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

btw whiney's protest of this thing is especially amusing since his mag just published a great big feature about the history of converse being worn by musicians

Mirror Traffic only getting 95% would suggest at least one person who preferred "R&B" or "Americana" as a genre to "rock" voted for it)

You can't imagine that someone who prefers "Americana" to "rock" might still drop a Stephen Malkmus solo joint in the back half of his ballot?

just keep seeing this on facebook with people lamenting what pitchfork people don't listen to.

The thing that keeps being overlooked wrt that particular argument is this: I picked 100 favorite albums released between '96 and '11 straight out of Pitchfork's database (which is clearly pretty limited in a lot of ways), and, if even a portion of the tens of thousands of people who participated have anything in common with me, their selections in this poll are (as a result) a super-narrow and in no way accurate picture of their musical tastes or interests. Their ballot might conceivably reveal something about them, but as anything resembling anthropological/sociological data, the results are compromised to the point of being pretty much worthless (i.e. they were engineered to look like the results of a Pitchfork reader's poll).

You can't imagine that someone who prefers "Americana" to "rock" might still drop a Stephen Malkmus solo joint in the back half of his ballot?

Well, if it's the album that came CLOSEST to being purely "loved by Rock enthusiasts"

what do all these poll-voters think when they read all the stuff that pitchfork covers? lately i've been surprised by how many metal reviews they've been running, for pitchfork. do those voters just like click past those, or are they reading them and listening to a bit of metal but not promoting it to all-time-list levels when they vote?

i've been wondering about something some dude said too

tbf 2010 is tied for the year w/ the highest number of albums in the list (xpost)

― some dude, Wednesday, August 22, 2012 1:35 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

since i've gone to mostly computer-based listening i've noticed that i've lost a lot of track of what i've enjoyed listening to in the past several years. i might not have seen physical copies of some of my music in years. a lot of it is er purely non-physical. but because of space limitations i delete a lot pretty regularly as it ages and i find i hadn't listened much to it lately. all of which means it's just hard to really bring to mind a lot of the music from former years.

old lunch are you aware that you could add albums to your list that weren't in the database?

Yeah. I did one, then I got lazy. As I'm sure most people did.

i'd wager the opposte, actually

and in any event, i'm not sure what the end game is? pitchfork loads every album ever from 96-11 into the database?

I was under the impression you could only vote for stuff PFM reviewed, whether it was on their shortlist or not.

the database afaict was every album PF has reviewed + any album that made it onto a staff list -- that's a pretty decent starting point. from there, i don't think there's a point in adding more albums to the database because, again, where do you stop?

I was under the impression you could only vote for stuff PFM reviewed, whether it was on their shortlist or not.

― pun lovin criminal (polyphonic), Wednesday, August 22, 2012 6:35 PM (33 seconds ago) Bookmark

well most people probably read the intro, too

re the slate piece:

the online discussion spaces that i'm familiar with constantly remind me that most of the people who want to spend their free time obsessing over popular film and music - especially in a nerdy, would-be-expert "here's what i think is cool and here's why" sense - are male. this accords with my life experience, but i'm still taken aback by the the disparity online, where i would hope that such discussions would be a little more universally welcoming.

it may be that a lot of women just aren't interested. it may be that many women can't comfortably exist and speak their minds in a space that's also full of loudmouth men. some men talk too much (show of hands) and only pay attention to other men. some men are sexist pigs, actively hostile to women in "their space". these things are undeniably true, but even where they're not, the kind of hyperinvolved, list-making, expertise-flexing conversation i'm talking about seems to be primarily a guy thing online. not exclusively, mind, but primarily.

this situation is doubtless the product of many factors, chief among them cultural conditioning. i'm not suggesting that any group is more "naturally" inclined towards this kind of activity than any other. i do wonder, however, whether the disparity makes the sensibilities and tastes that emerge from certain online culture-sharing spaces seem more actively sexist than they really are. i mean, if online GOAT-list-making is much more interesting to men than to women, generally speaking, then it shouldn't come as any real surprise that so many online GOAT lists express a stereotypically "masculine" point of view, right?

we have to ask ourselves why such spaces and activities would be so much more attractive to men in the first place, and should probably take the aggregate opinions that emerge from them with a large grain of salt. that said, i'm hardly inclined to fault a list put together mostly by a group of indie guys for being overwhelmingly, well, indie-guyish. it seems to me that this sort of thing only becomes troublingly sexist when the taste of guys for "guy stuff" assumes an unquestioned centrality in the general discourse about what's culturally worthwhile without admitting how limited and demographically one-sided it really is, and without explicitly making room for other voices. that's a much bigger problem than the pitchfork reader's poll, though...

Their ballot might conceivably reveal something about them, but as anything resembling anthropological/sociological data, the results are compromised to the point of being pretty much worthless (i.e. they were engineered to look like the results of a Pitchfork reader's poll).

i really have no basis to comment on the likelihood of other voters being too lazy to add non-preloaded albums to their lists but i really, really dont think the results were 'engineered' to look the way they do, unless you consider 'statistics' to be engineering or s.thing

damn i really thought "old lunch" was bringing that rock solid logic to the arena

i mean there ARE more comprehensive databases out there like AMG's but who knows how much of a point of pride or expense it would've been to use their info (xpost)

So out of the female voters' top 20, only 25% of the groups have a female member I think. Am I counting that right? And 30% of the albums counting repeat artists. I have no idea what that means, if anything.

i mean like just at a really basic level these results have to be kinda depressing for p4ks editors/staff right?

Yeah, I was chatting about the list with a coworker earlier today, and he was disappointed/surprised that Ted Leo didn't show up. I forwarded him that USA Distribution Index, and he said "Yeah, I'm pretty sure that his style is extremely American. But, shit, he sings about Europe and socialism all the time!"

― squicky chutzpah in the drug biz (jaymc), Wednesday, August 22, 2012 5:14 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i dont know a lot of his stuff but i always thought the songs i heard sounded like (non-american band) thin lizzy

if the distinction index is literally "% of voters for album made up by subset" this would mean that literally no album had even half of its supporters from Metal enthusiasts, and that only albums in Rap and Electronic enjoyed enough strictly cult appreciation to get even 50% of its voters from primary enthusiasts for their genre. If this is true, it suggests that the voter base was OVERWHELMINGLY made up of "rock" fans with a dilettante's appreciation for other genres, and then calls into question why there were no 100% "only loved by rock fans" albums.

i feel like these results reinforce the canon PF has spent its lifespan asserting much more than it rebukes it or fails to live up to it

i mean there could've been some groundswell of PF readers saying "hey you guys don't cover the Deftones but fuck you they're the best!" or something but that just didn't happen

i mean there ARE more comprehensive databases out there like AMG's but who knows how much of a point of pride or expense it would've been to use their info (xpost)

― some dude, Wednesday, August 22, 2012 6:37 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

yeah. AMG is the obvious example, tho i have no idea if they're in the business of handing over that kind of data for free or what kind of price they would charge to do so

and anyway the idea that a wider database would've altered the results in any noticeable fashion is absurd

ha -- what are the odds of AMG switching to paid SoundScan data?

i mean there ARE more comprehensive databases out there like AMG's but who knows how much of a point of pride or expense it would've been to use their info (xpost)

They were obviously capable of counting the write-ins. They just didn't include them in the main list, right? Or else Pavement surely would have placed no? I don't know, I'm not into Pavement or 90% of the music on the list, but they seem to fit.

i mean like just at a really basic level these results have to be kinda depressing for p4ks editors/staff right?

― Lamp, Wednesday, August 22, 2012 10:38 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

why? it's a canon they consciously created.

i mean if they are depressed by it, wtf did they think would happen?

itt ppl who don't understand things talk about them

i mean like just at a really basic level these results have to be kinda depressing for p4ks editors/staff right?

only if you're unaware that lists aggregate data

I mean, placing a Radiohead album on your ballot means you've increased its chances of appearing in the final list even if you resent its being #1.

I grudgingly identified my preferred genre as "rock" just because it's the most amorphously defined.

They were obviously capable of counting the write-ins. They just didn't include them in the main list, right? Or else Pavement surely would have placed no? I don't know, I'm not into Pavement or 90% of the music on the list, but they seem to fit.

Well, they did come up with a list of highest-ranking write-ins, which was topped by Brighten the Corners. I don't know if they purposely didn't include the write-ins in the main list or whether their vote totals simply fell below 200th place.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at. The separate write-in list made me suspect that they just left them out of the running.

i don't think that's the case

oh c'mon Brighten The Corners just didn't place in the top 200

there's probably a correlation b/w no write-ins making the top 200 and the fact that you had to write them in, but not causation

it's not like there's some jaw dropping omission

they really easily could've sat down and figured out maybe 50 albums not in their database that were mostly likely to be voted for and added them, though. especially for that pitifully spare and narrow 96-99 set of recommendations.

Reasonable Doubt is maybe not jaw-dropping but pretty glaring imo

it's not like there's some jaw dropping omission

LOL

oh c'mon Brighten The Corners just didn't place in the top 200

ok, like I said, I don't know how they fit into the pitchfork canon. Pavement just seems like the kind of band that's beloved by the same people who like Neutral Milk Hotel or whoever.

they really easily could've sat down and figured out maybe 50 albums not in their database that were mostly likely to be voted for and added them, though. especially for that pitifully spare and narrow 96-99 set of recommendations.

― some dude, Wednesday, August 22, 2012 6:57 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

right. but then that opens the door for "why did you add this but not this, that, that one and the other one?" -- better just to not even start that conversation imo

Pavement's first 3 albums account for like 95% of their legacy

yeah - i mean i guess its possible that its easier for readers of a mainly indie site to reach a broader consensus on indie records than on rap or rnb or metal or dance records and that lots of individual ballots have all sorts of diverse selections even as homogeneous as the final results are...

why? it's a canon they consciously created.

i guess my impression was that the site has put a fair bit of effort in broadening its scope and its cannon and these results seem to suggest its mostly been in vain? like i guess im just stupid or w/e but i expected a couple of jay-z albums, 'life after death', at least one missy album maybe 'love vs. money' too all place higher than a mediocre jens lenkman album. im not sure the list would be all that much better if it had those records on it but itd be more in keeping w/ my idea of what p4k is 'about'

it's not like there's some jaw dropping omission

LOL

― lex pretend, Wednesday, August 22, 2012 6:58 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

oh stop it, lex. clearly i mean "there's no jaw dropping omission of a non-database album going by the type of album you would expect to place in this list"

going by the type of album you would expect to place in this list

well if we're going by what we expected, no, there's nothing amiss with this list at all!

Pavement's first 3 albums account for like 95% of their legacy

― some dude, Wednesday, August 22, 2012 6:59 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

or, as this poll indicates, 84%: Best Pavement/Malkmus album

right, that's my point.

xp

Pavement's first 3 albums account for like 95% of their legacy

ah, makes sense. I didn't think about them missing the date cutoff.