Pazz and Jop.

https://www.villagevoice.com/2018/01/25/pazz-jop-comments-the-top-albums-and-singles/

so it looks like Uproxx is going to try to pick up the Pazz & Jop torch.

hey twitter -- ballots for @uproxx's first music critics poll just went out. @Philip_Cosores and i did our best compiling a list of who might be interested. if you're a music writer who wants to vote, please send me an email: cait✧✧✧.wh✧✧✧@upr✧✧✧.c✧✧. all are welcome!

— caitlin cristin (@harmonicait) December 3, 2018

reminder: Uproxx is owned by Warner Music.

this bothers me. does it bother others or is it an unavoidable fact of music-critic life in 2018?

uproxx has bigger problems than its owners

https://deadspin.com/reading-product-plugs-from-joshua-tree-helped-me-unders-1822234122

Voting for U2's 'Joshua Tree' Helped Me Understand My Own Twisted Heart

Did anybody here get one of these invite emails? I didn't.

Yep.

I dunno if I want to participate. If you email her, I'm told, she'll allow you to participate.

I don't want to participate. I voted in The Wire's poll and the NPR jazz critics' poll, and wrote a jazz top ten for Stereogum. I'm listed out.

I sent them an email. I love skewing whatever lists there are with my questionable musical taste as long as I feel qualified to make a list. When I stopped writing I didn't. But now I do.

fuck this imo

r.i.p. pazz & jop

https://deadspin.com/reading-product-plugs-from-joshua-tree-helped-me-unders-1822234122

My list is already sponsored by Arby's.

@maura oh I know. besides ownership issues, I can’t really stand the thought of her and P.C. as gatekeepers for “the” big critics’ list

http://cleverbeans.blogspot.com/2006/12/pazznjopnhinder.html

hmmmmm re uproxx, I dunno

Let it die.

Let’s face it, Pazz and Jop was running on some serious fumes those last couple years. It got to the point where all the things that made it special in the first place were gone. Near the end there was no Robert Christgau year-in-review essay, there was no “see what your favorite critics voted for” webpage, there were no Singles Jukebox-y critic blurbs. So in the end all you had left was the same list of albums and singles that I can just go to Metacritic and get myself whenever I want. So yes, let it die.

The last couple years’ P&Js couldn’t even get their own ILM thread.

My own interest aside--I never hesitated for a second as to whether I'd participate; I planned to keep going for as long as they kept me on the mailing list--I agree. Honestly, the actual results lost all interest for me somewhere in the middle of the '90s.

This will be lost to history, but I bet I submitted more Pazz & Jop commentary than anyone this side of Christgau. Only a tiny fraction of it ever made it into print, but from '97 through to last year, I'd send in two or three pages of comments on my singles list every year--somewhere between 25-30,000 words, I'd estimate. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe a lot of voters did that. My sense is that most ballots were much shorter, and that many came in with no comments at all.

Wow, that’s a lot of comments. You’re probably right.

I have no idea how people wrote comments for those, by late December the thought of writing anything is like the thought of scooping my brain out with an ice pick (or rather, more like that than usual)

I contributed comments from 2003 to about 2012, then realized I was repeating stuff from other published things.

I voted. The email I got asked for pitches for essays for what it's worth but didn't seem to solicit comments.

The number and length of comments I send decreased over the years as I got more and more assignments, and the desire to be part of that aspect of P&J lessened somewhat.

I... just got my ballot?

lol I was just coming here to post that

Last year, writing in his Pazz + Jop essay, Robert Christgau called the poll “America’s most comprehensive survey of ‘rock critic’ taste,” and we’re happy to say that that legacy will continue with this year’s poll, as well as the essays, analysis and voter comments that have accompanied Pazz + Jop in the past.

who's doing it?

The email is from "The Village Voice" and says the poll will be posted on their site. But no editor name on the email

Ballots due 12 noon Friday January 4

Yeah, I got an email asking for a ballot as well... Strange!

I'm definitely gonna send them my list. I already have it made up so it's no real extra work.

In fact anyone who wants it I'll be happy to tell them.

it's a phishing scam, but they're phishing for music recs

wonder how uproxx feels right now

Mystified. It's like...a bankrupt store announcing a final sale after they've vacated the premises?

thank god, one more list to tell us that mitski and kacey musgraves made the best albums of the year

Mystified. It's like...a bankrupt store announcing a final sale after they've vacated the premises?

― clemenza, Thursday, December 20, 2018 11:27 AM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I hear if you submit a ballot you get a great deal on copper wiring.

Forks said:
Hi! Could you clarify who is running this poll and how the (now defunct) Village Voice is involved?

D@v1d Sw@ns0n said:
Sure. We have a skeleton editorial crew who are working on the Voice archives project, and given that we have the capability to continue the poll, we wanted to do so. And I’m happy to answer any other questions.

well christgau says it's ok

WOL? LUT? Huh? But just for the record, I knew Pazz & Jop 2018 was in the works and I'm voting. In fact, I'm kinda proud. The list has been updated, and any cross-publication/generation poll will will be better than none. I urge anyone who gets a ballot to participate. https://t.co/41mTiOM5pE

— Robert Christgau (@rxgau) December 20, 2018

Swanson answer is OK by me. Def voting in this. F Uproxx.

lmao wol & lut

but, as i've said before, any effort by anyone to run this thing without updating this site is incomplete: http://furia.com/pjs/table_voter_all_total.html

I would be happy to donate to a Kickstarter to get 2017 updated in there if Gl3nn names his price

i'd love to see a kickstarter to get that site updated for 2017 and 2018, and then start moving backward, too. i assume the voting data is long gone, but it'd be nice to go back as far as possible. that site is *already/still* a great resource .... it'd be even better if it went back a decade or two.

fund it immediately

I'm hoping somebody else will take over. I already told the Voice I would be happy to talk to anybody they could find to be the poll's new statistician. Most of the math I did isn't that complicated, and I can help pass it on. Let me know if you're interested, or know anybody else who might be.

But while I appreciate the notional Kickstarter sentiment, a lot, money is not the issue for me, it's time. And love.

When I started crunching P&J numbers, it was some of the most interesting music data I had. That stopped being the case a while ago.

A part of me is thrilled that the poll might survive, and I did get a ballot and might vote (I didn't last year). But I also spent enough years analyzing this poll, and now analyzing a lot more music data, to realize that the P&J in its honorable and venerable form is not really helping music in any of the ways I care most about. If it didn't exist, I wouldn't be trying to start it. I want some new thing, something far more inclusive and wider-reaching and less arbitrary.

There's an obvious, however partial, sense in which Spotify is that thing: a P&J with 200 million voters and a ballot of unlimited length. You can object, of course, that those 200 million listeners aren't all committed to thinking critically about music, and ballots of unlimited length don't force you to make any hard decisions. And, indeed, just counting streams isn't that interesting, in the same way that just counting P&J votes isn't that interesting, which is how I got involved in the first place. But I basically squeezed as much insight out of the P&J numbers as I could think to. That's nowhere near true of listening data yet.

money is not the issue for me, it's time. And love.

yeah, but ... how much money would make it worth your time

*whiney fans a fistful of washingtons and leers suggestively*

glenn, how do you parse Spotify listening data into conclusions that aren't dulled by this:

those 200 million listeners aren't all committed to thinking critically about music