Do we have a PAZZ AND JOB 2009 thread yet?

2009: the year indie broke pazz'n'jop

but why should they be? P&J is one of the only major year-end lists that does singles-qua-singles, not just albums, not 'tracks,' and I think having that is valuable. (xpost)

i almost wonder if the pop critics are dying out because indie-critics have the DIY ethic where they're happy to do a review for $20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbhjXVHFeXA

Also, you could argue that Animal Collective's "What Would I Want? Sky" shouldn't be on there, because the Fall Be Kind EP that it appears on only got two album votes, while the song got 14 votes. But it looks like 12 of those 14 votes were from people who also voted for Merriweather Post Pavilion.

i'm with some dude. i really think p&J should be hard and about SINGLES. but then how do we decide what a single is?

i'm not even really sure what indie songs are actually released as singles and which ones aren't--i guess maybe that's how most of the votership feels?

i go on whether i hear something mainly outside of the context of the album or my iTunes (radio, TV, clubs and parties), because i mean, i liked the Quik & Kurupt singles, but i didn't really hear them anywhere unless i was the one pressing 'play' myself.

Which songs in particular are people bitching about re: not being singles? What are the hands-down "wtf no video, no 7", no promotion, BULLSHIT INDIE MOTHER FUCKER" plain and blatant album tracks.

xpost ok, "a single is defined by ubiquity" is one answer

as noted above, all the songs in the top 10 had videos and were, to some degree, promoted as 'singles' or emphasis tracks, and maybe the voters did hear them out at parties a lot or whatever. i mean, it's not for me to say whether them hearing a song at an indie dance party (or something? do they play new stuff at those or only old Smiths and Depeche Mode songs?) is less valid than me hearing a song on a Radio One-owned station or MTV Hits, but i think it's worth talking about.

how do we decide what a single is?

You really can't anymore, not when basically every song can be bought individually on iTunes or wherever. I mean, I know in my head what I'd consider a single, for my own list. But by the late '90s (really, starting with ubiquitous AOR airplay tracks that were never released alone, even pre-digital era) it became impossible to enforce.

Honestly, when Christgau let Doug Simmons vote for Guns N Roses' "Civil War" in 1991, that opened the floodgates. It's been downhill ever since.

This doesn't directly address the poll or the critics voting in it, but I've noticed with my students that the Shared Listening Experience we've talked so much about is gone – unless you're attending the indie dance party that Al mentioned. It's got something to do with the line blurring between "single" and "track I really like": if you no longer listen to the radio, you get your music from sampling it on YouTube, then either buy the track online or download it illegally. Listening is more atomized.

ha, at least "Civil War" was a decent-sized rock radio hit!

and maybe the voters did hear them out at parties a lot or whatever

so fucking help me if i go to a party and someone plays GIRLS

would leave that party

Still not sure why the Best Singles Of The Year have to be the Best Hit Singles Of The Year

Because as much as everyone wants to decry popularity, it's still a valid component to the equation one uses to evaluate something's worth.

my secondary nagging issue here is, the people that vote for songs from albums on their ballot, are they voting for it because it's their favorite song or because it's the single or the best known track? is it strategic or pure passion? because part of the reason i don't vote for my favorite deep cut off of the Sonic Youth or Jarvis Cocker album or w/e my favorite indie albums are in a given year is that they'd be my own particular favorite and the odds would be very slim of anyone else voting for it. and i dunno, if people can really easily agree on the best track from an album that kinda says something negative about the album as a whole.

pretty sure everyone voted for a song they thought at the very least SHOULD be a hit, and i'm still waiting to hear which track in the top 40 was a breach of faith re: single status.

I voted for "Heads Will Roll" because it was so much my favorite song that I often played it and nothing else on the album (and lol I did hear it at an indie dance party).

civil war was a big single in the uk

There are five songs in the top 20 that the Singles Jukebox didn't cover:

Girls - Lust for Life
Lady Gaga - Poker Face
Kings of Leon - Use Somebody
Atlas Sound - Walkabout
Kid Cudi - Day N Nite

The Gaga, Cudi, and Kings of Leon singles came out before the Jukebox was revived in March and almost certainly would've been covered otherwise.

As for the other two: "Walkabout" was available as a promo mp3 on 4AD's website. Can't tell if there was a video or not. "Lust for Life" was released as a limited-edition 7" and had a video.

if people can really easily agree on the best track from an album that kinda says something negative about the album as a whole

I don't know if "a lot of people easily agree that this song is the best one on the album" is a de facto negative statement without a ton of inference turning "best" into "only song worth listening to"

my secondary nagging issue here is, the people that vote for songs from albums on their ballot, are they voting for it because it's their favorite song or because it's the single or the best known track?

I'm constantly surprised at how often these are the same for me. In general, bands/labels do a pretty good job of identifying the standout track to push.

Hypocrite that I am, I basically consider everything reviewed on Singles Jukebox eligible for my own singles list, whether it's being promoted as one otherwise or not. (Assume they are, 99% of the time, but it probably does still mean that I'm part of the problem.)

are you guys gonna let me write for singles jukebox this year or what. i sent an email to wbs and he didn't respond u_u

When did you send it? I get the impression Will has been pretty stressed out lately.

Isn't part of the reason for having a singles poll to throw a spotlight on fantastic music which either isn't on an album at all, or where the parent album really is mostly filler? The "hit" thing is sort of a red herring - sometimes that music has hit big, sometimes it hasn't.

But obviously a poll full of tracks from beloved albums isn't doing that job.

So the questions I'd be asking are: what is the great music that doesn't turn up on albums? And why aren't critics hearing/voting for it? It seems to me internet consensus shouldn't be a big factor here - if that consensus can form around an album, it can surely form around a track.

"Lust for Life" was released as a single in 2008 (I downloaded it from eMusic; didn't care for it then, don't care about it now).

I voted for two album cuts myself (Art Brut's "Demons Out!" and Dam-Funk's "Brookside Park") because I played them obsessively, like singles. Better send me back to the non-voting salt mines, Harvilla.

Oh, I see what you mean now, Chuck. Here's the breakdown of 2009 ballots by artist-overlap between albums and singles:

1 ballot had exactly the same artists on both lists, in the same order even.
0 ballots had 9 overlapping artists.
1 had 8.
14 had 7.
24 had 6.
42 had 5.
57 had 4.
74 had 3.
88 had 2.
81 had 1.
315 had none.

So with a no-more-than-3 rule, 139 people would have had more work to do, for a total of 284 votes that would need to be changed. But that's only ~6% of the single votes cast, and so dwarfed by the laziness of people who didn't vote for *any* singles, or only a couple (~2200-ish blank single slots).

Are there really very many songs that exist outside of albums these days? I just went through my 78-track favorite-songs-of-2009, and these are the only ones I found that did not have homes on full-length albums:

Spoon, "Got Nuffin" (from Got Nuffin EP)
Lady Gaga, "Bad Romance" (from The Fame Monster EP)
Washed Out, "Feel It All Around" (from Life of Leisure EP)
Destroyer, "Bay of Pigs" (from Bay of Pigs EP)

Furthermore, the Spoon song eventually showed up on the band's 2010 album. And with eight tracks, The Fame Monster is really pushing the limit of an EP.

Maybe I'm the problem, though. I guess the best example this year of a popular single without an album was "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell."

Actually, you also probably see it way more often with dance/electronic music.

man, Pitchfork circa 2000 and 2001 vs now is night and day. The size of the site now utterly dwarfs the site then, and certainly the way it's run and decisions are made are different (then: one guy in his apartment trying to juggle it all by calling a few labels and emailing people for reviews turned around asap; today: 17 f/t employees in two offices planning all aspects of a small biz/publication) is drastically different as well. It is amazing that people think the one is relevant to the other.

but I guess since many of you all live on the internet, and have an idea of "what pitchfork is" that extends back a decade, I don't think you recognize the ways "what Pitchfork is" has changed. We reach more people right now that Spin or Vibe ever did, even if you use the bs print mag idea that "every copy is read by 2.5 people." I get that we're free, and that not everyone looks at everything, and that someone clicking on the site by accident or for a second counts as a "reader." But not everyone looked at every individual piece of content in print pubs and the # of bs clicks we get is certainly not close to the number that were built into mag circ numbers/ad rates. e.g. it's hard as hell to fudge our metrics once you get away the frontpage; I know how many people have read, say, our Contra review or our The Fame Monster review. I would not be surprised if in a month those are the most-read reviews of either album in the U.S.

But a lot of people are happy to just ignore our readership because they personally knew some blog or dude who knew about dan deacon before we published a track review. You know who didn't? Most of our readers. (And Chris, if we're talking about the effects on Pazz and Jop: We matched 11 of the top 13 LPs, the top four metal LPs, five of the six top h-h LPs, and 31 of the top 34 songs were on our top 100. Again, we didn't do that through some sort of puppetmaster shit, but we are by any metric plugged in to what other critics and listeners want from music right now. We've succeeded at a time when nobody else has. I don't beg for credit or claim to be responsible for things, but to dismiss us outright as if we don't matter at all, which you've done, feels odd.)

hell, I should stop caring, get back to work, and let people keep underestimating us.

xp (Like "Hyph Mngo.")

can't stand the mngo! wait, i think that's the one i don't like. i remember it from my foray into xlr8r-land.

Hmph Mngo

i like the new, aggressive, scottpl

i don't think we'll ever know whether pitchfork is the chicken or the egg

I think we're neither

we can basically 1. expose a lot of people to something, often something that would take years of touring and work to generate the exposure we can potentially provide, 2. expose nominally indie/guitar rock kids to non-indie music, 3. provide a large platform for opinions/artists that aren't related in some ways to the machinations of the music industry (i.e. we don't need a "cover star" or only have 12 "lead reviews" a month, or to run features only on newsstand-ready artists), which is something we share with the whole of the internet granted. Though we have a much bigger soapbox.

we are, at most accurate, I think something that accelerates a process that is or would already happen (the Whiney opinion to be fair, though he doesn't recognize the "acceleration" part I don't think) and/or be a pub that can stand up and say, in ways that other pubs can't (to the same # of ppl) or won't (bcuz they aren't built to do that), "this newish thing is important and deserves some attention" and people will at least follow up on that.

nobody likes some thing just because we do, and we aren't telling people what to think and they are listening, that's crazy. If anything you could argue we're better A&R people than journalists, but it's possible that's all readers want from a pub these days anyway.

Are there really very many songs that exist outside of albums these days?

Well, I don't know how many were on albums (definitely a bunch of them, looks like) but from Glenn's list, these are the singles I see that had no overlap between album and singles voters, if that helps:

13 Joy Orbison · Hyph Mngo 22 22 1
14 Big Boi (ft. Gucci Mane) · Shine Blockas 21 21 1
18 Das Racist · Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell 18 18 1
21 Kid Cudi · Day 'N' Nite 16 16 1
22 Miley Cyrus · Party in the USA 16 16 1
26 Beyoncé · Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It) 14 14 1
33 Jay Electronica · Exhibit C 13 13 1
36 Jamie Foxx (ft. T-Pain) · Blame It 12 12 1
37 Kelly Clarkson · My Life Would Suck Without You 12 12 1
45 Major Lazer (ft. Nina Sky and Ricky Blaze) · Keep It Goin' Louder 10 10 1

Pretty sure Miley and Das Racist have no corresponding album. Beyonce' obviously came off an '08 album. Never heard of "Jay Electronica" until this very second. Skeptical about Kid Cudi up above -- didn't his album get a bunch of votes? Odd that there would be no overlap at all there.

i think the jay electronica song is going to be on an album this year?

i like the new, aggressive, scottpl

haha, I don't. Need more sleep. Less stress. I def don't mean any antagonism to Chris or Chuck or anyone, other than maybe lex and even that's tongue-in-cheek and I think I agree with him personally a hell of a lot more than he'd think.

For whatever reason I just find it odd that we get swept under the rug so completely. I've generally stopped taking it personally years ago, but we take pride in what we do, we work very hard, we don't rush judgments...I dunno, I got into this conversation talking about some of the marco reasons that rock = indie, or that the internet is homogenizing opinions (not a good thing mind you), but I can't help find it weird that the one pub that has succeeded the past five years in this music, media, and economic environment was considered meaningless by 2003. in 2003, it was a one-man show, now it's a real pub. This is just tunnelvision to me.

And obv I take that personally since I started here in late 2004, and also bcuz I like Chris and respect him and it's hard to hear from him that he thinks we're a lark. Alright, I will get out of this thread.

Never heard of these people until the last few minutes either, fwiw:

39 Washed Out · Feel It All Around 14 12 0.857

xxxp "Blame It," "My Life Would Suck Without You," "Keep It Goin' Louder," "Day 'N' Nite," and "Single Ladies" are off full-length albums. "Party in the USA" is off the Time of Our Lives EP. Presumably "Shine Blockas" is from Sir Luscious Left Foot (2010 release). The rest appear to be completely stand-alone (though I wouldn't be surprised if they eventually end up on albums this year).

Are there really very many songs that exist outside of albums these days?

Nine of my singles (and they were singles) did not appear on a single-artist album in 2009. One of the nine will definitely appear on a 2010 album. Not sure about the others.

also w/ a lot of popular music these days, especially R&B and rap, there's such a long lead time between singles being released and their parent albums being released that they're increasingly straddling different years

Yeah, Andy, I realized belatedly that it's far more common for dance/electronic artists to release stand-alone singles.

like, the 2010 album Big Boi had a single off of on this year's poll also had an earlier single get 6 votes in the 2008 poll (xpost)

ilxor, did you see one of nabsico's Tumblr posts from earlier? you were quoted.

Didn't see this, actually... mind pointing me in the right direction?

xp True -- I voted for a Kid Sister song in 2007 that eventually turned up on her 2009 album.

Didn't see this, actually... mind pointing me in the right direction?

http://agrammar.tumblr.com/post/344749076/a-lengthy-hack-through-recent-music-crit-stuff-mostly