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

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/

Hi Craig, sorry I missed you last night

No prob, Owen (btw, I'm contemplating hitching a ride to Hamilton in a few weeks to watch you et tes mouches play--have had fun at Supercrawl before </thread derail>)

nice to see Tim Hecker on so many lists; i don't think he's discussed much on ilm.

Craig good on you for remembering "Music is rotted one note" that is a forgotten former love if I've ever seen one

I must admit, if I'd bothered to write in/add records not already in the P4K ballot system database my list would've looked pretty different (and would've taken hours longer to complete).

what surprised me about my list, timeline-wise, was 2003-'05 having a heavier presence than '00-'02, which was not the case when i did a '00s decade list a couple years ago.

1999 to 2002 pretty much killed everything else on mine, which i was not surprised about in the least.

http://i48.tinypic.com/30a8dmt.jpg
Wendy Van Camp | August 19, 2012 at 3:31 pm | Reply
If you want to try some interesting female singers, I can recommend “Indigo Girls” to you. Excellent vocals. I found your conjecture about if you are a racist or not to be interesting. Why think that about yourself? If you are white and male does society automatically feel there is something wrong with you and you MUST feel guilt about the race and gender to which you were born? Is that not also racism? Perhaps it is time that we all feel equally good about ourselves. Dr. King said it best: let the measure of a man’s character be how we judge, not the color of his skin.

Gotta love blog comments.

the scales have fallen from my eyes

so who is wendy van camp on ilx again?

i don't care if you're black, white, purple, indigo

I thought it was you.

if you sing about your penis or putting it in things, fuck you

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v681/blusapphire/Prince/Tongue-40.gif

I can recommend “Indigo Girls” to you. Excellent vocals.

otm

indigo girls laid the groundwork for dave fm

nice to see Tim Hecker on so many lists; i don't think he's discussed much on ilm.

Harmony In Ultraviolet was one of the last albums I cut from my ballot, unfortunately.

you know i think this whole thing was awesome b/c all weekend i've just been listening to records on my list and on your guys' lists and thinking "this album rules" to myself every few seconds

like any project that makes me feel compelled to listen to celebrity skin, beaucoup fish and folie a deux in a day is a totally worthwhile project

somehow i'd missed that you posted yours itt, awesome list

i need to scour this thread just for list links and paste them into a word file.

follow up to last post: i tried pasting a bunch of links into this thread but i got an error message.

I started to analyze the breakdown of my list but basically my tastes are not that exciting to women (only one girlfriend I've had in my lifetime has enjoyed Swans or minimalist drone) so it makes sense that the gender bias would skew heavily male (interestingly though the top ten contains around a third of the women in my list). Also, I hate hip hop & my desire to not muddy my poll w/ re-issues meant that I couldn't include any of the afrobeat / ethiopiques reissues or mississippi records / soul jazz compilations which would have hugely added to the racial diversity of my list.

So there you go. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

An interesting question though. Does anyone know what percentage of records made overall were by women? I fell like that base level would be an interesting figure to compare the percentages people feel guilty about.

basically my tastes are not that exciting to women (only one girlfriend I've had in my lifetime has enjoyed Swans or minimalist drone)

i am a woman and this is v. exciting to me.

I am woman
hear me drone

at this point in my life, the "music enjoyed by my girlfriends" list is probably a lot broader than "music enjoyed by me".

amount of women in your record collection seems very very tied to what types of music you prefer, since the participation of female musicians varies pretty hugely from one genre to another.

how much the musicians you listen to 'look like you' (racially, culturally, etc.) is a little more complicated. my listening habits might be "diverse" by some standard but it's all relative, i know i'm pretty incurious about music from outside America and especially non-English speaking countries.

my desire to not muddy my poll w/ re-issues meant that I couldn't include any of the afrobeat / ethiopiques reissues or mississippi records / soul jazz compilations

God yeah this would have made things even more difficult - I allowed myself compilations/retrospective releases but only if the material on them came inside the '96-'11 time frame. No shortage of great reissue labels these days.

I did my best to leave out reissues but had Calling out of Context on mine because I couldn't omit it and it was never previously released anyway, also African Scream Contest because well not sure.

It pained me to leave out Arthur Russell but if I'd started w. reissues I think at least 95% of my list would have been recorded pre: 1985 which would have defeated the point no matter how accurate an insight into my actual listening habits it would have been.

they should've let us know ahead of time, if you want to be more anonymous you should sign in through twitter