minimoonstar:

occupiedterritories:

Tumblr doesn’t let you reblog someone else’s response to a question, so here’s how Jonathan Bogart responded to the question “What’s your top 10 albums shaping up like so far this year?”:

I have never made a top 10 albums list and I don’t plan to change that this year.

The more music I listen…

[snip] What this means is that my singles and albums “charts” are Venn diagrams with very little overlap, though, and obviously that’s not how most critics define things.

Go read all of Sabina’s response, but I wanted to excerpt this part just to say that someone should do the right thing and create something like a “pop separatist” index based on Glenn McDonald’s P&J stats that figure out how many people vote for singles artists who have NO relationship to their album artists. Then you could do the qualitative examination to figure out how “far apart” the albums are from the singles. I usually think of myself as a pop separatist — when there are pop albums on my top ten (which there often are) I don’t tend to vote for singles from them (tend to consciously avoid this).

But it would be interesting to track this back into the 90s to see if there was some moment where singles and albums started to “overlap” more, with people putting more singles from albums they liked on their singles ballots. (I know there’s a tendency for some indie-centric voters to put album tracks in the singles top tens.)

At the same time, though, “singles” isn’t quite right for this convo, since whatever’s happening to the album format, it’s not half as tough as figuring out what counts as a “single” as opposed to “discrete piece of music” aka “song.”