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

Oh yes:

Voice is as hard to come by in music as it is in writing, and though Dr Dog sound a little like the Band singing the Beatles, they manage to wear their influences with distinction. Actually, that’s not right: they don’t just put them on like that. They unravel them and, like, knit something new with the threads. And anyway, it’s not as if the Band and the Beatles are easy to rip off. This is is one of the loveliest new songs of the year.

They sound like cool guys: In addition, each band member has a nickname, and they have explained that friends of the band also receive nicknames, which are drawn from aspects of their lives and personalities (Former member Andrew "Trial" Jones, for example, is a licensed attorney).

also another pedantic point on this matter, PF could've put all the albums from their decade lists in there too -- i had to write in Smart Went Crazy's Con Art even though there was a review of it when it was new (which was then deleted i guess because it was much shorter than their reviews became later, but wasn't embarrassing like the Pavement one or anything), and it was on their first '90s albums list in '99.

what does one have to know about rashaan patterson in order to write meaningfully about frank ocean?

that he's gay, presumably

I understand being mad at this list because it omits non-white/non-indie music, but even as a list of white indie rock it is hugely boring.

I still think that they could've rigged it so that the first time someone wrote in an album, it would subsequently appear in the database for others to find. The main problem with that, I guess, is typos and misspellings. But I'm curious how that was dealt with for write-in ballots in general. Was there some sort of normalizing system to ensure that votes for "Brihgten the Corners" were counted alongside "Brighten the Corners"?

I would assume they did as little work as possible on that kind of thing; if you don't expect write-ins to place, why bother coding some complicated spelling corrector?

follow-up to the post that alfred posted. from facebook. in response to matos:

‎MM - some of my students may be the perfect Pitchfork demo, indeed. But its reach and scope go far, far beyond hipster Brooklyn. It's easy to recycle a world-weary response to anti-democratic + exclusionary practices ("peo
ple are still talking about sexism?" "of course the tea party is racist" duh etc) but activist work - and we all have to be activists because this is our shared culture - requires a continually renewed sense of purpose in the face of threat. As long as the threat exists, the need to respond exists. Beyond just being a benign bad idea, the malignant threat here is that through devices like its People's List, Pitchfork wants to reproduce an imaginary and elitist world in which indie rock exists in a vacuum and women, blacks, Latinos, gays, etc. - who have just as much or more at stake in the rock game as everyone else- are expected move to the back of the bus if they are deemed to exist at all. And that is something that every journalist, no matter what your particular bag is, should get riled up about. Haven't read XXL in quite some time, but to my knowledge it's very specifically a hip-hop magazine and they don't purport to be the People's anything nor are they billing themselves as anything so wide-ranging as an essential guide to independent music. Independent music is a much bigger ocean with more diverse species in it than the fishbowl Pitchfork is presenting.

posting that cuz the post that alfred put on here and the follow-up at least thoughtful and honest responses and not just pitchfork is lame where is the pop and rap and blah blah same old.

Here's a question: how do Radiohead NOT project "queerness" in its broadest definition -- creating a space, however insular, in which private longings, lost battles, and retreat are as iconoclastic?

My view is that Radiohead aren't particularly adept at articulating these things but I've heard some iteration of what I wrote above from lots of people over the years, especially if you were young and dumb in the late nineties.

Aren't those standard indie tropes? Or at least one confessional variety of indie.

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"

werent you kinda surprised not to see like 'life after death'?

Aren't those standard indie tropes? Or at least one confessional variety of indie.

Sure, and I know for a fact that the site's editors and writers will say, "Of COURSE Spoon, The National, Kanye, and Radiohead absorb these outsider tropes" and to some extent they're write.
b
The hate for Pitchfork from the old timers stems in large part from the conviction that Pitchfork validates only one approach to outsider tropes without considering how (to pick random examples) Brad Paisley or Adele might too.

uh they're RIGHT

nah, skews too old for pfork's core crowd, i think

xp to lamp

"Some p4k hack decreed that the people had lost the website's confidence and could only regain it with redoubled effort. If that is the case, would it not be be simpler, If the website simply dissolved the people And elected another?" - Bertolt Brecht

i think knowing what we know about the demographics yeah the '90s in general kinda got the short end of the stick, but that couldn't necessarily be assumed going in. Life After Death was a diamond-selling album that pretty much anyone over the age of 25 either heard or can remember its impact, its singles, etc. (xpost)

yeah but i'm in no way shocked that it got outranked by 6 jay-z/kanye albums, three outkast albums, ghostface, drake & the streets

oh and the clipse

i have been polling my students on the first day of class about their favorite records for more than ten years. there have always been votes for biggie!

but lots more kanye recently.

yeah kanye worked on literally half the rap albums on this thing didn't he? (xpost)

biggie turning over in his grave at p4k snub

biggie hologram mad as fuk

wonder if biggie knows what pitchfork is

i think the guy that said "when I die, fuck it I wanna go to hell" knows about pitchforks, yeah

i think knowing what we know about the demographics

yeah 'life after death' feels like the sort of iconic rap album that even people a few years younger than me latch on to but i may be totally overestimating my own anecdotal xps here

but like i had no idea more than 10 people in the world liked the arctic monkeys so

I still think that they could've rigged it so that the first time someone wrote in an album, it would subsequently appear in the database for others to find. The main problem with that, I guess, is typos and misspellings. But I'm curious how that was dealt with for write-in ballots in general. Was there some sort of normalizing system to ensure that votes for "Brihgten the Corners" were counted alongside "Brighten the Corners"?

I was concerned about that issue re: Dopesmoker/Jerusalem. In retrospect lol @ myself.

I can't believe my #1 vote for The Glands wasn't enough to get it on the list. This is an outrage.

if i were p4rk, i'd have tried hard to partner with allmusic on this, so that if respondents couldn't find the album they wanted in p4rk's db, they could link to allmusic and search there, then port the artist, album title and art back in for use by other respondents. would ensure write-in consistency and allow p4rk's db to grow as the poll went on.

can't imagine why allmusic wouldn't want to partner w p4rk on this, like for free, so long as they didn't have to do any work themselves. would be hugely beneficial for their brand. then again, i don't get most things. maybe the two sites see each other as "the competition".

you really couldn't imagine why?

again i think this entire discussion overlooks the fact that almost nothing would've changed had the database been expanded -- maybe 'reasonable doubt' would've hit number 186 or something

i can see Lauryn Hill doing pretty well if it wasn't a write-in

maybe. but people would've had to search for her name to find it. at that point, why not just add it in manually?

incidentally, the 4th biggest write-in album was some major label emo bands i've never heard of? weird

btw did anyone work out the highest-charting album that wasn't on the "best of" selection provided?

you really couldn't imagine why?

sincerely no. seems like it couldn't do anything but benefit allmusic. sharing artist & title info on a few thousand albums wouldn't undercut the value of their intellectual property, i don't think - especially not if they're getting hits out of it. i mean, p4rk could easily write code to strip that all info out if they really wanted to...

I'm sure someone already mentioned this, but, aside from, err, QOTSA, no metal on this list??1 #thefuck0)))

not even a token metal album? lol. Were any on the list to choose from?

shocked, i tell you, shocked

incidentally, the 4th biggest write-in album was some major label emo bands i've never heard of? weird

haha i cant believe youve never heard brand new!

as a branding exercise though it totally makes sense to only include the things that you have put your site stamp of approval on. pitchforkers are crafty dudes.

there have been a number of metal albums on the staff lists, so yeah there were plenty to choose from

i'm kinda surprised that mastodon didn't place... they probably would've had this poll been done 2 years ago

If P4k just wanted an album database w/out licensing issues they could have used Musicbrainz. But there's no evidence they had any interest in doing much to help writers-in.

Or Discogs, I guess (not sure how easy it is to get their data).

Thought a Boris album might at least make it

Did Big N Rich place?

haha i cant believe youve never heard brand new!

― Lamp, Wednesday, August 22, 2012 8:53 PM (6 minutes ago) Bookmark

i thought it was clear i don't know any emo bands unless they go platinum

yeah, that's kinda bugging me out