Will M.I.A. Win Pazz & Jop?

COMMON 2005 MOTHERGRABBERS

metacritic Top 30 2005 Albums Ranked By Metascore
http://www.metacritics.com/music/bests/2005.shtml

1 Arular by M.I.A.

*I haven't heard it. I suspect I'd like it lots.

(haha I think DJ Martian might have just pwned me again...but most of those rankings are from The Big Magazines)

Why did I just call you Mike?

anyway, I hear more buzz on M.I.A. but all that means is I run in non-rap circles, probably

I'd love to know the formula that MetaCritic uses to slap numerical ratings on Village Voice reviews.

Yeah, remember back when Exile In Guyville was burning up the pop charts?

The Decembrists album seems to have gotten good reviews in mainstream pubs and extremely good reviews in indie pubs, so that rating seems accurate. Didn't really see it on any of the ILM lists, though, which is sorta funny.

I'm not trying to argue, mind you. I'm just saying that you totally can win this thing and only have modest sales. None of those Dylan albums were very big either, remember. Or Wilco.

I see white people. And Wilco and Dylan debuted top 20.

(although, neither were forgotten by me!)

I'm influenced here by the fact that Arular didn't quite knock me out the way Piracy did.

but I'm a freak

Ehhh, depends, Tim. I read a lot of interesting things about Love & Theft which elucidated the album and put it in context (Greil Marcus wrote a nice essay right before its release), none of which made me think it said/predicted/evoked 9-11 better than, say, that movie The Siege.

Then the next year, when Yucky Hell Dogshit won, none of the reviews seemed to encapsulate how formless and dull the album was (many of the reviews mentioned the formlessness as a virtue or, worse, saw a reflection of "post 9-11 drift" or something).

So, in the end, it all depends on how a particular critic affects you. Which is no way of formulating a cogent hermaneutics, but there it is.

Ah, but that's probably why the fact of Love & Theft winning is strangely less annoying than Wilco, Outkast etc. despite being more predictable.

I'd hazard a guess that, to some extent, the "importance" of a new Dylan album is now so much taken for granted that it actually had the effect of freeing up a lot of critics in discussing Love & Theft (cf. Time Out Of Mind, which garnered many more annoying reviews, perhaps because critics were still in the business of shoring up Dylan's "comeback" rep).

This is getting repeated a lot, here - see also the polling of MetaCritic YHF reviews, showing that almost every piece mentioned the label stuff.

But YHF was at that time my favourite album of 2003, and still by far my favourite Wilco record. I don't give a flying fuck about the buy-and-sell label/band-drama stuff -- it's a fascinating and evocative album for me, about which I could write hundreds of words. That said, if I was writing a feature on it for a magazine/paper ca. 2003, you bet your boots I would have mentioned the label stuff: as a music journalist writing about the band and the album, it's relevant information! For the people who haven't heard Wilco or don't know anything about the record, it might be interesting (see also 50 Cent's gun wounds, MIA and the Tamils, Kanye and the injury, The Beatles and their squabbling, Annie being from Norway, etc etc). It's unfair to Wilco (and to many of the critics who voted for them) to say that we were all blinded by that narrative.

I do think that the narrative impacted the amount of press the band received (it's easier to write a feature about an album-with-a-Big-Story than about one without), and certainly that affected the number of people who heard the record, but I think it's a correlative relationship and not a causative one.

Sufjan won't place high because he's doing 50 States -- but the 50 States project certainly brought him out onto the front pages of arts sections and made people listen (and in some cases fall in love).

And also because *it's* a way more boring album than *Love and Theft* (and possibly one of Dylan's dullest ever, though I won't pretend I've actually attempted to keep up for the past several decades.)

>it's disturbingly overwhelmingly primarily a good old boys club of straight white males, that the republican party is more diverse, and that this pattern is only getting worse.<

All three accusations are gross exagerrations (nah...they're complete horseshit), especially the last one, though if James cites the figures that convince him that the percentage of either (1) those sent ballots or (2) those actually voting who are either straight, white, or male has increased over the decades, I'll definitely listen. More likely, it fluctuates slightly from year to year, with a general upward trend among gay, non-white, and female voters both balloted and participating. (On the other hand, is the straight white male % still way higher than I wish it was? Again, obviously yes.)

People in general seem to like narrative and meaning. It's not a necessity, but it is often a plus. Furthermore, in daily/weekly periodicals there is also something of a bias towards "news" and "journalism". So if there are interesting news stories to be told, they are going to get told. And records are going to get reviewed the week they are released (which from the standpoint of criticism is outrageously silly, and practically guarantees low quality).

That said, personally:

(1) YHF was my favorite record of 2003, too, and I didn't give a hoot about the label story. The stream of it was probably my favorite record of 2002 -- the first time I heard it, I was floored, and I listened to it three times through straight. Without being bored at all. I like it much more than Summerteeth and Ghost, both of which I like plenty.

(2) I thought Love & Theft was boring and inconsequential, and decent only by comparison with other even more boring, inconsequential stuff Dylan has done in the last 30 years. Greil Marcus' appreciation article, while not the worst, most self-indulgent piece of writing ever, was probably the worst, most self-indulgent piece of writing about music by a writer I respect in a high-prestige publication this decade.

(3) I like big-meaning stuff, and I dislike big-meaning stuff. The same goes for fun, no-meaning pop. Sometimes one is my favorite, sometimes the other; it actually kind of depends on the music. I'm not so sure where M.I.A. fits -- sure, the story is a great hook, but the music undermines the story all the time (which is part of what's fun about it). I don't think there's a whole lot of Big Meaning in Galang, Hombre, or Amazon, all of which curl my toes, beyond their general cross-culturality, which is hardly unique. (So far this year, M.I.A. is definitely my favorite, although there have been a lot of records I have liked a lot.)

(4) While the Big Meaning critique arguably applies to YHF, or Love & Theft, or College Dropout, or even Speakerboxx/Love Below, I have a hard time seeing how it applies, say, to Stankonia, another P&J winner. People vote how they vote. I usually find P&J interesting and fun, but rarely for who "wins". It's more who pops up unexpectedly in the top tier, and who drops a few rounds below their expected draft positions. Every year, I wind up buying a record or two principally because P&J tells me I should have paid more attention to it, and usually P&J is right.

xp

oops, I mean, "sometimes they're not not all of the above, and often they're *none* of the above." Or something. But this is obvious, right? Not only straight white male critics have boring tastes (and not everyone who votes for those artists I've named is boring either.)

That said, I think this less indicates that the criticism is invalid and more that the fight involves changing people's critical standards rather than simply forcing them to listen to other albums.

Haha! totally OTM! it is...also there's this local mpls website i'm totally ripping off too called double indemnity

Yes precisely.

"occasionally." right.

Singling out two atypical pieces (one of which people willfully misread, the other of which was called out by name in the Voice the very next week) really doesn't prove much. I'm glad my Voice editors in the '80s published pieces by me they disagreed with, too.

This week's lead review, by the way:

http://villagevoice.com/music/0545,morgan,69741,22.html

still willfully misreading after all these months.

(not that i'm attacking that review, i just think it's completely mistaken :)

let's all take one step back from the internet

Bardeux feat. Acacia sound like Stacey Q.

uhhh...