âDisrupting Songlinesâ: Some Thoughts About the Triple J Hottest 100, by Hannah Donnelly
Photo by Kevin Trotman. Reproduced under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License
All quiet on the colonial front.
Every January when the Triple J Hottest 100 is announced on Invasion Day, Iâm violently repelled by âAussie music cultureâ. Segregation runs through this music culture like a current, it censors our peopleâs stories.
The Hottest 100 music poll is open to votes in the weeks leading up to January 26, then people have a BBQ and get turnt up to the countdown on a day of mourning for those we lost in massacres and those we continue to lose while we remain in your possession. Our history and our music is confined to our own community radio stations, and only let in to your broadcasts when the segment suits.
PULL QUOTE: Our history and our music is confined to our own community radio stations, and only let in to your broadcasts when the segment suits.
Last year, I wrote a blog post on Aboriginal musicians in the 2014 Hottest 100. Ten Aboriginal artists had made the shortlist and they were mob and deadz and deserved our votes and always will. Still, I was curious why these songs werenât really given much airplay in the lead-up to the Hottest 100 being announced besides the token, âItâs NAIDOC week, we should play an Aboriginal artist,â or the occasional play due to pangs of guilt.
This year I suss the mob that are shortlisted for the Hottest 100. Again, ten Aboriginal artists are up for votes. Shep brother Briggs is shortlisted for his track âThe Children Came Back ft. Gurrumul and Dewayne Everettsmithâ which really did get some airplay and is true gawd the best film clip of the year, one that raises up our heroes and our ancestors. (Not to mention the clip features Princess Samarah.)
Yanuwa, Wardaman and Bardi brother Jimblah is on the shortlist with the anthem of the year, âTreaty ft. Nooky, Ellie Lovegrove, Zachariiah Feildingâ.
Palawa electronic folk singer DENNI brings her intriguing vocals to the track âBlink ft. Aphirâ, as well as on her collab with seventeen-year-old heartbreak bro Kuren.
Kuren has another track shortlisted, âIt Still Hurtsâ, off his fresh Love Lost EP.
And speaking the truth on that future looking vibe, Waanyi, Mitakoodi, Ringa Ringa and Kalkadoon rapper Lucky Luke made it with the song â1 Dayâ off his first album Whichway. (You can find the full list of the ten shortlisted Aboriginal artists at the end of this post.)
Some of these artists had been handpicked in Triple Jâs Five New Indigenous Artists You Need to Hear segment earlier in 2015. Cool, thanks, Triple J, you are doing so well. Only one out of these five spits some hard-hitting messages â not that you should have to as an Aboriginal artist. But in my experience as a listener and as a guest curator, radio presenters almost only pick songs for their audience that will not in any way confront their privilege â which is why exclusively white radio waves are travelling through our airspace. I am worried for presenters of Aussie radio; the only thing Iâm more scared of than finding the wrong feathers under my pillow is messing with someone elseâs songlines.
Whatâs the secret to Triple J airplay? I looked for data that would tell me how many times songs are played, but it turns out that unless you pay for it that informationâs limited. But I did find that if you lurk on JPlay you can find out the date a song was last aired. One shortlisted song, the beautiful â1966â by Alice Skye, was last aired in April. If it hasnât been played in over eight months thatâs gammon.
Going deeper, I found that songs by four of these shortlisted artists last aired on 9 July 2015. For those unaware, NAIDOC Week (National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee) is held the first week of July, which last year was July 5-12. Finally, I remembered that last year a song never played by Triple J before made not only the top 100, but the top 10". I can tell you, I really donât know how the Aboriginal artists on the shortlist were selected. But I have imagined it: a white middle-age male Triple J director is like, âSooooo thereâs all these Aboriginal artists and we didnât actually play their songs again. LOL land rights LOL. We should just put ten in the Hottest 100 shortlist again, even if we didnât play them, because then Aboriginal people canât say we donât play them.â
Australian radio, a representation of âAussie music cultureâ, is full of white privilege. Why else donât you hear songs unravelling the colonial myths and telling you the bloody truth of massacres? Of genocide, of our people dead in your custody, families still lost only to reunite at the grave? Your selection to not tune in to these songs is something Frantz Fanon calls cognitive dissonance: that extremely uncomfortable feeling you get when confronted with the truth of colonisation, so much so that you canât even, and instead of accepting new information your brain pretends it never happened.
PULL QUOTE: This track about murdered and missing Indigenous women from an Anishinaabe producer really clears the room.
As a DJ, I know this experience intimately. Some people love the hype of having a Wiradjuri DJ playing Indigenous music â but when my set starts the audience doesnât actually want to listen. People walk off the d floor when a song about forced closures by Gamilaraay MC Provocalz comes on. This track about murdered and missing Indigenous women from an Anishinaabe producer really clears the room. When old white people at charity gigs wonât hide their disdain and give me their best filthy Aborigine look. When someone requests âa local Melbourne artistâ after Iâve just played Yung Warriors â who are from, you guessed it, Melbourne. Recently I lip-read a mesh-dressed hipster say sideways to her friend, âLike I get it, I know itâs trying to be political, but what is she actually trying to do?â Nothing, bitch, Iâm just playing music. Youâre the one who is confronted.
This yarn isnât just about Triple Jâs Hottest 100 â itâs about Aussie music culture in general. No radio stations, commercial or alternative, give us the plays unless itâs a designated âspecialâ segment. Why not? Are we not allowed on your wavelength?
PULL QUOTE: If you are a gub and you are reading this, please ask yourself, have you ever tuned in to our stations?
Since the â70s Aboriginal communities have had a strong history of radio broadcasting, and we do it well. There are over a hundred mob stations across the country â 3KND is based in Melbourne (this Invasion Day theyâre doing a countdown of the Top 100 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander songs of all-time); Koori Radio in Sydney is home to the Indij Hip Hop Show; and in Brisbane, 98.9FM always has the best guest yarns on âLets Talkâ. Not to mention the National Indigenous Radio Service that delivers four channels of national content and news. But who is receiving our transmissions? If you are a gub and you are reading this, please ask yourself, have you ever tuned in to our stations? And if not, why not?
Itâs not just that our songs are too real for your radio waves, that they tell too many difficult truths. When those same truths are sung in our languages, the songs are then tagged as âworld musicâ. Like when Gurrumul won an Aria last year for âBest World Music Albumâ when heâs actually a traditional owner of this country. For the love of Biami, letâs get one thing out of the way: âworld musicâ is not a genre. Itâs a label that lazy, anthropologically inclined people use because they cbf acknowledging specific Indigenous nations and the lands artists come from.
It is the exclusion of our music in radio that disrupts songlines and makes me forcibly remove (assimilation pun intended) my ears from Aussie music culture. If Aboriginal musicians and presenters had more access to audiences not restricted by the colonised institution of broadcasting then maybe Aussie music culture would start to notice that there are so many lit Aboriginal musicians right now. I have over five hundred new tracks in a draft playlist waiting to be included in my monthly dose, and every month more music is released, more artists come through. I canât keep up. If it were my job to nationally broadcast local music on a government-funded radio station, I probs would include more than a handful of mob ay.
The Sovereign 10 of Triple Jâs 2015 Hottest 100 (alphabetical order):
Briggs â âThe Children Came Back ft. Gurrumul and Dewayne Everettsmithâ
Denni â âBlink ft. Aphirâ (and âWolves ft. Kurenâ)
East Journey â âEmu ft. Yothu Yindiâ
Jimblah â âTreaty ft. Nooky, Ellie Lovegrove, Zachariiah Feildingâ
Kuren â âAchilliesâ and and âIt Still Hurtsâ
Lucky Luke â â1 Dayâ
Philly â âDreamchaserâ and âThree little Birdsâ (Like A Version)
Robbie Miller â âThe Painâ
Zane Francis â âAcclimateâ
Golden Features â âNo One ft. Thelma Plumâ
Nathan Morrison â âOceans ft. Robbie Millerâ
Horrorshow â âAny Other Name ft. Jimblah, Thelma Plum, Urthboyâ
You can also vote for songs not on the shortlist if it meets the Triple J guidelines.
Hannah Donnelly is a Wiradjuri writer who experiments with speculative fiction and future imaginings of Indigenous responses to climate change. She is the creator of Sovereign Trax, which aims to foreground the consumption of Indigenous music âthrough our own paradigms that speak to our collective stories, identities and resistanceâ.
