Meet The Brave Guys Reviewing Every Single Hottest 100 Song Year By Year

We're not sure how this brilliant idea has escaped our attention thus far but the lads behind the podcast Hottest 100s & 1000s are launching their third season this May, reviewing every single song that scored a place in the triple j Hottest 100 in the year 1995.

Borne from an idea by All My Friends Are In Bar Bands' David James Young, FBi Radio's Nathan Harrison, Cultural Studies PhD student Andrew McDonald and Power FM's Adam Buncher, in season one and two the boys already pored over the songs and legacies of the 1993 and 1994 Hottest 100 lists. 

Speaking to The Music, Young explained, "We are going in chronological order from the first time the votes for the Hottest 100 were exclusively for the songs released that year," while Buncher adds, "I'd like to think we're going from the very first countdown so if/when we come up to date I can drop a "started from the bottom now we here" and really mean it."

It's a big task the team have embarked on but as Harrison says, "There’s something pretty funny about this ridiculous goal of doing every single year. We’re already 21 years behind. But I think that challenge makes the whole project feel big and focused, if slightly ridiculous."

"My biggest revelation doing this podcast has been that there has always been stupid stuff in the countdown."

Buncher also posits it's not just nostalgia driving the podcast every year. "In many ways the podcast is just an airing of the types of conversations we have about music as friends all the time. Our tastes have a lot of common ground but very distinct divergences as well ... I guess as we encounter songs from early in our life we are also starting to see how our tastes have been shaped in the first place too."

Given 1995's Hottest 100 hosted some bangers from You Am I, Green Day, Tumbleweed and Alanis Morrisette, what have the boys deduced about the Hottest 100 in this day and age?

"For every great song in the '93 countdown (Cannonball by The Breeders, No Rain by Blind Melon), there's some garbage like Jessie by Paw or Deep by East 17 (yeah, a boy band got in the Hottest 100 in 1993. Your move, rockists!) The same with the 2015 countdown - instant classics like King Kunta and Lean On have to share space with dribble like Hoops by The Rubens or Shine On by The Amity Affliction. For better and for worse, the Hottest 100 is a reflection of the popular songs of the time. It's a time capsule," says Young.

Harrison adds, "My biggest revelation doing this podcast has been that there has always been stupid stuff in the countdown. I know a lot of people that like to claim triple j has gotten terrible and used to be this bastion of quality, but doing this podcast has taught me that for better or worse, triple j has always been like this. Though maybe now we get fewer novelty songs  - I think Dennis Leary’s Asshole coming in at #1 in the first countdown is such a character defining moment for the Hottest 100, but I can’t see something like that happening these days."

Season 3 of Hottest 100s & 1000s kicks off on May 27 and is available weekly on iTunes and Podcast Machine.