Pazz and Jop.

tell me more about this sad horse cartoon

I could put together a Top 25 by merging my Nashville Scene and P&J, then filling the last five slots with a few from Uproxx (which will not have been quite the same as P&J, since the latter has given me more listening time) and the Imaginary Categories I always stick into the Scene ballot (Cat Power's Wanderer will be on Related Top Ten; not sure about Most Pathetic since Rushton Kelly seems to be actively campaigning for that, and I don't want to encourage him).
This might be good because I still dig the rigor of putting together a Final Ten: Wussy's What Heaven Is Like gives me a buzz that lasts all day, but still seems to be just another very good Wussy album, good for fans but lacking the kind of distinguishing characteristics we get with, say, Attica!. The same could be said of Young Fathers' Cocoa Sugar, but its speedy, stressed vibe and particulars don't need to go any deeper to speak to and for me, much more than the relatively detached shadings (and fun) of What Heaven.... So I may well pick YF over Wussy for P&J (and maybe should not have picked W for Uproxx, but was pressed for listening time).
Or maybe they'll both be on there---anyway, back to the headphones.

Maybe neither one will make it---this is a lifeboat dammit!

Let's say for a random example, Amanda Shires and Georgia Anne Muldrow made just a couple top 10s and don't make the overall top 100. But what if they made the top 25 for a couple dozen people? That could be enough for them to make it into the final results.

― Fastnbulbous, Friday, December 28, 2018 11:57 AM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I feel like a broken record but you still haven't said why the same thing (made only a couple top 10s but appeared in more longlists) could not happen for, say, Courtney Barnett and Janelle Monae

Or like the ease in which Filmstruck lets you watch things like Kurosawa and Bergman or w/e

tell us more about this ease

prob should be in past tense

yeah :(

Well, that was odd - I never got a P&J invite when they first went out, but I just got a "reminder" email, so I logged in and gave them the same Top Ten I gave The Wire (Sons of Kemet, Autechre, Ineffable Demise, Senyawa, Kamasi Washington, DJ Krush, Ingrid Laubrock, Tyshawn Sorey, Henry Threadgill, and the We Out Here compilation).

Cool!

I tried getting rid of my "Overrated" paragraph in the past, but many readers asked that I put it back. People like their schadenfreude I guess - case in point, Pazz & Jop pulled multiple quotes from it. Every year certain people zero in on it at the expense of everything else, so I probably will get rid of it again.

― Fastnbulbous

unsolicited advice: don't write for your "readers", there's little value in feeding your base

to attempt to seriously address your question, i find that having limited resources leads me to skew more obscure. for instance, given 30 slots for nominations i immediately went for stuff nobody knows about - i like the records by janelle monae and the beths, but i don't feel any particular desire to champion them, in contrast, to, for instance, brown calculus. so i'm not personally convinced by your hypothesis that more spaces = more diversity. the only place where having a longer list is interesting, imo, is in the _aggregate_.

^This sounds like Katherine’s point about more slots just leading to more “consensus” picks

wait ...

not sure about Most Pathetic since Rushton Kelly seems to be actively campaigning for that

dow, what do you mean by this?

^This sounds like Katherine’s point about more slots just leading to more “consensus” picks

― underqualified backing vocalist (morrisp)

i think she's right!

xpost, oh good you got the ballot. I was doubting myself (only a little) about the P&J database.

xxxp Hi Alpine. What I mean is, on Dying Star, Ruston Kelly, an avowed fan of Cobain, profanes his memory with the most abject, sniveling apologies for being such a bad, shitty no-good, black sheep, loser, fuck-up, hopeless, when will I ever learn, when will it all be over, little backwater fella, in track after track after track after track, all through the night. Inneresting that he's married to the increasingly positive Kasey Musgraves, who is perhaps overcompensating with the new album, where she's now moved beyond the previous set's bad greeting card verse, beyond bland, beyond anything (but a memory of dissolving vapor trails, mebbe). Kelly eventually bestirs himself into a few flickers of potentially enjoyable pop-country, but too late.

thanks dow. to each his own! i think the RK album is a wonderful collection of well-written, highly relatable and melodically inventive folk-pop songs about being (and wanting to stop being) a bad shitty no-good loser fuck up. if he'd trimmed it down from 14 tracks to, say, 11 or 12, it'd be Top 5 of 2018-worthy. as it is, it's more like Top 15ish.

I voted! In previous years I have always basically treated the album list as The Main Thing, and the songs list as Honorable Mention for smaller achievements. I didn't vote last year, but this year find myself voting the other way around: the song list came first, and the album list is kind of things that seemed great to me, but never quite reached the heights of individual perfection necessary to make the top 10 song list.

Just voted.

What are you guys all fighting about?

Whether to listen to 10 or 1200 new albums each year

and which is better

deadline is noon tomorrow, 9 fuckin a.m. on the West Coast so best to get it done tonight ... in case anyone needed prodding

i did. working on it

i missed it last year because ... i dunno, i guess i thought it was due by midnight or something, like most of these things? anyway.

reminder: this closes in about an hour and a half

(just submitted mine; also, one of the other useful things about glenn's stats is remembering how the fuck I did my score tiers the last time, although every year I change them because the distribution feels wrong)

songs list was rough to make this year, i have about 50-70 tracks i really enjoyed but a real ranking/top ten has yet to clarify itself

I switched up my scoring for the first time and went 12-12-11-11-10-10-9-9-8-8. Seemed cool to do and also appropriate.

Sent!

I think this year I went 17-14-14-10-10-10-10-5-5-5 -- I wanted a clear #1 but 21/12 points seemed too big a gap for the first and second tier, and I didn't want to knock any albums into the bottom tier, especially since giving a sub-10 score is kind of punishing them in the rankings.

obviously I am way overthinking this because very few other people are going to vote for some of these

i did 16-11-10-9-9-9-9-9-9-9

unless something is utterly killing it for me, i tend to go unweighted and i did this year

If anybody else votes for any of my albums other than CHVRCHES, I'll be mildly shocked. If anybody else votes for any of my songs other than Robyn, I'll be stunned. Unless Maura was being coy in Slate and actually voted for "Strange Embrace" after all.

Plus, I only changed my mind on 2 things since voting! So far...

25 25 10 10 5 5 5 5 5 5 here ... I think. I know I ended up with six 5s. Maybe it was 20 20 15 15

Shit! I meant to screenshot before submitting.

i really only had 3-5ish albums i hated to leave out this year ... that's much lower than usual.

Hello all!
Happy new year and thank you for your patience with us. The critic's poll was an enormous success with many more voters than we could've possibly anticipated, and wrestling the data took us a bit longer than we hoped. But, thanks to all who took the time out to participate, that is a good problem to have.

The results will be published this week, with the albums list on Wednesday, Jan 9 and the songs list on Thursday, Jan 10. Accompanying essays will be running alongside the polls.

Side note: If you sent a pitch for the poll it was deeply appreciated, but many excellent ideas pitched didn't correspond to the poll data and so were not accepted. If you're interested in re-tooling these ideas for a Grammys package Uproxx is running, please re-send to caitlin.white (at) uproxx.com as soon as possible.

Thanks again and looking forward to sharing the results with our community,

Caitlin White + Uproxx Music Team

critic's poll

they were only expecting one voter to respond

they were only expecting one voter to respond

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--JqnVnm_u--/getnvb6ucfffvtfqupf4.jpg

https://uproxx.com/critic-polls/uproxx-music-critics-poll-2018-albums/

a somewhat odd list for a consensus critics poll, leaning fairly indie especially compared to the EOY aggregates etc.

nice to see foxing get some love at least i guess

Aviary at #193?????

yeah that was especially strange to me, it unfortunately hasn't been anywhere near the critical favourite that have you in my wilderness was, but only getting a single vote there is still shocking

is there not a page that shows all the singles results? I eventually figured out "thank u, next" was #1 just by clicking on it and finding its individual page, but surely there's a ranking page I'm overlooking.

i think those are going up properly tomorrow

My Uproxx ballot if anyone cares...

https://uproxx.com/critics/brian-oneill/

someone start an Uproxx Poll thread and keep that major-label-tainted shit outta here

lol

Just Gimmee Indie Polls!

I looked at the VV site for the first time in months to see if there was anything about Pazz & Jop yet (no), but what they do have is a whole bunch of Christgau's essays, accompanied by scans of the whole insert for that year. You can get the essays on Christgau's own site, but the scans would be worth looking at for anyone who doesn't have the original copies.

http://www.villagevoice.com/

looks like they're posting one year per day, with 2002 having been posted most recently with 2003 coming up sometime tomorrow(/today)