Who's sitting P&J out this year?
Dave over on Tumblr:
I like voting in it - stayed on board for the Jackin’ Pop year (voted in both polls) and have thought about staying on this year, since for better or worse it’s the only huge critics poll. Glenn McDonald is still doing stats, which alone kind of makes me want to participate. Just wondering if anyone is staging a parallel poll ( Read more... )
I like voting in it - stayed on board for the Jackin’ Pop year (voted in both polls) and have thought about staying on this year, since for better or worse it’s the only huge critics poll. Glenn McDonald is still doing stats, which alone kind of makes me want to participate. Just wondering if anyone is staging a parallel poll ( Read more... )
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And by "It's been decades since they have," I guess I meant at least *three* decades, or ever since I've been voting, or something. Though at least until the mid '80s, I like a pretty decent percentage of the albums and singles that wind up in the P&J Top 30 and/or 40.
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Btw, to answer Dave's Tumblr question: There is not, to my knowledge, any alternate poll. Though there was apparently a new Hinder album this year, and Anthony Miccio has asked people to vote for it again.
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I'm as much a chronic outsider as anyone who got an invite, but I don't see people voting for consensus faves any more now than people were or weren't back when 30 or so critics were fooling themselves into believing in the greatness of Who's Next and The Basement Tapes and Songs In The Key Of Life. People vote for what they think is good. As for their choices gathering into crowds, last year's top five (tUnE-yArDs w h o k i l l, PJ Harvey Let England Shake, Jay-Z and Kanye West Watch the Throne, Wild Flag Wild Flag [whatever that is], Tom Waits Bad As Me [I think seeing this in the poll results is the first I even knew he had a new album]) is no more or less evidence of this than 1971's (The Who Who's Next, The Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers, Rod Stewart Every Picture Tells A Story, Van Morrison Tupelo Honey, John Lennon Imagine). The major ( ... )
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Oh yes, this is definitely happening; and what I was saying in my LVW piece was that the snowballing will happen, it's inevitable, there's no way to prevent it. So if nothing else was at work, we'd expect there to be as much or more clustering at the top as there'd been in the early '70s, when there was less information on what other people were listening to.
But there are some countermovements at work, which are (1) the world is at our fingertips, so anyone can hear way more music from many more places, and (2) there's such a large pool of music critics that many more subcults and minicountertrends can develop and have impact, pulling the voting away from just three or so main clusters of ( ... )
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What I think is probably true is that there is more general consensus for a pool of, say, twenty albums. Centricity only measures how close you voted to the Top Ten. I would bet that if you expanded that to twenty or thirty, you'd be able to test how strong the clusters around those albums actually are. Problem is that there are no stats before 2008, when the pattern I was seeing by just taking the #1 and #2 slots had been established for about four years already.
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Why do you say this? What's your evidence, and what's the comparison? Are you saying that in '87 an album that a lot of people didn't give a shit about could nonetheless finish top twenty on the basis of the people who liked it, but now near everyone agrees a top twenty album belongs there? Why in the world would you think so?
I'd assume that lots in the top twenty evokes a "why that?" or "what's that?"* among the many who didn't vote for it, and fewer now are likely to have even heard number twenty than in 1987 (first year I voted), when we had less access to a glut of sound from everywhere.
Or are you saying that something that places top twenty has more agreement among the people who've heard it than something in the top twenty in 1987? How can you possibly know this, and why do you think our psychology has changed since then, anyway?
Or are you saying that, if we take all the people who also vote for an album or single I vote ( ... )
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Yeah, so maybe what's worn me down is that a majority if not plurality of critics nowadays seem to gravitate around a certain aesthetic that's a ticket to boredom to me, if not necessarily always around a particular album. And as Frank suggests, it's not like critics haven't always gravitated around specific aesthetics -- in the 1978 Pazz & Jop poll results, which I think are amazing regardless (despite leaving out lots and lots of just-as-great 1978 albums), the top 26 finishers were rock albums (a good chunk of them punk-related) by white people. (Number 27 was Funkadelic.) That's probably more homogenous than Pazz & Jop has been in forever, but I'd still take it over any Pazz & Jop Top 30 since the '80s, at least.
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