Pazz and Jop 2010

people vote for what they like, its no big deal really.

and its not really surprising that people vote for an album then vote for their favourite track or 2 from it if that is their fave songs of the year. It's just for some reason that the past year or 2 its beem one genre that is different from before. Plus songs can now be huge in certain circles without getting mainstream play, kinda how Country music has sold shitloads over the years without mainstream play. Eventually some other genre will do it instead of the current corporate "indie"

then of course the fans of current indie will get pissy about it.

i couldn't personally care less whether any of my fav metal albums win a Pazz and Jop poll. it's always annoyed me how so many metalheads simultaneously decry the mainstream ignoring the genre while also complaining when underground acts gain mainstream acceptance (granted I'm not talking about anybody here in ILX, more or less in other walks of life with fellow metalheads).

people vote for what they like, its no big deal really.

― Algerian Goalkeeper, Wednesday, January 26, 2011

this is a pretty stupid thing to say when one thing p&j does is give critics an overview of american criticism for them to look at and wonder abt

This was mentioned up thread, but it seems like it comes down to, "What is each individual person trying to accomplish with his or her ballot?"

1) "People should check out what I like" - trying to get songs or albums on the ballot that you think are important but underheard, i.e., more people need to hear these songs and albums b/c they are good and the cosmic balance would be righted if they are more widely appreciated

2) "We need to figure out the best music of the year-- this is what I think it is"

3) This list provides a corrective to "the best-selling songs/albums of the year"; those metrics represented what everyone liked, this is what is actually good. Same way (x) author will never sell as well as Danielle Steele.

4) We need to comb through what "sold and/or was heard by millions of people" and find out what among that pool was actually good"; I think this is what some dude wants

5) We need to comb through what was "hyped" by indie-oriented sites and figure out what was good;

6) We need to make an "interesting" list of what the man in the street has never heard of. To turn some stones and find music that will be new to most people.

All of these things-- and there are easily a dozen more-- are legitimate reasons for making a list. The question is: WHY ARE YOU MAKING YOUR LIST? And that motivation, when extrapolated to 700 people, becomes P&J.

I'm down with 1, 2 and 6

but the man in the street wont have heard of P&J
xp

ahh yes let's have a man on the street P&J so afroman can take it year in and out, even if he releases nothing

like the best male/female awards at The Brits? ;)

Annie Lennox walks P&J top album & singles for the 30th year in a row

1) In its first 20-odd years of existence, the P&J singles poll was markedly more populist and unpredictable than the albums poll, which made for an interesting counterpoint and went against the grain of a lot of stereotypes about the snobbishness or tunnel vision of music critics.

While I totally see how you could see it this way (and appreciate you spelling out exactly what your point as), you could also look at the 1997 poll and say it takes until #20 for a song to appear on the singles chart that wasn't a really big MTV hit. That's a less snobby tunnel, but if you're going to complain that songs are just indie album artists and songs from pitchfork/stereogum, you could say the wild populist unpredictability of earlier years is still well within a tunnel of its own.

Ehhh, I think the problem with that line of thought is that MTV in those days was open to lots of fairly marginal things that weren't exactly blowing up radio or the Hot 100.

Well, "the tunnel vision of music critics" was a reference to the stereotype of critics turning their noses up at things like MTV so yeah, I don't really see it that way. Besides, while MTV was still pretty central to pop culture in 1997, around the mid-'90s they stopped really breaking many new songs/artists and were mainly following radio's lead at that point in terms of what they were playing. And if I'm talking about critics listening to music outside the internet nerd bubble then it kind of goes without saying that MTV doesn't present problems for me as a primary music source the way Stereogum does (even if MTV in any era is obviously not without its own problems).

xpost - I dunno, Rev, what was in MTV rotation back then that wasn't on the radio too?

4) We need to comb through what "sold and/or was heard by millions of people" and find out what among that pool was actually good"; I think this is what some dude wants

If you're referring to the albums poll, you're absolutely wrong. If you're referring to the singles poll... you're still wrong.

you can even look back at the pre-mtv era and see a real shift as the network gained weight (Ian Dury had the #1 single of 1979, you know).

Well, "the tunnel vision of music critics" was a reference to the stereotype of critics turning their noses up at things like MTV so yeah, I don't really see it that way.

I wonder how much of this stereotype is generational - the fact that the critics weren't turning their noses up at it would suggest that.

you can even look back at the pre-mtv era and see a real shift as the network gained weight (Ian Dury had the #1 single of 1979, you know).

― da croupier, Thursday, January 27, 2011 7:29 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

he also had a #1 on the UK pop charts with the same song

i really don't get why you think American critics liking UK hits with zero recognition here is somehow more "populist" than digging songs from bands that make the top 10 album charts in the US

like, Brit-popular new wave stuff would 100% be the Stereogum material of that time

Yeah, agree to disagree there, I guess. Voting for "Common People" is more populist than voting for an Arcade Fire song that wasn't even one of the 3 charting singles off their album, in my opinion.

"Bloodbuzz, Ohio" went top 20 in Belgium! Game changer.

xp Dury also hit with a two-sided single not from any album. (The 45 was included as a freebie inside certain copies of Do It Yourself, which unlike Dury's predecessor New Boots And Panties didn't place in the poll, but neither song was on the album itself.) And the song that got the most votes in 1979, M's "Pop Muzik," was a #1 pop single from an album that may well have received zero votes. (Xgau's essay: "In the end we decided not only to add all versions of a song together, but--as a tribute to the ancient concept of the two-sided single--to combine the votes for two songs that appeared on the same record. This is how Ian Dury beat out Robin Scott (a/k/a M), whose 'Pop Muzik' was certainly our song of the year.") And -- though this is maybe subjective -- it's not hard to see how both the Dury and M singles were major formal innovations -- i.e., new wave meets disco (meets early rap, in "Reasons To Be Cheerful"'s case) in pop form. And the top 10 that year also had big chart hits (Sister Sledge, the Knack), small chart hits (Flying Lizards), an indie rock hit (Brains), and Brit hits (Specials, Pretenders) from bands who either didn't have an album out yet or, if they did, didn't score on the album chart. (Fleetwood Mac did way better with "Tusk" the single than Tusk the album that year too. And Donna Summer did well on both charts, but had blown up the pop chart too -- both "Hot Stuff" and "Bad Girls" were multiple-week #1s.)

Brains not an indie rock "hit" i guess. (An actual single, though.) Anyway, that is one excellent Top 10 -- really varied, too.

yeah I wasn't saying it was a bad one, just noting the contrast to the MTV era

Also worth nothing you only needed 29 votes to top it in 1979 - if you broadened the polling base back then I think you'd probably see more laziness in some direction, be it "populist" (what you heard on casey kasem) or "indie" (trouser press stuff)

though obv its before my time so I dunno if just the popularity of 7-inches played a big stake in keeping things more single-y and less push track-y.

all I'm really saying, to reiterate a point from the article I linked upthread, is that we can make fun of the group of critics that named Imperial Bedroom the album of the year, but they could've put "Man Out Of Time" or something in the singles poll, and instead they chose "The Message" and "Sexual Healing."

xp Yeah, 7-inches were clearly part of it -- 12-inches (disco discs) too, in some cases. Something critics could hold in their hands.

But my point is that, with both the Trouser Press cult items and the legit pop hits, lots of what seemed to score high then seemed to be songs off albums that critics didn't particularly otherwise care about (or albums that didn't exist). I'd have to look over this year's chart (can somebody else, please? I'm busy), but who is scoring high these days with singles off albums that Pazz&Jop placings seem to agree are definite drop-offs from the band's previous albums? M.I.A.? Hold Steady? (Didn't they put a single in or near the Top 40?) That's what Dury sort of did in 1979 (albeit with a technically non-album single), and Fleetwood Mac, and I think Funkadelic further down the chart (which I also don't have time to actually look at right now.) Get the idea that happens less these days too, but I could be wrong.

Metal - 0/21

― glenn mcdonald, Wednesday, January 26, 2011 9:49 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

apparently no-one should vote for metal because it isn't popular enough and has only had 3 hit singles in 15 years, Glenn.

― Algerian Goalkeeper, Wednesday, January 26, 2011 9:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Dude, I am a HUGE metalhead (and one of the "vote more metal, critics" choir) and even I can see that it's not exactly a singles genre right now. I had Deftones "Rocket Skates" on my ballot, but like I couldn't even think of 10 legitimate, commercially released SINGLES I could put on an awesome metal ballot

Like I'm really into certain rando Rotting Christ and Dillinger and Torche album tracks, but I would exactly call any of them "singles" by any stretch of the imigination.

what i'm saying is, pick your battles

Would die a happy man hearing Casey Kasem introduce Rotting Christ

is that we can make fun of the group of critics that named Imperial Bedroom the album of the year, but they could've put "Man Out Of Time" or something in the singles poll, and instead they chose "The Message" and "Sexual Healing."

Fair enough, but I think this would hold a little more weight with me if if I felt like the p'n'j critics today were ignoring "The Message" and "Sexual Healing."

The "pop needs to be as good now as it was then for this argument to hold water" thing is like...is indie/college rock so much better now than it was then?

I'd put Imperial Bedroom and High Violet pretty even in my estimation

Fair enough, but I think this would hold a little more weight with me if if I felt like the p'n'j critics today were ignoring "The Message" and "Sexual Healing."

― da croupier, Thursday, January 27, 2011 8:35 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think they do ignore much better songs all the time??

I never doubted you did??

i meant much better than the ones they vote for, on par w/ the message & sexual healing, not that there are tons of songs better than those

I'd put Imperial Bedroom and High Violet pretty even in my estimation

― da croupier, Thursday, January 27, 2011 10:14 AM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

if we're gonna have a convenient-comparison-point-off, High Violet finished at #8, the same spot previously occupied by Zen Arcade, Life's Rich Pageant, and Bee Thousand.

i guess i take rock critics rating/overrating indie as more of a given than rock critics remembering to give a shout-out to this year's "tubthumping"

again, i'm not really denying this isn't a trend or noteworthy, but reducing it to "people used to be cool with pop and now they just read stereogum" ignores the stranglehold of MTV - you didn't have to go out of your way to hear that shit. If people don't wanna let "OMG" get its hooks in them, or god forbid prefer some indie jam, I don't think this is a major crime on their part.

that's kind of been my point this entire time? i mean i haven't really bitched about the albums results because it's Chinatown, but the singles results used to go against my more pessimistic expectations of critics and they don't as much anymore. (xpost)

Would die a happy man hearing Casey Kasem introduce Rotting Christ

― eep opp ork ah ah...and that means suck my dick (San Te),

is Casey Kasem still alive?

rotting casey could announce it.

anyway, if you really want to know how the singles list would look differently if all the non-charting songs weren't there and the people voted for singles they way I think they used to --

songs that would move into the top 10*: Window Seat, Teenage Dream, Soldier Of Love, Telephone

songs that would enter the top 25*: California Gurls, Born Free, Rude Boy, Ready To Start (ha), Stylo, Nothin' On You, Airplanes, Dog Days Are Over, Hard In Da Paint, Little Lion Man

*based on what was or wasn't in the top 10 or top 25 on the Voice site last week, not the way it currently is with ties moving a bunch of songs arbitrarily up in rank

to point out what glenn has repeatedly, though

what moves out of the top ten: runaway, monster, power

no, they all charted, so they'd move up from 4-5-6 to 3-4-5. where did Glenn say that?

https://pub.needlebase.com/actions/visualizer/V2Visualizer.do?domain=Pazz-Jop&query=2010+Non-Album+Song+Ranking

that's a completely different set of criteria than what I just described.

oh woops, i thought you were talking about if you removed the people who voted for albums and singles from the same artist xpost