Once Again, There’s A Campaign To Get Taylor Swift In The Hottest 100
Thanks to the Hottest 100 of the Decade, we're picking up a game we played in 2015.
Serving as more proof that nothing ever really dies, a campaign to get Taylor Swift back in triple j’s Hottest 100 has reared its head once again.
Seasoned Hottest 100 fans will know that we’ve played this game before: back in 2015, to be precise. That was shortly after the release of ‘Shake it Off’, one of Swift’s best singles and a tune that dominated the airwaves for months on end.
Well, most of the airwaves. Triple j never played ‘Shake It Off’, technically making it ineligible for the biggest song ranking in the world. But that didn’t stop those folks over at BuzzFeed from pushing a campaign to get the song in there, utilising the fact that triple j has a blank section in which users can write in the song they want to submit to the poll. “Let’s teach those music snobs a lesson,” wrote BuzzFeed’s Mark Di Stefano. “Get around #Tay4Hottest100.”
But triple j weren’t having any of it. They put a stop to the campaign, banning Swift and arguing that BuzzFeed and the many thousands of Taylor stans getting in on the campaign were unfairly gaming the results. The fact that KFC got involved didn’t help either, as triple j doesn’t allow artists in who have benefited from commercial campaigns.
Now, some five years later, the Hottest 100 of the Decade has provided an opportunity for the same old troublemakers to play the same old game.
That new massive poll — voting for which opens today — again has a space for users to submit their own track. So although the station still haven’t played Taylor Swift, the game is there for those who would like to play it. That’s the angle strongly being pushed by James McCann in a column for The Sydney Morning Herald, encouraging voters to once again unite behind Taylor.
It was a miscarriage of justice, a perversion of democracy, and a middle finger to devoted listeners who wanted their voices heard,” McCann writes. “And let us not pretend that it was not an attack on women, too. At the time of Triple J’s interference in the vote, no female solo artist had ever won the Hottest 100. It would take another five years to break that glass ceiling.
“A song need not have featured on a Hottest 100 previously to be eligible for this countdown. The people of Australia can finally back #Tay4Hottest100. In doing so, we can take the mistakes of the past, and shake them off.”
Like I said: nothing ever really dies, time is a flat circle, and we will keep being this way for the rest of time. See you at the Hottest 100 of the century, hey?