Another hottest 100, another absence of women ...

Triple JJJ's latest top 100 countdown in January 2015 yet again is disappointingly male-centred. The same debates are going on as for the last 5 years (and before!). If you feel like signing a petition to say you're angry, go here. If you feel like being passionate on Twitter, use the hashtags #women4hottest100 and #countthewomen.

Life and the poll

Unfortunately, due to life's irritating habit of Getting In The Way, I will not be able to spend a lot of time on the poll this year. The poll form itself is still up at SurveyMonkey, and people can still vote in it, and I can still do basic analysis to find the top 10 or so - but I won't spend extra time promoting it, or doing any extra analysis along the way. Sorry everyone, but hey, life happens.

Hottest 100 Women 2010 is ON! And I need your help

That's right, I'm doing it again - for all female artist songs released during 2010 - in Australia and the world.  First up, I need to build a list of all these songs.  And you can help by adding songs which should be on it, to the list - a file I have made publicly editable over at Google Docs.

Here's an easy way to find new songs to add:

1. Visit Wikipedia
2. Find an album with a female artist (start from half-way through February)
3. If it isn't on the list, add it by copying & pasting the track listing. 

Easy!

This file will close at the end of December, 2010, and voting will start in the first week of January, 2011, with results to be counted down somewhere early in February.  If you'd like to help out in any other way with the countdown, please, let me know!

My apologies to Lady Gaga

For thinking she didn't have any kind of 'point' with her performances. In fact, I'd call it performance art. I missed her live concerts here in Melbourne, but I've since spent a lot of time getting to know her through her video clips, and I'm at the point where I just cannot look away.

Standard disclaimer: I wish that to be truly At The Top Of Her Game, being Challenging and Artistic, a female artist would not automatically have to strip off, display a standardised body, and wear it as some kind of badge of pride.

But.

If they have to do it, I hope they do it like Gaga. Wearing her performances. Sneering at the camera. Demanding sex when she wants it. Rivaling the Cremaster Cycle in profusion of allegorical, symbolic and downright confusing imagery. Encasing body parts and concepts in materials weighed down by layers of meaning. Doing some damn fine music. Exploring colour, movement and texture. Toying with expectations and demands of others, and then throwing them off effortlessly.

When I grow up into a toned, bosomed and bleached body, I want to be Lady Gaga.

Hummingbird/Hottest100Women overall

So, how many songs did we have in common, and how many were different?

Well, 24 songs appeared in both lists. These songs were more likely to occur in the second 50 of the Hummingbird 100, and in the first 55 of the Hottest 100. That is to say - the songs we had in common were more likely to be the more popular alternative songs, which were less popular than the standard pop songs. So to speak.

Also, there were 64 artists appearing in the Hummingbird, compared to 69 in the Hottest 100 (which we should point out here, is actually 110). This equals a 64% uniqueness ratio (yes, that's the official term) for the Hummingbird, and 63% for H110 - ie, Hummingbird has a slightly higher ratio of individual artists.

Of those 64 artists, 22 were in the Hottest110 - meaning we had a much higher overlap of artists, than of songs. Which makes plenty of sense.