(Ex-) Pazz and Jop 2016

They changed the name ... and now they're changing it back?  I think?

I would have bet on "Lemonade" winning the poll this year in a walk, but somehow Bowie squeaked out one of the narrowest wins ever.  Somehow Beyonce dominated the songs poll like no artist ever has, but that support didn't transfer over to the albums poll.  It was the year of high profile celebrity deaths like no other, so perhaps Bowie's win was symbolic of the year that was.  Bowie has never drawn much support from P&J, having never placed an album in the top ten prior to "Blackstar". However, today's electorate is more than a generation removed from most of the writers who voted in the 70's and 80's.  Perhaps this generation unfairly judged his more recent work (although there wasn't anything to judge for most of the 21st century) in comparison with his now legendary 70's output, but the outpouring of condolences and memories on social media this past January was like anything I'd ever experienced following a celebrity death (sadly, until Prince passed away a few months later).  The pre and-post release praise for "Blackstar", followed by the gamut of emotions brought on by Bowie's sudden death only days later, raised his profile higher than it had ever been and clearly sealed this win for him.  Even with Michael Jackson's death in 2009, there weren't the same outlets for commiserating, linking, revisiting, and reminiscing the way we could for Bowie and Prince this year.  The win for "Blackstar" feels like a Grammy-esque Album of the Year award that's really a lifetime achievement award in disguise for a veteran artist.

Maura Johnston summed up a disappointing year for female artists on the pop charts with a powerful and insightful essay.  She may be overstating the case a bit, considering that Adele, Rihanna, and Sia totaled sixteen weeks at number one on the Hot 100 between them.  But she's dead on in considering the differences between how The Weeknd and Drake's paranoia and insecurities are perceived, versus how Beyonce's have been perceived, at least as far as the pop singles charts are concerned.  Yes, the critics loved "Lemonade", but the critics aren't the masses.  

As for Glenn McDonald's always indispensable P&J statistics, his tabulations revealed an unprecedented consensus in the albums voting -- giving some statistical mettle behind some of my recent complaints about the bland predictability of year end lists and critical tastes.  As expected, I nearly fell off the critical grid this year, ranking at number 493 (out of 542 albums voters), with a much lower centricity score than last year even though the percentile was nearly the same (bottom nine versus bottom ten for P&J '15).  But despite the strong consensus at the top of the poll, there was an equally strong lack of it at the bottom, with a long statistical tail of nonconformists.  In 2015, the bottom 20th percentile centricity score was 0.138, this year it was 0.103.  Seventy one voters (thirteen percent of the total) had a centricity less than 0.05, last year only forty three did (nine percent of the total). 

There were just 29 total other votes for the albums in my top ten (versus 47 in '15, which I figured was rock bottom at the time), and I was the only voter for six of them.  At least Moderat got some modest support this time, getting four times the support for "III" than for their last two albums combined (not counting my votes for all three).  My top kvltosis picks this year (i.e. reweighting of the albums lists according to centricity, with lower centricity voters' picks getting the highest weight) were Autechre (#6) and Moderat (#22) (how appropriate!), although they ranked slightly lower than last year's top two (Brandon Flowers at #5, Prurient at #16).