Status Updates From Shoulda Been Higher

2016: The Greatest Hottest 100 Of All Time.
Australiana
The local indie scene was never so well regarded as in 2016 – for good reason.

It, of course, starts with Flume. The greatest Australian electronic artist of all time officially took that title in 2016. He scored four tracks, including the absurdly great ‘Never Be Like You’.

‘Never Be Like You’ is the best Hottest 100 winner of the decade

There might be no greater career transformation in the history of pop music than Justin Bieber.

He exploded into the public consciousness as a fresh-faced teen idol in 2008, . . . to become the youngest solo male artist to ever top the Billboard chart with his infuriatingly catchy megahit ‘Baby’. For years, no artist was so simultaneously capable of bewitching young girls and angering fully grown adult men.

The 1998 Hottest 100’s biggest issue is its winning song – ‘Pretty Fly’ remains, no matter how much re contextualising and reappraising it may have received in the years since, simply awful. Yes, it’s meant to be sarcastic. Yes, The Offspring are in on the joke. That doesn’t make the song any more listenable.

Hilltop Hoods’ influence in Australian music is unmatched. Before Hilltop, Australian hip-hop was still very much in the developmental stage, with artists receiving little recognition or airplay. Hilltop changed that.

They paved the way for new Australian hip-hop artists to thrive, leading directly to future Hottest 100 songs such as ‘Boys Like You’ by 360, ‘Jimmy Richard’ by Drapht

The Hottest 100 was, for at least the first 20 years of its existence, a super rock-centric list. This started to change in 2010, when Angus & Julia Stone topped the countdown with their breezy acoustic folk. Followed by Goyte, Macklemore and Vance Joy, it looked like Australian music listeners might be moving away from rock, but it wasn’t clear the direction we were going.
Enter Chet Faker.

A common misconception of the Hottest 100 is that it’s a countdown of the best alternative music of the year. This is not quite correct.

The Hottest 100 is a countdown of people’s favourite music of the year – a subtle but crucial distinction, that gets to the heart of why we love it so much.

Because Hottest 100 voters are an odd bunch. We like weird shit. We love weird shit. The weirder the better, often.

The 2020s has introduced a far more diverse and varied breed of new-age music heroes for Generation Z. The most significant shift in diversity since the advent of the Hottest 100 seems to have come about for several reasons.
1. A generation of young people who are more socially aware and in tune with different communities and identities than any generation that has preceded them.