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

xpost Yeah, photos, bios - do it! It's a great idea. Music IS subjective after all and trying to homogenise everything under a house style is as ridiculous as me expecting all my friends to be into exactly the same things.

I guess this boils down to whether one believes that music criticism ought to be can be objective or subjective though.

^^^^fixed your post

It's the photos/bios thing that bothers me. I would much rather have a list of what ratings they gave to recent albums. I just think that a photo/bio, rather than provide the person's context, will just provide a way for some readers to dismiss that person's opinions if they are not of the expected gender/race/etc.

x-posts

At the same time, my guess is that most readers just don't look at bylines, they see a review and go "Pitchfork said this" or "NME said that".

― Matt DC, Wednesday, 22 August 2012 11:05 (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It just seems so old fashioned to think this way in this day and age. Especially when writers move from publication to publication. I'd really like to see music writers given a chance to exorcise their individual eccentricities and values - to maybe have multiple reviewers talking about a release and seeing where their opinions agree or conflict - somewhere between Singles Jukebox and the usual review format, maybe?

It's not old-fashioned, that's how modern media brand-building works, for better or worse. The Economist doesn't have a single byline in it most of the time.

The exception being columnists obviously, but that's something of a special case.

in my experience having a "bio" on your publication serves no other purpose than that when people disagree with your reviews they can grab at whatever factoids are available about you to use as insults when they want to discredit your opinions (the best was when a guy from a band i panned laid into me using each of the 4 or 5 things i'd tweeted that day against me in random contextless ways). if a publication doesn't edit away your personality or writing style and puts your byline on what you write that's all they're really obligated to do. not going beyond that to a bunch of social media nonsense is not 'monolithic.'

xpost Music (other than music news) is opinion-based, and therefore it's pointless to shy away from making that explicit. Music reviews are not facts, and so a byline works as a caveat: "this is my opinion, your listening experience may vary"

The idea of a "house voice" or "house opinion" bugs me no end; it's dishonest and it's myth-making. So glad Stylus not only put all a writer's stuff together but also gave space for a photo and bio if you wanted to put one too.

― Sick Mouthy (Scik Mouthy), Wednesday, August 22,

Your house opinion isn't in what you say about records, its about what you decide to cover

i mean i'm guessing virtually every PF writer has an easily googleable blog or social media presence where you could really get to know them and their taste if you want to, which would not have been as true 5 or certainly 10 years ago, so i don't know why there's a demand for the publication to hold your hand through that anyway.

xpost

i was gonna say "i don't" but then i remembered 12 years of the ilx archives. u_u

Your house opinion isn't in what you say about records, its about what you decide to cover

― coal, Wednesday, 22 August 2012 11:20

That's true.

Only partly true.

"truthy"

(sorry, couldn't resist)

PF does manage house opinion to a great degree, possibly more than other publications -- like seemingly going to pains to assign reviews to people who don't go against the staff's emerging consensus, etc. that's probably a smart thing in terms of, like, not panning a record that's going to get voted as one of the year's best a few months later, but it definitely seems a little overmanaged in that sense.

One year at Stylus we didn't even review the album that ended up taking our end of year poll #1 spot.

It's that kind of shortsighted amateurism that made us great.

Ouch this skews male.

http://pitchfork.com/peopleslist/

Might've hoped for 20% female. But no. 12%.

oh thank god we don't have to talk about stylus anymore

Is that 12% the artists or the voters, though?

It looks like the voters to me. (And I chose not to disclose my gender, and I know many women who do the same on the internet.)

12% female voters, aye. I'm not sure how they've gathered that data, though - I connected via twitter, but Google+ and Facebook were options. I don't remember filling anything in, so I assume they've farmed the data straight out of the API for whichever platform you used to login.

I signed in through twitter (which doesn't collect that info) and they asked, but I was able to decline.

Not that the actual representation of women in their list is any better. It's actually worse than I expected. :-/

Should we have a separate thread for the countdown or is that futile?

It doesn't merit its own thread.

More or less exactly the top 20 I'd have predicted, although maybe not in that order.

I hope the ILM 80s rock poll isn't as predictable

Would be fun (ha) to start a poll thread to see how high the first album on their vote placed. (40 for me, and it was the one I was most ashamed of including, 51 for an unconditional vote.)

I wrote about this on my blog

http://www.ci.desoto.tx.us/index.aspx?NID=61

no write-in votes placed afaict

apparently people who like pop/hip hop the most still prefer radiohead over outkast.

top ten write-ins

PAVEMENT BRIGHTEN THE CORNERS
REFUSED THE SHAPE OF PUNK TO COME
LAURYN HILL THE MISEDUCATION OF LAURYN HILL
BRAND NEW THE DEVIL AND GOD ARE RAGING INSIDE ME
PULP THIS IS HARDCORE
QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE RATED R
DEFTONES WHITE PONY
JAY-Z REASONABLE DOUBT
BEASTIE BOYS HELLO NASTY
PAVEMENT TERROR TWILIGHT

There's not much to say about this list, is there? 10 of my picks were in the top 200, pretty much the ones I expected.

Their 'experimental' list is ridiculous

Boring list, but between this and that cat power article they've been slipping in some really good design on p4k..

The country distribution is weird. There are more artists from Oxford than the entire country of Ireland? Really?

(am trying not to bristle that Aphex Twin has clearly been called English.)

i'd characterise him as English

Hang on, how can the same artist/album be in both the "experimental" category and the "pop/r&b" category. How does that work, then?

I suppose there can be experimental R&B, but there is no universe in which Radiohead are R&B. (Tho I don't think there's much of an argument for anything in the "experimental" section actually being experimental, more like.)

Were Pavement too mainstream for p4k back in the 90s?

isn't that just what people who categorised themselves as 'pop/hip hop' or 'rnb' voted for. rather than the genre of the albums themselves. i may be misunderstanding tho'

xp

Oh wait, I have read that section completely wrong. Duh. Radiohead as "global" would have been pretty funny, though.

nah, the Brighten the Corners review was removed cos it was one of Ryan's more embarassing early efforts

haha, i guess i didn't read the big blurb next to the genre lists either oops

so people who are 'experimental' really rate Fennesz. Are they any good?

35ish of my top 100 are in their top 200.

Fennesz is one dude, and is very good, yes; blissed out digital decaying guitar noise with hidden melodies.

fuckin hell the 10-15 yr olds are mad for last years strokes album

thank you Scik Mouthy!

Looking at this list now... I mean, woah! It took a year to find out something that could have been estimated within about 5 minutes. I'm actually surprised at how unsurprising this is.

i think Fennesz became the go-to experimental guy for sites like Pitchfork a few years back because you could talk about the Beach Boys and stuff when writing about him. He is good though, yes

I still don't understand what 'global' is supposed to be

Still hate that Neutral Milk Hotel record.

I'm trying to work out what "Pop/R&B" means. (Apart from "will actually rate women.")