The History Of Jop Part 2 aka Clap your hands everybody if you got what it takes

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The second instalment of this poll series takes us to the Pazz and Jop poll of 1980 - if you don't know what Pazz and Jop is, refer to the previous episode (or ignore it and do the poll anyway). You get to pick NINE of these.


[Poll #810979]


And now here's the results of the 1979 poll: the Joptimists Top Ten

1. Don't Stop Til You Get Enough (44 votes)
2. Rapper's Delight (40)
3. We Are Family/Greatest Dancer (37)
4. Good Times (34)
5. Pop Musik (31)
6. Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick/Reasons To Be Cheerful (30)
7. My Sharona (28)
8. Dreaming (26)
9. Hot Stuff (25)
10=. Gangsters (21)
10=. Life During Wartime (21)
10=. Damaged Goods/It's Her Factory (21)

Comments

[koganbot]

General thoughts:

(1) Useful to check here if you have any questions about whether something placed in a later year, how albums were doing, etc. 1979's album winner will make you gape.

http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/pnj/index.php

(2) This is a terrible list in comparison to 1979's, and it tempts me to start muttering things about stupid white people, stupid journalists, stupid bohemians, critics' basic dunderheadedness when it comes to pop music, and on and on and on. But there are mitigating factors:
i. Xgau as always was trying to further expand the voter rolls beyond people like himself, getting more rank-and-file journos, and he was succeeding.
ii. A lot of the best club music (what two seconds earlier had been called "disco") was now only getting airplay in a few markets or none at all, so a lot of great tracks weren't hitting the bulk of critics. So you had to search for them specially or be part of their scene, and most critics were doing their special searches and conveying word-of-mouth enthusiasm for post-punk, not for dance.
iii. Hip-hop was bursting amazingly onto record, but mainly in New York; and even in New York, black adults were frightened of hip-hop, so only a few hip-hop tracks at a time would be allowed on black or r&b radio, and Kurtis Blow's "Christmas Rapping" and "The Breaks" were the lucky ones with airplay.
iv. Punk and its relatives and friends and progeny were getting, you know, dumber and more boring.

(3) To elaborate on iii and answer Tom's question upthread, yes, hip-hop was bursting hugely and wonderfully on record, though people hadn't really figured out how to translate live DJ mix-and-cut brilliance to vinyl and make it work in short-enough-for-radio nuggets. But 1980 produced the best-ever Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five cut ("Supperrappin'"), the second-best ever Spoonie Gee cut ("Love Rap"), the best ever Sugarhill Gang cut ("8th Wonder"), the best ever Treacherous Three/Kool Moe Dee cut ("The Body Rock"), an astoundingly great DJ Hollywood track ("Rock Rock the House," which happens to be the only DJ Hollywood track I've heard), a great club take on hip-hop (Vaughn Mason & Crew's "Bounce Rock Skate Roll"), a great hip-hop take on a great club take on hip-hop (Trickeration's "Rap Bounce Rock Skate"), numerous great, terrible, fascinating one shots (e.g., there was a guy who called himself Sicle Cell who put out a track called "Rapazooty in Blue"), probably some obvious other things I'm not thinking of. But this was receiving almost no airplay anywhere, 'cept for "8th Wonder" and Flash's two follow-up singles. There's still no acceptable reason for "8th Wonder" not making this list. Maybe critics bought the crap about how the Sugarhill Gang weren't real hip-hop.

(4) You might want to keep an eye out for songs on these lists that fall into the following categories: Adult Contemporary, Country, Ballads. The numbers are usually sparse.