Do we have a PAZZ AND JOB 2009 thread yet?

I mean, Smash Mouth finished in the P&J top 10 singles TWICE.

Amid all this hand-wringing, 2009 wasn't exactly a vintage year for mega-selling pop music. I'm not really going to bang the drum for La Roux, the Black Eyed Peas or Flo Rida.

nobody said mega-selling, I'm just talking about singles that charted on any singles chart anywhere in the US.

what a disaster for 2009

xpost nah, and I'll definitely take "birthday sex" over "hyph myngo" or girls or whatever, I just can't get indignant that Jamie Foxx doesn't make the top ten singles or that Roseanne Cash, Green Day and that Sparklehorse/Dangermouse collabo didn't take their rightful place in the upper reaches of the album chart. There's an obvious nerd bias to this stuff, but I feel like people are just demanding indie guilt in the face of indie solipsism, and these criticisms are actually demanding young crits fulfill a duty than that they're missing out on fun.

typos galore there (and the disaster crack was re: BEPs).

I have a problem with "the myth of pitchfork," that they're shaping the lives of 20/30somethings the world over with their nutrageous tastemaking, when they're really making a lot of incredibly smart decisions based on things people are talking about already, and using their enormous circulation to blast them out into the red states and starbucks dilletantes.

I think this is 100% otm.

why would indie guilt be the #1 reason to pay attention to music that isn't indie rock, or want other people to? once again, we're not talking about catchy popular ubiquitous hit songs, not brussel sprouts.

er strike that first "not" obviously

you're not talking about "paying attention to catchy popular ubiquitous hit songs," you're talking about finding them to be among the ten best songs they heard this year. and as much as I've enjoyed a few of the year's declarations of sexual prowess and fashion-line themes, I didn't enjoy them so much that I'm going to demand ambitious collegiates put the dirty projectors down to give them love or whatever.

and I would have totally gone to bat for smashmouth

P&J runs a "singles" list, not a "songs" or "tracks" list. I just think that should still count for something.

Ah, another iteration of the old Lloyd Cole post-collegiate fanbase vs girls wearing Madonna gummy bracelets divide, in other words.

some dude otm, i still only vote for songs that are actual singles

And again, the singles ballots are optional, and many have and still do just leave them blank. Maybe the only difference is that a lot of the people that used to leave them blank aren't anymore.

didn't maura say all the top ten entries had videos?

Nothing says ambition like the Dirty Projectors.

only 4 of them charted in the Hot 100, though, which is a record low (I won't give away more, since I'm still compiling more complete data).

So, just supposin', if PFM asked its single reviewers to review more R&B, diva pop, and Britishes (as, say, The Singles Jukebox does), would it make any dent on the P&J singles chart?

this is starting to sound like canadian content laws

I think it would have been hilariously awesome if all 3 of BEP's 2009 singles ended up in the top 10. I fucking love those songs.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/12662-its-not-me-its-you/

so your example of a band that the indie cognoscenti behind Dan Deacon and Deerhunter has launched w/o us is an americana/folk group produced by Rick Rubin for his Sony label that gained a large audience in part touring with Dave Matthews and Widespread Panic?

I have a problem with "the myth of pitchfork," that they're shaping the lives of 20/30somethings the world over with their nutrageous tastemaking, when they're really making a lot of incredibly smart decisions based on things people are talking about already, and using their enormous circulation to blast them out into the red states and starbucks dilletantes.

What, in this context, is the difference between "nutrageous tastemaking" and "smart decisions", other than hyperbole and the pain each phrase exacts when you read it? Again, it's not like many of the hyped indie bands we "passed" on-- sound team, cold war kids, voxtrot, anathallo, ghostland observatory, white denim, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, birdmonster, for examples-- went anywhere in the long run did they?

Of course we are filtering through the bands around; of course some people freaking talk about them before we run shit, especially since, as I said before, we vet things carefully because every decision we make gets remembered. So we are sifting through things and making decisions based on what we like and broadcasting those decisions to an exponentially large audience than any other indie internet outlet. Then it turns out that only it's mostly only the bands we like that also get a foothold via these circles. And yet somehow we don't matter at all other than to the poor silly Starbucks drinkers and flyover kids who aren't wise enough to find this stuff through the much tinier outlets that exist? Honestly, Chris you know I love ya, but sometimes I think the whole of BKLYN has a pretty effed up perspective on this stuff. For us to drop out and not leave a central space in the middle of this process, would certainly alter things, or at the very least slow them down considerably. Maybe not for the tight circle of feedback-loop types feeding each other in NYC, but for many others, not just the people you're sniffing at here.

you linked to lily allen, silly head

it's not like many of the hyped indie bands we "passed" on--- went anywhere in the long run did they?

Yeah, but Electric Six are still making really good albums! (Something Anthony and I can finally agree on, I think.)

this is starting to sound like canadian content laws

― da croupier, Thursday, January 21, 2010 11:00 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I'm not saying the system is broken and new rules need to be enforced, I'm saying that a new approach is being taken to the singles list by the voters, and the list is less interesting (or at least far less distinct from the albums list) because of it.

The lack of critical enthusiasm for E6 is probably a big factor in my indifference as to which acts p'n'j does overrate.

Come back when E6 has been around as long as The Cure and Depeche Mode and you'll finally understand Ned and me.

there are plenty of bands that PF ignored or panned early on that went on to do big things -- De Stijl was a pretty big deal, indie-wise, but they didn't review the White Stripes until White Blood Cells, while defensively noting on the front page that they hadn't reviewed the first 2 albums because noone sent them promos.

at least those guys are rich!

xpost

haha true

you linked to lily allen, silly head

yeah wrong link; lily allen we were down with from the start though, and again the AnCo crowd didn't matter there at all

there are plenty of bands that PF ignored or panned early on that went on to do big things

yeah, totally. see, for instance, this review of Blood Visions that they didn't run until after Jay signed with Matador--long after it had been out and gotten pretty big with people I know

http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/6760-through-the-cracks/

Had we poked our head up around the middle of last year and gotten as excited about this record as we should (I would have lobbied for a "Best New Music" designation), there would be loads of people pointing and snickering about how "late" we were to it, which in hindsight is a silly thing to worry about-- reviewing it then would have meant there would have been far more readers just learning about it for the first time.

Ha, I guess being late to something is a silly thing to worry about though, right? ;)

i don't think we'll ever know whether pitchfork is the chicken or the egg

Again, it's not like many of the hyped indie bands we "passed" on-- sound team, cold war kids, voxtrot, anathallo, ghostland observatory, white denim, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, birdmonster, for examples-- went anywhere in the long run did they?

Ppl have selective memories about pfork too! Like you guys regularly give 8s to bands like Oneida and Patrin-endorsed indie rappers and no one gives a flying fuck because it's not falling into a model of the worldwide Juno-styled hand-scribbled NPR indieverse that is actually bigger than pfork

i mean, look, i agree with you on most of your points re: filtering and having a bigger reach than coffee unaderachievers or whatevs, but this debate is about pitchfork's effect on the 696 critics who vote in p&j, and those voters are all definitely more PART of the feddback loop than PRODUCTS of the feedback loop

the whole pfork thing is selective memory. like everyone "forgets" that the same day Dan Deacon's album got his glowing review on pfork, he was also the front page story on the NYT arts section

And also, i can't say much for indie bands you didn't pass on like CYHSY and Tapes N Tapes actually going anywhere in the long run

The Pitchfork argument is really, I think, just an Internet argument: the P&J voting community has a much faster and more amplified internal feedback loop today than it had 30 years ago. There are dozens of factors in this, from human editorial decisions to collaborative filtering, and the effect is futher amplified by the addition of voters for whom the web is their native media (both as writers and music-learners), who are collectively more active participants in these loops.

And so, necessarily, the "winners" chart is the least interesting thing about the P&J. The poll's real value is that it collects data that rewards exploration, either by just clicking around in it yourself, or by statistical correlation. More voters make the data more interesting, overall, but the "winners" less interesting.

The singles side suffers more subltly from the internet loop effects, or more precisely, from the addition of these loop effects to the old loop effects of radio in a pre-internet world. Effectively, in the old days, the album poll was freeform and the singles poll was constrained, with radio as the authoritative source of nominations. Radio still contributes, but it's no longer authoritative. Thus the "singles" side fragments and disperses. Absent some structural change, over the next few years I think we'll see it flatten out even more.

I don't think this is necessarily bad. One of the things I did in my data-analysis was an Artist chart (here), counting album-points as voted, and song-votes as 2 points each. This would really need some more data-work to dual-attribute all the X-ft-Y singles to X (and Y?), and maybe a rule-tweak (no more than two songs from a single album, would be my suggestion, just to keep people from boring point-loading on their favorite album), but this combined chart is already much more interesting than either current official chart, and turns the phenomenon of people voting for their favorite tracks from their favorite albums into a virtue, as you can now kind of see deeper into voters' experiences of those albums.

I wonder what would happen, Glenn, if you eliminated the album-ballot-duplicating votes of anyone who votes for, say, three or more singles from albums they've also voted for, and then re-crunched the remaining singles numbers from there. If that makes any sense (which it probably doesn't).

I really want to see that Artist chart, but I got a login thing from your link, and can't find it on the main All Idols page.

but sometimes I think the whole of BKLYN has a pretty effed up perspective on this stuff

i mean, this is true too.

whenever i co home for xmas break, i go to the record store in my hometown I always ask how many records they sold. They never even ORDERED a copy of Animal Collective or Dirty Projectors. They sold one Gucci Mane on opening week.

xp Or easier (though I'd never advocate this as a policy), what would happen if you just subtracted all album-duplicating singles votes in general. (Guessing that might hurt, say, DJ Quik and Kurupt's singles ratings as much as any indie band's -- might not help Taylor Swift's either -- but I'd still be curious how the results would shake out.)

what if people just voted for singles

De Stijl was a pretty big deal, indie-wise,

This isn't a great example to use, because the record came out in 2000, long before Pitchfork had nearly the kind of influence it does now. And aren't we trying to find examples of indie records that were not just popular in a particular scene but around which a widespread critical consensus developed? De Stijl only finished #229 in P&J.

I don't think that anyone's arguing that P4k doesn't provide a valuable service to the indie music-listening community, or that they aren't to some extent arbiters of taste within that sphere. They have a symbiotic relationship to that scene - both benefiting from its growing popularity and contributing to it. The music would exist without P4k or a similar site, but it wouldn't perhaps be as widely known or promoted outside the confines of that scene. Every scene needs some star acts to champion it, and P4k helps in the process of consensus formation around those stars. They don't dictate who the stars will be, but by generally listening to a lot of stuff and having taste that aligns pretty well with their audience, they are usually able to provide some filtering. So P4k may be a small contributing factor to indie domination of P&J, but I would argue that there are other more important factors, but it's difficult to discuss because "indie" is such an amorphous label.

what if people just voted for singles

i was going to say "would you bitch if people voted for airplay-only push tracks from pop albums?" but then that's a pretty '90s phenomenon with no real place in iTunes culture. And, for the same reason - any indie push track with an official video is a single.

btw PF "passing" on bands seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me -- once the site has made a big gesture of saying "this band sucks, don't believe the hype" or "they're not the kind of indie we like" or whatever, odds are slim that readers or staff are going to be following them much from thereon to even know if they end up improving or making a great record later on. there have been so many slow burn careers the last few years, from bands who just seemed to be plugging along for years and eventually got a big following (Of Montreal, Spoon, etc.) that it'll be interesting to see, 5 or 10 years from now, what bands can survive a quick-bursting blog/PF hype bubble and end up having a good long run and maybe winning back some of those media outlets (or finding different kinds of success).

I wrote for Pitchfork in 2000, and everyone I knew IRL (if not on staff, since I didn't really know any of those folks at the time ) that listened to indie at the time was talking about De Stijl or telling me to check it out. it definitely felt weird at the time that PF didn't review it.

I really want to see that Artist chart, but I got a login thing from your link, and can't find it on the main All Idols page.

https://pub.needlebase.com/actions/visualizer/V2Visualizer.do?domain=Pazz-Jop-2009&query=Combined+Artist+Chart

does anyone know how much a gap there is between # of readers, say, Stereogum, has and the # of reads P4k has?

Or easier (though I'd never advocate this as a policy), what would happen if you just subtracted all album-duplicating singles votes in general

This would solve the laziness issue - you can either vote for the single or the album, but not both - but it would penalize acts who release a great album that also spawns a lot of great singles. Interesting trade-off, I guess. I don't know if there's a more gradualist remedy that would be equally effective. I think maybe that it would be best to fragment the poll. Forget the idea of overall best album & single, but have separate polls for "Best Indie Album", "Best Dance Single", "Best Radio Single", "Best Video", "Best Country Album", "Best Metal Album", etc. Let people vote in as many of the sub-polls as they want to.