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

Just realized that much of my 'female-fronted' percentage is represented by Broadcast and Deerhoof, who collectively compose a whopping 10% of my ballot. Guess I'm a fan.

Now That's What I Call Female-Fronted Bands!, Vol. 32

90% of my album covers were female-fronted, or specifically featured the front of a female. The other 10% featured penises.

doing this I realised I listened to a lot fewer women ten years ago

continuing defensively from my last post...

i listen to rap more than R&B, guitar rock at least as much as modern indie, electronic music and chartpop. these are habits as much as they are considered expressions of taste. not sure whether i'm attracted to male-dominated genres because or in spite of the gender imbalance, but that feels like a dodge and it's beside the point anyway. i could have made room for portishead's third, melt banana's cell-scape, joanna newsom's milk-eyed mender, cat power's moon pix, goldfrapp's felt mountain and the fourth angel in heavy syrup album, all of which i've spent a good deal of time with during the last decade and a half.

and the bellrays' let it blast is a top-ten favorite that i just plain forgot. fuck. what i get for doing this at the last minute >:[

I would really love to see the compiled ILXor-specific results of this particular poll, if anyone has scads of free time and the hyperanal determination to see it through.

I don't think I'd ever give anybody the business over a tendency towards listening to more music from a particular gender or race than another (although a Skr3wdr1ver album in their collection would certainly be cause for alarm). I probably tend to listen to a fair number of female-oriented artists because I'm not a very dude-y brah, but I'm sure a lot of guys are probably much more drawn to testosterock. I don't tend to listen to much current r&b or hip hop, but (as hinted at above) old school r&b is very nearly my personal popular music high-water mark. At any rate, I'm not sure that a whole lot can be legitimately discerned about gender/racial bias based on the 50-100 albums that someone cherrypicked from a 15-year span of time.

It's an impossible percentage to even calculate because (this comes up every time) how do you even define "female artist" - like, can you count a sole female singer fronting an otherwise all male band? What about duos of one female/one male songwriter (an arrangement which makes up a great deal of my list.) What about artists that are two blokes, but routinely use a shifting series of female singers?

Yeah I had this problem - I'm on about 20% but quite a few of those are bands featuring a combination of male and female voices (e.g. Low, New Pornographers) or female vocalists collaborating with male producers (Aaliyah, Electrik Red).

Never mind the fact that there are very few legitimately solo albums and therefore very few albums sans artistic collaborators. And artistic collaborators tend at least half of the time to be male. I can't even imagine what might count as a legitimately female-only album on my ballot.

More female producers and session musicians now!

Considering this is a "people's poll" and not an official critic's end-of-year/end-of-decade round-up, I don't think you should feel pressured toward gender- or genre-neutrality.

I mean I have a "where's the rap? where are the girls? where are the gays?" stump but if I were participating in this thing there wouldn't be any rap between 2001 and 2010 because I didn't listen to rap during those years.

I dunno. On the contrary, I think that those cherry-picking and self selecting exercises are exactly where people's subconscious biases pop up the most.

Like, no one at all should feel pressured to represent themselves as listening to music that they don't. That's absurd. But recognising that those biases are there, and that they do influence what we expose ourselves to and what we value - I think that's important.

But anyway, the point was mostly that, for me, if someone has an exclusively 90% male list, our tastes are unlikely to overlap and that's not someone whose choices or recommendations I'm likely to pay attention to. That's not a value judgement on a person or on a person's taste, it's just whether their guidance is likely to be useful to me or helpful to me or not.

I'm bemused and impressed at the popularity of this thing, I have such trouble making even an end-of-year list and I can't imagine how an individual can look back on fifteen years of music and say "this is #1". Some pretty cool lists, though.

I love maura's list, it's so fun it could double as a personals ad

ILX0rs love making lists. Don't get why that's such a mystery!

I can never do an end of year list - the only one I did last year was kind of a joke to knock a point home. But it is fun to read and criticise them.

I do them half-heartedly, I usually just name all my friends' bands so I don't get any angry e-mails when any of them read it. (Half-hearted only toward list-making, it's not that I only half-heartedly like their records).

I put two of yr albums in my top 50 iirc!

I appreciate your sentiment but I don't care. Not a dis to you! I don't like lists or rating systems.

I can't help but feel skeptical about these canon lists, firstly b/c the part of my brain that listens to rap isn't the same part of my brain that listens to Supersilent, secondly b/c the results suggest that a zeitgeist-harnessing record like "Funeral" is somehow more valuable than another local record I love so much more (Hank's "How to prosper in the coming bad years" for example), thirdly b/c all it really ends up being is a contest between "Ok Computer" and "Kid A" and fuck it I haven't listened to either record in over ten years.

Anyway I'm just hungover and grumpy and I am loving reading these lists, it's cool to see Fonal getting such love from ILXors

Nah, I get it. I mean, it's fun putting together these lists, but only because I try not to get too worked up over the likelihood that I'm one of maybe three people who would think to vote for Zero 7's Yeah Ghost in a ballot like this.

Canon lists really aren't helpful on an aggregated level, they really aren't.

But individual lists can be helpful for the reasons I stated above - that they reveal a person's tastes and foibles and whatnot. Not (as people have often interpreted me as doing) to judge them and go "YOU ARE A HORRIBLE PERSON FOR NOT LIKING ANY WOMEN" (though that is problematic on a cultural level, which is another story which we have discussed too many times already) but more just to figure out whose tastes are aligned to mine, in terms of who to trust when they make recommendations. Given how much my personal taste is "wow, I just really like the sound of female vocalists" then for me, finding someone who also appreciates that in music, too, that's a plus for me. Or wubby synths. Or tremoloed guitars. Or hopefully all three together.

Like, in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't really matter if a person picks OK Computer or Kid A. But that weirdo who goes "you know what? I like Amnesiac (or Hail To The Thief) better!" is the kinda person I want to talk to.

I wasn't even trying to make a list of "these are the best records ever" I was trying to make a list of "if someone wanted a representation of What I Like in music, well, here it is."

I mean, aggregated lists can show you the bias of a culture.

But mostly it's like, if I look at a list - like Tom E's or DJP's or Melissa's - and I know that I like at least half of what they have up there. It makes me curious to check out the other half of what they have listed to see if it's also something I'd like.

Yeah, I was super interested in looking at ILXors lists-- I love that you got Electrik Red and "W" on yours, WCC, those are awesome underrated records-- but then I looked at some P4K staffers lists and got poo-faced

i didn't know this had a deadline, i was going to start mine today

oh wellll

damn, was excited to see your list when i saw that you posted on the thread

tbh, someone probably should've started a thread for this before yesterday.

Yeah, by the time my brother posted his list on Facebook, I figured the news had already come and gone on ILM.

there was talk on the PF thread about it before this thread

Here's mine:
http://peopleslist.pitchfork.com/list/5e340118/

I didn't get a chance to rearrange order and add more albums because the applet kept crashing when I was voting but the top 10 is pretty much in order.

I picked albums from their recommended top lists to increase the chances of getting them in the final countdown.

See, the point of these lists to me is (for example) noticing that this Paavoharju band that you've never heard of is popping up on every other ballot and subsequently listening to their songs on YouTube and realizing that you've found something new and awesome that's very firmly up your alley.

imo the most intriguing&useful lists aren't the ones which chime w/ a significant portion of my current tastes

without that much thought. order is kinda irrelevant : http://peopleslist.pitchfork.com/list/f2a3948c/

^^ obv there are many things that have been forgotten, but these should've definitely been included :

gas - pop
mouse on mars - autoditacker / niun niggung
brandy - full moon
tlc - fanmail
stereolab - dots & loops
boredoms - rebore vol. 0
gang gang dance - god's money
kevin drumm - sheer hellish miasma
annie - anniemal
jim o' rourke - bad timing / insignificance
dialing in - ketalysergichmeta mother

and am i the only one who has a tendency to think about albums post-00 way more easily than the ones from the 90's? like if it's a best of the decade/noughties kinda list?

also, hole - celebrity skin

(how could i forget that?)

I did too. And Madvillain.

I hope that when Pitchfork anounces the results, they also post an additional list of top 50 or 100 albums not in their database. I'd actually be most curious about the results of that.

Thought I had more time for this too--thought I'd voted for Aquemini but it's not there, and there's lots I'd delete, ah well.

lol, i put the death album in there w the wrong title. it's for the whole world to see, not for all the world to see. but it should have been in the database, dammit. they reviewed it and everything.

70.

Forgot the last Broadcast album, agh, fuck me, just fuck me.

I will be totally ready for a singles list, should they ever do one.

Oh god didn't realise TLC - Fanmail was in the right time period.

well, last night's deadline hit me in the head before i could rearrange shit and add/delete more stuff so this pretty much looks like a work in progress

but anyway http://peopleslist.pitchfork.com/list/71a7ac6b/

2 that i def forgot that are prob top-30 ish for me are

rachel stevens - come and get it
magik markers - boss

I will be totally ready for a singles list, should they ever do one.
--Michael Daddino

you can just post your singles list, you don't have to wait for them, you know

lol can you imagine if they did a singles poll like this, the only songs pre-loaded as options would be songs covered in 'we are the world' and 'the forkcast'

magik markers - boss

― johnny crunch, Saturday, August 18, 2012 6:26 PM (2 hours ago)

goddammit, i forgot that one too >:[

I started writing this in the box here but it started getting long so I figured I'd put it on my blog, but here are some thoughts on whether to not my list makes me a racist, sexist scumbag - http://sickmouthy.com/2012/08/19/am-i-a-racist-sexist-scumbag-when-it-comes-to-being-a-music-fan/

That is the most unhelpful, reductive way of putting that you possibly could have found.

This is what is so frustrating about this conversations. That you can try to have these nuanced conversations about personal taste and unconscious bias - and all you hear of that conversation is "someone's calling me a racist, sexist scumbag" ? When that was the thinking that was never said, and I went to great pains to say that was NOT what I was saying?

But that's how you frame it? Really?

I thought the post was pretty nuanced and interesting tbh, especially in the context of unconscious biases.