Hottest 100 picks, 2017

It's that time of the year again when Australia hosts the world's largest online music poll. The publicly-funded radio station Triple J is known as the nation's left-leaning, youth-centred, commercial-free station for cool tunes, with the main genres ranging around indie rock, folk, trip-hop and basically anything not too hard or poppy. But more importantly:

• It's the only FM station that has reception on long road trips across this huge country, and
• It hosts an immensely popular music poll: The Hottest 100.

Votes for the top 100 songs are cast by a million-plus listeners over the Aussie summer, culminating in a six-hour broadcast of the results that has almost been an integral part of the Australian Day celebrations of January 26 (until now). I wish I had enough time and/or coolness to be able to say I have my finger on the pulse of modern music every year. Secretly, I would have loved to be a music critic. I love almost every genre, I'm addicted to the world of musical trends, and I'm bombastic enough to create meaningless words that wouldn't seem out of place in a copy of Rolling Stone. The sad reality is that I have no objective talent, either for music appreciation or performance.

But it's still fun to pretend.

For some reason, chess.com's blog doesn't allow a smooth cross-posting of my article, with all the embedded music videos etc. But it doesn't have anything to do with chess anyway. If you want to check it out and drink in the smooth tunes, you can head to the source: http://davidsmerdon.com/?p=1998