Lukewarm-100 Countdown of 2020

• Australia’s annual music countdown, Triple J’s ‘Hottest 100’, has rolled around again. As always, I submitted my votes for the ten best songs of the past year. But I must confess I didn’t feel that familiar sense of satisfaction when I clicked “SUBMIT” this time. I’m not sure if it was because musical artists struggled to record during the pandemic lockdowns, or because anything with “2020” in the title inevitably leads to a sense of disappointment – but I’m significantly unenthused about this year’s countdown.

You can find my picks at the end of this post, but to celebrate having survived from lock-down with a toddler, I thought I’d do something different this year. In this post, I ‘critically’ describe and review the ten tunes that were most sung – often, despite my best efforts at sabotage – in my household in 2020. As will soon become apparent, this is a very different sort of list than has appeared in my past countdown posts…

=10th: The Grand Old Duke of York

A stinging rebuke of industry hierarchy, with a clear rallying cry to lower-level employees everywhere: Just because your boss is giving you orders doesn’t mean he has a clue what he’s doing.

 

=10th: Incy Wincy Spider

A harsh warning to the underprivileged that no matter how hard or how many times you try to climb the spout of society, the forces of the universe will ensure that you fall right back down to the bottom.

 

9th: BINGO

A tragic tale of a lonely farmer who gradually goes deaf, one letter at a time, until finally he cannot remember his own dog’s name. The contrast in the upbeat tune only seeks to reinforce the darkness in the Stephen-King-esque plot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJyQnCuB-ZA

 

8th: Baa Baa Black Sheep

A classic tale of exploitation of the masses. Under interrogation from an imperialist known only as “Sir”, our working-class hero confesses that the entire output of his labour has been earmarked for others. A popular marching song for the Proud Boys.

 

7th: Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed

A favourite in my household, for reasons I’m yet to fathom. If anything, the obvious concern from this tale of five springy munchkins is that we need an urgent review of our medical board standards. As the saying goes, “Make a mistake once and it becomes a lesson; make the same mistake twice and it becomes a choice.” Given that the doctor’s treatment repeatedly fails, it’s unforgivable that he or she was allowed to keep their licence, despite serious head traumas for several underage patients.

 

6th: Under the Sea – Sebastian the Crab (The Little Mermaid Soundtrack)

Pure smut. How this got past the Disney censors is an eternal mystery to me; Sebastian’s performance is reminiscent of Joel Grey and the crude crustacean’s crooning wouldn’t at all be out of place on the Cabaret stage. Still, the Academy – that bastion of moral integrity – thought differently, awarding the song an Oscar for Best Original Score, narrowly beating the same movie’s controversial take on the issue of consent in Kiss the Girl.

 

5th: Hakuna Matata – Timon, Pumbaa and Simba (The Lion King Soundtrack)

Released in 1994, The Lion King was the animated inspiration for my generation. And its influence on society is no better evidenced than in this catchy triplet, in which Simba, in a stunning disregard for his own privilege, shuns his responsibilities for a life of idleness, dependency and hair-flicking. No wonder we are the generation that created Facebook and Instagram.

 

4th: Wer hat die Kokosnuss geklaut? (“Who stole the coconut?”)

An entire tribe of monkeys desperately searches for its sole food supply: a single coconut. The parallels to Jesus feeding the masses with bread and fish are readily apparent as their saviour appears – not as the adult Messiah, but as a baby monkey – holding the holy nut. The resolution leaves the audience with not only Biblical ruminations, but also a debate over where parenting sits in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: is it worth sacrificing a child to preserve the species? Food for thought.

 

3rd: Baby Shark Dance – Pink Fong

Baby Shark Dance is a source of inspiration for every aspiring songwriter. It’s easy to see why: of the 246 words in the song, 162 are repetitions of the word “doo”. Ostensibly, the song’s content is largely a genealogical treatise about the ocean’s most famous predator, which is all the more confusing given that two-thirds of its lyrics refer to the Scottish word for a pigeon. Despite its global success – it has been viewed almost 8 billion times on YouTube, more than the world’s entire population – the song risks a legacy as a one-hit wonder for Pink Fong. Its subsequent songs releases involved recording the exact same melody and lyrics but replacing the word “shark” with another creature, such as in “Baby Monkey Dance”, “Baby T-Rex Dance” and “Baby Kitty Dance” – the shift to two-syllable nouns has not been successful to date – and the optimistic “Baby Car Dance”.  The further spin-offs “Baby Shark Retro”, “Cook-Off With Baby Shark” and “Baby Shark’s Space Adventure” are sad reflections that the writers have well and truly jumped the Selachimorpha by this stage.

Still, two points score in its favour. The final verse mercifully repeats the phrase “It’s the end” four times to reassure the listener that they are not at risk of zoological overload. And the song is remarkably superior to James Corden’s cover version, which maintains the 100% record for the originals of songs that have been subjected to this increasingly common form of artistic abuse.

 

2nd: Let It Go – Elsa (Frozen Soundtrack)

An entitled millennial wails at her misfortune in inheriting an entire kingdom, before celebrating a newfound resolve to not give a f*ck. By breaking several labour laws in slashing the welfare of her employees and single-handedly causing climate change, Elsa has inspired a generation of young girls to smash the ice ceiling by growing up to become the manipulative, destructive capitalists our society desperately needs.

 

1st: Bing Bong Song – Madame Gazelle (from Peppa Pig)

One of the most popular children’s shows, which prides itself on its educational content, pulls no punches with this masterpiece. Given that the Peppa Pig theme song is lyric-less, millions of children and (to a significantly lesser extent) parents around the world anxiously awaited the release of the show’s musical magnum opus, which has appeared in no less than three episodes to date. The song begins:

“Oh, we’re playing a tune and we’re singing a song,
With a bing and a bong and a bing.”

The privileged listener is treated to an opening surprise, with the final word of the second line breaking down all rhyming expectations and nursery stereotypes. But the twists keep on coming as it immediately bridges into its unforgettable chorus:

“Bong, bing, boo, bing, bong, bing,
Bing, bong, bingerly bongerly boo!”

What chicanery! What artistic courage! The lucky listener is constantly kept on her trotters, never knowing which syllable will follow which, as the rulebook of every children’s singalong ever is unceremoniously thrown out the window by the unconvincingly French-accented Madame Gazelle. The song continues with two more repeats of this unforgettable (literally) chorus, before a suddenly sharp silence is employed to leave the listener with a psychological earworm for the rest of the day.

 

Triple J didn’t include any of the above songs in its pool of candidates for the Hottest 100 Songs of 2020. So here are the votes I was forced to enter instead:

• Tekno – Kata
• Remi Wolf – Monte Carlo
• Caribou – Sunny’s Time
• The Weeknd – Blinding Light
• Glass Animals – Heat Waves
• Flume ft. Toro y Moi – The Difference
• Dua Lipa – Don’t Start Now
• Halsey – Without Me
• Daughter – No Care
• Caribou – Never Come Back