A Hundred Percent or More
As the clock ticked down towards number one on the national poll of the best songs of the previous calendar year — as deemed by the core 16-34 demo, cleansing of all troll-voting options, all Swifts and Styles (Harry and P) and Rod "Bloody" Stewarts via the custom playlists curated by those outside that core demo, those employed at the hosting radio station, falling back on the backdoor, unpublished, but well known rank/points system, whereby the selections of the org's President is worth more than all those beneath Him combined and so on etc — He looked over the drafted Blog posts listed in the backend of the Pop Culture Website he co-co-managed; on an intern wage of free alcoholic drinks from that quarter's core sponsor; Thursday to Sunday, "flexible hours".
He had a headline for every scenario, all covered, as discussed at several meetings and via one-way memos and subject-only emails all week — What about Beyonce?; Women Underrepresented AGAIN in Hottest 100 Countdown; Gang of Youths Cap Off Big Year with Hottest 100 Victory; Aussie Acts Absent from Hottest 100 AGAIN; etc.
And, publish, publish, publish, as number two is announced as Gang of Youths' "Let Me Down Easy" and by deductive reasoning that means number one this year will undoubtedly be Kendrick Lamar's "Humble". And, as directed by the variety of inspirational posters hanging on the exposed brick walls of the chic industrial Surry Hills or Redfern office — "First IS First", "Content is King", "The Scatter Matters" — He knows this is the wild western world: the quick and the opinionated. So out into the ocean of users goes the full op-ed spectrum, contradictory and covering all bases but also, all thumbs-upped by the Facebook promo-targeted, headline-only-reading echo chamber. Publish that one about POC; publish that one about a rap song willy-n-nilly using the word "bitch" in 2018 (of all times!); publish that one about the author of such a song being too famous, or aloof, to call into a radio station on the other side of the planet and thank them for giving him a level of recognition all-deserved and already bestowed on him by countless other media organisations both big and small during the correct end-of-year lists season: December.
Of course, being barely paid, it's completely forgivable that He is unaware of how history will judge that quickfire run of opinions that made perfect sense in the clickbait era of publishing. There was a time when we and the bill-paying ad-lords only cared about hits, and to a lesser extent that alluring "time on site" metric, He would say, decades from today, to disappointed Grandkids.
And of course, those Grand Lil' Kiddies, with unshakable confidence only obtainable from gene-mapped frames void of any pesky hereditary diseases, would almost certainly question the factual missteps, purposeful or otherwise, that the article on the rampant use of the word "bitch" failed to mention both that the #2 song from Gang of Youths also uses that nasty b-word; nor that Lamar has consistently played actor in his artful stanzas, constructing characters, stepping into the mind of a generation, holding a flamed torch to the hypocrisies of hip-hop etc; nor the publisher's own willy-nilly use of the same word. But beyond all that was said in those January, 2018 posts, these little future offspring of future offspring will almost certainly, and certainly more importantly, focus on what wasn't said. Particularly, the absence of any songs from Jess Locke's 2017 album, Universe.
Not since the 2006 Hottest 100 when Augie March's "One Crowded Hour" finished at least 100 spots ahead of that year's correct best song (LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends") has the countdown's voting public completely failed in their responsibility in the creation of music history in such remarkably glaring fashion. Without even a smirk of hyperbole, the fact that none of the songs from Universe featured in the top 100 (or, for that matter, the top 200) displays a level of injustice we'll likely never outlive, compounded only by the lack of Smirnoff-sponsored blog posts highlighting such a fact.
Because let's not even trip, or t-walk, or drop some Tides, as the kids of respected core demos say: Universe was the best album, by an Australian or anyone, released in 2017. And in any imaginable parallel world of justness, where Donald J. Trump is rightfully left as discard on a towel in some rich daddy's lux wank room; and where workers can legally strike without the threat of lawsuits — all ten tracks from Universe would've featured in the Hottest 100.
And in one such parallel world they did; also complimenting the album's perfect sequencing by featuring in the tracklist order, with opener "Drive to Drink" at #10 and the album's standout, the epic closer "Border Security", landing the coveted top-spot, at least a tenner ahead of all Lordes and Lamars and Le'aupepes, all admirable challengers but lacking the songwriting prowess; the fragile, soul-bearing starkness of Locke's spotlight-embracing LP. (Side: it would also be perfectly acceptable for #2 — in this scenario, Locke's "Gut Feeling", which imho is the weakest song on the album — to be swapped out for Stella Donnelly's "Boys Will Be Boys", which, was similarly and criminally overlooked, landing at #102).
A second victory in such a magnificent alt-world is that the blogterns of the nation were caught holding 100 blog posts for a 100 scenarios, none of which covered this record-breaking feat. So they scramble, as they do, save themselves with a clever pun headline ("The Locke Out") and a delayed gushing bio wiki-post mapping the songwriter's migration from Cen-Co to Culture Capital Melbourne; alongside her transformation from bedroom champ to full-band backed rise. And publish, just as "Border Security" does the first stanza closing stumble; and a billion bogans and The Woke masses across the country; some still salty over the date-change of the countdown, some concerned about the misogynistic lyrical content of Brockhampton's "Sweet", some twelve Woodstock tallboys past the point of caring about anything; all temporarily unified for a single moment as the song rebuilds, a choir of conflicting online opinions, but together triumphantly proclaiming that "we all wanted to be sucked off and spoken to" into the summer night sky.
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Top photo: page from 'A Zine Related to an Album Called Universe' by Jess Locke