Killing in the Lame: there’s more to music than white dude rock

By Anh Tran-Nam

The Triple J Hottest 100 of All Time list really sucks. It would be a bit ridonculous
for anyone to expect the listeners of one Australian radio station to come up with
a canon that reflects the incredibly rich and diverse nature of the entire history of
music in the world, but that doesn’t let Triple J or its listeners off the hook.

Let’s back up for anyone who doesn’t know what I’m referring to. In July this
year, Triple J, the national ‘youth’ radio station funded by the Australian
Government, released a list of the best one hundred songs ever written, as voted
by its listeners. The list named Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana as the #1
song of all time and songs by artists like Rage Against the Machine, Jeff Buckley,
Radiohead and Queen made the top ten.

A lot of hoo-ha has surrounded the list since it was released, and rightly so. It's a
bit like the cast of Neighbours: save for the token ethnic, it’s strikingly lacking in
diversity. Out of a hundred songs, there are a pathetic total of two rap songs –
The Nosebleed Section and Sabotage by (non-black) hip hop groups Hilltop
Hoods and the Beastie Boys. Only five black artists made the cut: Michael
Jackson (R.I.P.), Jimi Hendrix, Bob Marley, Stevie Wonder and the indie band TV
on the Radio, who are four-fifths African-American. To top it off, only one song –
Teardrop by Massive Attack – features female vocals, and even then, they're
guest female vocals in an otherwise two-man band.

The Neighbours comparison holds for the annual Hottest 100 lists from the past
ten years. To me, these lists illustrate how Triple J and its listeners are trapped in
a parochial mindset which almost exclusively thinks of ‘good’ or culturally
valuable music as white, male (dominated) rock. I use 'rock' in the more liberal,
guitar-ish sense of the word, which includes indie rock, indie pop-rock,
acoustic/twee, metal, dance rock, etc. There is some diversity within that label,
sure, but it excludes other hugely important genres like pop, hip hop, R&B,
reggae and dub, dance and its sub-genres (like drum and bass, breakbeat etc),
jazz, blues and classical.

It’s reasonable for commercial or community radio stations to stick to a particular

type of music to cater to their target audience. By the very nature of their funding,
they have to program music that satisfies their listeners' tastes. The problem
with Triple J is that tax dollars from all Australians, no matter what their musical
preferences, are being used to fund a station that privilege white, male rock over
everything else.

Triple J loves to brand itself as a station dedicated to the ‘youth’ of Australia. Its
guiding principles (available on the website) tell us it has a mandate to “satisfy all
your musical and cultural needs”. My beef is that it’s preposterous to
characterise the Australian 'youth' as a homogenous group who overwhelmingly
love white, male rock. Young people generally have a strong preference for Top
40 music – according to a 2009 Nielsen survey, 65% of 18-24 year olds who
listen to radio tune into 2Day, Nova, Mix or Vega. Seeing as Top 40 pop, rap and
R&B is virtually unrepresented in the Hottest 100 lists, the whole claim about
being a ‘youth’ project is pretty disingenuous.

Of course, the Hottest 100 of All Time list is not a perfect reflection of the Triple J
playlist, especially in recent years. Unlike what the Hottest 100 list would
suggest, Triple J do play and promote female artists, like Missy Higgins,
Ladyhawke and more recently ex-Australian Idol contestant, Lisa Mitchell. It’s
also hard to deny that in the past few years, Triple J have been giving more air
time to hip hop, Australian (Hilltop Hoods, the Herd) and otherwise (Kanye West,
Dizzee Rascal, Lupe Fiasco). The station also now have a three hour weekly hip
hop show, as well as the Roots ‘N All program, which covers misc genres like
blues, jazz, soul, reggae.

Efforts like these make it clear that Triple J is not entirely hostile to rap. In fact,
the station claims to be the “only station in the world” that played the seminal rap
song Fuck Tha Police by NWA in 1989. Slowly, American hip hop and pop is
finding its way into the Hottest 100 – Kanye’s Stronger was #20 in 2007, Hey Ya!
by Outkast was #2 in 2003. That’s not to say, though, that while white, male rock
seems to be played without much careful consideration of quality (think: Limp
Bizkit, Alien Ant Farm, arguably Kings of Leon...), the prevailing attitude is still
that ‘good’ hip hop is the exception to the rule of crap, mainstream hip hop.
There are a select few rappers, like the ones named above, who are anointed the
diamonds amongst the rough. You just wouldn’t hear rappers like 50 Cent or Flo
Rida on Triple J played in a serious way, no matter how good their individual
songs are.

The station still seems to cling to the idea that Top 40 pop and R&B has no
artistic merit, justifying its complete exclusion from the Triple J playlist, even
though some of the biggest and most elitist indie institutions have made their
peace with these genres. In 2006, Pitchfork named My Love by Justin
Timberlake the #1 song of the year. Rap and R&B songs by artists like Beyoncé,
Usher and Rihanna were well represented in Pitchfork's Top 100 Tracks of 2008.
Triple J is getting left behind as it fails to recognise and question its narrow-
minded ideas of what constitutes art. Pretty ironic for a station that’s continually
claiming to embody youthful edginess.

If you’ve already bought into the cultural bias that Top 40 pop, R&B and rap is
almost necessarily bad, then that’s a real shame. Top 40 benefits from having
obscene amounts of marketing money thrown at it, but it’s also prolific because it
conveys meaningful ideas, experiences and emotions that engage people in
compelling ways.

For example, Katy Perry’s song I Kissed A Girl is a song about female sexual
awakening, experimentation and pleasure. It reflects the real, emerging cultural
phenomenon of ‘bicurious’ young women. Fill Me In sung in that
characteristically smooth, sweet and syncopated style of Craig David is a song
that plays with narration and is told from two points of view – the verses tell the
story of a guy who is dating a young woman discretely so that her parents don’t
find out, while the chorus assumes the voice of the young woman’s suspicious
parents.

As for rap, I see it as a technically exciting and alluring type of music – in terms
of rap flow, rhymes and beat production. Rap also expresses very real and
subversive ideas, experiences and emotions – ranging from the struggle to
respect women in a sexist culture (Keep Ya Head Up by 2pac), biographical
ghetto stories (In My Hood by 50 Cent), questioning the legitimacy of
institutionalised authority (Fuck Tha Police) to graphic expressions of female
sexual desire (Work It by Missy Elliott).

Hip hop’s not without its flaws – some rap contains very offensive homophobic or
misogynist content, for example – but there’s no need to like everything that’s
contained within a genre to recognise its worth. Dismissing the cultural value of
hip hop doesn’t make you a racist – it's not necessarily motivated by hate or
malice. But it is ignorant.

But why should Triple J play Top 40 when it’s so easily accessible on other
stations? Shouldn’t Triple J be about hearing ‘alternative’ music that you can’t
get anywhere else? Sure, it’s important to cater to the tastes of minorities and be
able to listen to non-Top 40 if that’s what you like, but there’s no compelling
reason why every single taxpayer should have to pay to satiate and entrench the
culturally biased musical tastes of a small minority (9.5% of 18-24 year olds tune
into Triple J according the aforementioned Nielsen survey). There are other
feasible models out there, like commercial stations (like Triple M) or community
stations (like FBi and 2SER), which do exactly that. FBi, in particular, is a great
example being funded by a combination of listeners and sponsors, and who do a
great job playing good, alternative music – FBi broke big name Australian acts
like the Presets, Wolfmother, Dappled Cities, Muscles, and Cut Copy.

If it wants to keep its mandate of satisfying all the musical and cultural needs of
the entire ‘youth’, Triple J has to undergo a huge overhaul of its programming.
Alternatively, it should stop making these laughable claims and be more honest
about predominantly promoting white, male rock for a small minority of young
people and then justify the taxpayer expenditure from there.