1990 Pazz & Jop

1990 was one of the worst years for music ever. Along with 1987, 1988 and 1998, it is completely at the bottom of my list of years, at least post-Beatles.

3 The Beach Boys: Pet Sounds (Capitol)

Wow...it kind of blows my mind to think that an utter canon album like Pet Sounds wasn't available on CD until 1990.

Man, the singles list for this year is pretty awesome! Kinda funny that the original "The Power" and the Snap! version are both in the top 20. I can't remember, was the Power Jam/Chill Rob G version a big hit back in the day? Nowadays most people remember just the Snap! version.

]19 Yo La Tengo: Fakebook (Restless/Bar/None)

love this album but I didn't realize they were already enough of a critical darling to rank this high pre-matador

― da croupier, Wednesday, January 19, 2011 6:36 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

kind of surprised at the surprise, re: fakebook and submarine bells, as both got a lot of attention at the time

Stuff that didn't make it:

Depeche Mode- Violator
Nick Cave- The Good Son
Cocteau Twins- Heaven or Las Vegas
Fugazi- Repeater
Ride- Nowhere
Dwight Yoakam- If There Was a Way

And they missed every Metal release

It's called Pazz & Jop, not Petal & Mop.

It's also not called Hazz & Jip Hop, but that doesn't make a difference.

Hip hop = pop.

Metal = mostly not pop, except for Metallica.

In the 80s and early 90s Rap and Metal were the popular genres. One clearly had more critic support than the other.

And I'm not sure you could call stuff like "Songs For Drella" or "Fakebook" pop (or jazz.)

what metal albums could/should have made it tho?

...aside from the three that did, that is.

judas priest's painkiller for starters. entombed's debut, self-titled trouble, slayer's seasons in the abyss, that kind of thing.

yeah, but none of those would have been likely to place then or now. the poll is called pazz and jop after all. and maybe i'm not listening in the correctly proscribed manner, but none of those seem very jopy to me; not enough (any?) outward reach in them grooves, i'd say. i mean, this has always primarily been a poll about popular music, y'know. (and yes, the occasional Coleman, Sharrock, etc. placing aside, the pazz is mostly there as an in-joke.)

Metal was largely hated by critics in 1980.

I mean, note that most critics in 1980 were baby boomers, only adding a handful of then young and aspiring critics whose musical awakening was punk. Those kids who bought and enjoyed the music of the 80s would not become critics until the end of the 80s at earliest.

yeah, maybe, but that's entirely beside the point here, Geir.

xp

1990. 1990. 1990. NINETY!

yeah, maybe, but that's entirely beside the point here, Geir.

I do believe the lack of 80s kids among 80s music journalists is a very obvious explanation whereas typical 80s genres like heavy metal and synth based pop music often perform badly in 80s critic polls.

explanation why, I mean.

i mean, this has always primarily been a poll about popular music, y'know.

jk? the slayer and judas priest albums sold better than many of the albums on the above list. even generated some radio/MTV play in their niche. moreso than that yo la tengo album (great as it is). i'm more inclined to go with geir's explanation.

See also "Violator's" non-inclusion in the 1990 polls. There were still too few 80s kids among critics for Depeche Mode to be fully valued as an important act then.

popular in outreach, not in how many units sold. Slayer never gave a shit about any of that; Priest were way past caring by then.

yeah, maybe. it's harder to say when a single act representing a somewhat faded genre (no offense) is excluded. you know, as opposed to tons of acts representing a genre in flower.

that "maybe" to geir

i would say that both slayer and priest gave at least as much of a shit about selling records as you la tengo and the chills. and "outreach" is such a vague term. to who and on what terms? preist's previous record had alienated fans and performed poorly. as a result they refocused their sound, sold piles of records and won a grammy. sort of defines outreach within their parameters.

i mean, ice cube's amerikkka's most wanted shows up in the top 10. risk of alienating certain audiences clearly wasn't a dealbreaker.

This was such a strange music year for me. First, it was the year I didn't pay attention. A magazine I worked for folded at the beginning of '89, I got into teacher's college for '89-90, and basically I just attended to other things. Second, I think of it as the year that falls between a huge year for hip-hop and popular critical successes--the '89 poll was filled with stuff like Tone Loc and Soul II Soul that did well with critics and on Billboard--and '91, when Nirvana came along. To me, 1990 is a clear dividing point; since half of that view is tied in with events in my own life, I wouldn't expect anyone else to see it that way. Anyway, much later, I caught up with lots of music from 1990 that I now love, like the Posies' "Any Other Way" and Fudge's "Girlwish."

kind of surprised at the surprise, re: fakebook and submarine bells, as both got a lot of attention at the time

part of my point in mentioning that I can't really picture the indie-crit elite pre-nirvana...I was 11 when this poll dropped.

yeah, sometimes kids are slow

11's a pretty young age for your poll to drop actually

i was pretty precocious, what can i say

Great year for singles!

― NoTimeBeforeTime, Wednesday, January 19, 2011 8:33 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark

^this! I was nine when this list came out, and I was at the height of my very first obsessive music-geek phase...I used to get up every Sunday morning at 6am to listen to Casey Kasem's Top 40 Countdown in its entirety (a futile goal; we always ended up going to church when the countdown got in its teens...have I told this story before?)

Anyways, by 1991, I had moved on to Marvel comix, and didn't come back around to grunge until 1993. Still I remember hearing 90% of that singles list when it came out, and all of those songs were HUGE deals to me back then...(a lot of them still are!)

they missed every Metal release

This isn't news -- so did every other Pazz & Jop poll ever (except maybe 2009, where three metal releases finished Top 25, and the couple times when Metallica placed, if they count. And a handful of other metal bands over the years that metal people don't consider metal anymore anyway -- Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, Jane's Addiction, Aerosmith, Guns N Roses, etc.) Anyway, Living Colour were at least sort of metal. Somewhere in my closet I've got the actual hard copy of the Pazz & Jop section from 1990, and they ran somebody's ballot (Erik Davis? Bob Mack?) who voted for, I think, Voivod, King's X, a few bands like that. (Also, Pazz & Jop obviously "misses" scores of good albums, metal and otherwise, every year. So non-metal misses aren't remotely news, either.)

Oh duh, just noticed Jane's in the tally up there -- so yeah, again, that's some 1990 (semi)-metal that Pazz & Jop didn't miss. And Faith No More, too! Actually, this might be one of the most metal Pazz & Jop years ever!

just sayin the electorate has always skewed pop-friendly, and that Slayer (and even Priest) didn't make the cut for a sizable portion of voters in that respect. for example: Van Halen, Boston, Cheap Trick, BOC, yes; Cannibal Corpse, Morbid Angel, et al, no.

yeah, i get that, but it's funny how people construct their versions of something as amorphous as "pop". not saying anyone's in the wrong...

oh, i agree with you there. as xhuxk sez it's just the way things have always been, re: metal. except for the 2009 results. maybe.

metal critics probably not asked or just not interested in voting in a generalist poll that has no history of metal placing in it. Though when chuck was running it I am surprised that more metal journos didn't vote.
If chuck couldn't convince his peers of metal then I don't suppose anyone could.

also, it seems like metal as a genre has only in the last decade started to ooze out onto the "generalist's" radar. perhaps this resulted from the gradual unveiling of the appealingly arcane subgenres cultured in the 90s, perhaps from metal's incorporation of crit-friendly drone, psyche and shoegaze elements. or, i dunno, maybe it's the internet. seems like it's always the internet.

but xhuxk is not exactly into the kind of metal most mj's would for, u see. Def Leppard /= Napalm Death.

Poptimist pop-critic people still dont give a shit about metal. It's got an increased fashionability amount indie/p4k types because a lot of the 90s subgenres have parallels in the stuff we like, which is why you start seeing a lot of SunnO))), Kylesa and Converge—because that stuff is sonically close and even marketed to indie rock ppl somewhat

funny thing about people mentioning that metal made a strong showing in the 2009 poll is that pitchfork (noted music marketing agency) gave a lot of emphasis to metal in 2009. they ran a regular column on under-the-radar metal acts and frequently gave high praise to metal albums. seemed to me that they backed off on this in 2010, and, well...

i blame that on Scott S3w@rd myself. \m/

xp

Bizarrely metal was at its most pop as in POP & also POPULAR in the 80s, so it is a bit strange that it got ignored. But then again, I hated hair metal as much then as I do now so I'm not arsed that it got no acclaim. Slayer & Anthrax however working with beastie boys and public enemy I thought would have helped them. Metal fans took those 2 to their hearts so why not the other way?

xposts

Also, in 1990 there was like 230 critics and now there's 700, so you have a million metal critics all in the mix, I mean:

http://www.villagevoice.com/pazznjop/albums/2010/TWFycm93IG9mIHRoZSBTcGlyaXR8fHxBZ2FsbG9jaA==/

critwise hair metal was clearly at a generational disadvantage in the '80s, i think.

also, didn't Anthrax's version of "Bring the Noise" make the list in '91?

yep, it's no. 20.

Obv. I mean critics treated it the same way that contemporary critics treat the bands on the cover of Alternative Press and Bamboozle. Maybe there will be a critical reevaluation of mall emo in 20 years. And the future President Keyes can get all huffy about the 2010 Pazz And Jop not having A Day To Remember or Nevershoutnever on it

http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/pnj/pjres91.php

Poptimist pop-critic people still dont give a shit about metal. It's got an increased fashionability amount indie/p4k types because a lot of the 90s subgenres have parallels in the stuff we like, which is why you start seeing a lot of SunnO))), Kylesa and Converge—because that stuff is sonically close and even marketed to indie rock ppl somewhat

― Dan Watagatapitusperry (Whiney G. Weingarten), Thursday, January 20, 2011 10:46 AM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^yeah I was going to say something like this, but I thought, is this really much different than grunge (except that grunge blew up big in the 'pop' sense)? Grunge did well in P&J didn't it? I dunno how Alice in Chains or Candlebox (not to mention Helmet or Pantera) but those bands were definitely metal disguised as grunge imo....

i know plenty of people who'd call themselves pop fans who'd also call themselves metal fans

Like Superunknown placed #11 in '94...if you're scanning that album as 'not-metal' you're being disingenuous imo...

xhuxk otm also with Metallica & 2 G n'R albums making the top 20

xxpost, that must be why Idolator and Popdust have been sweating that Bathtub Shitter EP so hard

2 G n'R albums making the top 20

― amphetamine enhanced scholar (Drugs A. Money), Thursday, January 20, 2011 8:11 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

gn'r are/were a special case, though, and by that point had exactly nothing to do with anyone's conception of heavy metal

which leaves just metallica: the very successful pop move of a long-running and critically-celebrated heavy metal band whose best and most influential work was clearly behind them

why isn't "1990 and 2010 were different times" a sufficient answer?

Plenty of "alt-rock" (Smashing Pumpkins) and "grunge" (Pearl Jam) and "industrial" (Nine Inch Nails) bands that would've been considered metal in any previous decade scored on Pazz & Jop in the '90s, yeah. (Though I think that post the first time I've ever heard anybody call Pantera grunge.)

And right, I definitely tried hard to bring in more metal voters in the '00s. Probably had some success, too, here and there, but (just like with country voters, Latin voters, etc.) obviously not enough to affect the overall tally. (Like Whiney was basically saying, metal voters are not going to place any albums in Pazz & Jop on their own; they need help from non-metal people.)

by that point had exactly nothing to do with anyone's conception of heavy metal

Pretty sure plenty of non-metal-obsessed people still considered GnR a hair-metal band.

Guns n' Roses: hair-metal::Led Zeppelin: psychedelia

And the future President Keyes can get all huffy about the 2010 Pazz And Jop not having A Day To Remember or Nevershoutnever on it

I was just pointing out a few now well-regarded albums that didn't make the list, and may have a better chance if the year was re-polled today. Honestly didn't even register of Jane's or Living Colour as Metal when I saw the list. And I'm in more of a tizzy than a huff.

Let's get huffy about these results.

Or these!