Yo P&J, I'm really happy for you, Imma let you finish, but ILX had the greatest 2009 poll of all time! All time! (2009 ILX Trax Poll Results: TOP TEN TODAY)

Euler I agree with all of that - I tend to think also that Taylor's songwriting is a bit less formalist than the really big country-pop stars (Garth, or the Garth I'm familiar with at any rate, Shania, Faith Hill say) - which it allows it to seem both more "confessional" and also seem more self-aware. Shania, for example, didn't really invest her songs with that same air of specificity - where her songs get specific, it's metaphorical, one detail standing in for a host of other possible details (Man shirts! Short Skirts! ....So, you're a rocket scientist?). Whereas with Taylor the details matter.

Right, it's the mix of confessional writing that somehow seems "true" (which is pretty par for the course for country songwriting, especially female country songwriting) with self-awareness (which is more an element of pop songwriting nowadays), that's characteristic of Taylor Swift's songwriting.

Off topic, but can someone link the "best of 2000-04" poll results? I'm curious about those results.

One more "results" just for good measure.

poll hit-rate over the years for me...the no of songs i actively like-to-loved, or have basically +ve feelings towards:

2004 - 35/50
2005 - 33/50
2006 - 26/50 (ugh can't believe "crazy" beat "what you know" this year)
2007 - 25/50
2008 - 32/50
2009 - 35/50

I found this, but nothing further: End of a half-decade: ILM kinda official Top 100 Albums & Tracks Poll - VOTING OVER (thank heavens)

Oh wait... yay! ILM Top 100 2000-2004: ALBUMS

ILM Top 100 2000-2004: TRACKS

I love old ILM. Anybody want to do something like this for the 05-09 poll?

http://base58.com/ilx/ilm/top100/20002004/

wouldn't be that hard

COnclusions from this poll: I have been living under a rock/in a different universe for the whole of 2009. Other than Lisztomania, Animal Collective, the XX and a couple of dubstep tracks, I hadn't even heard/heard of the majority of things here. Not even Taylor Swift or 1901 or anything. The 2005 poll is the same - I haven't knowingly heard one track in that year's top ten.

the 2005 top 10 is

1. Amerie - 1 Thing
2. Girls Aloud - Biology
3. Kelly Clarkson - Since U Been Gone
4. Three 6 Mafia ft. Young Buck, 8Ball & MJG - Stay Fly
5. Madonna - Hung Up
6. Gwen Stefani - Hollaback Girl
7. Kanye West ft. Jamie Foxx - Gold Digger
8. Ladytron - Destroy Everything You Touch
9. The Game ft. 50 Cent - Hate It Or Love It
10. Robyn - Be Mine

YOU ARE ACTUALLY TAKING THE PISS. not one of those tracks??!!!

You and me both, matey xp. That's kind of exactly what's cool about it though - a little bit of passion can turn the whole thing upside down. Trax week is a massive boon for me getting 2009 2010 off to a great start. If we had 10,000 people participating, most of the new stuff would get lost in the noise.

the only act on the 09 list i hadn't heard of before this was washed out

i mean...it doesn't take much more than basic "paying attention to other people" to have heard of a majority of these artists, even if you don't care for the music

how is there someone on earth that hasn't heard "gold digger"

or "since u been gone"?? i think it should be an automatic perma ban from the board if you haven't heard that song, sorry

did they play exclusively crazy frog over there in 05 or what? sheesh

Lex - actually now I come to think of it, I've heard Gold Digger and Hollaback Girl. Might have heard the others, but not knowingly.

(Too busy listening to Feels I guess :-p )

not sure you're taking account of the fact that some people have 'other stuff to do', lex

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Still, even if a lot of the stuff in this list isn't my usual taste, I'm glad to be checking it out. My TV aerial's been broken for most of the year and there's no radio in my office so a lot of mainstream stuff goes right over my head. I realise this can be quite amusing to a lot of people I know who see me as a music nerd.

Ismael OTM - I don't stop listening to music, but there's a lot of stuff out there i know i AM going to like, that I don't have time to check out stuff I probably won't. As such, I've gone and downloaded Taylor Swift's album out of intrigue more than anything else, because otherwise I'd have written her off as the next Jewel (or what have you). It's very handy having these polls.

And for once I'm going to applaud Lex for being open minded enough to give things like AC a go, even if he knows he's going to hate it.

Another thing to take into account is that I listen to a lot of old music. Along with dubstep, I was rediscovering the Beatles back catalogue for instance - something I know Lex definitely didn't. Anyway, enough defensiveness... On with 2010.

the sad thing is, when i first checked out an AC-related thing - the panda bear album from the other year - i really expected to like it, given how people were talking about it, and then THE HORROR :(

I don't like Panda Bear's album much tbh. The only thing I think you might perhaps have an infinitesimally small chance of enjoying is the Prospect Hummer EP they did with Vashti Bunyan. AC, I feel are a band who take a while to click, and never will for a lot of people.

Another conclusion I've made from this poll is that a lot of people invest way too much in artists' singing abilities - their ability to sing "well" - almost to a Simon Cowell degree of fussiness. Like the Girls track or Joanna Newsom - sure they're not Mariah Carey, but whatever happened to allowing for idiosyncratic vocals that suit a particular kind of music? It's like moaning about Nirvana because Kurt Cobain doesn't sing like an angel. The Girls track wasn't a great song - it was flimsy, fairly formulaic, like a Lemonheads b-side or something. But complaining about the singing seems a bit redundant to me.

Listening to Since U Been Gone - I've heard this before I think. It's absolutely the opposite of what I'd ever want to listen to for fun. Sounds like Pink or Alanis-style commercial pop/rock dressed up in punk clothes. Sorry, not my thing at all.

It's not really dressed up much.. just Max Martin doing his thing. (He did it even better with The Veronicas' "4 Ever")

even better?

oh my!

fuck an 05-09 because Since U Been Gone would probably win it (if not YBWM)

not a fan but those do shed some light. (Kogan and Bradley excluded for overreaching and making me want to vomit.)

whatever happened to allowing for idiosyncratic vocals that suit a particular kind of music?

idk, there are plenty of "idiosyncratic" vocals which seem widely accepted on ilm: fever ray is the most obvious example here, shakira sounds like a hiccuping goat (in a good way!), taylor swift is far from a virtuoso; and more generally, the likes of björk/tom waits/pj harvey rarely get the sort of mockery that girls and joanna newsom did here. maybe dan can pinpoint a more technical reason, but to me joanna newsom (and devendra banhart, lykke li et al) seem really affected and mannered while karin dreijer and björk seem less forced and more natural; while someone like swift makes up for her technical limitations with a conversational tone and great phrasing. i guess it's a case-by-case basis.

also, the "idiosyncratic" voices i don't have time for seem mostly to tend towards "sounding like a child" - adults who affect childlike poses are the worst savages to me

but i think chords are at least as important as lyrics

lol ie, not that important

chords are what you make of them and are totally uninteresting until they've been coloured over with melody. reducing a song to its lyrics is unfair, but at least lyrics are their own individual and separate sub-compartment of a song that can be looked at as such. saying "oh that's just a 1-4-5" is meaningless, because chords alone don't say anything about anything. it's like saying "nice white shirt with letters on it" or something.

taken individually, that's obviously true. but if you look at a songwriter's songs collectively you can see patterns that can be interesting. (dylan's great for this -- a lot of his albums have very distinct chord patterns and keys that give them musical coherence.) in taylor's case, it's just that she obviously has kind of songwriting crutches she relies on, which you'd maybe expect of someone as young as her. but it'll be interesting to see if and how she expands her musical palette along with her lyrical concerns.

xp:

and yeah it's the sum that matters, not the parts. but the parts can help make sense of the sum.

sorry to keep digging this up, but i honestly think this:
"who the fuck is this snotty, conventionally pretty, boring as hell blonde chick to pretend she's an outsider LIKE I ACTUALLY WAS AT THAT AGE??!"
goes straight to the heart of why taylor gets sniffy attitude from a number of otherwise all-accepting music nerds. And I ain't even fronting, I notice that attitude in myself as well; it's just not productive.

and the thing is (and not that her biography should matter that much) she pretty much was an outsider -- she spent her whole early adolescence trying to get a record deal. that's a sort of voluntarily outsiderhood, but if it hadn't panned out she would've just been a weird girl who kept taking trips to nashville trying to sell songs.

^^ yeah i was pretty tempted earlier to say that, though she's blonde and cute and likes pretty dresses and all, having that consuming an outside hobby during HS basically prevents you from being one of The Popular Girls, which is a pretty time-consuming job in and of itself.

She's also said in interviews that before her music star makeover she was the ugly outcast nerd she sings about in her songs.

I don't doubt her actual sincerity but the marketing doesn't really match the material.

also, i think having an obvious talent or commitment to a creative pursuit probably marks you out as a bit of a weirdo in most high schools.

also, the "idiosyncratic" voices i don't have time for seem mostly to tend towards "sounding like a child" - adults who affect childlike poses are the worst savages to me

― لوووووووووووووووووووول (lex pretend), Wednesday, February 3, 2010 2:00 PM (1 hour ago)

I agree, but I also think it's completely wrong to put Joanna Newsom in some sort of opposition to the likes of Fever Ray or Bjork. 'Natural' is the least fitting adjective for Karin Dreijer's vocal ticks I could think of. She uses it as a tool to great effect. The mostly female songwriters who grasp for some childlike innocence are posing, trying to come off a certain way that's besides their music. Newsom just has an odd, marmite voice.

That's a good point. My rather good-looking former dance teacher was heavily into ballet when she was younger (to the point where she got to briefly perform with the Pennsylvania Ballet) and she talked about being a social outcast (at least until late high school) partly as a result of that. (By the end of high school people were more like: oh, cool, you get out of taking the classes we have to take because of your dance rehearsals.)

But anyway, in other songs on Fearless (most of them even) she talks about perfectly normal high school experiences (which are alien to me).

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yeah people seriously trying to have it both ways with "ratface" AND "she's too pretty to sing about unrequited love"

i think the thing is that EVERYONE feels like an outcast in high school; a thousand little cuts, puberty, initial heartbreak, lack of control of your own destiny, shared awkward moments... the girl who ate her own boogers in third grade still had to deal with that as a hs senior. It's a hellish backwater.

does it really matter how popular taylor swift was in high school? the song is one big cliche, whether or not she 'lived it'

yeah tbh that's mainly why i feel at an arm's length from her songs -- feels more like she's patterning her narratives off of romantic comedies than anything in her life

plus as pretty as she tends to look, she still has the slightly hunched posture of a tall, gawky girl in most of her pictures!

she strikes me as the equivalent of the blue-stocking, poetry-writing girl most of us probably knew at school; maybe not a total bullied outcast, maybe on the fringes of the Popular Crowd (close enough to be able to speak to the hot sporty boys, at any rate), enough on the fringes to fret about acceptance into it.

I like "You Belong" a lot (it was in my top 20 singles of the year but I ended up bumping it to make room for some album tracks), but really for me it's all about the hook -- musically's right, the character she plays in that song is a total passive-aggressive bitch.

bumping it from my ballot, I mean

not invested enough in the argument to google for old interviews to confirm my recollection but I feel like I read that she was flat-out ostracized and socially tortured in school

I just like to rhyme.

pies and fries, you belong with me because I'm hungry