Frank Kogan

Hadn't read this when I posted above. Yes, I had the same thought of the weird almost gleefulness Xgau used to characterize the RS/Pfork result. But he didn't say enough about it for me to get a clear sense of what he was saying about the convergence.

It would be interesting to have other data on the P&J voters -- how many albums did they hear altogether? What were they? I imagine that when you get that granular, you'd find out whether, e.g., whether this group of critics largely listens to (say) 200-300 albums and no others (which would be a HUGE consensus of a sort given how much music is available) or if people really do have radically different listening patterns and happen to converge on a few flagship albums in a year.

My guess would be the former -- that of this group, there's a kind of unthinking convergence on a particular field of music that when examined might reveal omissions (other languages and cultures, other social groups, etc) or might reveal nothing in particular (or, rather, nothing in GENERAL and a lot of messy particulars). And then you might be able to generalize a bit to what social group this pack of critics represents, etc.

Semi-related anecdote that I figure I'll just stick here: Last week I visited my sister-in-law and was kind of surprised when she put on her 2013 pop playlist and played a group of songs that (1) I hated more or less and (2) critics likely hated (e.g. several were featured on the ILM "worst music of the year" thread or panned on the Jukebox) and (3) were broadly popular with her and her friends and colleagues. My open-mindedness (or whatever) to pop music or pop country didn't translate to her own map, even though on paper it would seem like a critical group that puts Beyonce at #4 or Kacey Musgraves at #10 (or whatever she was) might have room for a lot of the stuff. Generic distinction and social distinction weren't meaningfully related. I can imagine a computer that would put her country picks (which I'm forgetting now) on the same playlist with Ashley Monroe, but in practice there was a kind of wall between her listening and mine that had to do not so much with what the music sounded like or where it "fit" but something far more complicated about the contexts in which we listen to the music. (Life contexts, I mean.) I wonder if what music critics really share are those life contexts -- listening habits, sources for reading, philosophies, whatever -- and that the outcome of all that stuff together in a list doesn't matter nearly so much. (Still working this out.)