Pazz & Jop 2008

why do you insist on reading some kind of taste agenda into what I said about those victories?

I don't, Michaelangelo, not at all. In fact, I know you don't have such an agenda, which is why I was trying to get the bottom of what else you think those decisive LCD/ TVOTR victories might signify; you're the one who connected them with the web schism, though maybe I misinterpreted that. All I'm saying is that "decisive victories" and "echo chamber" go hand-in-hand (right, in the case of this year's P&J, too), and I don't necessasrily think that's a positive thing. Didn't mean to imply you thought otherwise, though I'm curious what you do think. (Above, you connected this year's P&J's results to the "web-generation schism" and said P&J singles tastes were rock-entrenched, which seems to me naturally begs a question; I'm just trying to find out how you think the results might have turned out differently with a less entrenched voter group.)

And at this point, to be honest, the idea that adding a few techno or hip-hop voters here, a few metal or world voters there, would add up to enough of a consensus in any direction to break indie's hold on the poll seems pretty much like a pipe dream to me. It's not like critics within any of those genres all agree on a year's best records to begin with, right?

It would not break the indie hold but I think it would still be good to have larger subgroups than currently exist. My pipedream is just to get editors at genral interest publications to recognize that they should ocassionally cover non-indie music. Whether such editors would look down to the bottom fringes of future P & J polls and see the non-indie stuff I don't know, but at least it would be there .

Consensus is dull. Adding more voters isn't going to make the consensus any less dull. Adding more albums per voter isn't going to make the consensus any less dull. But both things could make the whole poll more interesting by providing more patterns that can be extracted by analysis. Demographic and genre information would also facilitate more analysis, even including the easy kind you don't need me to do.

But of these four things, one is way hard (getting more voters), one is hard and contentious (getting consistent demographic info), one is a little hard and a little controversial (genre info) and one is fairly easy (more slots per ballot), and even just the last one would give me more data to work with.

For another example of what I can do with more data, here's the poll retabulated to include only the 47 voters who by my count voted for at least 3 rap albums. My list of what's rap and what isn't comes from the voting in the hiphopcritic.com poll, plus a handful of additional artists I looked up and flagged after checking the ballots of people who voted for the first set:

28 - Lil Wayne - Tha Carter III
20 - Q-Tip - Renaissance
19 - Erykah Badu - New Amerykah, Pt. 1: 4th World War
17 - Kanye West - 808s and Heartbreak
15 - TV on the Radio - Dear Science
12 - T.I. - Paper Trail
10 - Roots - Rising Down
10 - Young Jeezy - Recession
9 - Nas - Untitled
7 - Portishead - Third
7 - Santogold - Santogold
7 - Vampire Weekend - Vampire Weekend
6 - Flying Lotus - Los Angeles
6 - Ne-Yo - Year of the Gentleman
5 - Adele - 19
5 - Black Milk - Tronic
5 - Coldplay - Viva La Vida, or Death and All His Friends
5 - Estelle - Shine
5 - Foreign Exchange - Leave It All Behind
5 - Hold Steady - Stay Positive
4 - Bon Iver - For Emma, Forever Ago
4 - Cool Kids - Bake Sale
4 - Gaslight Anthem - '59 Sound
4 - Girl Talk - Feed the Animals
4 - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!
4 - Scarface - Emeritus
4 - Solange Knowles - Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams
4 - The-Dream - Love/Hate
3 - Atmosphere - When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold
3 - Bun B - II Trill
3 - Drive-By Truckers - Brighter Than Creation's Dark
3 - Guilty Simpson - Ode to the Ghetto
3 - Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair
3 - Jazmine Sullivan - Fearless (Jazmine Sullivan)
3 - Jazzanova - Of All the Things
3 - Ludacris - Theater of the Mind
3 - Murs - Murs for President
3 - Nine Inch Nails - Slip
3 - Raphael Saadiq - Way I See It
3 - Steinski - What Does It All Mean? 1983-2006 Retrospective
3 - Taylor Swift - Fearless
3 - Usher - Here I Stand
3 - Wale - Mixtape About Nothing
3 - Z-Ro - Crack

xpost to Chuck:

I don't know how this year's would have turned out--I really didn't pay any attention to how which albums were doing with critics generally, though obviously I know what certain people thought of certain things. I knew I wasn't in the race this year and I was fine with that.

I think LCD and TVOTR's victories just signified younger fan bases; in fact (as was pointed out, which I wish I'd remembered to write the first time, since I'd intended to), the younger skewing is why Dylan finished sixth in I.P. (and first in P&J). In my '07 essay I talked about how I was prepared for a dogfight and it never came; then P&J came out with the Top 3 knotted close together. So my prediction had some substance, just for the other poll. Idolator had a lot of the voters were bloggers who'd never voted in P&J, and I think more of them vote for singles, and I think that boosted "Umbrella."

I think an echo chamber is inevitable; it's human nature, and I agree and disagree with it, but I don't feel like there's much I can do about it. So having an opinion about it seems kind of pointless to me, unless it's about specific instances where I agree with it or don't. As far as the singles tastes of P&J voters being "rock-entrenched," I should have just said what I meant, which is that old people voted for "Rehab" because it sounded like an old record and young people voted for "Umbrella" because it sounded like a current one. (I like both records a lot.)

get editors at genral interest publications to recognize that they should ocassionally cover non-indie music.

Not trying to be a crank this morning, or an apologist, but what publications don't already do this? (Do agree they could all do it more.)

Don't most general interest publications tend to cover mainstream, major-label music more than anything?

yeah newsweek is always going on and on about wolf parade and animal collective

Assumed he meant Spin/Blender/Rolling Stone (though yeah, they all tend more toward big-leagers too, as far as I can tell. Or at least bigger indie acts.)

old people voted for "Rehab" because it sounded like an old record and young people voted for "Umbrella" because it sounded like a current one

Yeah, that makes sense, and it's what I figured you meant. (As does the other stuff you said. Thanks!)

poll retabulated to include only the 47 voters who by my count voted for at least 3 rap albums

So the Knux's votes came almost exlusively from voters (like me, I admit) who listed almost no other rap? (Or did you just miss them? Pretty funny if, despite finishing 96th in the overall poll, they actually less turn out to be less troo hip-hop than Drive-By Truckers or Taylor Swift.)

(Same with Steinski, which finished 93rd, and I guess Why?, at 97th -- he used to be sort of hip-hip, right? -- though those are less surprising. Not that Knux are all that surprising themselves.)

Knux voters and their rap votes:

Arielle Castillo - Knux - Lil Wayne
Sean Daly - Kanye West - Knux
Corey du Browa - Knux
Chuck Eddy - Knux
Andy Gensler - Knux
James Hannaham - Knux
Dave Herrera - Knux - Murs
Christian Hoard - Knux - Lil Wayne
James Hunter - Knux
Melissa Maerz - Knux - Lil Wayne
Kembrew McLeod - Knux
Alex Rawls - Cool Kids - Knux - Lil Wayne - Steinski
Ben Wener - Knux

Here's the Metal version from the 26 voters who picked at least 3 metal albums ("metal" labels from ILM Metal poll plus a couple more uncontroversial ones I flagged myself):

10 - Nachtmystium - Assassins: Black Meddle, Pt.1
10 - Torche - Meanderthal
8 - Opeth - Watershed
7 - Portishead - Third
6 - Harvey Milk - Life...The Best Game in Town
6 - Metallica - Death Magnetic
5 - Enslaved - Vertebrae
5 - Genghis Tron - Board Up the House
5 - Sword - Gods of the Earth
4 - Fucked Up - Chemistry of Common Life
4 - Gojira - Way of All Flesh
4 - Meshuggah - obZen
3 - Amon Amarth - Twilight of the Thunder God
3 - Disfear - Live the Storm
3 - Fennesz - Black Sea
3 - Krallice - Krallice
3 - Leviathan - Massive Conspiracy Against All Life
3 - Made Out of Babies - Ruiner
3 - Sigur Rós - Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust
3 - Testament - Formation of Damnation
3 - TV on the Radio - Dear Science

I guess "general interest" was not the best term. I meant alt-weeklies. It is starting to seem like to me that for some daily newspapers and Time, Newsweek, etc. that after covering major-label popular releases, indie-rock seems to be the only acceptable genre to cover that does not have the same number of followers sales-wise.

Alt-weeklies and Spin, Blender, & RS

Pitchfork has some specialty columns.

RS, Spin, Blender, and the alt-weeklies all include reviews of other genres (especially hip-hop), so I'm still not real sure what you're getting at...(Though sure, again, they could all conceivably include more country, African, Latin, metal, electronic, blues, etc. And some do better than others I'm sure.)

(And the reviews could be longer, and there's no reason for them to be so sycophantically "pegged" to release dates or tour stops, etc. Not claiming coverage couldn't be a whole lot better, obviously.)

Yeah, "indie" is a straw man here (which I don't mean as an insult).

"More" reviews of non- alt-rock in publications and websites that cover more than one genre, and more reviewers of such in the P & J is what I would like to see even if it would not change the predominant musical genre(s) or the 'consensus'.

What is up with the Knux votes from non-rap pollsters? I only read about them on rap blogs and wasn't too impressed with anything on the record outside of "Cappuchino." Did they reach somewhere else?

Then again, I only had two rap albums on my ballot, and even that depends if you count Steinski.

I thought the Knux album was a lot of fun (maybe not great in a "hip-hop" sense for all I know, but that's not what I care about -- actually, they sound really new wave to my ears); I gave it a good review in RS, of all places, so I'll take partial blame. (If I had to do my ballot over, though, it's possible I'd vote for Ashlee Simpson instead. Who also sounded really new wave, strangely enough.) No idea whether Knux crossed over to indie kids, though.

The Knux album was the only rap album in my top 20.

I don't really understand where the Knux came from, seemed like they just started showing up on blogs once they had a video for a major label single, got the album out with nonexistant airplay/buzz, and got a ton of positive reviews. Did they just send out a ton of promos?

Aside to Pete Scholtes: those rap/metal recounts were by vote, not by points, and did include you (even though I didn't have Big Jess flagged as rap yet). And no, I don't see any other singles votes for Unk's "Show Out", sorry!

I totally did not get a knux promo and I am on tons of promo lists!

This is going back days and days, but people here are seriously working on some assumed wisdom with dismissing Simon Reynolds's hyperbole about rhythm -- like this couldn't possibly have any element of rightness in it just per ... per what, received arguments? Assumptions about genre? Normal lines of partisanship?

http://tomlanesblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/country-gets-pazz-and-jop-shaft.html

I got a Knux promo, but presumably only because I had the RS assignment. No idea if anybody else did.

x-post to Nabisco

I am curious if you agree with Simon. Simon said "Vampire Weekend has more interesting rhythms than any hip-hop record I've heard these past several years." I have listened to hiphop over the past several years, I have listened to and like Vampire Weekend, I have read Simon's blog posts about rap and grime and whatever over the past few years and read some of his published articles. So while it is possible that received arguments, assumptions, and partisanship were somehow involved in me highlighting that line and disagreeing with it, I think it had more to do with the music involved and me thinking he was completely off-base.

Sure, curmudgeon, that's completely fair, and I think it's pretty clear that dude is deploying some hyperbole there and being a bit snarky about it. There's nothing at all weird about disagreeing with it -- it's just interesting to me as the sort of statement that people will kinda knee-jerk disagree with and not much think about.

I doubt it's super-literally true for Simon, but I think there's an element to it that makes total sense -- it's a somewhat rhythmically interesting record we're talking about, and as much as there's this assumption that hip-hop is by definition more interesting in rhythm than kids in indie guitar bands, I don't think it's patently crazy to suggest that what's going on with the rhythms in something like this caught your ear more than the rhythms in a crapload of hip-hop records that weren't doing anything particularly new or surprising with hip-hop rhythms. You know?

i think it just really rubbed me the wrong way as far as throwaway hyperbole goes--like, explain what you mean by "interesting rhythms," explain which rhythms on the VW record were so interesting, and explain why you couldn't find any hip-hop that was as rhythmically interesting, and then maybe we could have a conversation. the rest of reynolds' essay wasn't particularly strong either (at least i didn't think it was) so it didn't seem like much of a debate-starter.

i mean i didn't listen to much hip-hop this year but a lot of that vampire weekend album is played pretty damn straight (and i like that album, but i'm just saying).

I guess he didn't get a Knux promo either. Hee hee

SR's statement is not necessarily wrong (rap production didn't develop in any particularly notable ways this year, and most of the production trends weren't really rhythm-related), but "more interesting rhythms" is a pretty goofy trump card to pull in the way he did.

"these past several years' to be nitpicky literal implies at least 2 years.

Vampire Weekend actually do have fairly interesting rhythms for an indie-rock band (often taken from early '80s new wave bands like the English Beat and the Police, which was part of Simon's point, I think even if he didn't mention those names -- he said they were Anglophiles as much as Afrophiles, right?) What they don't have, to my ears, is especially interesting voices. And it seems to me that, even going stictly by appropriation of rhythms associated with Africa, the 2008 album by K'Naan (how many hip-hop critics voted for that, Glenn? Any??) had more going on. Also don't think Simon's point came across as hyperbole, if that's how he meant it. (I sure didn't read it that way.) But though I definitely don't agree with him (K'Naan would be the least of the reasons why, too), and I wish he'd been more specific (assume he was pushing against his word count as is), it really didn't bug me. Then again, I don't spend most of my time listening to rap, either.

for an indie-rock band

I feel like this needs to be stressed.

Yeah, that's why I put it in there.

But I mean, I actually think it was an interesting point to throw out there -- that, just maybe, hip-hop isn't where the hottest rhythmic action is going on anymore. Probably a stretch to suggest that VW are (not that he exactly said that, either), but I don't see why such a point should be off-limits. (And right, he didn't exactly spell out what "interesting" means.)

K'naan only got four votes, period:

Christian Hoard (Lil Wayne, Knux)
Keith Harris (no rap)
Max Berry (Kanye West, Lil Wayne)
Tom Hull (Roots)

I didn't listen to the K'naan because it looked super wack.

Ha ha, that's probably part of why I did listen to it. (Hip-hop could use more wackness these days.)

that, just maybe, hip-hop isn't where the hottest rhythmic action is going on anymore.

this would indeed be a point worth discussing, which makes the fact that it was a throwaway line in a piece about VW all the more irritating.

i think its a problem because the way i read 'interesting rhythms' is like him saying 'the rhythms they are taking from are more exotic to me than rap music which ive been hearing for awhile' but because as a group VW (who i have nothing against personally) took from a genre that isnt as high profile here (assuming in fact this is true, i dont recall the rhythms being particularly crazy but ill accept it for the sake of argument) its inherently more worthwhile -- not more worthwhile than, say, other indie rock bands that just take from rap music, but more worthwhile than the entirety of rap music, and its just ugh. i mean seriously what new rap did he even listen to this year other than 'a millie' and 'put a donk on it'?

i mean i know its supposed to be intentionally provocative trolling for rap heads so getting mad at it is just the angle he was going for as an irreverent critic but to me this kind of dismissive shit when im invested in a genre that matters is hopelessly corny. its like cool kid posturing, "HOT: vampire weekend. NOT: gangsta rap!"

and in the context of an essay that begins:

In an enervated year for music,

i mean yeah, he kind of lost me right there.

You know, I don't think the issue here is that VW don't have interesting rhythms, it's that their so damn prissy about them in a way (the vast majority of) your hiphop dudes would never be. In a rap song, the beats usually take an orderly, predictable rhythm, but the vocals are anything but, constantly changing rhythmic shape and focus, creating an immense variety of rhythm within one song. In a VW song, all the rhythms are more or less static, with none of the irregularities presented in most rap vocals.

...it's that they're so damn...

Well, yeah, but if I'm reading Simon right (which isn't always easy), a big part of his point is that VW's prissines is a good thing. (Don't buy that, either, but then I'm not British.)

(Though I also definitely don't think that vocal rhythms constantly changing direction for their own sake is interesting in and of itself, like hip-hop has forever now. Which is probably one reason most of the rap music I love most is really really old.) (Probably a blind spot on my own part, but still.)

this kind of dismissive shit when im invested in a genre that matters is hopelessly corny

Deej this is totally pot-kettle, though, is the whole point I'm trying to make here: surely the main reason you find the claim "dismissive" is the fact that you immediately dismiss the idea that it might be honest, leave alone correct!

(I mean, note that approximately zero people here would have that reaction if someone said "X hip-hop record was more rhythmically interesting than anything any indie-rock band has put out in years.")

Some of VW's most interesting rhythms (to me at least) are fussy 300-year-old baroque patterns that aren't so much "innovative" or "out there" but nevertheless fresh-sounding in the context of the kind of music they make.

im dismissing it because i dont believe that simon reynolds actually knows what hes talking about when it comes to 'rhythms' yeah