The History Of Jop Part 1 aka Everybody's Talking About Pop Musik

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Obviously nothing can replace the Now Polls in our hearts. But koganbot suggested doing polls bassed on the Village Voice Pazz and Jop feature, and that seemed a good idea to me.

The what and what? The Pazz and Jop poll* is an annual poll published by the Village Voice newspaper** in New York. The idea is that every rock critic in America - and latterly in THE WHOLE WORLD (sort of) - gets to vote for their favourite albums and singles of the year. We'll be looking at the singles polls here, historically the poor relation of the albums polls ftb loads of critics not bothering voting in them.

These polls will be done canon-style, i.e. you pick your favourite ten out of the top thirty singles. Or in this case, because this first one was a small enfeebled thing, you pick your favourite NINE out of 26.

The point of the polls, as well as the usual timewasting comment fun, is to get a handle on how critical opinion works and has shifted and where you agree and don't and all that fun stuff.

Without further ado - TO THE TICKY BOXES.


[Poll #809394]


*don't worry too much about the Pazz bit.

**whether there will still be a Pazz and Jop poll following the VV's recent takeover by The Man, I do not know.

Comments

In-Joke vs Joke

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

i.e. the impulse "Wouldn't it be funny/fantastic if we could get this into the Pazz and Jop poll?" has zero implications for the quality or not of the song.

Especially when you parse it as:

"Wouldn't it be fantastic if we could get [song by guy we know] into [authoritative poll run by other guy we know]?" (even leaving aside what Guy B thinks of Guy A) because regardless of quality it's pushing private social context into public social context (which is what an in-joke is) ("hall" into "classroom" if you like!).

When Stylus was doing its Top 50 singles of last year or the year before (forget which) an email went round saying "Let's all vote for "Schnappi"!". This wasn't because we didn't like Schnappi, it's because we DID like it, and wanted it to do well, and overlaid on this would be a feeling that it would tweak the 'authority' of the Top 50 singles, AND also it might be fun to make Nick Southall have to acknowledge it.

And there wouldn't have been any point to that if it wasn't a good record!

Or see also the Top 100 Comics Poll we did on ILX, which has stuff by my brother in, or the Top 60 Comics Characters one, which has characters hugely celebrated on the website which are also legitimate votes.

Now I wasn't there in 1979, and maybe NONE of that stuff was going on. But it seemed to me not unlikely that some of it was!