My Pazz & Jop Ballot

[koganbot]

The polls keep coming. I made a couple of substitutions and I shuffled the order a little bit from my Jackin' Pop. And I wrote new comments. (I hope that if Rob excerpts from my ballot, he doesn't just take my Powter and Blunt bites out of context. Otherwise, they could read as simply dismissive.)

Frank Kogan's Pazz & Jop ballot, 2006:

SINGLES:
1. The Veronicas - "4ever" - Warner Bros
2. Lily Allen - "LDN" - Regal import
3. Aly & AJ - "Rush" - Hollywood
4. The Pack - "Vans" - Jive
5. Marit Larsen - "Only A Fool" - EMI
6. High School Musical - "Breaking Free" - Hollywood
7. Hi_Tack - "Say Say Say (Waiting for You)" - Gut
8. Fergie - "London Bridge" - Interscope
9. Blog 27 - "Hey Boy" - Magic import
10. Yung Joc - "It's Goin' Down" - Bad Boy

ALBUMS:
1. Marit Larsen - Under the Surface - EMI (15 points)
2. Paris Hilton - Paris - Warner Bros. (14 points)
3. Brooke Hogan - Undiscovered - SoBe Entertainment (12 points)
4. Lily Allen - Alright, Still - Regal import (10 points)
5. Ciara - The Evolution - LaFace (10 points)
6. JoJo - The High Road - Blackground (10 points)
7. Robyn - The Rakamonie EP - Konichiwa import (9 points)
8. Taylor Swift - Taylor Swift - Big Machine (9 points)
9. Cham - Ghetto Story - Mad House/Atlantic (6 points)
10. Alan Jackson - Like Red On A Rose - Arista Nashville (5 points)

Rob - I'll start where I left off 12 months ago, writing to Xgau. I'd raised the issue of why ballads never win Pazz & Jop (unless you're willing to call "Gangsta's Paradise" and "When Doves Cry" ballads). My point was that a 10-best list isn't meant to represent the year in music - my list doesn't even represent my year, just the music I think is best. Yet Bob would use our lists to spark ruminations on the state of music, not just on the state of a fairly narrow group of people's positive tastes. He had interesting things to say, often enough, but so much was missing from the story, stuff we dislike, stuff we're deaf to, stuff we don't notice. The whole shadowland of our hatreds and our indifference, what we adamantly define ourselves against by disliking and what we inadvertently define ourselves against by dismissing.

The most important song of 2002 was Fat Joe's "What's Luv," the biggest of the thug 'n' hug rap-r&b combinations, the one that foreshadowed the present. It got four votes and no comment. It didn't get my vote either, since Joe telling Ashanti he wouldn't go down on her gave me the creeps. It was my number 11 song, and I genuinely believed I had 10 songs that were better. But I'd looked hard for those 10, 'cause I didn't want Joe on there. The song of the year for 2006 is Cassie's "Me & U," an absolutely wondrous bit of ice sculpture, with a normal, human Cassie shining and vulnerable in its light - r&b having totally absorbed the lessons of hip-hop, going for spareness and experiment. Number 12 on my ballot, not kept off the 10 by any antagonism of mine, just a preference for things with more of a blood pulse. But maybe that preference has to do with my not giving two shits about this whole r&b dulled-out romance obsession. (Like, I'm supposed to care that the other guys heard she was good but that he's the one she wants to give it to?) The ethos doesn't connect to me. Maybe if I cared about the ethos, the song's ice would be screaming loud in me, and I'd vote "Me & U" the number one it deserves. I don't know. I think there are 11 better.

Here's a brave prediction: Daniel Powter's "Bad Day" - number one for 2006 on Billboard - is not going to win Pazz & Jop. It's not even gonna be top 10. Neither will James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" (Billboard number four). Powter's song is this half-jaunty, half-expressive, half-catchy, mediocre... fuck it. I don't want to write about it. It's hummable and I hate it. It's aggressively ordinary. (Is it? Aggressively? Or do I just find its ordinariness an intrusion?)

"You're Beautiful" is a ballad. Blah. Sounds worse than "Bad Day," but I don't hate it. Just... (Snore.) It was bought and probably loved by millions, not without reasons, but I don't know what those reasons are.

From the evidence, people who like a James Blunt and a Daniel Powter have trouble getting published in our subarea of journalism. Or maybe they're not the sort who'd consider criticism for a vocation or an avocation. There's self-selection by social class here. Maybe they don't feel they belong.

Of course - no surprise, given that I made my mark twenty years ago as the indie boy who hates indie - conspicuous by its absence from my own list is "indie rock." At its frequent worst, indie is the Daniel Powter of bohemia. A sad, shuffling misfit ordinariness - and some real talents who find ways to undercut themselves: they won't make the effort to find a great singer, or if they do find her, they'll hide her behind fuzz and gloom.

So that's a brief light into my negative space. You need more attention on rock criticism's slush and shadows, what's beyond our taste and beyond our ken.

Comments

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

why isnt when doves cry a ballad?

[koganbot]

'Cause the rhythm that's way upfront isn't a for slow cheek-to-cheek dancing, basically.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I like what you say about Daniel Powter and James Blunt. I get extremely uncomfortable with the mindless 'James Blunt is rhyming slang' stuff that goes on over here, even in places I'd generally expect to be above that kind of slur because clearly, people like him. I can't really understand why, either but that ought to be something of interest more than something that receives the gut-reaction snotty 'eww look at those common non-musos listening to bad music' comments it's had.

My mum (who was delighted this year to receive the new Meatloaf album for Christmas and whose in-car tape collection contains largely Black Sabbath and Motorhead) uncharacteristically last year asked for 'Back To Bedlam' for her birthday. She said she was a bit disappointed by how samey a lot of it was but she likes 'You're Beautiful' because she says the dichotomy (right word? probably not) between the apparently romantic ballad and the fact the narrative is actually Mr Blunt lusting after someone else's girlfriend whilst he's sitting on the tube, stoned off his face, is appealling. I can't really get past the fact I find the repetition of the words 'You're Beautiful' intensely annoying but I thought that was an interesting response to the song. I have the feeling a lot of people just hear it as romantic but still... err, I've derailed my train of thought.

I do find the rise of what you call 'aggressively ordinary' (which is a phrase I like) music interesting. It sells in great numbers and yet it doesn't seem to me to be the sort of thing anyone could buy; I suspect this is partly caused by the rise of iTunes etc. since it's now easier to buy singles but then I also think it might be symptomatic of Terry Woganism, whereby the kids (who are a lot of the aggressively ordinary buying demographic over here, at least, I suspect) are too scared to buy music that their parents/music critics/whoever will say is crap because anything that might have been encouraging them to buy that kind of thing has either died or turned against them or both and kids do, usually, need some kind of encouragement. Then again, maybe that would only be forcing a different set of values, musically, upon them but I naturally think it would be a better one, since it would be one I'd approve of.

My iTunes theory fails to account for album sales, I've just realised, since most people still buy hardcopy albums. Arse.

The other thing is... have music tastes actually evolved much post-Beatles? I was just thinking about that Powter song and it's rather Paul McCartney. I mean, I know The Beatles had far more interesting moments but as someone who didn't hear them at the time, they do sound rather MOR to me.

I forget where I was going with that paragraph or, indeed, this entire comment. I may, of course, have been vastly misinterpreting what you said as well.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

In the third paragraph of the above, I should have elaborated that when I said I couldn't see how anyone could buy agressively ordinary music, I meant that by its very background/semi-ambient nature, it seemed to me that it was something that would be liked by people who didn't bother to buy it, partly due to its heavy radio and tv rotation and partly because it just didn't seem, by its very nature, something anyone would go 'OMG I MUST GO TO WOOLWORTHS AND BY THAT' about. Clearly this is another facet of the phenomenon that's interesting/unfathomable, for me at least.

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I can spell 'buy' really.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I just accidentally deleted a vast response to this :( Summarised points:

- the Powter/Blunt wave is being sold as singer-songwriters - it's the quality of songs and directness of expression that's the selling point.
- but unlike the singer-songwriters of the early 70s they're mostly not being promoted as sensitive souls with particularly resonant or poetic insights, just as ordinary people with the talent to turn their everyday lives into music.
- So the 'aggressive ordinariness' is deliberate, part of the same macro trend as blogging and reality TV I'd guess.
- It's the mainstream backlash against 'manufactured pop' but also against 'overhyped trendy bands' and 'violent hip-hop'. No-nonsense, mass-market, but dependable high quality is the appeal: a sort of musical equivalent of Marks and Spencer maybe?
- Early marker for the trend is Dido.