Jackin' Pop Results (from Idolator)

I was a bit disappointed with the results of this poll, mainly due to the utter predicabilty of the results, which carried a frightening ressemblance to Pitchfork's poll except with bonus Dylan, because that's what happens when people over 40 years old are participating. The entire top 50 was so ... expected, with not a single album or placing that could be considered truly suprising (in either a good or a bad way). Exceptions ... maybe the low placing for the Liars? Arctic Monkeys nearly cracking the top ten? The wonderfully bizarre 23-24-25 triplet of Scott Walker, Mastodon, and Tom Waits?

Organizationally speaking, Idolator did a fantastic job. Browsing the results is simple, intuitive, and they put the whole ensemble together in a very timely fashion. For statheads, there are options for sorting the data by age, race, region, or primary writing outlet (but unfortunately not by gender -- this yielded intriguing results in past P&J polls). As a card-carrying stathead, I really enjoyed Maura Johnston's essay, which listed all thirty albums that received only one #1 vote but not a single other vote from any other contributor. Out of 497 contributors, it means that a full 6% of #1 album votes fell into that category, which to me is a startlingly high number. Album winners TV on the Radio drew a little over 25% support (comparable to what P&J winners have gotten in recent years), but only three albums earned 100 votes, and only four others earned over 60 (12%), indicating a distinct lack of consensus among the contributors.

I nearly figured into Maura's essay (only one other vote -- for 6th place -- was submitted for "Ticket Crystals"), and would have qualified if she'd done the same for the singles list, as I was the only person to cast a vote for Jesu's "Silver". A comparable list for top singles would likely comprise more than thirty entries (or perhaps not, considering the degree to which the top four singles dominated the competition and particularly the astounding amount of consensus around the #1 pick) but strangely enough (taking non-consensus to the next level), nobody else cast a single vote for my top three singles (along with my #6, #9, and #10 singles). I must continue to state my surprise at the complete anonymity of "Mighty Girl", which, considering the generally high profile of DFA/LCD Soundsystem clones these days, is looking like one of the great forgotten singles of the past few years. And I continue to be baffled by the never-ending stream of accolades for "Return to Cookie Mountain", which is choked with the exact same faults as their debut (most notably that every track is two minutes longer than it needs to be) but I don't remember anybody lauding "Desperate Youth Blood Thirsty Babes" as an album of the year contender. Unabashed love for American indie rock somehow came back into crit-fashion this year, but that genre has always fallen on the outskirts of my personal taste, so it's no shock that I mostly ignored it yet again this year (stay tuned for the ongoing chinstroking of YEAR-END LIST REVIEW MANIA and you will note the decade-plus pattern).

Finally, Glenn Mcdonald's alignment rankings are now available (see here) and I'm in the bottom 9th percentile, which is more or less where I figured I'd be. This number stands to get even lower for P&J, unless perhaps there's a massive deluge of Yo La Tengo votes.