Pazz & Jop 2008

My ballot (heavily but not entirely metal):

http://www.villagevoice.com/pazznjop/critics/2008/685521

And lots of stats, including voter centricity, voter similarity and album similarity:

http://www.furia.com/all-idols/2008/index.html

Am I really the first one to point out that Third came in...third?

Nice to see "It's All Your Fault" on a ballot, Glenn. I'm pretty uptight about only listing singles but it'd definitely be in my top 10 album tracks.

Mine: http://www.villagevoice.com/pazznjop/critics/2008/685882

I limited releases to some vague notion of roots/rock and rock/folk/countryish stuff. First year I didn't try to create some well-rounded ballot. I like how it turned out though. Made more sense to compare/contrast stuff that was a bit more related, although it forced me to leave some gems out in the cold. For example, I listened to that Jennifer Cardini mix on Kompakt A LOT. Oh well. Fun exercise.

Is it me or in previous years did VV offer a top ten reissues section? Or did I simply miss it?

In some previous years they had a reissues list but I think they stopped that a couple years ago.

Didn't the Voice poll back in the '90s and early 00's get alot more than 577 voters?

Ayyyy

0.441 Alfred Soto
0.399 Tim Finney

Unsurprising.

Last reissues tally was in 1999:

http://robertchristgau.com/xg/pnj/pjres99.php

Voters peaked at 795 in 2005, just before the New Times merger/changing of the guard; plummeted to 494 a year later, and is apparently still recovering:

http://robertchristgau.com/xg/pnj/pjres05.php

By the way, I swear I couldn't find the number of voters anywhere in the hard-copy of this week's Voice I picked up today, but maybe I just wasn't looking on the right pages. If there really are 577 voters, as Glenn says, that's exactly the same as last year; kind of curious how hard the sub-poobahs had to work at the last minute to match that number.

So has anybody mentioned Nick Cave in the Top 10? That's just crazy to me, given that, as far as I can tell, he's been making the same album for the past couple decades, and I'm pretty sure he never used to score in Pazz & Jop at all until the past few years. Talk about being grandfathered in (as an actual grandfather, for all I know). Has he ever finished Top 10 before? Last couple did okay, maybe, but I bet no Birthday Party LPs ever finished Top 300. (I voted for Kicking Against The Pricks in 1986, but I wouldn't be surprised if nobody else did.)

marcello to thread

He ranted about that in the end of year poll threads

Am I really the first one to point out that Third came in...third?

― The Reverend, Wednesday, January 21, 2009 3:09 PM Bookmark

Wait, hold up. Third in third and 4th World War in fourth.

i don't know if it's related to the vote number, but i never got the first ballot email, just a "reminder" the day before it was due. it's possible some people never got it at all.

x-post

Dig and that earlier Grinderman cd have more energy than the prior 12 or so Cave releases since the end of the Birthday Party. I think in some ways its viewed as a comeback so that folks who were too young to have voted for the Birthday Party can cast a vote for them now.
I wasn't wowed enough by what I heard from Dig (and Marcello was ranting on another thread about how he could not understand the raves it was getting), but I understand Cave on his most recent US tour was just as charismatic as ever and the band sounded great. So that might have helped also.

Mine: http://www.villagevoice.com/pazznjop/critics/2008/686236

Why did they a) let "Paper Planes" be eligible even though was released in 2007 and placed on the 2007 poll, and b) include those 2007 poll votes in the tally for 2008? Not really fair. No wonder it finished first.

they always allow rollover votes, which for singles especially i think makes sense since their impact doesn't necessarily follow calendar years. and if you had to pick one year to assign "paper planes" too, it was much more a 2008 single. that's the year it actually charted.

Yep. Other P&J carry-over repeat finishers:

Soft Cell, "Tainted Love" (7th in 1981, 5th in 1982)
Pretenders, "Back on the Chain Gang" (7th in 1982, 3rd in 1983)
Michael Jackson, Thriller (15th in 1982, 1st in 1983)
John Fogerty, "Old Man Down the Road" (13th in 1984, 3rd in 1985)
XTC, Skylarking (33rd in 1986, 9th in 1987)
Tone-Loc, "Wild Thing" (20th in 1988, 5th in 1989)
Cypress Hill, "How I Could Just Kill a Man" (22nd in 1991, 5th in 1992)
TLC, "Creep" (outside of Top 25 in 1994, 8th in 1995)
Oasis, "Wonderwall" (11th in 1995, 4th in 1996)
Coldplay, "Yellow" (14th in 2000, 5th in 2001)

mine: http://www.villagevoice.com/pazznjop/critics/2008/686278

xp Album impact doesn't necessarily follow calendar years either (especially if they're released late in the year, and/or give up a bunch of hit singles in the following year.) The rule makes perfect sense.

Here are some minor (i.e., not affecting the top 100) collation errors I caught, either album typos that didn't get corrected and combined, or votes where the artist and album were reversed.

Alphabeat (1+1)
Bodies of Water (1+1)
Boduf Songs (1+1 reversed)
Cloud Cult (2+1)
Dirtbombs (1+1 reversed)
Disfear (4+1 reversed)
Ettes (1+1+1 reversed)
Fleet Foxes - Sun Giant (1+1)
Future Clouds and Radar (just 1, but reversed)
Grand Buffet (1+1 reversed)
In Flames (1+1)
Joseph Arther (1+1 reversed)
Jucifer (just 1, but reversed)
Margot and the Nuclear So-and-So's (2+1)
NOMO (5+1 reversed, would move them from 212 to 186)
Sam Phillips (6+1, would move her from 170 to 152)
Savina Yannatou (1+1)
Shapeshifters (2+1 reversed as "Shape Shifters"
Slim Cessna's Auto Club (1+1 reversed)
Snowman (2+1 reversed)
Theresa Andersson (3+1 reversed)

Also: 579 voters, total. 577 in my stats because I use only the album ballots, and two people voted only for singles...

Phil Dellio is one of the singles-only (as he has been for over a decade now); who's the other one?

My ballot, fwiw:

http://www.villagevoice.com/pazznjop/critics/2008/684436

Spencer Kaufman was the other singles-only voter.

Are the links on your site working Glenn? If you click my name (Mark Richardson) Simon Reynolds' ballot comes up.

I just uploaded new files after making a few more minor corrections, and you must have clicked your link after the index was updated but before your new page got sent up. They're all in sync again now...

I probably would've voted for "Lookin' Boy" if I had only remembered.

I totally forgot that I own that Philip Jeck album! I should listen to it!

Do you like Jeck, Sundar?

Wow. Looking at my critical alignment rating (Centricity: 552/576), I'm kind of amazed I even have a job writing about music, as my tastes seem to have virtually zero overlap... (Juana Molina's Un Dia, with 10 other voters, was my closest "mainstream" inclusion; for most of my choices I was the only voter.)

Question for Glenn: What does it mean if a voter isn't included in the Similarity list?

I do, generally, Mark. Saw him in Toronto some years back and really enjoyed it. Enjoyed checking out his setup and stack of 7"s too.

Wow, I kind of <3 J.D. Considine's list. Should check out more of that.

http://www.villagevoice.com/pazznjop/critics/2008/684566

Oh, here's my ballot

How do you see your critical alignment rating?

i like scrolling thru all the 1-mention stuff on the lists. more interesting than the top 100.

Fuck, 'Lookin' Boy'! I forgot 'Lookin' Boy'!

Fuck, 'Lookin' Boy'! I forgot 'Lookin' Boy'! YAHHH TRICK YAHHH

Only 5 votes for Supreme Balloon?

I've never really understood the rationale behind carryover votes either. For one thing, if you're going to claim that points awarded by a voter in 2007 are valid in 2008, then you're implicitly assuming that those voters feel the same way about that song (or album) in 2008 as they did in 2007 (unless they voted for the song in both years -- isn't double-counting votes a bit unfair too?) And of course, a record's impact won't necessarily be aligned with the calendar year, but the poll does have one (and only one) calendar year in its title, so compiling two year's worth of votes for some songs vs one year's worth for others doesn't present an equal playing field. The calendar year "cutoff" is arbitrary, but doesn't that mean that a single released in November (that will collect votes in two different years) has an unfair advantage over a single released in April (that probably won't?)

In analogy to sports, it would be like comparing two candidates for a 2008 MVP award, and favouring one guy only because he had the better year in 2007 (of course people actually do this, but I think it's also wrong.) They're different years!

Maybe a fairer system for P&J would be one in which only 50% of the vote from the previous year was carried over?

Has P&J always been this predictable? Apart from Nick Cave getting more love than I expected (which is great) and Kanye likewise (which I don't understand at all) there's not a single surprise on here. Over on the "Is it Rolling, Bob?" thread these whole Top 10s were pretty much predicted back in October.

Oh, and woot Portishead.

consensus is as consensus does.

Nick Cave in every freaking top ten list - is there some kind of Heidi Fleiss thing going on here?

t.i. should've kicked Nick's pasty ass!!!

Seconded!!

btw, was anyone expecting Q-Tip to do as well as he did? (beat the Truckers even.)

xp

xp???

I've only heard a couple of tracks off the new Q-Tip so far; quite pleasant but nothing earth shattering.

Only one vote for Paarvoharju?

Only heard one track off that so far and it was v. good indeed so clearly it's another album I have to get familiar with.

how many ilxors does it take to get Torche in the top 40?

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