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... )
After "liking" his post, and noting some people disagreeing with it (saying that you should only vote if you vote for your very favorite records, after which some people replied that it's not like they like their favorite album all that much more than their 50th favorite album anyway), I replied thusly: "I basically do this every year anyway, without even thinking about it -- AND they're my painstakingly calibrated no-lie favorite records, after comparing and re-comparing scores of times. There's no difference; I don't have to bump up or give mercy points to anything. But I'm lucky, in that my tastes rarely align with any consensus anyway. (This year, though, assuming I vote, one album on my ballot is still sure to do really well in the poll, and at least one single will. Still not sure whether I'm voting, though.) (And I'm not saying my votes *couldn't*, theoretically, miraculously align with the consensus someday. It's just been decades since they have.)"
Then, an hour later, I added this: "Anyway, what I like about Nate's proposal is that it helps counteract all the boring people who vote for consensus faves just because they're lazy and can't be bothered to think of anything else to vote for -- which gives those albums votes they don't really deserve. There's no way to measure it, and who knows maybe it's just a figment of my paranoid imagination, but it seems like that's been happening more and more in recent years, as Pazz & Jop follows hundreds of other best-of lists that start materializing before Thanksgiving. ("Oh, people are still saying that album's important? Guess they're right!") It's also one of the reasons I don't care about P&J anymore, about who wins or places (plus, we already know who's going to win anyway, right?) -- that, and that the poll is run in a publication that no longer seems to have any real connection to what P&J used to stand for. And I'm somebody who placed as much weight on that poll as anybody, for decades, and then co-ran it for six years. I owe my livelihood to Pazz & Jop. But I kind of wish, at this point, it'd just shrivel up and disappear. Still think it be depressing to quit voting after 30 years, though. So...I'll flip a coin."
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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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Even before the 2006 craziness, albums weren't winning as handily as they were since any time since (IIRC) the mid-80s, a trend that got increasingly more obvious after Kanye West's two-win (and relative consensus-y) showings.
When whokill won for best album, e.g., it was with the lowest percentage of total voters in what I think was the history of the poll (maybe outdone in 2006 for a very weak Bob Dylan/TVOTR one-two). That means that the real stories are beyond the top tens and even twenties and (with the publication of other lists) even forties. The stories (to me) are mostly valuable in the individual ballots, or clusters of them that are now discernible thanks to Glenn's work doing the compiling. There's nothing comparable to either Xgau's rudimentary archiving on his own website of the previous polls and then Glenn's navigable stat frenzy to go through general musical opinion in a given year, to my knowledge. Certainly the critical aggregators don't do that kind of long tail work; usually they just help all of the middling bloat stay at the top and shove everything else down into irrelevance.
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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 difference I see is that these days indie enthusiasts are by far the strongest constituency in the P&J album results. But top finishers are finishing with weak percentages compared to winners of the past. So whatever the influence of the hundreds of prior best-of lists, it isn't making up for the voters voting wide and disparate with the world at the tip of their pads & keyboards. Anyway, the tendency to cluster is pretty much hard-wired into human biology. It's not laziness or conformity so much as people simply paying attention to what others around them do, and checking out what other people are interested in. Is why my list this year will resemble Dave's, as it has for the last three or four, and why for years it resembled yours. I don't go, "Oh, I better vote for that, because Dave's voting for it," but rather I'm wondering what to listen to and I see he liked Americana, so I think I'll listen to it (and he himself may have listened to it because Xgau liked it), etc. And obv. I'm only going to vote for music I've listened to, and if I don't think I like something at first, I'm more likely to listen again and give myself a chance to change my mind if I see someone who likes it and writes well about it. As for what American and European and Japanese pop music I decide to listen to, I'm heavily dependent on what the selectors at the Singles Jukebox choose.
(I think I wrote well about the tendency to cluster back during my Las Vegas Weekly gig, my piece on the Social Butterfly Effect.)
And my own choices run closer to the world's cluster than do many other voters', it's just that mine don't run closer to the P&J cluster. Last year my albums list was topped by the (at the time) most popular K-pop act in the world, and included another who'd gone viral that summer. But also, if you look at individual ballots, well, okay, let's take the first one up for whoever-the-fuck-they-are Wild Flag. It's Billy Altman! He votes another two high finishers (Adele and Tom Waits), he votes one I voted for (Miranda Lambert), votes some with middling support (Lady Gaga, Gillian Welch [who made my Nashville Scene singles ballot, btw], Ryan Adams), and votes some that only he or only he and one or two others voted for (Dengue Fever, Sarah Jarosz [whom Paul Krugman* likes!], Matraca Berg). And of course the idiosyncratic choices don't have a big impact on the poll. Stuff that someone seeks out without other people's guiding hand (that of other critics, the public, A&R, publicists, your circle, etc.) never does. But that doesn't mean voters aren't seeking.
(And yes, you subject yourself to a greater variety of music than anyone else I know of, and you don't veer towards critics' genres, so of course your choices go even farther afield.)
*A sucker for Very Serious Music.
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So theoretically, at least, it seems we can now see winners coming (presumably Frank Ocean this year) a mile away. That said, though, I don’t think I had any clue tuneyards would win last year; I remember trusting people who predicted Adele. (Even now actually, when Dave mentioned *whokill* upthread, it took me a while to even remember what *whokill* was - I’m still pretty oblivious to tuneyards.) Like I said above, the increasing laziness of voting may well be a figment of my imagination, even if it’s hard for me to shake my suspicion that a lot of voters cast ballots for albums they’ve been convinced are important rather than what they actually like. But I can’t read their minds. And right, if they do that now, didn’t they always? Maybe I trust smaller clusters more than big ones, but it’s also probably hypocritical to pretend my own ballots over the years haven’t also been influenced by others’ recommendations (including yours, a lot - just filed my Nashville Scene ballot yesterday, and two singles wouldn’t be on it if you hadn’t pointed me to them.) Either way, the way best-of season drags on forever these days, and almost always tends to revolve around music whose appeal is beyond me, while excluding most kinds of music that I do care about, has probably just helped me lose my taste for the process. And I’m more and more frustrated that so many critics *don’t* seem to pay attention to a wide variety of music - Though then again, I also feel guilty for ignoring hip-hop and regional Mexican and dancehall and so on myself.
Plus, like Rob Harvilla said on Facebook last week, “Pazz & Jop has sucked since that one guy left.” That said, I think you guys have pretty much convinced me to cast a ballot this year, after all. What makes the poll still interesting, if not nearly as interesting as it was when Christgau was making sense of it all, are the individual ballots, and how they interact with each other, and how people react to the poll once it happens. I’ve been part of that for forever, and it would feel lonely to stop this late in the game. Also, if the poll didn’t collapse when I got laid off there, maybe I shouldn’t worry about whether it dies now.
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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 critical popularity (circa 1981 that's gonna be postpunk/new wave, still-respected rock, and hip-hop/r&b [big surprise looking back is how well Rick James did on the albums list]). But within the subcults and minicountertrends, the same law of cumulative advantage will be at work, and it'll be at work regarding which trends break out from their original critical supporters to garner support from critics all over.
Also, that there seems to be no galvanizing, leading musical force in music right now, nothing like rock in the '60s or hip-hop through the early '00s that seems to be fomenting change and taking music forward on its path, may also be working to cause voting patterns to be more diffuse than we'd expect.
By the way, not that this is relevant to what we've been talking about, but the most interesting idea in my LVW piece* is that there's an ineradicable element of randomness as to what gets popular. Take ten songs of equal appeal and equal promo budget, and they're not all going to do equally well or equally poorly.
*The ideas in the piece being Duncan J. Watts', not mine, though I think he's right.
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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 for that places in the top twenty, that the rest of my ballot will have more in common with those people's ballots in 2011 than in 1987? If this is what you mean, I still really doubt it.
Also, I know I'm fighting a losing battle, but whatever "consensus" means, it shouldn't mean "8 percent of 700 voters put it on their ballot," which is about what you need to reach the top twenty. What we're looking at is "potentially significant clusters," not "consensus," a term I'd reserve for "broad or nearly unanimous agreement."
*Kurt Vile, Smoke Ring For My Halo, 56 mentions.
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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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I saw a lot of originality and intelligence in Pazz & Jop at least through most of the '80s -- I wouldn't say the early '70s were the highlight of the poll by any means. The poll results -- though not Christgau's essays, or the comments -- started to bore me/lose me in the early '90s (and didn't get much better while I was actually there), and plummeted soon after I left. Though that probably has way more to do with my own veering off from focusing on the genres of music most other critics focus on than anything other factor.
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