Pazz & Jop 2008

JVC, your Badu blurb really stood out when I read through the comments earlier (and I didn't even know it was you). Nice work.

Thanks. I was happy to see they printed my comment on my first year taking part.

I posted about this before, but my post got eaten somehow, so I'll bring it back: why on earth did Real Emotional Trash place so high? It's the least of Malkmus' albums, to these ears, Janet Weiss' addition nonwithstanding.

Btw: Is anyone else shocked Malkmus didn't place higher?

― Mordy, Wednesday, January 21, 2009 1:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I posted about this before, but my post got eaten somehow, so I'll bring it back: why on earth did Real Emotional Trash place so high? It's the least of Malkmus' albums, to these ears, Janet Weiss' addition nonwithstanding.

― Beatrix Kiddo, Thursday, January 22, 2009 9:16 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

lol perspectives

a lot of great comments this year - the one about the dude sitting on the writer's hood for over an hour listening to Death Magnetic (true or not) was probably my favorite.

but i liked this one too (even though, reading the author's crit growing up in baltimore, i detested everything he stood for and wanted to be the anti-him) and it raises an interesting question:

One question I'd love to see asked in a year-end poll would look into how many voters maintain an ongoing Best Albums/Best Tracks list, and how many spend a couple of desperate days each December trying to remember (like I do) what they were listening to and liking back in April. It's not that I don't understand the impulse to make lists; where I break ranks is when list-making becomes a form of ranking. Moving something up a list of favorites is obviously an act of affection, and declaring this or that recording to be the best is not unlike informing a loved one that he or she is the most wonderful person in the world (and about as objective). As critics, we're expected to make value judgments and declare some things worthy and others un-, but why does that have to become a form of scorekeeping? Really, isn't the notion of debating whether TV on the Radio made a better album than Vampire Weekend a bit like debating whether Wolverine could beat up Spawn?

J.D. Considine
Toronto, ON

personally, i keep a running list all year long - otherwise i'd forget great records and songs from early in the year. then when it's time to make ye olde lists i revisit stuff. how about you?

End of year: sort itunes by year and pick my favorite albums.

realistically in the aughts, the 20s are probably the highest malk can expect to place, am i right? and i say that as a serious fan.

isn't the notion of debating whether TV on the Radio made a better album than Vampire Weekend a bit like debating whether Wolverine could beat up Spawn?

i thought this was exactly the attraction of making year-end lists. (also, wolverine duh.)

yeah the last few years i've gotten pretty compulsive about keeping a running tally throughout the year and constantly revising it and re-listening to things and rethinking their place on the list. December is still a mad scramble to commit to some semblance of a 'final' decision, though.

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

Valid point, I guess. But I still think it's pretty fair to assume most voters still like the song. (Then again, you could go even further -- Why assume voters still feel the same way in January about the records they voted for a month earlier, in December?)

(unless they voted for the song in both years -- isn't double-counting votes a bit unfair too?)

Doesn't happen. As Harvilla explained in his M.I.A. essay, individual voters are only allowed to vote for a given record once -- when votes from two years are combined, any duplicated votes are subtracted. (For albums, if a critic votes for the same one twice, points given the current year would be used.)

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?)

Nope. People have had longer to live with the April record, for one thing. (And if voters have such short memories that they can't remember a record eight months after release, what makes you think they'd remember a record 13 months after?) And most singles released in November don't collect votes for two years straight; singles that do (which could have been released the previous April, too) have always been the exception. And critics don't work for record companies; they're not required to hear records the day those records are released (or even in the first few weeks). Sometimes they actually wait til the records are hits, and stumble across them by accident, like normal people! And the poll doesn't predetermine which records can get carryover votes; like those Ron Clark Academy kids said, you can vote for whoever you like. So, for what records is the playing field not equal?

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!

But they're the same record! So the analogy makes no sense at all. Pazz & Jop voters are (at least theoretically) voting for much they like a record, not "how good a year" the record had. (I'm not even sure what that would mean, if they did do it.)

Has P&J always been this predictable?

Well, no, becauase it didn't used to be preceded by 1000 mini-polls from other places. The Internets, among other factors, have made Pazz & Jop into way less an event than it used to be. Probably not hard to predict P&J placement after you've seen all those earlier polls. Still, I saw a bunch, and I have to say there are still a lot of records that finished higher or lower than I would have predicted. (I actually thought Kanye would do better than he did! And I have no opinion of that album at all.)

Only 5 votes for Supreme Balloon?

― Sundar, Thursday, January 22, 2009 12:37 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark

Standing on Earth, not rapt above the Pole,
More safe I Sing with mortal voice, unchang'd
To hoarce or mute, though fall'n on evil dayes, [ 25 ]
On evil dayes though fall'n, and evil tongues;
In darkness, and with dangers compast round,
And solitude; yet not alone, while thou
Visit'st my slumbers Nightly, or when Morn
Purples the East: still govern thou my Song, [ 30 ]
Urania, and fit audience find, though few.

[PL, VII, 23-31]

If you're going to enter a ballot, then keeping a running tally seems like a helpful thing to do -- no diff from note-taking, really.

x-post

lol that reynolds essay is probably the most tortured way that one could explain that vampire weekend are an indie pop band.

iTunes has made year-end list-making about a thousand times easier for me, both in the gather-the-shortlist stage and in relistening to stuff to make up my mind. Yay technology.

That said, I totally agree with JD's point about the inanity of fine distinctions, and if I ran P&J I'd ditch the points. I enjoy ranking my own list for my own purposes, but I definitely do not care 3-6 times as much about what another person thinks is #1 vs #10. The points usually don't end up making a very big difference in the results (see http://www.furia.com/all-idols/2008/winners.html for this year's poll redone that way), but I think they mischaractize the enterprise and implicitly encourage a pointless (hah!) lack of either perspective or humility, depending on how you look at it.

those Ron Clark Academy kids

Got three singles votes themselves, by the way:

http://www.villagevoice.com/pazznjop/singles/2008/WW91IENhbiBWb3RlIEhvd2V2ZXIgWW91IExpa2U=

Biggest surprises on the albums list: Grace Jones right down at #1365, and not one single vote for Neil Diamond's US chart-topper.

The points usually don't end up making a very big difference in the results

Well, if you just went by votes, you'd probably hurt records like Fucked Up, which looks like it got a pretty decent point-to-voter ratio (finished #38 but was named on only 20 ballots.) I dunno, I like the points -- they add a degree of precision about how much people like each record. And voters can always opt of them, either by filing unranked ballots (every album gets 10) or by dividing their points 15-14-13-12-11-9-8-7-6-5. (Math-haters have always complained about the points, by the way, though that category clearly doesn't include Glenn.)

Thing about that Fucked Up record is, you can at least look at the numbers are deduce that people were actually excited about the thing; it wasn't just another perfunctory entry they thought they should vote for. I think that's pretty cool.

Points also let people like Greil Marcus give 30 points to each of the two albums they REALLY REALLY REALLY liked in a given year, and 5 to all the rest. Which is good. (Greil used to do that every year! I'm not sure if anybody did it this year, or not.)

i just saw a ballot where someone did that but can't remember who it was. but one of their 30s went to Lil Wayne as if he needed the help.

Aha, Neil Diamond *is* in there, at #238.

Unfortunately, he's listed as Neil Young.

Hah, I hadn't noticed the Neil Young/Diamond error. Looking at the ballots it's clear that when they tabulated the poll they only fixed up the album names. There's lots of variation in the artist names for the same album across multiple ballots, and for the lower things they appear to have picked the artist for the results page at random from the ballots that mentioned the album. If you check the five votes for Home Before Dark you'll see that Craig Hlavaty screwed it up, but the other four voters got it right.

By the way, speaking of carryover votes from previous years, I wonder if the Voice guys gave any thought about what to do about this record, which was already getting votes back when I had their job:

http://www.villagevoice.com/pazznjop/albums/2008/Um9ieW4=

happy badu is so high.

Glad I gave it 30 points (it outscored Fleet Foxes by three).

No one loved the Ribot-fronted Zorn albums! I'm a bit surprised, esp about Asmodeus. I thought it was probably the best guitar rock of the year. Should have appealed to e.g. Sharrock fans.

(I enjoyed spinning that Jeck again, Mark. He does sometimes tend to slip into a formula but it can really work.)

Tzadik doesn't send promos for anything to anyone so tons of Zorn stuff just flys under the radar.

how many spend a couple of desperate days each December trying to remember (like I do) what they were listening to and liking back in April.

One big problem with this method is that too many voters wind up using other critics' Top 10 lists to jog their memories. Which eventually amplifies the bandwagon effect exponentially, and makes lists way more similar than they might be otherwise. (Not that JD's own list seems to have been affected that way.)

Yeah, none of you fuxx voted for Maryanne Amacher either but that's less surprising.

xpost (JD said that he doesn't use that method himself though, didn't he? I had no idea Quinsin put something out last year.)

here's a scientific study for someone: what's the correlation between huge promo mailouts and top placings in P&J? (there probably isn't any, and folks can download all kinds of stuff for free, but i wonder anyway.)

Oh, there's definitely a correlation (though maybe not as big a one as there once was.) Somebody should tally up the results by publicity company sometime -- I bet Girlie Action gets LOTS of P&J action.

nick cave is awesome

here's a scientific study for someone: what's the correlation between huge promo mailouts and top placings in P&J? (there probably isn't any, and folks can download all kinds of stuff for free, but i wonder anyway.)

― Beatrix Kiddo, Thursday, January 22, 2009 12:19 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban

Bon Iver released LITERALLY the same album in 08 as 07, but one had a huge promo bomb with it. I mean just because people CAN download something still means its less likely to be listened to than something that's sitting on your desk.

I don't think that Bon Iver record is the best to use for a promo bomb exactly. I think that had more to do with blog after blog after blog buzzing about it with the re-release.

does that mean there are critics that actually open & pay attention to the dozens of hugely unappetizing indie rock publicist e-mails that they're sent everyday? scary.

I listen to 80% of what comes to me in an envelope.

ahem, I hope everyone here has participated in the vastly superior ILX 2008 poll

and you can all view the results of ILX METAL ALBUMS OF THE YEAR 2008 RESULTS

Over the past few years I've gotten really into maintaining an ongoing iTunes playlist where I can slot all the songs I like throughout the year -- which means I rarely forget anything -- but I've sort of stopped caring about ranking music. When I was younger, I placed a lot of value on ranked lists from critics because they seemed to reflect the critics' vast knowledge and authority, and my own lists were largely attempts to emulate that superior perspective. Then I realized that a lot of critics, including ones I admired, just slapped the things together at the behest of their editors and couldn't actually tell you the difference between their #7 and their #6. And even though I was still obsessive enough to try to be true to my own sense of what I liked best throughout the year (especially when I was regularly writing about music), it increasingly seemed like a fool's errand. (At one point I was convinced that the best way to do it was objectively, through playcounts, but that doesn't factor in all the times when I've listened to albums because I want to like them more than I do, or when I've put stuff on just because it's comfortable or familiar or isn't too disruptive to listen to at work.) So 2008 was the first year this decade that I just didn't bother.

http://flavorwire.com/8659/critical-review-an-interview-with-village-voice-music-editor-rob-harvilla-on-pazz-jop

So, I listened to all the top 40 tracks I hadn't heard.

• "Electric Feel" is great. Why did no one whose taste I trust tell me MGMT were worth caring about? Their other song that placed is decent, too.

• The song about wanting to kick Jesus' ass is hilarious and I'm glad people voted for it.

• The Bon Iver song has a good tune and I might even like it given an entirely different perfomer and style.

• Didn't realize Lykke Li is indie pop as in pop that's a little bit indie (acceptable), rather than indie that isn't quite rock (terrible).

• WTF kind of sub-Nickelback bullshit is "Sex on Fire"?

u get tired of electric feel pretty quick

its weird cuz i liked it too at first

I'm sure when I do, I can just move on to the Jim Jones remix. /jo3k

Anyway, do the fuxxors really like indie guitar sounds so much that Hinder+indie guitar sounds becomes something praiseworthy?

i been saying that for years. instead of macho posturing to get laid its awkward posturing to get laid

random side note relating to nickelback: my roomate has nickelback lyrics as his away message right now. i read them and was like "hm, that's kinda rapey", looked it up and voila. Same kid who thinks dane cook and carlos mencia are funny tho, not much of a surprise.

It's kind of inexcusable that in 200fuckin9 they didn't post online links to the singles on a voice youtube page or embedded them in imeem or something.
Anybody related to the paper that can explain why that didn't happen?

So basically, what you're saying is that you're too lazy to even search for them on youtube without someone else doing the work for you.

INEXCUSABLE

you know that's actually a valid poiYAHHH TRICK YAHHHGLLDABAUGGH GLLDABAUGGGH