Who's sitting P&J out this year?

[koganbot]

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

Comments

Re: Chuck Pazzing And Jopping

[skyecaptain]

The relevance of P&J has even shifted since I started following it, around the turn of the last decade (like lots of things on the internet) to a long tail enterprise.

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.