Pazz and Jop.

Alfred Soto Tantabara Tal National 10
Brad Luen Tantabara Tal National 11
Christopher R. Weingarten Tantabara Tal National 8
Jason Gross Tantabara Tal National 8
Kevin John Tantabara Tal National 10
Steve Kiviat Tantabara Tal National 10

Crystal Leww Vibras J. Balvin 10
Josh Love Vibras J. Balvin 5
Steve Kiviat Vibras J. Balvin 10

you're welcome!

Too bad there won’t more votes for those. Not enough folks into “niche genres “ participating in the poll

Time Waits For No One

Incidentally, Boy in Da Corner also featured the year’s deepest beats, courtesy of producer Dizzee Rascal. It’s every bit as great a debut album as Run-D.M.C. or Ready to Die or Pretenders or The Clash.

That tune-yards album still sounds good to me---Garbus does something I don't quite get from any other source, and does it well: what counts most with me when putting together faux-lifeboat/triage "Top Ten" (basically a bs premise)
(Haven't done comparative listening w prev albums, don't feel the need. Also don't read many rockrit thinkpieces so no prob.)

I’d take a sip of Kelis’s milk-shake over a lick of Beyoncé’s jelly any day.

AMY PHILLIPS
Manhattan

o_O

conference room etc

I didn't catch this before, but it looks like the Village Voice's archivist and web administrators are scanning every page of their Pazz & Jop issues and uploading them on to the pages they have for Christgau's main essay. Comments, select ballots, even ads...all there.

Just read this one: https://www.villagevoice.com/2019/01/14/1986-pazz-jop-township-jive-conquers-the-world/

It makes for an entertaining read, and interesting who used to vote in these (Vernon Reid before Living Colour, Glenn Kenny before he went into film criticism full-time, etc.)

Whoa, thanks. Vernon Reid's '86 ballot is great. And Jack Rabid's singles, w/ "Tears"!

thank you for posting that, and the link

One of my favourite Marcus quotes is buried in there: "Singles are the pop world. Look, on Top 40 (I don’t care what it’s called now), Pia Zadora could make the best record of 1987, and we’d all (those of us honest enough to admit it) be scurrying to figure out what that meant. It wouldn’t mean anything, other than that the radio is still a good, weird machine."

You're welcome! From the looks of it, it's not until the 1983 poll that the Pazz & Jop issue really begins to blow up, beginning with a comments section for participants: https://www.villagevoice.com/2019/01/09/1983-pazz-jop-who-else-a-goddamn-critics-band-thats-who-else/

Before that year, Christgau's site more or less has everything that was published (except for photos of course - some of the original captions are kind of amusing).

One of my favourite Marcus quotes is buried in there: "Singles are the pop world. Look, on Top 40 (I don’t care what it’s called now), Pia Zadora could make the best record of 1987, and we’d all (those of us honest enough to admit it) be scurrying to figure out what that meant. It wouldn’t mean anything, other than that the radio is still a good, weird machine."

His comments are usually good. For example, in 1984's section on music videos (which used to be a category in the P&J poll), he writes this about "Boys of Summer": "...just as you can't get blood from a stone you can't get an expression from Don Henley's face."

Wished I saved those scans, they've all been taken down and replaced with Village Voice logos. Boooooooooo...

Must be that Orange County, Cali Republican Dude who bought the Voice

So there's a Facebook group called "Village Voice Pazz & Jop Rip-off Poll" and the results were just posted. Top albums are:

1. Wet Leg
2. Big Thief
3. The Beths
4. Beyonce
5. Alvays
6. Horsegirl
7 Spoon
8. Fontaines DC
9. The Smile
10. Kendrick Lamar

Not too many participants into afropop/afrobeats, reggaeton, or r'n'b.

Based in consensus chatter, that’s more or less what I’d expect.

SZA came in at about #50.

and lo, the horny dads shall inherit the music criticism

They’re phrasing it as feminism

Apparently there's some discontent within that group over the final results according to the organizer. I can't find any details though - anyone know what that's about?

Consensus choices for 90s and 80s Anglo rock adaptations largely which I like , but in 2023 I liked other genres as much or more and they’re way down —SZA at 51 , Rosalia at 31, still looking for Bad Bunny, Rema, Asake,

Did see Kruangbin w/ Vieux Farka Toure way down in the 100s

I didn't participate because in December the results already looked like they were going to glaze the eyes.

X-post - one participant said he liked the initial Wet Leg single but he called the album “a piece of sh-t” in a way that some perceived it as sexist, and so others got mad at poll administrator for not quickly condemning/removing the troublemaker. The administrator said he does his best.

The Horsegirl album seems like a real outlier. It was #85 in the Uproxx poll and #47 in Album of the Year's year-end list aggregate.

(Fontaines DC was even lower in the Uproxx poll but #7 on the Album of the Year list, probably because it included more British critics.)

I didn't participate because in December the results already looked like they were going to glaze the eyes.

Same here, more or less. The albums I actually listened to and liked best this year would have had zero impact on the final list, so why bother?

X-post - one participant said he liked the initial Wet Leg single but he called the album “a piece of sh-t” in a way that some perceived it as sexist, and so others got mad at poll administrator for not quickly condemning/removing the troublemaker. The administrator said he does his best.

― curmudgeon, Monday, 9 January 2023 14:04 (thirty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

lmao, clowns

nice to see Spoon sneak in amongst the 'feminism' though, old habits eh

still, it's nice to have results that are so conservative and boring they'll make ILM's look exciting by comparison

(hopefully)

The Horsegirl album seems like a real outlier

An outlier in terms of having not done as well in other 2 lists you mentioned, but aesthetics wise the group which has covered a Minutemen song and has widely proclaimed their love for 80s and 90s Anglo rock in interviews and a Spotify playlist or 2 , fits right in with Spoon, et Al.

Looking at their previous polls, it looks like the results usually end up moving in that direction.

the horsegirl album is good

tbf it is, yeah

but it's very much a tentative debut, much more to come from them I'd hope

but it's very much a tentative debut, much more to come from them I'd hope

― imago, Monday, January 9, 2023 9:35 AM (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

agreed, feels like good things ahead

i don't care about polls so i don't know how it stacks up but it's one of the only of the numerous recent 90s revival albums that had the *feel*

yup. goon as well, a few others

not familiar w.goon will check them out

horsegirl recalls scrawl sometimes a band i haven't thought about in a long time

and well surface to air missive just continually, quietly putting out 90s-inflected greatness (that tbf doesn't truly sound of any time) - consider that my primary recommendation here, latest album good place to start

likewise, will investigate scrawl...

I remember enjoying that Horsegirl record a lot on first listen, but it also felt a bit derivative the more I played it.

On a slight tangent, I was thinking the other day how even great revitalizations in rock tend to revive older sounds. With the Beatles (and the British Invasion), it was reviving the first wave sounds that had receded (Chuck Berry, Little Richard et al). The punk movement was virtually by design hitting the reset button and drawing on older rock, even covering so many of those songs. Nirvana's a bit more unique because they tapped into underground bands that were NOT popular with the mainstream, though quite a few of the biggest alternative bands actually drew heavily on classic rock (Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden, etc.)

There are later pioneers who really do break new ground - sometimes they're so far ahead of their time that they don't sell many records (the Velvet Underground probably the most famous example) - but I want to say that's usually on an individual basis and that big sea changes in music usually have some revival element that's central to it.

An outlier in terms of having not done as well in other 2 lists you mentioned, but aesthetics wise the group which has covered a Minutemen song and has widely proclaimed their love for 80s and 90s Anglo rock in interviews and a Spotify playlist or 2 , fits right in with Spoon, et Al.

― curmudgeon, Monday, January 9, 2023 9:23 AM (twenty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh yeah, definitely. "Outlier" was probably the wrong word to use. But it's the entry that's most revealing of the biases of the voters in this poll.

one participant said he liked the initial Wet Leg single but he called the album “a piece of sh-t”

― curmudgeon, Monday, January 9, 2023 8:04 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

+1

Don't know if this would make any converts, when I went to see Wet Leg at Webster Hall, pretty much every single track came off better live. (And the still-unreleased slow number "Obvious" was amazing.)

I like that Facebook group/poll fine, I found some interesting things off individual ballots. The final results are right in the center lane, but ... stones, glass houses, etc. I totally missed the apparent blowup, and happily too.

yeah same, v little interest in the final results but i keep up with the group bc i enjoy seeing & chatting about lists posted by friends who are not writers & otherwise wouldnt be prompted to share a list like that. i dont spend hours on it but i can usually find some interesting stuff by surfing the individual lists & avoiding the whitebread vinyl dads.

ultimately, it's too bad some established, not-going-anywhere publication/website didn't work with the Voice to move the real Pazz & Jop (including their voter email list) to a new home. doesn't seem like it would've been *that* hard.

Ended up tonight thinking about Pazz & Jop album winners that have one down the most in estimation over the years. I suppose Sandinista! has always enjoyed a special relationship with American rock critics (even the recent RS 500 albums list failed to see it gone. In fact it went up), but these are albums I probably had to do a double take the first time I saw they topped P&J, which would have largely been before I began familiarising myself with RS, Spin, the VV etc and their tastes over the decades: Little Creatures (insane), Ragged Glory (just seems quite arbitrary?), the first Arrested Development (I suppose few albums have fallen the distance this has), Play (especially as this was before it properly blew up commercially), Modern Times (I mean I get it: Dylan), Dear Science and Whokill (feels like years since I last saw anyone mention it tbh!)

I'm always astonished by xgau's singles pick in 93 being Plastic Dreams.

Ragged Glory (just seems quite arbitrary?)

Should be 'seemed', sorry. With that one in particular I just recall being surprised it topped it ahead of Sinead and Public Enemy, who I would have instinctively expected instead. Probably was an important lesson in establishing how seriously Neil was taken even at that point.