The Pitchfork People's List - top albums 1996-2012

of course Kanye knows what Pitchfork is. That doesn't mean he would deign to play their festival

xp Voodoo is all over the place on these ballots. Year 2000 Pitchfork wouldn't know what to make of that.

― Chick-on-Chick-fil-A (Johnny Fever), Saturday, August 18, 2012 12:10 AM (30 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ship wrote a review for them that they apparently didn't accept!

but again, what ballots

i could see voodoo being in the bottom of the overall top 100. obv it's not coming close to sniffing MBDTF

what's funny is Voodoo is in their archive i guess from being in their best of decade list, but it was never reviewed. i remember because it was one of my sample reviews that got me hired, but the only one that didn't get published.

xpost lol k3v's xls is impressive!

although it was already several months old at that point is probably why, i mainly wrote it because i was annoyed they hadn't covered it already

ship i thought i remember you saying that you didn't really give voodoo much of a chance up until very recently (like the last 2-3 years)

ILM ballots and fb friends' ballots. However, I realize I live inside a bubble where people who'd vote in this poll don't listen to mopey dudes with greasy hair all day long.

right that's what i'm sayin. remember who the voting base is here

cmon kanye def cares what TASTEMAKERS think & pfork is exactly the kind of thing hed care about

ship i thought i remember you saying that you didn't really give voodoo much of a chance up until very recently (like the last 2-3 years)

― a hoy hoy heat (J0rdan S.), Saturday, August 18, 2012 12:14 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

hmmm did i? it was more the opposite, grappled with but ultimately embraced it early on, but it fell in my esteem over the years as i heard Brown Sugar, Instant Vintage, other things i hold in comparison to now

fuck i just realized i didn't vote for Instant Vintage

dude gets more excited about being in Paris newspapers than any music website though

fuck i just realized i didn't vote for Instant Vintage

― some dude, Friday, August 17, 2012 11:19 PM (55 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ugh me either.
this is like when i realized urban hang suite was actually '96 too

yeah but tastemakers to kanye are fashion designers, not journalists

yeah, ship OTM

i haven't seen any evidence in the past 5 years that kanye defines himself/his art in traditional ways

pitchfork has been around since he was not the noted name he is today

al I just read back the post on narrowcast where you wrote about voodoo in your decade wrap and I just misremembered it

ah ok

around the good friday run, kanye did show up at one of those pfork bowling alley shows that I think a-trak was DJ-ing iirc

still I think the amount with which he cares about what the site/its readers think is being overstated

being overstated by who?

I never meant to imply he cares that much on a day to day basis, but if MBDTF were to win he'd sure talk about it all day.

he didn't actually seem to talk, publicly anyway, about all the album's initial claim much at all. only public statement i can remember was an unhappy one about the Grammy AOTY snub.

initial acclaim

tbh the only time I know what Kanye's doing is when someone else brings it to my attention.

the site didn't specify but i was hoping it was 11:59 pacific time. apparently not.

lol at you guys wondering what write-in might make it and thinking 'reasonable doubt' and going huh at old pfork not covering d'angelo

balls: tickled

also are you guys actually befuddled at there being ppl (esp ppl who read pfork) whose favorite kanye might be mbdtf? really?

kanye talks recent pfork album reviews with rob kardashian

i mean i can imagine the argument for watch the throne or 808s and those would be alot more whuh to me.

i know people love MBDTF and all, i just always wonder how much that was tied up in it being the supposed best of its year/era and whether that many people actually ultimately prefer it to all his other albums. College Dropout was, um, pretty popular with the Pitchfork crowd too iirc.

It's kind of funny how much of an outlier I'd be if I actually tried to do one of these.

which is a reason to do it imo, but having to add lots of albums really does make it more of a time-consuming pain in the ass

feels futile, too

like you know you're gonna wind up getting swept by kanye/arcadefire/neutralmilk/builttospill/blueprint/radiohead/pavement/etc

all his albums were pretty popular w/ the pfork crowd. but yeah i can totally buy an indie rock audience leaning towards the 'ambitious' rockist statement album that features bon iver, esp since it came out recently and it's strongest comp came out when pforks demo was in junior high. if you were to ask me which kanye would most appeal to a demo that's gonna vote ok computer the best album of the past 15+ years i would put my money on the one w/ the prominent king crimson sample. i wouldn't get my panties in a wad or kmt if/when it happened either.

pavement's got no shot at this plz

i did this but got angry at it bc of the whole "before you start take a tour through our greatest hits and we'll stick them at the top of your list" + it's really annoying moving all those albums to the bottom/almost crashed my browser so i just gave up with the ordering

if i didn't know pfork was too half assed and incompetent (amy phillips, senior news editor) i'd almost suspect the huge 90s gaps were left in to slant the results younger/more recent.

it's weird for me to think of a kanye album unseating LR as the rock critic favorite, but yeah balls makes a pretty good case.

it's funny... by no other means is it kanye's most popular album, except that a lot of critics seem invested in willing it to be so

they're all ambitious rockist statement albums, though. and the jon brion thing seemed like a bigger deal at the time than the bon iver thing. but right yeah, being more recent may be the biggest factor in his favor (maybe? isn't this thing totally gonna be dominated by stuff from before, say, 2003?)

xpost

you can substitute "fans" for "critics" in that post and it all still applies

kanyetothe forum definitely gonna have a huge turnout in this thing

whats the difference amirite xp

kanyetotheforum cares so much about pfork reviews

that place is hilarious/awesome

yeah i alluded to it w/ the nudge mention above (and it WAS convenient so i can't bitch too much) but i do think they stacked the deck having those staff lists there as a guide. if this thing gets that many votes beyond dorks and cranks a pretty big plurality is just gonna go thru those lists, click on the ones they know/like, get outraged at the omission of one or two faves and maybe bother to look them up and them maybe bother to reorder their list. it'll be interesting to see if the final list has a weird chronological bent to it at all, esp beyond the top 20 or so. i do know if the album's not in the database it's fucked on some level, looking at several lists i've seen olivia tremor control's from dusk at cubist castle entered in several slightly different ways which maybe the tallying will pick up or maybe not.

if i didn't know pfork was too half assed and incompetent (amy phillips, senior news editor)

I'm not saying Pitchfork is a mansion on the hill or anything, but news and editorial have always been separate and completely different in tone.

ktt is more (unintentionally) hilarious, less awesome. too much naive teenage angst to ever be taken seriously...but i doubt anyone here would be taking it seriously in the first place.

i'd almost suspect the huge 90s gaps were left in to slant the results younger/more recent.

― balls, Friday, August 17, 2012 9:55 PM (4 minutes ago)

thought this abt several albums, especially hello nasty: "no conceivable reason to exclude this except to skew the results." other albums i was genuinely surprised i had to write in on a pitchfork ballot:

white stripes - de stijl
blur - blur
guided by voices - under the bushes under the stars
sleater-kinney - dig me out

@balls - They don't have listings for records they haven't reviewed so that's why there are pretty huge gaps. ie: hip hop earlier in it's history, metal when brandon wasn't involved. If I remember the early days it was a) much more reflective of ryans taste b) was lighter on album reviews? That said, there's no excuse for any website not exalting the Wrangler Brutes as saviours of modern music.

yeah it always amused me that PF dropped the ball on even reviewing De Stijl when the buzz seemed huge with their readership at the time, and the White Blood Cells reviews was hilariously defensive about how hey we weren't sent promos of the first 2