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

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

I think they started with three a day early on and now they're up to five. Also, they purposely scrubbed a lot of the pre-millenium content from existence.

a good amount of early millenium stuff too

o yeah alot of the stuff was reviewed at the time. trust me pfork reviewed pavement and gbv and olivia tremor control at the time. the first time i'd ever heard of pfork was 1998 from k3vin b4rnes bitching about what they'd written about him and asking him 'wtf is pitchfork? and why do you care what some dork on the internet wrote about you? besides everybody reads sonicnet anyway' and then by no more than two years later max it was huge, i can remember if you went into the university library and looked at a computers browser history someone had just been looking at either pfork or jambands.com and then a little later when i was working at wuxtry it was pretty much guaranteed that if pfork raved about something that shit was gonna sell, the only other thing that was guaranteed to move product like that was npr love. i wonder how much this is the case anymore. tbh more than the results i'd be curious to see what the median age for voters is, it's still big obv but i wonder about it's relevance. as welcome as the popist changes there have been it seems like it's lost some of its voice maybe or its authority.

must've been a lot of pre-millennium tension.

<3, tricky.

xpost rah

it was pretty much guaranteed that if pfork raved about something that shit was gonna sell...i wonder how much this is the case anymore.

How much does anything sell anymore? I think it's cute that they still wait until around the time of street dates to put up album reviews.

i can also remember when cmj (remember cmj?) had their scandal w/ rigging their charts and falsifying data and stuff thinking that if pfork really wanted to kill cmj (at a time when that would've been an accomplishment) they would start doing college radio charts but now seeing how badly they've managed something as simple as this poll there is no way they could've ever managed something like that.

I'm still wondering why you think this poll is badly managed? The decision to sweep old Pfork content under the rug was done a long time ago, and definitely without a poll of this nature in mind. To me, it appears they constructed a pretty user-friendly voting system (except for the scroll and drag ordering) and neither over nor underpublicized it.

ever notice how every ILM thread eventually comes around to talking about Kanye?

― to welcome jer.fairall, pie is served. (jer.fairall), Tuesday, August 7, 2012 10:06 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

weirdly i think the 'actually the internet HELPS record sales!' argument actually might apply to indie rock nevermind the big indie rock acts of today playing much much bigger rooms than the big indie rock acts of the 90s (nevermind the 80s) did.

To me, it appears they constructed a pretty user-friendly voting system (except for the scroll and drag ordering) and neither over nor underpublicized it.

yeah, it seems pretty well managed to me. easy & fun to use (except for the bullshit pain of reordering, unless i missed something). plus p much guaranteed by design to subtly reinforce pitchfork's authority.

johnny when you construct a poll that has even the staff having to write in not remotely obscure choices in their top ten (among other problems) than that is a poorly constructed poll. nevermind other ways they play into default biases. this thing's alot closer to a drudgereport poll than quinnipac or whatever.

What did you want them to do? Best I can tell, all their album matches (with art) come from the review database. I guess they could've set it up to scrape Amazon or something, but writing-in votes is easier for the builders and not hard at all for us.

They could've spent the last year behind the scenes building a database of everything someone might conceivably vote for in this poll they probably cooked up only a short while ago, OR they could just let people write in things. I'd have gone with the latter too.

last 'year' - really

One way they could do it that once someone typed "Beastie Boys - Hello Nasty," it would be automatically entered into the database and come up as a suggestion for the next user. Maybe that would create an unusably large database, though?

...could do it IS that once...

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, Friday, August 17, 2012 11:32 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

RD has totally become a retroactive illmatic among the jay-z stans, if any unreviewed rap album makes it it'll be that one

johnny when you construct a poll that has even the staff having to write in not remotely obscure choices in their top ten (among other problems) than that is a poorly constructed poll. nevermind other ways they play into default biases. this thing's alot closer to a drudgereport poll than quinnipac or whatever.

― balls, Saturday, August 18, 2012 12:56 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a poll of the albums in the current archive, not hard 2 understand

Hate Kanye.

And good morning to you.

One way they could do it that once someone typed "Beastie Boys - Hello Nasty," it would be automatically entered into the database and come up as a suggestion for the next user. Maybe that would create an unusably large database, though?

the problem isn't that the database would be large, but that it would be full of the album "smell of bals" by the artist "likk penis"

They could've spent the last year behind the scenes building a database of everything someone might conceivably vote for in this poll they probably cooked up only a short while ago, OR they could just let people write in things. I'd have gone with the latter too.

― Johnny Fever, Saturday, August 18, 2012 2:01 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

last 'year' - really

― balls, Saturday, August 18, 2012 2:03 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

As someone whose job is creating a huge database of information for a living, with new information coming in all the time, I can tell you that it's a slow process. Places like Rate Your Music or Discogs weren't created in a week or two. Like I mentioned before, they probably could've set up something to scrape those databases or used Amazon as a backbone or any number of other options, but it's so much easier and cheaper to just let voters write-in albums on their ballots. Especially for something that's just a summer timekiller and a demographic info net.

yeah i know reasonable doubt's rep (not retroactive btw though i understand you were 8 at the time or whatever), i'm just thinking that it might not feature highly among a demo that tbh probably think the black album is the best jay-z album (if not "whichever one has 'niggas in paris' on it"), write-in factor (which it apparently might surprise some ppl actually works as a big hurdle for respondents in polling) seals it.

xxp Fair point, but each person wouldn't necessarily know that their unmatched entries were being added.

johnny explaining why it's half assed or poorly designed isn't really working as an argument against 'this poll is half assed and poorly designed'. well aware that pfork is lazy and has no incentive to be otherwise (again, 'amy phillips, senior news editor').

a) I don't know why you're taking such issue with the fact their database isn't all-encompassing.
b) Did Amy Phillips shit on your rug? I know she wrote the terrible Sonic Youth article a decade ago, but damn.

http://peopleslist.pitchfork.com/list/090eb47f/

Didn't realise that the voting would close so soon, otherwise some of the final positions would change. Top 20 looks about right.

i'm not taking such issue w/ the fact their database isn't all-encompassing. i merely pointed out that this poll is poorly designed and half assed in standard pfork fashion. to which capn-save-a-poll jumped in and said 'b-b-but doing it another way might require WORK!' to which i responded this doesn't really argue against my point at which time you decided to disagree w/ a straw man instead. if one of the interns in my lab read some tubes at the spec for me but didn't validate the spec ('work') and o yeah the readings were out of range and they couldn't be bothered to do dilutions ('work') and o yeah they read it at 450nm instead of 280nm i wouldn't regard the data as valid or their performance as anything other than poor and half assed. if the point of this exercise was to gather any kind of accurate data about their readers they've failed in nearly every way a poll can fail at this (all encompassing database wouldn't solve it and isn't necessary). if the point of this was to create some buzz and build the brand than maybe they've succeeded (big maybe). eg requiring all choices to be written in would help the former cause of data gathering but hurt the latter cause by making this exercise much less user friendly. i was merely noting that putting a finger on the scale, nevermind five fingers, can skew the results and that in this case that the results would probably be skewed in a way favorable to how pfork would like to present itself and that this might prompt suspicion if one wasn't pretty sure that this poor design was due to incompetence and not cunning.

lol. poll more than likely did what it said out to do. complaints that it failed to be something else are beside the point.

capn-save-a-poll

lol @ me being nicknamed this after how I routinely create chaos in any poll Algerian Goalkeeper creates.

yeah if the poll was designed to get ppl on facebook and twitter to promote pitchfork it succeeded (maybe? i literally don't know anyone non-ilx who gave a fuck about this and i live in a place where their black kids review was a major topic of conversation), if the poll was designed to survey their readership's opinion of the best records of the pfork era and by doing so provide the world w/ a 'people's list' than it's a highly flawed (but not useless and for the triviality of the task almost definitely good enough) model.

seriously nowhere near as perturbed by this issue as i am by this: the jason alexander body double in this nickelback video is a really poor jason alexander body double imo

Just realised I voted for completely the wrong spoon album and forgot 'in a beautiful place out in the country'. Fuck. My. Life.

Completely forgot Mahogany. Bah.

Would really like a cross-rating system whereby one could check one's musical compatibility with other posters (e.g. in order to decide whether to take their musical opinions seriously or not) that came up with a percentile match based on albums and/or artists listed.

(Would also like ability to put in a facility for posters' particular bugbears like "no rap except Kanye" mentioned above or "has no female artists in their top 10/fewer than 10% in whole list" for me or "slags off Radiohead but still put OK Computer in their list" for Melissa or Turangalila)

http://peopleslist.pitchfork.com/list/090eb47f/

Didn't realise that the voting would close so soon, otherwise some of the final positions would change. Top 20 looks about right.

― fun loving and xtremely tolrant (Billy Dods)

Great list. Especially pleased to see another vote for Beyond The Sun and a great choice for your number one.