koganbot | 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 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.

Current Music: Sistar "Alone"

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

From: (Anonymous)

Still don't know what I'm going to do. Nate Patrin had posted thuswise on Facebook last night: "A suggestion for people abstaining from or concocting protest ballots for Pazz & Jop: fill out a ballot, but put the least-touted, most-underrated favorites of yours on it. Even if you think Frank Ocean or Kendrick Lamar or Sky Ferreira or Fiona Apple put out the 'best' music of the year, that doesn't matter; they'll receive their hard-earned due elsewhere. What matters is using one of the most well-organized and public polls in music criticism to deliberately tilt things away from the consensus while still being honest about stuff you like that might not get exposure otherwise."

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."

From: (Anonymous)

(And fwiw, of course I know "consensus" is a lazy misnomer. But it was late, and I was too tired to think of a better word.)

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.

From: (Anonymous)

(Or Top However-Many-Singles-They-Listed.)

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.

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

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.

Edited Date: 2012-12-18 06:46 pm (UTC)

From:

koganbot

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

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.

Edited Date: 2012-12-19 03:50 pm (UTC)

From:

koganbot

UPDATE: It turns out that a Wild Flag track ("Future Crimes") crawled onto my computer at one point, I know not how; but I now remember the aggegation: a couple Sleater-Kinneys plus a couple more luminaries. The actual physics of rock 'n' roll still escapes them, but the tune and the effort move me. (Sweetly atmospheric "oo-oos" hover above busy guitar figures. [7])

From:

koganbot

Here's a power law graph of "ranking of popularity" (with a long tail) that I filched from Wikipedia:

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

I don't know if P&J results fall under a power law, and I barely know any math anymore and couldn't tell you what a power law is. Wikip: "If the frequency (with which an event occurs) varies as a power of some attribute of that event (e.g. its size), the frequency is said to follow a power law. For instance, the number of cities having a certain population size is found to vary as a power of the size of the population, and hence follows a power law," the word "power" meaning squared, cubed, taken to the fourth power, taken to the fifth power, etc. If the number of cities varies as a power of the size of the population, you'll get (this is from Wikip's entry on "Rank-size distribution") a large city "with other cities decreasing in size respective to it, initially at a rapid rate and then more slowly. This results in a few large cities, and a much larger number of cities orders of magnitude smaller." You find something like that with radio play, Website hits, and, I assume, Pazz & Jop voting, though again I don't know if these exactly follow power laws or just look like they do at a glance. But way more acts will get six votes than will get twelve votes, way more will get twelve than eighteen, and so on. This is how these things tend to work, and even if everyone searched and voted with the great seeking that you do, the result would still be a small number of acts with a lot of votes and a lot of acts with a small number of votes. If you vote "Gangnam Style," "Merry Go Round," and a bunch of Dev and K-pop and metal that only a handful or fewer of ilXors vote for, and a lot of other people vote "Gangnam Style," and some other people vote "Merry Go Round," and then their votes scatter along their idiosyncratic interests, we'll look at the poll results and say, "Everyone's copying each other and voting for 'Gangnam Style.'"

(My guess is that "Thinkin Bout You" wins, but I'm hardly the one who's paying attention to this. "Gangnam Style" and "Call Me Maybe" will do reasonably well, but there'll likely be a few respecto-soul or respecto-indie or ambitious-sounding hip-hop tracks that'll edge them out, as there often are, though I have no idea what they are this year or if I'm right this time. Kendrick Lamar? Miguel?)

Edited Date: 2012-12-19 03:43 pm (UTC)

From: (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.

From: (Anonymous)

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

From:

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.

Edited Date: 2012-12-19 10:44 pm (UTC)

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

I think it will likely be "Gangnam Style" or "Call Me Maybe." Frank Ocean will split votes between "Thinkin Bout You" and "Pyramids." Grimes will probably split votes between "Genesis" and "Oblivion" (would have pegged "Genesis," which got a lot of indie/alternative/college airplay this year, but Pfork just voted "Oblivion" #1). Kendrick Lamar will probably place top ten for (if I had to guess) "Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe" (which will get lots of votes from people voting for album tracks from their fave albums). Miguel's "Adorn" will do well, and I would guess that Usher's "Climax" might do OK.

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

Tried to get all the way through the Frank Ocean album again today and found it to be a real chore. When it wins, it will probably be the most boring record to win since 2006, or maybe the TVOTR win in 2008. (Aside from their first EP I think TVOTR is the most consistently boring band on the planet.) Or Animal Collective in 2009, though that one's not so much "boring record" as "bad record getting inexplicable acclaim" (and I liked Animal Collective a few albums prior).

From:

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.

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

FYI, here's the informal number work I did for 90-99 and 00-09.

http://cureforbedbugs.tumblr.com/post/346346664/p-js-1s-and-2s-1990-2009

From:

koganbot

I liked hunks of the 2006 winner:

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From:

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.

Edited Date: 2012-12-19 10:10 pm (UTC)

From:

koganbot

Forgot about "Oblivion," which is pretty mere compared to 2011's "Vanessa," which I placed on my long list. "Oblivion" is interesting as an Everlys/Del Shannon/Beatles melody put under restraints and behind a filter, which maybe is necessary so that it doesn't sound empty and regressive altogether. And no doubt many people find the restraint deeply moving. But there's a chasm of achievement between Evs/Shannons/Beatles and this stuff, which lacks the old stuff's thrill and outrageous beauty. Meanwhile, for new stuff, I've got Shinsadong Tiger, hence a new Ev-Shan-Beatle, just for the taking. Of course, from what I know of Grimes' taste,* she's got Shinsadong Tiger, too.

*But I've yet to click on that Grimes interview you linked on Tumblr.

From:

koganbot

will probably place top ten for (if I had to guess) "Bitch Don't Kill My Vibe"

'Cause it's the Lamar that sounds most like it was produced by Grimes?

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

I've never actually heard it! Haven't listened to Kendrick Lamar yet. I think most of my positive discoveries are fairly spontaneous (i.e. I listen to things my friends listen to because it's in my frame of reference from hanging around friends, not because I'm thinking "I must learn to like what my friends like," though that might be some part of it) but my ignorances are often deliberate reactions to stuff that other people are talking about in ways that put me off. I do quite like the Grimes album in a "bubbling under my top twenty" sort of way, though.

From:

koganbot

I recommend Lamar, though I haven't heard the album yet. He employs sound filtering that sounds accidentally (I assume) similar to indie (think he's trying to evoke dope and alcohol haze, not indie distance; also think he's ambivalent about the moral value of livin' the haze). Here are a couple of good ones:

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From:

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.

Edited Date: 2012-12-19 10:42 pm (UTC)

From:

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.

From: (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.

From: (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.

From: (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.)

From: (Anonymous)

Think another big single could be that boring Gotye hit I can never remember the name of. And wouldn't be shocked if singles by Alabama Shakes and Mumford & Sons (both of whose tepid albums should also do real well with more trad daily paper hack types) place in the Top 10.

By the way, Frank, here's a long review of the Mumford & Sons album I wrote for Spin, in case you never saw it:

http://www.spin.com/reviews/mumford-and-sons-babel-gentlemen-of-the-roadglassnote

And while I'm at it, an even longer review of the new Ke$ha album:

http://www.spin.com/reviews/kesha-warrior-rca

From: (Anonymous)

I think I got through both the Ocean album and the Miguel album twice sometime in the summer or fall, paid at least perfunctory attention but couldn't hear at all what the big deal was, and moved on. Best I could tell, and I'm probably way off on this, they reminded me of mid/late '80s starting-to-go-downhill Prince, only not as good. Especially Miguel, who seemed to have a lot of "Raspberry Beret" tweeness in him. Got the idea that he's a better singer than Ocean, but neither of them seemed all that great at it.

Didn't even get through the Kendrick Lamar album when I tried last month. Maybe half of it. Though maybe (at least Frank's post suggests this) I just wasn't listening for the right things. But really (and something Dave said here mirrored this I think), these kind of overwhelming critic favorite albums just seem like work to try to get into (and actually, most hip-hop albums since the '90s have also seemed like worth to get into for me, so I've got a double blindspot there.) Though at least I tried with these three albums, which is more than I can say for, say, Fiona Apple.

Saw 15 minutes of Japandroids live at SXSW, and that told me all I needed to know about them. Ick.

From:

koganbot

Any guesses as to how Sleigh Bells'll do? I'm not tuned in enough to know, but it seems as if this year's album, which is better (or at least not worse) than their first, has been getting a lot less attention. Was surprised how many had a tepid response to "Demons" on the Jukebox (though the Jukebox are a small, always shifting, not typical sample).

From: (Anonymous)

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

From: (Anonymous)

overwhelming critic favorite albums just seem like work to try to get into

Which is to say that I'm kind of at the point in my career when, if I'm going to listen to something primarily out of professional duty, I kind of want to get PAID for it.

most hip-hop albums since the '90s have also seemed like worth to get into for me

Like WORK, I meant...And I still like plenty of them (and love even more singles), but to be honest I don't even return to those great old Eminem and Ying Yang and Mannie Fresh and Trick Daddy albums much. If at all. Though I did find a cool double-vinyl copy of Field Mob's From The Roota To The Toota in a dollar bin this year. Not as good as my memory thought it was, but not bad.

From:

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.)

From:

skyecaptain.livejournal.com

Sleigh Bells will probably be in the top 40, but no songs or album making any waves. Figures that when they click with me everyone else has moved on to the next thing -- but I'm not seeing them show up in year-ends, and I don't think they speak to the "silent minority" of people who will probably vote for the new Dylan and Springsteen (and maybe Leonard Cohen) albums into the top 20-30. Forgot that Gotye will likely get counted from last year's votes and do pretty well, probably top twenty in singles.

From: (Anonymous)

Didn't read this (and doubt the headline is true), but somebody just linked to this on my facebook feed.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mikebarthel/sleigh-bells-made-the-most-underrated-album-of-201