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 or “vote for Hinder” style shenanigans.

I'm voting (also voted in '06, when they fired Chuck and Xgau and, not incidentally, shut the door on me, too). The poll obviously doesn't mean what it once did: it's not going to reveal many surprises, since these days polls and wrapups and sum-ups are all over the Internet weeks and months prior. Also doesn't have the brains on call it once had. But it's the only place where ballots and writers show up in bulk, and it can provide an excuse for mass taking-of-stock all over the Web, not just at the Village Voice site. I remember some exciting ILM back-and-forth back in the day. Better some chance for a mass taking-of-stock than zero chance of a mass taking-of-stock, and there's no good reason for me not to be part of it.

Given that Pazz & Jop has little news value anymore, maybe the Voice will opt for intelligence, deciding that that will draw the reader. I wouldn't bet on it, or trust them to know it when they see it, but I can hope. Not that I'm likely to notice if they do: I haven't been reading their or most people's year-end talk for years. But I'll surely look at a lot of ballots. Looking at ballots is how Trevor Link found me last year, and therefore how I found him.

Mid year I'd have guessed that the Korean track most likely to garner multiple votes would be Sistar's "Alone." This was before "Gangnam Style." Don't know if anything other than "Gangnam Style" will exceed "I Am The Best"'s seven votes last year.

Speaking of Dave, a.k.a. DJ Bedbugs, this is the first year a friend of mine is a serious candidate for my albums ballot.* But he's also someone whose lists I'm checking for overlooked music. It would be ironic if something he recommends knocks him off my ballot. Am listening right now to the Dave-recommended Rebirth, by Jimmy Cliff; has a couple corkers ("One More" and "Bang"), but I don't know if there'll be enough to carry it through.

Currently on the bubble: Serebro, Miss A, DJ Bedbugs, Orange Caramel, Jewelry, Taylor Swift, After School.

*Iirc. Maybe I voted for a friend or two in years past and have forgotten.

Comments

(Chuck Again)

[(Anonymous)]

What you’re saying makes a lot of sense, Frank. And it had already occured to me that, if the stats Dave is citing is true, and winning P&J albums in recent years have actually drawn far lower rather than higher percentages of total votes, that voters may actually be acting more, not less, independently – that the voting has become less of an perfunctory daisy chain, or whatever. Though I would think the real statistic to look at might be the centricity rankings that Glenn McDonald computes every year – whether more voters are bunched toward the top end than used to be. (Then again, Billy Altman, whose ballot you cited, was ranked 185 out of about 700 voters in the chart I’m looking at, for what it’s worth – so his ballot skews much closer to the overall results than most ballots do . And right, even then, his ballot doesn’t seem to be particularly slavish or conventional .) So I wonder why have this perception, which statistically, doesn’t seem to hold much water. Partly it’s that it seems like, these days, it’s impossible not to see groundswells of support for certain albums (certain albums I almost never care about – which is probably significant) snowballing through the year, and especially picking up steam once publications’ and websites’ best-of lists start hitting the street around Thanksgiving; I hope you’re not denying that *that* has changed – I saw nothing like it in my first couple decades of voting in the poll, and back then I thought a lot more about Pazz & Jop than I do now: I notice it without even really paying attention.

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.

Re: (Chuck Again)

[(Anonymous)]

"...the stats Dave is citing ARE true," obviously. (Among other typos, I'm sure.)

Re: (Chuck Again)

[koganbot]

Partly it's that it seems like, these days, it's impossible not to see groundswells of support for certain albums (certain albums I almost never care about – which is probably significant) snowballing through the year, and especially picking up steam once publications' and websites' best-of lists start hitting the street around Thanksgiving

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.

Re: (Chuck Again)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

My stat is way more rudimentary than Glenn's centricity ranking -- basically just tallies what percentage of the overall number of voters the top two albums got. You see a sharp decline between the 90s and the 00s.

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.

Re: (Chuck Again)

[koganbot]

What I think is probably true is that there is more general consensus for a pool of, say, twenty albums

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.

Re: (Chuck Again)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I rescind that -- I think it's more my list fatigue talking. It feels like I see the same albums a lot before P&J publishes, but that speaks more to my own tendency to look at all those lists (and accordingly listen to the albums, usually) than anything else. "I've seen this before" is the result of my access to the stuff I've seen.

Re: (Chuck Again)

[(Anonymous)]

there is more general consensus for a pool of, say, twenty albums


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.

Re: (Chuck Again)

[(Anonymous)]

Oops, Dave quote now voided apparently. But most of what I wrote under it still stands, I think.

Re: (Chuck Again)

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

This seems more reasonable, and I think it connects to the idea that who's leading the (milder) winning albums voting pack has changed over time. Which IIRC is partly what your "consensus" article(which was only called that in the headline) was talking about -- the changing of the guard from the boring-and-I-know-it daily grind reviewers and the boring-and-I-think-it's-provocative indie guard. (I still like a lot of indie OK, I just no longer think it's usually daring or important.)

Re: (Chuck Again)

[koganbot]

As for laziness, I'd say that through the early and mid '70s Pazz & Jop's voting pool was likely above average in originality and intelligence, but that's just because it was still close to the pioneering days of rockwrite, and the originators with new ideas are the ones who'll risk 'em on a new enterprise. But of course, with P&J (as opposed to the music section itself) Christgau was seeking the average; in the early-to-mid '70s he just didn't have access to it yet. Averageness came later. But I doubt the species has gotten lazier in the last thirty-five years. And as for people voting for what they should rather than what they like, I doubt this is more a factor now than in the past. I think most people mostly vote their guts (and listen with their guts); and most people's guts are as middlebrow and conventional as the rest of their bodies. They find what they vote for very moving. I wish they'd use their minds more.

Re: (Chuck Again)

[(Anonymous)]

I have to wonder, though, whether the electorate hasn't gotten dumber over the last ten years or so -- Seems to me like at some point the influx of anybody-can-do-it blog critics diluted the pool. (Not that your average blog critics are dumber than your average print hack, except that...well, a lot of them are.) I definitely don't get nearly as much out of the comments as I used to. Though part of that could be me losing interest, part of it could be no Xgau around anymore to select the best comments and arrange them into a coherent conversation, part of it could be voters (like me -- I haven't sent in comments since I left) just not being as inspired anymore to come up with good comments, what with the comments not appearing in print, Christgau not providing a backboard to bounce off of, the New Times draining life from the Voice, there being no real conversation to join into, the Internet providing better conversations all year long to join into, etc.

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.

Re: (Chuck Again)

[(Anonymous)]

Of course two reasons the early '70s weren't P&J's high point (which is what I meant, not "highlight") is the Xgau's essays were really short before 1977 or 1978 and hadn't fully gelled into interesting commentary yet, and he didn't start printing voters' comments as sidebars until 1983 (when I supposedly inspired him to start.)