Do we have a PAZZ AND JOB 2009 thread yet?

: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.

i guess what i'm trying to say is partially that, when you ask mostly white, middle class, college-educated males writing for indie rock blogs, indie rock websites, and alt-weeklies what they thought the best albums of the year were, they're probably going to get back to you with a lot of indie rock records. the few people polled who fall outside this demographic, unsurprisingly, tend to vote for different records, but their votes don't affect the overall results very much for obvious reasons.

you get the results you ask for.

I don't even consider myself an indie-blogger, but when you're sure that the consensus is going to shake out a certain way it's hard to vote for albums that you know will never place in a visible place on the list.

another thing: in this discussion, "internet people" is more or less a stand-in for "white, middle class, college-educated males writing for indie rock blogs, indie rock websites, and alt-weeklies." hip-hop, metal, electronic, world, etc., etc. bloggers and writers are on the internet too, but their voices aren't heard either because they don't want to participate or because their voices don't dominate the same parts of the internet that most people voting in the poll tend to hang around.

poll Pitchfork's entire masthead, receive results similar to P4k's own year-end list

Comparing to other years, did it take fewer points for AnCo and Phoenix, e.g., to take the top spots? If so, what's happening on P&J is not dissimilar from what's happening on the charts -- the falling ceiling would mean that smaller consensus looks bigger when you make a list. The other question would be whether or not there are more albums TOTAL listed than ever before (someone may have mentioned this already.) It might just be what a "selling 100,000 albums now counts as a really big deal in a way that it didn't before" looks like in a critics poll. But I could be totally off base.

The 2002 list is excellent!! Fresh sounds that are accessible, that is how an alterna-list should look.

The 2002 2009 list is excellent!! Fresh sounds that are accessible, that is how an alterna-list should look.

i don't like this top 10 either, but i don't see how you vote with any sort of broad pool and not end up with a kind of boring consensus (even if the nature of the consensus shifts over time from say dadrock to alt-dadrock). the film poll model wouldn't do you any good because let's say you limit it to the 100 most prominent critics or whatever -- go look at the top 10 lists from the 100 critics at the biggest publications, and you'll see a lot of animal collective and grizzly bear etc. limit it to one critic each or five critics each from a bunch of different specialty areas (rock, country, hip-hop, jazz, latin, avant-garde, whatever) and you'd get a bunch of interesting individual lists and no meaningful "consensus" at all -- and if you want that you can just scroll through the individual ballots or go look at the lists in the specialty mags and websites.

the problem may be with the democratic poll model. maybe a tournament system would be more fun: nominating committees of specialists could select a handful of candidates in various categories and send a field of 64 things out to fight each other. then the broader voting pool could listen to all of them and vote in each head-to-head matchup. you might still end up with animal collective winning, but everybody would hear a lot more stuff along the way.

The reason that 2002 list inspired so much dissent is because it's almost as dull as this one.

Pazz & Jop, proving once again that the target audience for most music polls are not the people who post to www.ilxor.com

The All-New STYLUS.

mostly white, middle class, college-educated males writing for indie rock blogs, indie rock websites, and alt-weeklies

Take out the word "blog" and this is pretty much just "rock critics" from the beginning of time

the more i think about this top 10, the more i'm cool with it in the sense of "if you want to know what critics were talking about in 2009, here ya go." it is what it is - and I'd only be annoyed by its lack of excitement for me if I thought 2009 was an exciting year for music.

yeah well i thought 2009 was a super-exciting year so maybe that's why all these dull EOY lists grate on me

Take out the word "blog" and this is pretty much just "rock critics" from the beginning of time

is it too much to hope that this might, you know, change at some point?

Just pulling some data randomly since the P&J archives are useless (if they even exist anymore), here's a stat from ILM re: 2005 that I'm assuming is accurate:

Late Registration on 28.6% of ballots cast
Arular 27.4%

By comparison, MPP was on 22% of ballots cast, Phoenix on about 20%. Not that huge of a difference, possibly not significant at all, but I do wonder if it's a trend. (TVOTR and AnCo had the same number of mentions at #1 this year and last, though I don't remember how many people were in the poll at that point.)

the answer is not getting nichey microgenre obsessives or these mysterious critics of race that you guys think pazz and jop isn't reaching out to (tons of non-white ppl vote in pazz and jop, and NEWS FLASH, African-American rock critics like indie rock too!)

the answer is focusing more on a smaller selection of pan-genre pop critics like Christgau, SFJ, Caramanica, Powers, Harvilla, etc who listen to tons of music that lives outside of the hype machine

Imaginary comments on imaginary 1960s poll--"aw man, nothing but Beatles, Beach Boys and garage rock, what about Motown, Stax and all those hard to find Franco records from the Congo"

sincere question: if P&J were to only poll the type of critic you want them to, why do you think the results would be more interesting/useful?

would there even be a consensus or would all of their ballots be so disparate that it wouldn't be worth doing anything but publishing each one of them individually?

Um.

xp Ha ha, pretty sure what few critics actually existed in the '60s had even less use for garage rock (which wasn't even called that then) than the Supremes, fwiw.