ILM's Top 77 Tracks of 2014

like I'm fairly confident that "a snapshot of what records ilx liked over the past year" is exactly what we got despite some people possibly changing a couple of places on their ballots

xp that too

jeez don't take away my special snowflake feeling it's one of the last things i am clinging to

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

^ this guy gets it

I discovered ILX through a past EOY poll in '06 or so, when a couple of downlist albums were ones I thought were unfairly ignored elsewhere.

User polls don't create a critical canon, they just provide a demographic portrait of a community at an instant. So I make no attempt to curate my year or much effort to expand my horizons, I just try to narrow down to from hundreds of tracks and 50 odd albums I've heard to the ones I think I'll want to hear again in a decade. Its the only fair way of representing myself in this demographic portrait.

Perhaps in a few years someone will Google and discover this is the community that loved Ninos du Brazil or Holly Herndon and join.

also "seasons" was huge all year, yes the letterman performance (first week of March) was a big part of it, but ppl forget that it was the first time anyone (indie fans or not, FI fans or people who'd never heard of them before) had ever heard the song (aside from maybe a handful of live performances at smallish venues in the preceding months). the single came out a week or two later and imo stands on its own merit

if you didn't care enough to read the afropop thread three days before voting, why start now just because you have a ballot to fill?

Why not? It's as good a motivating factor as any other to check out things that you might have missed out on otherwise. It's a lot of work to follow rolling threads on every genre that interests me (and even when I try to, e.g. with the metal and classical threads, I still miss out on things that I catch up on with EOY lists and poll nomination lists). These are a good way to look into some highlights and could inspire one to follow things more closely afterwards). It's not as if I didn't actually love the Noura Mint Seymali album just because I was introduced to it via the nominations playlist and not by following a rolling thread on every piece of music that wasn't sung in English all year.

2xpost

If people hear something through the noms or the actual poll roll-out and think "this is better than half my actual/existing ballot" why wouldn't they vote for it or wish they had?

It'd be nice to be on top of everything all year all the time but the truth is everyone relies on gatekeepers and the ILM poll process is no worse than many gatekeepers available.

noms are important to help u remember what songs u like

Tim F otm

Buncha special snowflakes, each and every one of you (DJP & Flopson excepted).

if you didn't care enough to read the afropop thread three days before voting, why start now just because you have a ballot to fill?

yeah this is "wizards only" rockism. you must forage your own nuts and berries, earn each ballot placement by hard months of deep scavenging. fuck that. sometimes i'll hear a track at the end of the year and fall in love. sometimes i hear those tracks only cuz someone else is listing their favorites. and sometimes the genre involved is one with which i'd rarely otherwise cross paths. like, if i were voting right now, i'd totally include ninos du brazil, kiesza and vic mensa on my ballot. all unknown to me a week ago. so what?

Don't really see much point in second-guessing or judging people's motivations for voting. Everyone has their own way of doing it - e.g. lex refuses to vote for an artist in both tracks and albums, some people will vote for songs that first came out before the year in question, some won't - and anyway making a list of your favourite music from a 12-month period is not among the most significant of human endeavours. For me the poll is a big crowdsourced recommendation engine with a bit of theatre attached, and what makes it fun is the pleasure in sharing and discovering awesome music, I have no interest in building canons.

From a practical perspective there has to be some master list to compare ballots against, otherwise tabulation would take a lot longer and I probably wouldn't want to do it. Where that list comes from is not so important - I could just download a big list of everything released in 2014 from musicbrainz or somewhere like that. But we have this debate every year and the system we have now works ok, I think.

But that's not your 2014. I like those songs too, and am glad to have discovered them now, but they have no bearing on what I listened to last year. They were someone else's music, which is fine. If I heard them in January before I voted I still wouldn't consider it part of my listening in 2014.

xpost

yeah maybe i listened to caribou all year and was sick of it by the time it was voting time so i put a few tracks i discovered in the noms and loved, who cares

yeah this is "wizards only" rockism. you must forage your own nuts and berries, earn each ballot placement by hard months of deep scavenging. fuck that. sometimes i'll hear a track at the end of the year and fall in love. sometimes i hear those tracks only cuz someone else is listing their favorites. and sometimes the genre involved is one with which i'd rarely otherwise cross paths. like, if i were voting right now, i'd totally include ninos du brazil, kiesza and vic mensa on my ballot. all unknown to me a week ago. so what?

― deliberately clunky, needlessly arty, (contenderizer), Saturday, January 24, 2015 9:34 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

god its like ur delib trying to read in the most nefarious implications into it. we're all music nerds here. we all forage and we all coast off each others scavenged nuts. i'm the fucking _king_ of downloading something just cause someone i like mentioned it on ilx. just, to me, the poll is about the music i liked that year & i don't think it's in the spirit to go last minute extra-curricular on it

btw i stayed up til 7 AM working on an assignment thursday nite cause i wasted the whole week i was supposed to be working on it reading this poll

http://images4.fanpop.com/image/photos/15300000/Dr-Nefarious-ratchet-and-clank-15310498-800-452.jpg

^ flopson

doing revision for a poll so you get the right answers has always seemed nuts to me but polling records is not exactly a serious business anyway so let the grade-grubbers roll imo, it's just a variation on talking about what you like vs talking about what is "important" hohoho

NV otm at the end of the day, I just find a lot of you people super irritating

oh god yes

some people will vote for songs that first came out before the year in question, some won't

confession: I voted for "Stoner" two years in a row ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

last year I was its only vote tho

ha nice

there's nothing wrong with being a little strategic in your voting, right? i mean, if my eoy ballot had to authentically reflect my actual year in listening, it'd be 3/4 metal and garage rock stuff that doesn't have a hope in hell of actually placing. DJP seemed to suggest that we should either stay tru or stay out. i'd rather split the difference: agitate & vote for the music i love best, sure, but also comb other people's favorites for awesome shit from outside my world of guitar people that i can genuinely get behind.

Like it's funny there's this undercurrent of how dare he be flamboyant as a performer because of how he looks

― Wu-Tang Clannad (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Sunday, January 25, 2015 1:28 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i'm goin' bald atm so his confidence & swag in that performance is actually inspiring to me

― flopson, Sunday, January 25, 2015 1:37 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this and this otm btw, it's not the sum total of their appeal but there is something David Thomas-ly no fucks given about FI that is def part of the goodness

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HemmX3IoHe8 xp

"Wizards only?"

just like a fuckin boss

strategy? agitation?? do the winners of this poll get to run music for the next year or something???

i genuinely cannot comprehend what kind of attitude to anything this is so i'm going to hush my big mouth now

yes. and you should listen to artificial brain.

xp

like, the kind of "agitation" i'm speaking of consists mostly of dumping youtubes in the noms thread

DJP just annoyed bc no one votes strategically for Lamb.

DJP i had alcest on my list but cut them at the last minute

jk no i didn't but i like that record ok

the kind of "agitation" i'm speaking of consists mostly of dumping youtubes in the noms thread

― deliberately clunky, needlessly arty, (contenderizer), Saturday, January 24, 2015 10:18 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think if the person "agitating" hustles hard enough it ceases to become a problem tbh. like i can't fault anyone for voting for songs from those sick-ass year end threads tim used to do where he posted luscious paragraphs about all the songs he had been hoarding from us all year, i probably voted for a few of them myself

did vahid go to stanf?

wrong thred

also "seasons" was huge all year, yes the letterman performance (first week of March) was a big part of it, but ppl forget that it was the first time anyone (indie fans or not, FI fans or people who'd never heard of them before) had ever heard the song (aside from maybe a handful of live performances at smallish venues in the preceding months). the single came out a week or two later and imo stands on its own merit

― gr8080, Saturday, January 24, 2015 9:15 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

not that it really matters, but this isn't true, the song and its official video were out in late January, over a month before the Letterman appearances.

it is pretty funny how many if not most of the acts that placed in this poll performed on Letterman but we're only making it some kind of weird stigma against the band who bodied it so hard that it inadvertently became a major piece of their career narrative.

bodied by an old dude in a letterman beef

Tbc, my earlier post was about voting for stuff that genuinely impressed me from the noms list, not for voting 'strategically'. I don't vote 'strategically' even for elections that actually matter.

(Scare quotes reflect the amount of actual strategy that is actually involved with most 'strategic' voting as it is usually practised imo.)

If you were less strategic about your voting, there's more of a chance of your guitar music appearing in the poll, which would be interesting to others.

eh, it's not a big deal. strategic as in not completely overcrowding ballot with brick-laden deathmetal, pushing up "no type" & dropping "no flex zone" for the half-lolzy sake of ~team loyalty~, that kind of thing.

tho i didn't vote at all this year, i generally do vote for a lot of guitar rock.

deliberately clunky, needlessly arty, (contenderizer)
Posted: January 24, 2015 at 9:12:47 PM
there's nothing wrong with being a little strategic in your voting, right? i mean, if my eoy ballot had to authentically reflect my actual year in listening, it'd be 3/4 metal and garage rock stuff that doesn't have a hope in hell of actually placing. DJP seemed to suggest that we should either stay tru or stay out. i'd rather split the difference: agitate & vote for the music i love best, sure, but also comb other people's favorites for awesome shit from outside my world of guitar people that i can genuinely get behind.

Ok, I'll bite. Why?

I mean that seriously - why ballot anything that isn't your actual favorite 25 songs? No one gives a shit about this poll outside of here. Why massage it at all?

why not? i love to hear new things. i get caught happily running circles in my well-trodden ruts and EOY summary time is a great opportunity to broaden my horizons.

special snowflake syndrome

I love hearing new things too! That's why the poll is interesting. Voting for stuff you hear in the nom stage so it places is the logical opposite of hearing new things!

i hope some of us are still alive on monday to see the albums rollout