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

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.

I'm sorry WCC, framing it in those terms is a clumsy, pseudo-defensive shorthand on my part and is the result of a little socio-cultural guilt, an attempt to confront those terms head-on and thus make it NOT be about those issues as much as if they'd gone unwritten and ended up inferred, which I clearly failed at from your perspective, plus a bit of antagonistic top-and-tailing to try and drag people outside of this thread into the debate (which it's done elsewhere a bit already). Like it or not, those words get attention in the way that titling the post "a nuanced discussion of gender bias in my musical taste" just wouldn't have done. I have a natural inclination for Daily Mail-esque click bait SEO when it comes to my blog which can be counter productive. I hope the actual content of the post is a bit more thoughtful.

xpost; thank you.

I wonder how much class is an unspoken bias, too? Much harder to get a grip on than race or gender. I don't think there's much music in my selection that I'd codify (no that I quite know how I would do so) as "working class" or "upper class".

My female artists as a proportion of overall list is 23% (counting stuff like Hole and Gang Gang Dance). Not sure if that's low or high or what.

― Tim F, Saturday, August 18, 2012 4:30 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

that strikes me as low because you seem to heavily favor female artists (compared to someone like me, anyway, and i'm at 17%)

― some dude, Saturday, August 18, 2012 11:30 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Yeah I was kinda surprised myself. Chalk it up to the baleful influence of dance music and rap I guess (though I did vote for Foxy Brown and a ridiculous 3 Missy albums).

i only finally knuckled down and put one of these together because i felt a certain professional obligation (guess i've just lost the list-making jones), but in doing so i realized that the late 90s have become a giant blank spot in my memory. albums keep popping up on people's lists that are total how-could-i-forget-that head-slappers, and whole swathes of stuff that dominated the pop culture discussion in those years has just seemingly evaporated from my brain, whether i would have included it or not. on the other hand, i had to go over almost every professional top ten i've submitted in the last ten years to even remember some of my "favorite" albums from this decade, so maybe i've just developed early onset dementia.

I learned that I still listen to late nineties albums more than mid 2000's ones.

i only finally knuckled down and put one of these together because i felt a certain professional obligation (guess i've just lost the list-making jones), but in doing so i realized that the late 90s have become a giant blank spot in my memory. albums keep popping up on people's lists that are total how-could-i-forget-that head-slappers, and whole swathes of stuff that dominated the pop culture discussion in those years has just seemingly evaporated from my brain, whether i would have included it or not. on the other hand, i had to go over almost every professional top ten i've submitted in the last ten years to even remember some of my "favorite" albums from this decade, so maybe i've just developed early onset dementia.

― big-mammed punisher (strongo hulkington's ghost dad), Sunday, 19 August 2012 12:53 (28 minutes ago) Permalink

I'm similar. Maybe it's something to do with the period 98-00 not really being defined by a handy musical 'era' - i.e. I'm at pains to think of it the same way I do 94-96, which to me is epitomised by BRITPOP! TRIPHOP! DRUM'n'BASS! etc. etc. There were still plenty of decent albums going around in the late 90s, just no handy category to draw memory from, discounting things like garage which wasn't a big album genre anyway.

ugh, sorry, what a horribly formed 'post'

All caps when you spell the album's name (anyone else put Madvillainy at #1?):
https://peopleslist.pitchfork.com/list/cf710159/