Ranking the Hottest 100s - #95

Looking at the Hottest 100 position by position, sees a few noteworthy occurrences at #95:

• The second instance of an artist having two songs place at a position (Placebo in 2003 and 2004) (joining the The Cat Empire with two at #100)
• The second instance of a cover of a song to have made the Hottest 100 to also place in the Hottest 100 (Frank Bennett's lounge music cover of Radiohead's "Creep" joining Mr Little Jeans' cover of "The Suburbs")
• The second instance of a song that would feature across multiple Hottest 100s

Songs in red are those that made my shortlist, at the time. Songs in blue are those where I voted for that artist, but for a different song, in that particular countdown. Songs in green are those where I have voted for that artist in other annual Hottest 100s. My voting goes back to 1998.

22. Wiley - "Wearing My Rolex" (2008)
21.  Vance Joy - "Play With Fire" (2013)

20.  Good Charlotte - "Little Things" (2000)
19.  Frank Bennett - "Creep" (1996) 
18.  Faithless - "Don't Leave" (1997)

17.  Grouplove - "Naked Kids" (2011)
16. Kisschasy - "Face Without A Name" (2005)
15. Beck - "Tropicalia" (1998)
14. Machine Translations - "She wears a mask" (2002)

13.  Placebo - "Twenty years" (2004)
12. Cruel Sea - "Delivery Man" (1993)

11. Last Dinosaurs - "Andy" (2012)

10. Massive Attack - "Protection" (1995)
9.  Regina Spektor - "Samson" (2007)

8. Public Image Limited - "Order Of Death" {Blair Witch Mix} (1999)

7.  Def Fx - "Masses Like Asses" (1994)
6. Eskimo Joe - "New York" (2006)
5. Placebo - "Special Needs" (2003)
4. Broken Bells - "The High Road" (2010)
3. Silversun Pickups - "Panic Switch" (2009)
2. Rage Against The Machine - "Renegades of Funk" (2000)
1. Thelma Plum - "How Much Does Your Love Cost?" (2014)

Yep, that's right - Rage Against the Machine go below Thelma Plum. How can I commit such an atrocity? Well firstly, "How Much Does Your Love Cost?" is a fantastic song. One of the things I love from Hottest 100 day is discovering the songs that I missed during the year, and this falls in to that category. It had me hooked from the awesomely catchy opening riff. Throw in some brilliantly structured lyircs -not overwrought, rather in places (particularly during the chorus) seemingly detached.

With "Renegades of Funk", while it's a fantastic cover (I'd vote for it when it was re-eligible and placed at #18 in 2001), outside of Zack de la Rocha's vocals, it never conveyed the menace or the anger, or the cry to arms that I associate with the Rage Against the Machine at their best. My strongest association with this song is with the great film clip, paying tribute to the greats of the hip hop genre.

One of the benefits of listening again to all of these songs with a view to ranking them (by position number) is that you rediscover songs (or artists) that you'd forgotten, or ones that you had dismissed. "Masses like Asses" is one of these... Def FX had never been a band I'd paid a great deal of attention to, but focusing on this project reminded me of how good they had been.

The opposite case will also apply though.

"Creep" is very much a novelty song in this context, and the lounge act version of the song works nicely in small doses. Unlike "Masses for Asses", I found that focusing on this repeatedly over a short time frame had a detrimental effect... I had originally pencilled this towards the top third of the #95 position, but I found I was just craving Radiohead's original.

As for Vance Joy, I stand by what I said when "Play With Fire" made the countdown on Australia Day 2014:

"@triplej: #95 @vancejoy - 'Play With Fire' #Hottest100" given this wasnt expected to chart, probably a sign of what's going to top the list

— Michael Bassett (@BlandMike) January 26, 2014

At the tail end, is Wiley's "Wearing my Rolex". Chalk this up to genre bias... there's a great core sample there (from "What Would We Do" by DSK), but there is too much of a disconnect with the shift from the sample to Wiley's verse for my liking.