rocketsandrayguns:

tomewing:

rocketsandrayguns:

Why would anyone expect anything other than consensus, especially as professional critics become more and more digitally connected? In fact, I’d assume the more talk of audience fragmentation, the more consensus we’d get from career critics. If critical fragmentation matched audience fragmentation, wouldn’t that only support the perception that music critics are now obsolete? You need consensus for perceived relevance.

I don’t think anyone would EXPECT a lack of consensus - but “consensus” vs “fragmentation” covers a great big span of activity.

My point is that at the moment we have one very big taste-cluster and it’s centred on the Pitchfork Top 10. This is no fault of Pitchfork’s and indeed the editors and publisher should be very proud and happy about it. But there’s also no reason why competing large taste-clusters shouldn’t exist, large enough that P4K’s Top 10 only crosses over with 30% or 40% of the P&J Top 10.

It’s worth pointing out that this wouldn’t necessarily make the P&J list better or more exciting! In the mid 00s we DID have another large taste-cluster, the boomer-rock one Chuck is saying has evaporated, and it competed with the fork-y favourites and the conversation around the P&J lists was “Oh FFS Dylan at the top again”.

Maybe instead of “expect anything other than consensus,” I should have written, “be surprised there’s so much consensus.” But I take your point—there could be more than one large sphere. Or could there be? Has the internet essentially merged the spheres together, paradoxically leading to more, not less, consensus? I don’t have any answers, just questions.

Frank Kogan has a post on this on his LiveJournal now, specifically pointing out that words like “consensus” and “contrarian” and “populist” don’t explain themselves and are being used to cover a wide (and in some cases inaccurate) range of ideas in P&J convos (I’d add that it isn’t just here, and it isn’t limited to this particular conversation — I’ve started to abandon the currently vogue “monoculture” vs. “fragmentation” binary simply because I can’t keep straight what either of those things is supposed to mean in any given argument. Totally fucked up a paper I was writing and have since abandoned, THANKS A LOT INTERNET BRAIN).

Anyway. The point I’d like to make is that my top-line take away from the results of this year’s poll is that it shows a less unified electorate than previous years. The closest thing we’ve had to “consensus” in P&J history is the longstanding (as far as I can tell) tradition of one album rising to the top to create a significant distance between it and second place. Christgau mentions that 2005 is the first year that this was not the case (a close call between Kanye and M.I.A. that year) and the same has been true for every year afterward except 2008.*

This year, the #1 album was only on 22% of P&J ballots, while the second-place one was on 20%. A truly huge album of the last decade would pull in over 40% of voters — still not “consensus” technically but an awful lot closer than less than a quarter. I think the story to take away might be that, like in the pop charts, the ceiling is also falling on big-picture critic polling, so that you don’t need as many votes to be on top as you used to. Which itself diminishes the import of being #1, to some degree, and part of the anxiety here — to the extent that there is some — may have to do with the fact that the #1’s don’t “feel” #1, regardless of whether we think they’re best or not. (This doesn’t answer the question of whether anything that wasn’t indie “felt” #1 either — I would argue that there isn’t anything like it this year.)

I’ll follow up this post with one that lists both the percentage of voters voting for the #1 album and the difference between #1 and #2 through the 90’s and into the 00’s. The trend in the past five years seems to be a move away from a clear and resounding #1 and a narrowing of the gap between the #1 and #2 album, with a few 90’s exceptions.

*My hunch is that 2008 itself was a strange year, and I’m wondering if the point spread was generally lower. 2006-2008 is a tough period for judging P&J because of the immediate fall-out of the New Times insanity in 2006 — it’s unclear how many critics left, who they were, whether they came back, and what they would have voted for. In 2009 the poll is back up to nearly 800, which includes a 100-person spike from last year alone.