call me one of those ‘mainstream’ fans that only jumped onto the bandwagon once they became popular. The only thing is that instead of following Metallica forwards, I went backwards. I listened to ‘…and Justice For All’, ‘Master of Puppets’, right back to ‘Kill ’em All’ and loved them all.

Then they went and brought out ‘Load’, ‘Reload’ and they turned to shit. I’m sorry, but the 3 albums after the ‘Black’ album were pretty much crap. Last years ‘Death Magnetic’ was a slight return to form but honestly nothing beats the ‘Master of Puppets’ album for pure Metallica gold.

Ironically this song doesn’t come off my favourite album, but instead off the epic ‘…and Justice For All’ album.

This song is like a novel. It starts out slowly, introducing the guitar and lyrics, slowly building up to a slowish drum beat. Then it starts to get heavy. The whaling guitar of Kirk Hammett together with Lars’ pelting drum beat build up to the blazing triplet beat of double-kick and guitars.

Hold my breath as I wish for death
Oh please god,wake me
Now the world is gone Im just one
Oh god,help me hold my breath as I wish for death
Oh please God help me

The finishing guitar solo with the underlying rhythms of Jason and Lars are just amazing to hear. Seriously, this song is like an aural orgasm to me. My heart races. I get sweaty. It just DOES it for me.

Now, combine the amazing song with the scary, yet captivating film clip and you have the complete package.

Listen to the song, but then watch the video clip. You will learn to love it. Trust me

Just the song

The Video Clip.

Song 10 – Wicked Game – Chris Isaak

Now to something completely different. You can’t change styles much more than from Metallica to Chris Isaak, but I think that this proves that I enjoy a wide range of musical genres.

This song is almost a gimme. I mean, who doesn’t love the deep, sexy melancholy of Isaak’s voice along with the sexiness of how he looks. I mean seriously, he was damn hot back in the day.

Throw a topless Helena Christensen into the film clip and you have a complete song that just screams SEX.

I have loudly sung along to this song many many times in the car (or at karaoke!) and I just the pitch change in the chorus. “No…I…iiiiiiii….don’t wanna fall in love”.

Watch and try not to squirm….

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So that’s it. My Top 10 songs that I voted for in the Hottest 100 Of All Time

It was not easy, and it seriously took me a month to work out.

So many good songs missed out, but I feel pretty confident that I have picked a great representation of my favourite songs.

Songs that nearly made it:

AC/DC – You Shook Me All Night Long
Air – All I Need
Alice in Chains – Rooster
Arrested Development – Mr. Wendal
Audioslave – Cochise
Beastie Boys – Sabotage
Ben Harper – Faded
Billy Idol – Hot In The City
Bob Marley – No Woman No Cry
Bomb The Bass – Bug Powder Dust
Bon Jovi – Bad Medicine
Crowded House – Don’t Dream It’s Over
The Doors – Light My Fire
Faith No More – Epic
Foo Fighters – Monkey Wrench
Green Day – Welcome To Paradise
Guns n’ Roses – November Rain
Hoodoo Gurus – Thousand Miles Away
Icehouse – Man of Colours
Jamiroquai – When You Gonna Learn
John Butler Trio – Betterman
John Denver – Take Me Home, Country Road
Josh Pyke – Lines on Palms
Lenny Kravitz – Always On The Run
Living Colour – Cult of Personality
Midnight Oil – Power & The Passion
Muse – Stockholm Syndrome
New Order – Bizarre Love Triangle
Nick Cave & Bad Seeds – Ship Song
Nirvana – Lounge Act
Outkast – Hey Ya!
PJ Harvey – This Mess We’re In
Placebo – Special K
The Police – Message In A Bottle
Prince – Sign O’ The Times
R.E.M. – Drive
Ratcat – Don’t Go Now
Red Hot Chili Peppers – Suck My Kiss
Redgum – I Was Only 19
The Screaming Jets – Better
The Shins – New Slang
Skunkhour – Sunstone
Smashing Pumpkins – Soma
Soundgarden – Jesus Christ Pose
Stevie Ray Vaughn – Little Wing
Stevie Wonder – Superstition
Sting – Fields of Gold
Stone Temple Pilots – Interstate Love Song
System Of A Down – BYOB
They Might Be Giants – Birdhouse In Your Soul
Tool – 46 and 2
Tricky – Black Steel
U2 – Pride (in the Name of Love)
Urge Overkill  – Sister Havana
Vanilla Ice – Ice Ice Baby (really!)
Violent Femmes – Blister In The Sun
Wolfmother – Joker and the Thief
Young MC – Bust a Move

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The countdown starts tomorrow!

From 10am tomorrow and then at 4pm all weekend songs from 100 to 21 will be counted down.

Then on Saturday 100 – 51 from midday and then 50 – 1 on Sunday from midday.

I can’t wait to find out who makes it and intend to have the radio blasting all weekend!

My tips?

Smells Like Teen Spirit will win.

Love Will Tear Us Apart will be up there, along with Boys Don’t Cry and Throw Your Arms Around Me.

Alive, One and Stairway to Heaven will probably make it. I think a roughie might be Muse or Kings of Leon.

I Spoke in Class Today. Time to VOTE! (Part 5)

Ok, I’ve gotta hurry this up.

Voting for the Hottest 100 of All Time finishes on Sunday, which means I have 7 days to reveal my last 6 songs.

I still haven’t actually finalised the list and in fact I’ve been doubting my last pick. Was I too hasty to pick that one? I think I prefer ‘Beat It’ or maybe even ‘Smooth Criminal’.

But there’ll be time to debate Wacko Jacko later.

It’s time to get back to grunge.

Yes, back to my roots. Back to the music that shaped my musical tastes forever.

This song had a couple of big impacts on me. For one, it was the anthem of my 10th grade at school. You know how school years have songs that seem to represent their class? You get ‘Time of Your Life’ or ‘Another One Bites the Dust’ or ‘Beautiful Day’ or something. Our grade at Ginninderra High was suitably represented by the bleak grungey outlook that this song portrays.

The song is ‘Jeremy’ by Pearl Jam. And you can’t tell me that most people who love Pearl Jam can’t say this isn’t one of their best ever songs. Sure; it’s not as rocking as ‘Even Flow’, as popular as ‘Alive’ or as driving as ‘Corduroy’ or ‘rearviewmirror’, but for pure grungey 1991 goodness, you can’t go past this downbeat sad song.

This song, and video clip, were so damn powerful and was met with so much controversy that Pearl Jam decided not to record another video clip for any of their songs for 10 years.

It may surprise you to know however, that the Pearl Jam clip we know and love was not the original clip. A little known director funded and filmed his own clip first, which can be seen here. It was ultimately rejected by the record label.

The ironic thing is that I love this song for the song, but I also love the clip. However, once Pearl Jam decided to boycott videos and effectively boycott MTV, I took on a similar view. I made a conscious effort for a long time to either not watch video clips, and not be influenced into liking or disliking a song because of the clip. I think that there was a time where so much effort went into making a fancy, over the top clip that the actual music became secondary and this, whilst healthy for the mainstream TV watching public, was to the detriment of music lovers everywhere.

That’s not to say that I don’t love a good video clip, or that a video clip can’t enhance a song. I am just against a song becoming famous because of its video clip.

Case in point; OK Go’s ‘Here it Goes Again’. Yeah, ingenius and original film clip, but the song is not really anything to write home about.

Ok, I am warbling on a lot here. I don’t mean for each of these votes to be such a marathon effort, but once I get going on something I am passionate about, I find it hard to stop (Just ask LaLa :))

The bottom line is. It’s a top song. It’s in my Top 10. So there.

Go check out the video clip again. Just look at how intense Eddie Vedder is in the clip. I can’t find the unedited version anywhere and I can’t embed it, but you get the idea.

I’m only halfway there, but I haven’t picked Rick Astley yet….guess I’ve only got 4 left..

Where Do We Go Now? To Part 3 of the Hottest 100 of All Time!

In my continuing series of picking my Top 10 Hottest 100 Songs of All Time, (see Parts 1 and 2 here), I am going to be talking today about the starts of  songs.

Years ago, I remember KIX-106 had a policy on never talking over the beginning of a song when they played it. They claimed that the beginning of the song is sometimes the best part and who wants to hear a DJ yabbering on about what’s coming up in the next hour?

I’ve always remembered this because I totally agree. Some of the best songs of all time have big opening bars. They will grab our attention straight away, and like a good movie opening or the first tastefuls of a yummy meal, once you have a little, you want it all.

Think about it. Epic, by Faith No More has a bit powerful opening few chords and you instantly know the song.  Friday I’m in Love by The Cure has the instantly recognisable guitar riff to start it before the song takes off. Led Zepellin’s Stairway to Heaven has one of the best and most copied riffs (see Wayne’s World) you’ve heard to start their epic tune. Sabotage by The Beastie Boys with its messy guitar sound. Enter Sandman from Metallica with its sinister riff.

Even the 2 songs that I have picked so far, Smells Like Teen Spirit and All Along The Watchtower have powerful and solid openings.

So it makes it so easy to pick my next song that I am voting for.

This song has the most beautiful guitar riff opening of any song I have ever known. Even when I hear it now, it gives me tingles and makes me stop and feel the music. You know how sometimes you can just feel the music flowing through you?

Rewind to 1987, the first time I heard this song. I was watching Video Hits and probably after Mel and Kim or something there they were. Guns N’ Roses. A long haired bandana wearing skinny white guy. A permed drummer. A blonde haired mess of a bassist. A guitarist in dark glasses and then, that man, Mr. Saul Hudson. AKA Slash. Nothing can quite compare to seeing Slash rip out the guts of Sweet Child and lay down that solo near the end of the song. Especially when he is 5 metres away from you, as he was when I saw Gunners at Eastern Creek in 1993.

Coincidentally, Slash lost his mother to lung cancer this as I discovered on his twitter page. Who’d have thought that Slash would ever use Twitter??

Guns N’ Roses went on to influence me in more ways than one over the following years and still stand as one of my favourite bands of all time now..

3. Sweet Child O’ Mine – Guns N’ Roses

The original music video (with the radio edit, which has always pissed me off)

The full version can be found in this following video which was filmed at The Ritz in New York in 1988

The Original banned cover of Appetite for Destruction

http://twitter.com/SlashHudson

Smells Like the Hottest 100 of All Time. (Part 2)

This is what my blog is becoming folks. I get on a topic and then I try to stretch it out as long as I can.

In this case it is because of the Hottest 100 of All Time that Triple J is running again as a 20 year anniversary to the very first Hottest 100 in 1989.

In 1989 and 1990 Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ won the top spot. Then in 1991, Nirvana’s newly released ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ won No.1

Obviously the brains trust at Triple J quickly realised that whichever song was the most popular of the year would probably get into the ‘All Time’ list, so it was quickly decided to make the Hottest 100 an annual event which only covered the songs of the previous year.

Since 1991,  the All-Time countdown has been done one more time in 1998. Nirvana grabbed the top spot once again with Hunters & Collectors grabbing No.2 with ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me’.

Now, what’s going to change in 2009? Will Nirvana win an unprecedented 3rd title?

The answer, my friends, is almost certainly, yes.

My second vote for this years Hottest 100 of all time is, you guessed it, Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana.

Ok, stop rolling your eyes. It may be cliched and it may be too easy to vote for this, but hear me out.

The reason this song is so damn popular is because it changed a lot of people’s perceptions of what music could sound like.

Back in 1990 and 1991, music was desperately trying to claw its way out of the bright, electronic and synthetic sound of the 80’s. The radio was clogged with Roxette, Milli Vanilli and Guru Josh (It’s time for the Guru..)

I mean, did you know that MC Hammer’s ‘U Can’t Touch This’ was the 2nd highest selling single in 1990?

All of sudden a new sound emerged from the least likely of places. Seattle? WTF is in Seattle?

As it turned out, A lot.

Green River, Temple of the Dog, Mother Love Bone, The Melvins, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, Screaming Trees and Mudhoney all hail from Seattle.

Where the 80’s was surrounded around a cocaine infused LA rock club scene, Seattle was to become the centre of the Rock universe.

Except this time it was called Grunge.

Let me tell you about the first time I heard Grunge.

It was a night like any other, and I was listening to KIX 106 as I did most nights back then. This is before it was taken over by the Austereo network and before it turned into the ‘Classic Hits’ that we hear today. Back then it was not uncommon to hear Metallica’s ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ being belted out, or Skid Row’s ‘Youth Gone Wild’ being played way too loud. I even heard the uneditted version of ‘Killing in the Name’ on KIX 106.

I had heard ‘Bad’ Boyd Duczynski mention the band Nirvana and that he was going to play their killer new song. It was probably around 7pm (an hour till the Hot 8 at 8!)

It was then that the opening chords to ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ hit my earballs.

I turned it up.

Loud.

I have spoken to others since that still remember the first time they heard that song.

All of a sudden, instead of listening to Extreme, Vanilla Ice and The KLF, I was seeking out albums by Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains.

There was also that video clip. The image of a dirty, messy 3-piece playing in front of a bored bunch of teenagers. In the next 5 minutes the kids turn into a unruly mob of ferals; moshing, head-banging and smashing the bands gear. (where are those kids from the film clip now?)

How awesome is that…

As a 15 year old, there was nothing better. I could shut my door, turn on my stereo and just forget everything else in the world except for those thrashy chords blasting out of  my ‘Sharp’ CD player (it cost me $500).

So, there’s my justification. I am not voting for it because it’s the ‘done’ thing, or because Triple J would want me to. I am voting for it because it has had a special effect on my life, as all of my Top 10 songs have.

Song No. 2 for the Hottest 100 of All Time voting. (in no particular order)

2. Smells Like Teen Spirit – Nirvana

(to be continued…..)

All Time Baby. All TIME! (Part 1)

Today signifies the start of 2 things.

Winter (fucking brrr. 3 months more. Dangit.)

and, the Hottest 100 of All Time Voting at Triple J.

So this month, I dedicate myself to finding out the Top 10 songs of my life to vote for.

This is not going to be an easy task.

We all listen to thousands (probably tens of thousands) of songs in our lives. How to pick the best?

Is it your favourite to listen to? The ones that make you smile? The ones that you remember from pivotal points in your life?

The ones where you were sad? Happy? Angry?

But what about those songs that were released before you were born? Do you pick those ones that were successful? Do you have to include a Beatles track? A Nirvana track? A Michael Jackson track?

Each week I plan to dive headfirst into my musical history and pluck out a couple of worthy songs that will appear on my voting page.

This week I go old school. I go back to 1967.

I have never been a huge Bob Dylan fan, but while his voice may not be my cup of tea, his lyrics are something else, and his musicianship is outstanding.

What he did do back in 1967 is write a little song called All Along The Watchtower.

A little guitarist called Jimi Hendrix was then passed this track in 1968 and decided to give it a shot. He recorded it over and over until the Bass player gave up, so he recorded the whole thing himself.

The result? A beautifully structured, powerful but simple cover song.

Bob Dylan said it best;

“It overwhelmed me, really. He had such talent, he could find things inside a song and vigorously develop them. He found things that other people wouldn’t think of finding in there. He probably improved upon it by the spaces he was using. I took license with the song from his version, actually, and continue to do it to this day”

Listen to the original version, as recorded by Jimi that day on Electric Ladyland as below

My first experience with this song would have been in my early teen years as I browsed through my dad’s record collection.

His Hendrix records always stood out for me, even if it was just for the cover-art originally.

In my first cover band during high school we also covered this song and it’s always been one of my favourites to play as well.

So there we go.

Song No. 1 for the Hottest 100 of All Time voting.

1. All Along The Watchtower – Jimi Hendrix

Stay tuned for more…

EDIT: News just in! Apparently Jimi Hendrix was murdered by his manager?