Do we have a PAZZ AND JOB 2009 thread yet?

The poll and comments are boring (Maura's excepted), the way people are down on r & b and think a bad year is sign of a greater trend. TOO NEGATIVE and why would you want all that negativity when you are buying music. Also I personally was underwhelmed by a lot of artists at the tops of these polls.

Seems to me a lot of people are still having trouble wrt internet and music. I don't see why the internet is such an obstacle for some people, back in the old days, most people relied on RADIO to get their music, conceptually the internet isn't much different, it's just that the variety is much greater.

I consume music on the internet in much the same way I consumed it when I was a kid: flipping the dials, if I am sick of one style, I go to another one. This poll seems so press-oriented and out of touch with how most people get their music these days.

Also, I like unperson's all-Latin ballot, this is the future in the USA, better get used to it.

mike powell's anco essay is typically well-written but (and i'm sure he realizes this) functions just as well as an argument against them as it does an argument for them.

I think what finally made "New York State of Mind" finally click with me was hearing it in a bunch of different settings, it just sounded huge and anthemic - a quality that seems to have been missing from hip-hop for a while now (cue the autogoon crew popping up with dozens of refs to "anthemic" Gucci mixtape moments). I liked how bold and brash it sounded, that's all. Wasn't my single of the year, in fact it wasn't even top five. It just had a quality that a lot of other rap singles have been missing. I mean, all you guys complaining about swag, this isn't Jay's young man swag, this is "fuck you, I run this city" swag.

i have a lot of mixed feelings abt this whole thing; i get why everyone is disappointed in the consensus this year but i really liked several records that made up that consensus and some of them placed high on my own list. part of me thinks it was a uniquely good year for mass-appeal pop/indie and we have to wait for next year to determine if there's any kind of trend.

It's not overstated at all, because it's never happened before, not even close. (But yeah, as I said in my essay, the list gets somewhat less Pitchforky -- and slightly less indie -- past the Top 10. But I doubt the Top 40 has ever been near this indiecentric before, either.)

I guess what I'm really saying is that I'm not convinced it *means* anything in the long run, I think it's a fluke. There were a handful of indie records that got an insane amount of hype but otherwise (i.e. if you showed me the entire list but removed #1-10) then it doesn't look too different from other years, complete with an inexplicably high showing for U2.

mike powell's anco essay is typically well-written but (and i'm sure he realizes this) functions just as well as an argument against them as it does an argument for them.

Yeah, that's what I loved about it!

There were a handful of indie records that got an insane amount of hype

There also wasn't a lot of hype for any non-indie rock from old touchstones - Dylan and Springsteen's were pretty much non-starters once the albums were actually out.

See, thats kind of what I was wondering. Would people have been more satisfied with the list if perennial faves like Dylan and The Boss had made the top ten? I think that would have disappointed me in a different way.

Empire State of Mind is awful, the chorus feels like it comes straight out of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical about hip-hop.

any year, you can always say "gee, i wish people checked out this obscure stuff only i liked," but its not like that usually makes the top 10. but as much as I find most of the indie stuff negligible personally, i'd still take people ganging up over it instead of 21st century breakdown or whatever.

an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical about hip-hop

Now I understand why I love the song.

it's not a fluke if things have been headed in this direction for the last several years of the poll (xpost)

i think the main reason its not an "interesting list" is that there's 700 critics voting in it--of course it's gonna be a bunch of consensus choices. The VV Film Poll is super-interesting--and prolly my fave critic poll anywhere--because they cap it at 94 ppl.

One of my rants to Flavorpill re: critics in 2009 is especially apt: There's so many records coming down the pipeline, and they are all so easy to hear that critics mostly have to heed advice of other critics just to decide what to even LISTEN TO. It's not like the 70s where there was 600 records that come out and you can hear all of them. Everyone has LIMITLESS access to EVERY record released, and "records" are easier than ever to release. The only way to decide what to even spin is to listen to other ppl doing the same thing.

that's not really true, it's possible to listen to a ton of music and still be on your own path and not really care about what other critics are recommending

mike powell's anco essay is typically well-written but (and i'm sure he realizes this) functions just as well as an argument against them as it does an argument for them.

well, it makes me not want to see where the wild things are, at any rate. otherwise the constant "white guys in their 30s"..."adults pretending to be kids"...refrain just made me think, oh fuck the fuck OFF you tiresome dudes and your tiresome mid-privileged-life crises, just fuck OFF, these things are not interesting or worthwhile.

it's also possible to cover a micro-beat, a very specific genre where you hear everything that comes out and then you can tell everyone else what the stand-outs that year in that genre are

it seems like one could strike a balance between listening to your fellow critics and then checking out other, less well-known stuff in whatever genre's one's interested in

Would people have been more satisfied with the list if perennial faves like Dylan and The Boss had made the top ten? I think that would have disappointed me in a different way.

I don't know about "more satisfied", but the narrative definitely shifts if you make just one or two (hypothetical) changes. If you bump Bob Dylan off the list in '06 (remove him completely and bump everyone else up one spot) then it's an indie-centric top 15 without the "indie was big this year but in the end, the old guard won out" storyline.

that the-dream essay is really not v. good at all

one thing that struck me about the trax ballot particularly - it only took SEVEN mentions for a track to place in the top 100?? is that unusually low? because it seems so.

yay lex we agree on a thing (re: midlife crises etc.)!

:D

it seems like one could strike a balance between listening to your fellow critics and then checking out other, less well-known stuff in whatever genre's one's interested in

It's possible people aren't - I'm not looking at full ballots of pitchfork types or anything to see what they put between grizzly bear and the xx - but there's no way we'd see that just by looking at the top 40 of pazz'n'jop, where the consensus choices are what would be apparent.

I really miss the separate reissue category. Wish they'd bring it back.

if all critics are just going to vote for the same records that P4k bumps, it seems like what we really need is fewer critics. or at least fewer indie rock critics, because at this point we can pretty much glean everything about a wide swath of critics' tastes just by visiting one website. still, i'd be more interested in reading more ballots from genre specialists. the most interesting ballots were the most idiosyncratic ones.

to be fair (if that's the word) to animal collective, their potsy-dotsy childhood-wonder thing has been part of their dna forever. it's not a midlife crisis, it's just plain old arrested development.

as a lolindie sidenote, it also seems strange that Animal Collective didn't break with Strawberry Jam, which production and songwriting-wise is much more immediate than Merriweather. it was probably a bootstrap thing whereby SJ got them a much bigger audience from 2007-2008, and then when Merriweather leaked there was a huge group of people waiting to hear from it, and the hype machine pushed it to even more people from there.

pazz'n'jop always tends to reward cult lifers a little after their peak

so who's this year's John Hiatt?

kshighway otm

We prolly need more actual "critics" and less "internet people" on this list. I think when the poll opened itself up from just a handful of bloggers to TONS of bloggers, it just started reflecting hype machine--which basically is a pazz and jop-style blogger poll that runs all year.

But then again RSS-ville is maybe better than when P&J reflected the Springsteeny tastes of a bunch of 40+ alt-weekly editors?

that's not really true, it's possible to listen to a ton of music and still be on your own path and not really care about what other critics are recommending

Sure, it's possible. But I think it's far easier to pay attention to your peers. I don't vote in P&J anymore, but I know that a lot of the stuff that I choose to buy or download is a direct result of recommendations from ILXors or ex-Stylusers. I pay attention to those albums in part because I trust the people recommending them, but also because I want to participate in the discourse around the album. Which only leaves a handful of albums each year that exist outside the critical vacuum.

Btw, I wrote about this issue at length in Stylus a couple years ago:
http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/soulseeking/life-inside-the-hivemind.htm

i think the main reason its not an "interesting list" is that there's 700 critics voting in it--of course it's gonna be a bunch of consensus choices. The VV Film Poll is super-interesting--and prolly my fave critic poll anywhere--because they cap it at 94 ppl.

One of my rants to Flavorpill re: critics in 2009 is especially apt: There's so many records coming down the pipeline, and they are all so easy to hear that critics mostly have to heed advice of other critics just to decide what to even LISTEN TO. It's not like the 70s where there was 600 records that come out and you can hear all of them. Everyone has LIMITLESS access to EVERY record released, and "records" are easier than ever to release. The only way to decide what to even spin is to listen to other ppl doing the same thing.

― forksclovetoFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU- (Whiney G. Weingarten), Wednesday, January 20, 2010 3:00 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

The number of critics is not the problem. Would you complain if next year a number of additional folks who write about non-indie for websites, magazines, or newspapers decided to submit their names to Harvilla and vote. Regarding your other point, everyone may have "limitless" access to tons of music, but part-time freelance writers with dayjobs and families and whatever else, all use their limited time they have available to keep up on music differently. Alas for some of us, most of the P & Jers use that time mainly for indie.

2002:

1. Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (Nonesuch) 2328 (201)
2. Beck: Sea Change (DGC) 1506 (139)
3. The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (Warner Bros.) 1227 (111)
4. The Streets: Original Pirate Material (Locked On/Vice) 1189 (101)
5. Sleater-Kinney: One Beat (Kill Rock Stars) 1126 (100)
6. Bruce Springsteen: The Rising (Columbia) 1108 (96)
7. The Roots: Phrenology (MCA) 1092 (109)
8. Eminem: The Eminem Show (Aftermath/Interscope) 1012 (93)
9. Coldplay: A Rush of Blood to the Head (Capitol) 964 (88)
10. Missy Elliott: Under Construction (Elektra)

i get a ton of recommendations from ilx - and my like-minded peers here remain probably the most reliably excellent recommenders i know - but i'd feel seriously claustrophobic if it was my only source - i pay just as much heed to UK critics, IRL friends, my own forays into random stuff and so on

actually, v pertinent and interesting is this kogan post-ballot post on where we first heard/heard about the albums/trax on our ballots (mine are in the comments) - http://koganbot.livejournal.com/199238.html

Would you complain if next year a number of additional folks who write about non-indie for websites, magazines, or newspapers decided to submit their names to Harvilla and vote.

this is such a weak argument because PLENTY OF people who "write about non-indie" usually end up voting for a few token indie records too--just like many indie critics end up voting for Raekwon or whatever

geez i don't care for anything in that 2002 top 10

It was the last list to inspire so much....dissent.

i mean, i don't know what ppl expected. the pazz list is exactly what critics polls on every site and mag have been leading up to all year except throw Neko Case in the middle of a GAPDY top 6 because a lot of P&J voters are older,

But then again RSS-ville is maybe better than when P&J reflected the Springsteeny tastes of a bunch of 40+ alt-weekly editors?

in both cases the tastes of one very specific demographic are being over-represented and passed off as the "critical consensus," where there really is no single monolithic critical consensus anymore. either the editors should rebrand this as an indie rock poll, or it should be reconfigured so that there are separate genre polls.

as it is, i don't think P&J is an exercise worth doing anymore. as Whiney said, Hype Machine tells people what the indie blogosphere thinks is hot all year round. we know a lot of indie rock critics and bloggers liked Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear, and making that semi-definitive by polling them is a worthless exercise.

I love the Neko Case placement, btw. I think the album definitely deserves it.

This poll seems so press-oriented

Well, that tends to happen when it's a poll of writers.

the main reason its not an "interesting list" is that there's 700 critics voting in it--of course it's gonna be a bunch of consensus choices

But 700 P&J voters is nothing new. And the list is way less interesting than it used to be. (If not the album list, then definitely the singles list. But as I say in my essay, it's not just Springsteen and Dylan who fell short this year. As for whether this is a long-term sea change or a one-year blip, only time will tell. For the people who think the latter, I'd be curious why they think that; are they suggesting that Pitchfork's influence will diminish in the near future? And if so, why?)

One guy commenting on Voice website did find an error in my essay, though; I kind of love this:

Rob Tomshany on Wed Jan 20, 2010, 07:18:26, says:
As a longtime Pazz & Jop watcher I mostly liked your essay, but found one slight error; Los Lobos's cover of "La Bamba" was the title song from the movie of the same name, and did not appear on their top 10 Pazz & Jop album By the Light of the Moon which came out in the same year. That makes only six top 10 P&J singles from top 10 P&J albums in 1987, so this year's seven is a record. (1987 still came close, though; R.E.M.'s "It's the End of the World as We Know It"--from Document, same as "The One I Love"--missed tying for 10th by a single point.)

We prolly need more actual "critics" and less "internet people" on this list.

But, conversely, putting more interesting internet people on the list would probably get more votes to more idiosyncratic albums; by all rights they should take me off of the list, what with not reviewing anywhere for forever, but then that Crazy Cousinz comp would lose its vote :(.

Also tough to draw the line with internet people -- most of the "most central" voters are, I imagine, legit reviewers for alt-weeklies, online sites like Pitchfork or PopMatters or [insert indie site I don't happen to read]. I think everyone who writes at the Singles Jukebox should be eligible to vote in P&J -- not sure what the stance on UK/non-US people is these days -- but under stricter guidelines some of the more interesting writers there might not make the cut. Part of what makes them valuable contributors is not being sucked into to some of the more deadening cycles of music/internet chatter.

yeah, ksh kind of otm. i don't think it's "not worth doing," i just think it has to be like the film poll and work with a higher standard for what it considers a critic if we want interesting results

at this point i'm not even sure what "interesting results" would look like

I wonder if the poll spotlighting interesting ballots, like the all-Latin one, might not help this issue. Not only would it add some variety to the same top 10, but it would encourage other micro-beat following critics to submit more obscure lists for next year -- which would in hand start to reshape the general albums list.

i do wish more UK writers took part - i actually can't think of a single british critic who submits ballots who hasn't been ilx-affiliated, which obviously skews towards "internet people" again - afaik not a single one of my own guardian colleagues sent in a ballot

xpAlso, P&J never really "reflected the Springsteeny tastes of a bunch of 40+ alt-weekly editors," I don't think. The Kevin McFrenches I talked about in my essay were one demographic of critics out of several -- a real easy one to make fun of, even back then. They never dominated the top of the poll as fully as indie voters this year. And their lame singles votes never had much effect on the overall results.

I think that's because British writers who aren't "internet people" have no idea what Pazz and Jop is. (xpost)

well yes, precisely! but it seems so random and illogical that some british writers contribute to it and others have no idea

I want people who do not participate in the previously published critics polls to write. I want the Latin Beat magazine poll participants to vote (even if Rudi thinks they're too NYcentric and vote for too much Latin jazz and not enough salsa); I want Southern soul (Ecko/Malaco type stuff) bloggers to vote; I want California and Texas banda and mariachi fans to vote; I want NY based Haitian compas types to vote; I wanted the contributors to the now in 2010 defunct Los Angeles based Beat magazine(African, Caribbean music mainly) to vote; I want more rap and r'n'b and dahnce and reggae and soca folks to vote.