Heart on a Stick
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BLOGOSPHERE NAMES HINDER’S ‘EXTREME BEHAVIOUR’ BEST ALBUM OF 2006 (BEST TWO OUT OF THREE EDITION)
posted 02/07/2007
The 2006 Music Bloggregate
[The Music Bloggregate is a weighted survey of bloggers’ published Top Ten Album lists. The 2006 version features 640 sources and contains mention of 1,421 titles. Head to the main page for the meat; continue below for indulgent blather and cursory comparisons.]
Added 2/07/07 -
You could skim the surface and think: Same shit, different day.
The Village Voice dumped its Pazz/Jop results on corners throughout New York, last night; by the time you read this, the (pick one) venerable/vulnerable music critic poll will have found its way into the pants of every homeless person who matters.
No Cookie Mountain joke, here: Though the TV on the Radio album was the clear frontrunner in both The 2006 Music Bloggregate and Idolator’s Jackin’ Pop poll, Conventional Wisdom (which assumes, wrongly, that every P/J voter has a Viagra prescription) dictated the Voice survey would skew older. And it did. Their top spot went to Helen Mirren. Wait. I mean: Bob Dylan’s Modern Times (#17 on the Bloggregate, #6 on Jackin’ Pop) came in at #1, besting the Brooklyn band by a mere fourteen points; and while Bobby’s score was higher, TVotR received more list mentions (99 to Dylan’s 95).
It’s one of those photo finishes where you really don’t care if the picture comes out. TVotR’s dominance in a humdrum year has already been established, and crowning Dylan for this CD’s a bit like giving Mirren an Oscar for Calendar Girls.
Far more surprising: Not only do the old men of Pazz/Jop love old guys, they also like young boys. My Chemical Romance’s Billy Elliot The Black Parade (#53 on the Bloggregate, #36 on Jackin’ Pop) sashayed on up to #17 in Pazz/Jop, pressed itself right against the hilt of The Knife’s Silent Shout. So you guys spend all your time on myspace listening to bands, right? Kewl.
With a few other exceptions – the side-by-side-by-side’s a bit further down the page – these were the Packin’ Jop results, kerfluffled around. Such an uninspiring consensus in a year when critics couldn’t even decide which poll they wanted to vote in... and that’s an equally uninteresting subplot. The Under New Management Village Gag’s obligatory run at Pazz/Jop VERSUS Gawker afterthought Idlelooter’s PR Grab. The existence of two polls caused overlap, confusion, heartbreak, famine, suffering. Allegiances were formed, enemies were made. And for all America cared, that shit might as well be going down in Africa.
So who cliqued with whom? Bunches – including deposed Pazz/Jop Dean Robert Christgau – chose both; someone (probably someone from here) may come up with a full compare/contrast attendance sheet.
[UPDATE: Glenn McDonald did this - he found 804 total voters, only 180 people who voted in both P/J and JP - and then combined both polls' results. He also created a critical alignment chart and clustered albums by common vote. Zowee.]
Some fun ones, though: Former New Times/VVM man Michaelangelo Matos helped compile Idolator’s poll and found himself banished from P/J... but Idolator’s co-editor Maura Johnston was welcomed in (Nothing from her partner, woeful invertebrate Brian Raftery; he was probably too busy brainstorming unfunny things Ian Anderson’s flute might say). Ex-Voice coverboy Nick Sylvester was back. Voice contributor and Meloy fanboy Chris Ott denounced the Idolator survey, then failed to recommend anything to anyone in the Voice poll (he essayed – mostly about how he fucking hates fucking everything (hopefully, that fucking includes fucking Chris Ott) – but that don’t tally).
While you can have some catty fun watching where each body fell, fall they did: Last year’s Pazz/Jop poll rounded up 795 head; this year’s lassoed a little more than 62% of that. Voice Music Editor Rob Harvilla’s calling this a “rebuilding year” – something that should warm the hearts of Detroit Lion fans everywhere – but fact is he brought home three fewer dogies than the upstart rustlers over at Gawker Media.
The larger Top Album surveys sum up a little something like this:
- Indie for Bunnies – 236 Sources
- The Village Voice Pazz & Jop Critics Poll – 494 Ballots
- Idolator’s Jackin’ Pop Critics Poll – 497 Ballots
- The 2006 Music Bloggregate – 640 Sources
So now those music critics polls can bicker over whose constituency is more exclusive.
*
Of course, quantity doesn’t equal quality. If it did, this year would have fookin’ rocked. Bumping The Bunnies for the moment , let’s look at the Top 31 (The Bloggregate had a tie at #30) ranked CDs. And let’s put those notorious neocons from the Voice on the right, where they belong.
[Titles in blue don’t appear in the Bloggregate top 30 (their Bloggregate ranking is in parenthesis); the titles in green only appear in the Voice’s top 30 (their Bloggregate/Idolator rankings appear in parenthesis).]
- 21 of the top 31 Bloggregate albums were duplicated in Jackin’ Pop; only 18 made it to Pazz & Jop.
- Gone were consensus Bloggregate/Jackin’ picks The Thermals (#41 on P/J), Lily Allen (#37), and Destroyer(#35).
- The Raconteurs’ Broken Boy Soldiers (Bloggregate’s #27) fell on Idolator’s poll (to #50) only to bounce back up on Pazz/Jop (#26).
- Girl Talk (#37 in the Voice poll), Lupe Fiasco (#34) and Mastodon (#44) fell off from Jackin’ Pop.
Yet Jenny Lewis is still up there.
Let's pause and think about that one.
Moving on.
Into the void leapt – along with the previously mentioned MCR title – an album of Pete Seeger covers, a couple country records that weren’t produced by Jack White, and Sound Grammar by Ornette Coleman. Jazz, represent.
- The Bloggregate had 640 sources citing 1421 titles.
- Jackin’ Pop had 497 ballots citing 1300 titles.
- Pazz/Jop had 494 ballots citing 1593 titles (not including three place-holding titles I found)
- As mentioned, Cookie Mountain got the highest number of votes in all three polls. On The Bloggregate, it got 151 mentions (just under 24% of the lists). Jackin’ Pop had 125 mentions (over 25%). Pazz/Jop had 99 mentions (just over 20%).
- Long tail time. Titles receiving only a single vote: Bloggregate, 854 (60% of all mentioned); Jackin’ Pop, 800 (61.5%); Pazz/Jop, 1028 (64.5%).
*
The Voice poll has a different scoring method than The Bloggregate and Jackin’ Pop. The latter two basically adopted the scoring system from the old Voice film poll. Every list of ten gets 100 points, distributed with fixed weight according to ranking (15 pts for #1 through 5 pts for #10) for ranked lists or 10 points/title for unranked lists.
Pazz/Jop allows the voter to distribute the points among his ten choices as he/she sees fit, though there is a maximum (30) and minimum (5) number of points you can give to any title.
These following four titles each received a single 30-point vote:
Cassie – s/t
Tragically Hip – World Container
Everyothers – Pink Sticky Lies
Billy Idol – Happy Holidays
*
You can hear Harvilla – who sounds exhausted and apologetic – discuss the poll and his choices on a podcast. Though he didn’t rank his ballot, he makes clear that his top choice was the re-release of an offering from L.A. emo outfit Say Anything (myspace), 2004’s ...Is a Real Boy. It’s a record no one else voted for (there were also no votes on The Bloggregate, or on Jackin’ Pop – possibly because it’s a record that’s two years old...).
I was also the only person in my survey to list my favorite record of 2006 – the first eight songs from Butch Walker and the Let’s-Go-Out-Tonites’ The Rise and Fall of... (which got exactly one vote on Pazz/Jop and two on Jackin’ Pop).
And – like I say a few hundred times below – that’s what these lists are about to me. Not "My list is bigger and/or shinier than yours." Not consensus, not “critical legacy.” You cry out the name of something you love, and hope someone hears it.
That’s all.
*
Added 1/22/07 -
It’s done(-ish)! It’s up! 640 bloggers’ top ten album lists, 1421 CDs, ranked n’ bassed for your amusement. Head to the main page for the meat; continue below for indulgent blather and cursory comparisons.
*
I’ve been suffering great bouts of gastrointestinal distress, lately, and the situation’s escalated from embarrassing and uncomfortable to life-threatening. An ex-girlfriend with whom I’ve remained friendly was in town this past weekend; there was low-grade body oil, and candles, and... Listen, all I’m saying is that when you get a racy tattoo in a delicate place thinking no one will see it who isn’t meant to, you might consider the possibility an emergency skin graft could slap that thing right across your forehead. That’s all I’m saying.
Too much information.
A very bloggy sort of problem, that, and one with which I’ve been wrestling the past couple months. When I initially posted this year’s Bloggregate, just before Christmas, I’d maxed out an Excel spreadsheet with the info already collected (“That’s Microsoft’s way of saying, ‘Build a real database,’” someone told me). Then, I had 249 sources... And while I couldn’t use many of the examples linked on Largehearted Boy’s massive throbbing collection of Year-End Music Lists, a combination of those I could use and others e-mailed my way or found through searches brought me beyond the 640 currently included.
That final number is almost 500 lists larger than last year’s Bloggregate. It’s larger than Idolator’s first Jackin’ Pop survey, and they had, like, paid helpers and tech people and interns and stuff. I had me and an abacus and a lot of Diet Dr. Pepper. It’s smaller than the 2005 edition of the Voice’s Pazz/Jop poll – that had 795 participants (the 2006 edition is due next month), but I could have dwarfed that had I wanted. Because there is so much information – On the Internet? Who knew? – you could keep compiling lists until people started making next years’ lists.
Included are lists from pro music critics who blog, like Sasha Frere-Jones and Simon Reynolds; also included, that guy from Pink is the New Blog. And Jesus. And me. And 635 other people. Because we count, too. But if I didn’t find you in time, I didn’t count you. Sorry.
In the end, I just ran out of space and time and sanity.
Those are pretty good parameters, come to think of it.
*
Results? You want results? Jeez.
All right. Here’s your final Top 30:
And a side-by-side comparison with the old (12/21) Top 30:
I’m not going to delve into the results too deeply – as I’ve noted before, I don’t find the consensus that important – but with some notable exceptions, the additional 400 lists mostly led to a little shuffling and a longer tail. The Top 30 is a little less white-white-white: Ghostface jumped from #46 to 23, Clipse from #53 to 28. The Roots had the highest ranked hip-hop album before (#43); now, they’ve got the third-highest ranked (and are still at #43). Nine of the top ten from December’s survey remain in the top ten; the top three are exactly the same – though at one point The Hold Steady were barking at Newsom’s ankles. Nasally.
Here’s a side-by-side-by-side comparison with Jalopfensnork and the sizable-enough Indie for Bunnies blogger poll. The titles in blue didn’t appear in the Bloggregate Top 30 (their ranking is noted in parenthesis).
Obviously the Schnookfenbrackers went heavier on the rap, for whatever reason; not only are Ghostface and Clipse in the top four, but four additional hip-hop acts made their top thirty. They also broke both older and artsier (Waits, Walker, Sonic Youth) and younger and dancier (Timberlake, Girl Talk).
The blogger consensus leaned indie-er. Top 30 Boogergate acts that failed to crack Chupacabra’s Top 30: Beirut, Camera Obscura, Grizzly Bear, Lily Allen, Islands, M. Ward, Muse, Regina Spektor, Sunset Rubdown, Thom Yorke.
But the two lists shared 21 of their top 31 records (Brahrahgrah having a tie for the #30 spot, CrackerJism putting Lily Allen at #31). The Bunnies poll, predictably, had even more overlap.
Further comparison between Bwanganana and Josiepoop:
- Idolator: TVotR got 125 mentions from its 497 ballots, better than 25%; here we got 151 mentions from 640 lists, just under 24%.
- Jerknsquat voters nominated 1300 titles (a suspiciously round number, but whatever); the Gluggluggrape contains 1421 different CDs
- Bloggregate: 854 titles (60% of all mentioned) only received a single vote; my own list accounts for two of those. It looks like exactly 800 CDs (61.5%) in the Idolator poll got one vote each.
- Both polls have stupid names.
*
One big difference is context.
I really wish the Voice and Idolator would give us some clue as to who their voters are. A link, or a bio snippet, or at least a primary publication. Pazz/Jop promises “the brightest minds in music journalism” (biting... tongue...). Idolator boldly mumbled that their poll was “open primarily to people who regularly write about music”... which I read as: “We’ll take anyone willing to force at least two adverbs into every sentence" (and later became "anyone whose ballot doesn’t get swallowed by their spam filter”). A step in the right direction but, still, who are those people? I’m not Googling all that shit. Are they implying everyone should look at those lists of names and just know, man? That’s the sort of insularity that makes music critics so off-putting in the first place. Or are they implying that we shouldn’t care?
Whatever. In the end, I know more about the people behind Bite Your Zombie! and Communications Major/English Minor than Name Person and Other Name Person. Because the link to their list is also a link to their site.
Just tell me that Raymond Cummings is the Voguing to Danzig guy. Jeez. Is Gawker Media worried about their Blogshares rating or something?
*
(And FWIW, I did include the ballots of Idolator eds Johnston and Raftery here; it’s awful nice Denton allowed them to put their names on something.)
*
A couple other quick snaps before I get to work at dreading next year (when this will all be done differently, either by me or someone who actually knows how to use a computer...).
Here are your top first-place vote-getters:
And, finally, I took the titles in the top ten percent and re-ranked them according to average vote (1 being highest, 10 lowest).
Coming out on top were The Veils; I’d already snatched that one up thanks to these folks. Listen to those folks. They know of what they rave.
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Go! Play!
*
From 12/21/06 -
“Oppinions,” my good friend Lindsay Lohan says, “are like ay-holes: They should be collected, ranked, and displayed.”
While I've no idea what she's talking about I do know this: We’re waist-deep in list-making season and it’s time to push out the first version of this year’s Music Bloggregate – a weighted compilation of Top Ten Album lists from around the internet. (For more on why I started this, go here.)
Last year’s list, compiled haphazardly, ended up with 148 sources and 419 albums. This initial version of the 2006 aggregate features 249 sources and almost 800 albums. And that’s only because I ran out of room.(*) This is a work-in-progress, and there’s a lot more to come.
(If you want to dive in, just go to the Main Page.)
Knowing this year’s would be a bigger batch I figured that in addition to a sizable spreadsheet (something I stole originally from Movie City News’ movie aggregate) I’d steal something from Pazz/Jop: Individual pages for each title with links to the lists on which they were included.
I wasn’t counting on having 800 titles.(**) So this is all still under construction. The Albums page has most of the links, but those pages are mostly empty (I quickly threw together the Joanna Newsom Ys page as an example). I’ll fill it up as I can; lists are still pouring in, too. So again: Work-in-progress.
*
A quick word about the current results and the lists currently compiled:
First, here’s your Top 20 (again, full results and all votes are on the spreadsheet; for those who don’t have Excel, the Chart page has jpgs of the results columns):
If you follow music online at all, those are pretty unexciting, predictable results. But the consensus doesn’t exist to surprise people; finding that, for me, was never the important part of this process.
The important part is that there were 780 other titles people were passionate enough to call their favorites. The consensus might meet in the middle, but there are intersections all over the place. The spreadsheet is searchable. Find someone who likes the same stuff you do, find what else they like. It’s easy to get snide and dismissive about some of the choices, but it’s more fun and interesting looking into the material you didn’t know about, or hadn’t thought about in a certain way, and...
...like, holy crap, check out this “Grace Kelly” song. Zowee.
So hunt and peck and have fun. Check out the music on myspace or Hype Machine or Elbo.ws. Fall in love with something, and support the artists by buying their records.(***)
*
The consensus isn’t a caucus. The laziest of journalists will take that chart and say, “Bloggers vote TV on the Radio best album of 2006.” Only these bloggers didn’t get together to vote – these lists weren’t made to be included here, they were all found online – and if you look at the stats only five of the 59 lists that included TVotR put Cookie Mountain first. If you re-sort the sheet according to first-place votes, love-her/hate-her harpist Newsom comes out on top. Even then, that’s only 13 votes out of 249.
What’s most impressive about these lists is their non-groupthink mentality. Indie Rock is over-represented, sure, but most lists I saw didn’t read like they came from Catbirdseat’s Cheat Sheet or Yeti’s peer-approval exercise (though the consensus, obviously, does). I saw Paris Hilton, Leann Rimes and Herbert on one list. Beyoncé, My Chemical Romance and Destroyer on another. There’s Death Metal and kid’s music and Christian rock and Country(****). And the lists themselves, some are dissertations, some have no commentary at all. Some were sweated over, some slapped-together. My favorite list was pretty obviously a joke (and yes, I still counted it). And after going through hundreds of lists and seeing lots of heated comment discussion, there’s something really refreshing about seeing something like this:
“Here’s my list of the 10 new albums I enjoyed most in 2006. This doesn’t mean I listened to them the most, just that I made it all the way through at least once and didn’t say ‘oh man that sucked.’”
So no, these aren’t all “music bloggers.” Thank God. No one’s oppinion is more important than anyone else’s. Like Lindsay says, we’ve all got ‘em. (Some Velvet Blog recently posted the results of a small music blogger poll; Sweeping the Nation posted a UK blogger poll. Indie for Dummies Bunnies is currently compiling one, also. )
I’m indebted to Largehearted Boy’s massive list of Top 10s; I was gathering my own for a while but it proved redundant. He’s got a lot of lists there that I haven’t yet included or couldn’t use for one reason or another (and if you think I’m crazy, check out the guy who compiled his “Top 2006 Songs of 2006”). The current Bloggregate doesn’t have anything from myspace or LiveJournal – I very consciously excluded online communities (there are even LJ and MOG “best of” groups). I also couldn’t include user-based blog lists (this or this, for instance) or message board threads. I haven’t included guest-lists or online magazines, though I might relent on those.
Most important to me, my list hasn’t been included. I haven’t finished it, yet. But – like last year – my favorite record hasn’t been mentioned by anyone else, and that alone is incentive to keep updating. If you’re in the same boat, or have a list you want included and don’t see it on the links page, e-mail me the link(*****). Heartonastick (at) g mail (dot) com. Put “Top 10” in the subject heading. Also, if you catch any errors – I’m really, really human – let me know so I can fix them.
I’ll be updating the monster periodically through mid-January, though I’d sort of like to get off my oppinion and get my life back. At the very least I'd like to get back to work on my other blog.
Do have yourselves safe and happy holidays.
[UPDATE: Andrew Parker at The Gong Show did something similar, mixing in more MSM sources and online mags and only tabulating their #1 pick. You can see that all here. More love/respect predictably goes to Bob Dylan, but there are also big jumps for Mastodon and J Dilla. Some of his sources are ones I'd been considering, and might make their way here in the next round... but a quick look at his spreadsheet validates my fears about counting individual mag contributor's lists: Pitchfork writers and guest lists account for 75 of his 180 sources -- more than 40% of the voices coming through an already too-influential outlet -- while Prefix mag staff brings in another 21. They're valid as individual people, of course --and naturally they don't agree on at least their top pick -- but I think the inclusion would turn this into a "Pitchfork + Everyone Else" survey.]
(*) Excel has size limits? I’d figured this might produce a spreadsheet as big as Nebraska, but hadn’t thought there’d be rigid county lines. But then I’ve got all the computer know-how of a developmentally-disabled anemone.
(**) I’m sure there were easier ways to go about this, but back to note one: Programming/database knowledge? Duct tape and spit, that I’ve got. Next year I’ll try using my brain. Wiki, anyone?
(***) The album pages have “buy” links to Amazon. That’s not necessarily an endorsement, I’m just hotlinking all their cover art. There’s supposedly some referral bonus involved, but I’ve gotten exactly zero dollars for these things in the past; should I get anything from this I’ll donate it to the BRC or something.
(****) Though not enough, proportionally. I think the highest-ranking country CD so far’s been the Dixie Chicks (#117)... and they were only on four lists. Hip-hop, too: Ghostface comes in at #46, Clipse follows at #53 (the latter’s record was just released this month and I wonder if it might still be finding its way to people who don’t illegally download/get promos). Unfortunately I was unable to include entries from bloggers who gave each genre its own list; one list/person.
(*****) The link. Please don’t send me a list. Thanks.
YES? YOU THERE IN THE BACK? (8)
1. kathryn left...
12/22/2006 1:51 pm :: http://kathrynyu.com/
You really REALLY need to hire/find a programmer to help you do this stuff.
Surely there's someone out there who will volunteer...post a call for help,
don't bury it in a footnote.
2. aw left...
12/22/2006 7:27 pm
this list blows. as do all lists, who the hell cares what someone else
thinks are the best albums. first of all don't call it "BEST", if anything
these are lists of FAVORITE albums. what do i hate about xmas, the year end
lists and all the brouhaha about them.
5. d left...
01/22/2007 11:34 am :: http://www.softcommunication.blogspot.co
While I actually enjoy what Idolator does, I agree with you on wishing
Jackin Pop had more information about their voters. Especially since not
all of them chose to write any additional notes on their ballot so it's a
bit of a mystery as to where they come from. They did in fact turn people
down, so they must've had some criteria besides adjective count?
6. mjrc left...
02/08/2007 6:58 am :: http://lostinyourinbox.blog-city.com
um, there is one glaring ommision in the sources list, and that would be
YOUR top-ten list. it says: this entry is no longer available or some such
thing. inquiring minds want to know, you know.
7. Paul left...
03/02/2007 10:06 am
How come you don't have Stadium Arcadium by the Red Hot Chili Pepper?
They're #1 on http://www.rankopedia.com.
8. J____ left...
03/02/2007 1:16 pm :: http://heartonastick.blog-city.com/
Stadium Aradium came in at #104; Nine blogs mentioned the
album on their lists.