Do we have a PAZZ AND JOB 2009 thread yet?

I guess the question then becomes "but for Pitchfork, would P&J this year look any different??"

I'm leaning to "no" - Pitchfork has played a big role w/r/t the development of what you might call the mainstream-indie-sensibility, but I don't think that it wouldn't have happened anyway had the website not existed.

mordy i don't think anyone was genuinely complaining about pitchfork, more p4k's consensus influence and every other writer biting their taste

Well, yeah. But people were also complaining that the consequence of letting all the p4k writers vote is that the P+J poll looks like the p4k poll.

i think you guys are putting the cart before the horse here

animal collective was entertainment weekly's album of the year. we should maybe be decrying the EW halo effect...

I mean these albums were gonna be popular even if Pitchfork dropped off the face of the earth in December 2008

Everyone made their mind up about Animal Collective like WEEKS before pfork ran their review, Pfork REFLECTS a current critical mood more than it SHAPES it

Can I just say: I listened to Phoenix a bunch and I totally didn't get the big deal. And I've read all this critical stuff about the album and I still have no idea why people like it. Unrelated, but I wanted to say this somewhere. I don't hate the album, but I really do not get the big deal at all.

I'd credit the "pitchfork effect" for helping blowing up something stupid like "The Drums" but there's no way I'm gonna credit them for critics liking the Yeah Yeah Yeahs for the fifth year running or making heroes of bands like Girls who were tearing up Hype Machine for like ever

xpost

i heard their single for the first time today and I had the same reaction

(Not trying to bait an explanation either. I'm really trying to say that when I look at a poll that puts Phoenix in the top 5 slot I assume that it's not going to be totally congruent with my tastes. And I'm okay with that. If it was my poll Neko Case would be #1 and that would be totally weird, right?)

Everyone made their mind up about Animal Collective like WEEKS before pfork ran their review, Pfork REFLECTS a current critical mood more than it SHAPES it

yeah really the main thing that bugs me (apart from the animal collective album itself, which definitely bugs me) is that mpp was seemingly declared ALBUM OF 2009 sometime in late 2008 and it was like "ok that's settled" and we went through a whole year of fairly interesting music and still at the end of the year the consensus somehow held. which maybe wouldn't bother me if i liked the record, i concede that, and i don't doubt that other people really like the record as much as they say they do. but it all just felt sort of weirdly pro forma to me.

and i'm already afraid that contra is going to do the same thing this year. can't we at least wait til february to declare a winner?

At this point I'm just taking people at face value. A lot of people really really really like Animal Collective. I don't hear it, but there are people who don't like Dylan. So anywayz, not losing sleep over it. Scott, do you really dig AnCo?

tipsy, I'd be really shocked if Contra became the de facto best album of the year. It doesn't sound like that kind of album to me. I happen to really love it, but I can't imagine it has that same kind of consensus.

I'm looking at the 1971 P+J poll and I wasn't alive at the time but I'd probably be a little annoyed at Blue coming in at 9 when it's clearly the best album of all time and who has even heard of this Joy of Cooking indie album? (nb I don't know what kind of music Joy of Cooking is. I think it's a cookbook?)

sure but electrik red and gucci* aren't the consensus picks on pazz and jop any more than they are on pitchork. in fact, hell, both of those records placed higher on the p4k poll than on the p&j one, we just didn't print full results. 40% of the burrprint voters in p&j are on our staff currently; and three of the nine p&j ER voters have logged decent time as p4k writers.

― scottpl, Thursday, January 21, 2010 1:07 AM (7 minutes ago)

right i'm just saying, (and this is in general b/c i know ewing likes YYYs, deej like girls, tim likes anco etc,) you're making it seem like the whole staff is all over the map when i'd guess (maybe wrongly) that you've got a lot of dudes voting GADPY and a smaller number of (different) writers forming the consensus for the r&b and rap albums while also throwing some GADPY votes to strengthen consensus. not that this is necessarily awful

you didnt post individual lists this year so i'm basically talking outta my ass here i realize

I mean these albums were gonna be popular even if Pitchfork dropped off the face of the earth in December 2008

― Whiney G. Weingarten, Thursday, January 21, 2010 1:21 AM (14 minutes ago)

december 2008, sure. december 1997? maybe not

(nb I don't know what kind of music Joy of Cooking is. I think it's a cookbook?)

Bless you. (They were a Bay Area folk-rock combo led by two women.)

a serious discussion of the relative merits of GAPDY has broken out in that poll Whiney started

Everyone made their mind up about Animal Collective like WEEKS before pfork ran their review, Pfork REFLECTS a current critical mood more than it SHAPES it

the LP leaked on XMAS and we ran our review 12 days later on Jan 5, our first day back from break. So, no, that didn't happen.

And the Drums thing was a readers poll result, not something we've talked a lot about. We reviewed one song.

I don't even know what to say to crediting "the hype machine" for something. Nobody cares. It's an aggregator of blogs with mostly a fraction of the readership of us (or Stereogum or Fader). Their cumulative top songs of the year are full of things most people don't know exist (http://hypem.com/zeitgeist/2009/songs), whereas, again, 30 of the top 34 p&j songs also made our year-end list.

other than that, I agree with your facts and conclusions ;)

do you think P&J would look any different if PF waited to post it's albums/singles lists until the day after the P&J deadline, though?

re: Girls. Hellhole Ratrace was in our 2008 year-end list and we booked them for Primavera and SXSW this time last year. This is a meaningless argument over flag-planting but at the very least I will defend the false accusation that we're following people. Just because we don't have the luxury to post whateverthefuck, say nothing about it, have everyone forget you posted it, and then point to it months later and say "see, see, I posted it early!" if it's advantageous to do so doesn't mean we are hanging around looking over other people's shoulders. People remember what we say and we give things due diligence, and as a consequence we sacrifice speed at times.

But, still, having the belief the that some blog is more responsible for spreading news about a band than us probably means you like in Brooklyn or somewhere else where you're surrounded by this sort of inside baseball shit all the time. Even a "big" blog like gvsb, well we'll have more readers from midnight to the time I clock in for work tomorrow than he'll have all month. I think you underestimate how much bigger we are than these sites.

Wait, so you are taking responsibility for P+J looking a ton like p4k?

http://www.pjlighthouse.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/a-few-good-ads-funny-junk.jpg

Genuine LOL

haha i was about to go for a different Sorkin soliloquy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqeC3BPYTmE

?!

All I said to Chris was that it's possible the publication with by far the second-biggest readership in the country had more effect on people than the kid down his block who runs a blog.

the few good men thing is a genuine lol tho ha

so which one are you beating, time or newsweek

Anyways if I had voted in P&J there would have been one more vote for AnCo - it's no #4 for me (when Dan says "biggest case of Emperor's New Clothes since The Avalanches" I think "get me that designer's number"). I don't think it's being defensive for me to say that this is less about whether or not critics like Anco and more about whether and why critics like or don't like the other stuff we think should be at or near the top of the list.

If Pitchfork either shapes or reflects the consensus (it doesn't matter for the purposes of what I'm about to say), and Pitchfork is in fact gfetting behind artists like Gucci Mane or Electrik Red (in terms of very positive reviews at least), why are hardly any other critics agreeing? Every person who voted for Burrprint: 3D is an ILM regular except for Tom Breihan, who's a Pitchfork writer! Same story for Electrik Red (replace tom with Julianne Shepherd).

Now admittedly the reviews for those albums appeared in Pitchfork in January and December respectively, i.e. they weren't gonna impact on voting habits. But it strikes me that to the extent that ILM might complain about the tastes of other critics, Pitchfork is ahead of any non-ILM critics anywhere...

(see also: Deej and Lex were the only two people to vote for "Inflation" despite it being the best song of the year)

so, to back up: No I don't think our year-end lists specifically do shit for P&J. Any effect, which is totally impossible to quantify (so no there is no credit involved!), would come from our reviews throughout the year and the rather easy way we present our bnm. It's quite simple to drop in and see what we've been most enthusiastic about. It's not simple to do that with nearly any other pub of any size.

But it's impossible to determine how much effect this or that thing has on the larger critical culture. Even w/AnCo, despite getting our best review in five years, I'm sure we had *zero* effect. We def had no effect on Uncut, since Stevie T, who wrote that review, heard the LP before I did and filed his review before ours. That's the one real-world example I can give either way.

oops, I meant to say: Even w/AnCo, despite getting our best review in five years, I'm sure we had *zero* effect in some cases. I'm sure we did have some effect, but to "take credit" for it all is silly.

so which one are you beating, time or newsweek

ha, *music* publication.

I didn't mean it as an inquisition. I was just confused. Scott sounded like he was downplaying the influence p4k has on music critics and music consensus and then started talking about how p4k was the most important music blog on the interwebz. I thought he was saying something different. I'm not trying to score any points here :P

ya i think all it is is that pitchfork is really dependable if you like that sort of thing, and so most critics who voted in pazz and jop's ballots were probably just a dozen or so albums that were best new music at some point this year shuffled about. it's easy to be lazy, and as we've seen from every other year-end list, there isn't really another big voice that's saying anything different. pitchfork are just victims of their own success.

i think a publication with a similarly wide scope, but significantly different tastes would be v welcome and nice in 2010.

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.

― you gone float up with it (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Wednesday, January 20, 2010 9:43 AM (5 hours ago)

Sorry for coming back to this, but didn't he do that a billion times better on The Blueprint? ESoM doesn't even have the "fuck you" to accompany the running of the city.

So okay, just to make sure I understand the logic emerging on this thread, here's what I've got so far:

1) All current music is indie rock -- well, 99 percent of the good stuff anyway, at least when it involves white guys in guitar bands -- so using the category when analyzing which music scores better than other music in critics' polls is a fool's game.

2) Pitchfork covers all kinds of music all the time, so no matter how indie-rock biased, say, the site's Top 10 or 50 albums at the end of every year might seem to you, you're deluded if you associate the site with that particular genre.

3) Any sudden drastic increase (even doubling) in the overlap between records finishing near the top of the Pazz & Jop poll and those finishing near the top of the Pitchfork poll, even when said increase affects the P&J singles list as much as the albums list in entirely unprecedented ways, is mere coincidence. Commonality doesn't imply causality, of course, and the similarities merely reflect something in the air. The results would be exactly the same if Pitchfork had stopped existing a long time ago.

Let me know if I'm missing anything, or if I have anything wrong. But I'm pretty sure I'm getting there now; thanks!

^^that ether

Chuck, I kinda overstated my disagreement with your article - you've definitely made the case for this year potentially being a noteworthy one re: indie placing. Point 1 isn't so much that acknowledging it is a "fool's game," but that indie doesn't have nearly as rigid a definition now, and it's hard to find young critically successful rock artists that don't fall under the envelope (and the flaming lips aren't even young!). As pre-indie Pazz'n'Jop perennials get older/make fewer "clasics," you're going to see an influx of "indie" from that unless there's a sea change in what passes for critically acclaimed rock.

And as for 3, it's not necessarily a mere coincidence, but 5 of the 2008 p'n'j top tenners made Pitchfork's top 10. And of the five p'n'j placers that aren't - Erykah Badu and Lil Wayne made their top 20, leaving Bon Iver (who they actually bother to note would have placed if it hadn't already appeared on their 2007 list), Kanye and Santogold (both pretty pitchfork friendly). Only four of Pitchfork's top 10 for 2007 are in the pazz'n'jops, but kanye and the national made their top 20, leaving Amy Winehouse, bruce springsteen and robert plant, who made big classy hit albums that resonated with older fans - something we didn't see much of this year. Pitchfork and Pazz'n'Jops tastes were headed for this kind of alignment, and I'm not sold that the top 20 rather than top 10 placement of The-Dream and Maxwell signifies a new-new wave hegemony.

Not disputing Chuck's arguments but I still think this year was about a lack of consensus w/r/t wutz good in non-indie land more than anything else. Not saying this "lack of consensus" isn't itself erm politically charged (e.g. the "lack of consensus" re R&B being at least in part because most critics don't bother to check out R&B unless it's shoved under their noses) of course.

The sort of the pop hits that have done really well in P&J polls in the last five years or so have usually also done really well in Pitchfork polls as well.

And while I certainly find Pitchfork'n'Jops the-best-singles-are-the-best-songs-from-our-favorite-albums synergy at the very least boring, your main theory for why it happened makes me pause: Lazy indie voters turning a fun exercise into a dutiful one by listing random "singles" off albums they also voted for are the new version of lazy AOR voters who used to vote for perfunctory tracks off albums they also voted for. Only the genre and technology have changed, and the fact that the AOR squares—back before our newfangled, allegedly singles-oriented, iTunes-through-shitty-speakers era began—almost always got marginalized by radio-imbibing pop and dance and hip-hop fans. Though, hey, at least critics still fell for Lady Gaga this year.

Are you saying picking your favorite songs from your favorite albums is "dutiful" rather than "fun"? Wouldn't it be just as "dutiful" for them to deny themselves the chance to praise their favorite act twice in the name of True Single-hood? I feel like your decades-long contempt for indie rock fans in general cuts into your valid obsveration about what happened this year. Whether or not you like them, they're here. And whether or not they throw some token non-indie acts on their ballot in a slow year for non-indie - making the top ten look less creamcheese - they've been here for a long time.

xpost to Tim

Again, I'd be even more comfortable if said voters' favorite singles came from different indie bands than their favorite albums. As is, compared to 30 previous years of singles voting, by critics supporting all genres (indie rock included, which I've been known to sometimes vote for myself), the overlap really does look pathetic to me. (Then again, that admittedly might have something to do with my decades-long contempt for critics too lazy to find favorite singles that aren't on their favorite albums. Such as the AOR folks I talked about there.)

5 of the 2008 p'n'j top tenners made Pitchfork's top 10

Actually four, by my count (same as 2007, 2006, and 2005, unless I missing something somewhere, and -- again -- half as many as 2009):

1. TV on the Radio (#6 Pitchfork)
2. Vampire Weekend (#7)
3. Portishead (#2)
4. Fleet Foxes (#1)

but not

5. Erykah Badu (#13)
6. Lil Wayne (#11)
7. Santogold (#22)
8. Bon Iver (#29 in 2007)
9. Nick Cave (#32)
10. Kayne West (#21)

For what it's worth, the 2007 P&J top 10, by my count, had three albums (Plant, Winehouse, and Bruce) that didn't even hit the Pitchfork Top 40; 2006 P&J Top 10 had four (Gnarls Barkley, Arctic Monkeys, Neko Case, Tom Waits); 2005 had three (Fiona Apple, White Stripes, My Morning Jacket); 2004 had four (Loretta Lynn, Green Day, U2, Danger Mouse.) So 2008 was a big change in a more Pitchforky direction in itself, in way, already. 2009 just extended the simialirites more.

is it possible that this just has to do with no one being clear on what a single is anymore

http://www.villagevoice.com/pazznjop/albums/2008/

the pazz i'm looking at has deerhunter (a pitchfork pick) at #10 and nick cave at #11

xhuxk, it kind of seems like you want the favorite tracks to come from different bands than favorite albums for very personal reasons. I'm not sure it really indicates anything other than, after years of being limited to "singles", voters have moved away from that criteria completely. It didn't happen overnight whatever year all tracks became eligible. These days, most peoples albums are made up of songs they like a lot, and I don't think they feel any obligation to honor P&J's history by separating the albums from the singles.

For what it's worth, the 2007 P&J top 10, by my count, had three albums (Plant, Winehouse, and Bruce) that didn't even hit the Pitchfork Top 40; 2006 P&J Top 10 had four (Gnarls Barkley, Arctic Monkeys, Neko Case, Tom Waits); 2005 had three (Fiona Apple, White Stripes, My Morning Jacket); 2004 had four (Loretta Lynn, Green Day, U2, Danger Mouse.) So 2008 was a big change in a more Pitchforky direction in itself, in way, already. 2009 just extended the simialirites more.

This is interesting, as it seems the likely top tenner albums from years past that got slighted this year weren't the-dream/maxwell straight-r&b albums, but boomer novelties, BIG rock bands and All Things Dangermouse.

Pretty sure people's favorite albums have always been made up of songs they like a lot. But I do agree the blurring definition of the single has something to do with this. But that definition has been blurring for at least a decade now; it doesn't explain the gigantic leap this year to seven top 10 singles (all "indie"-ish) from Top 10 albums.

xp Weird. The one I printed out from the site just a couple weeks ago had Cave #9 (687 votes, 61 mentions); Kanye #10 (603, 57); Deerhunter #11 (585, 55). Guess that's a question for the Voice tech folks.

same as 2007, 2006, and 2005

And 2004, oops.

And it's hard to imagine a more creamcheesey singles Top 10 than the one we got, to my eyes.

Can I just say: I listened to Phoenix a bunch and I totally didn't get the big deal. And I've read all this critical stuff about the album and I still have no idea why people like it. Unrelated, but I wanted to say this somewhere. I don't hate the album, but I really do not get the big deal at all.
― Mordy, Thursday, January 21, 2010 6:23 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

mordy, this is scottpl's perfectly sensible explanation from another thread:

This Phoenix record was a bigger deal than the others because it was the first one released into an environment in which most indie listeners and sites/blogs "agreed" that Phoenix were a relatively big deal. Like a 2009 example of why Elephant was a major release the week it came out but White Blood Cells wasn't.

The band had pulled in fans from different spheres over the course of the decade, released records that were mostly slow burns but eventually beloved to some extent (esp the one prior to WAP w/in the U.S.), but this time around it was a hotly anticipated record. The early two tracks, the singles, were then two of the only things people sort of stopped and made time for immediately last year. It didn't hurt that the consensus was then "wow, this is really good."

― scottpl, Friday, December 11, 2009 1:27 PM (1 month ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink