The History Of Jop Part 9 aka Every other story is tellin you somebody died

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The Pazz and Jop poll for 1987, revisited. You get nine choices.


[Poll #832067]


1986: The Jip-Jop Wars (Poptimist Version)

1. West End Girls (38 votes)
2. Word Up (35)
3=. Walk This Way (33)
3=. Fight For Your Right To Party (33)
3=. Papa Don't Preach (33)
6=. Kiss (31)
6=. Walk Like An Egyptian (31)
8. Manic Monday (25)
9=. Rise (18)
9=. Nasty (18)
9=. Addicted To Love (18)

Comments

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

This has been the hardest year for me to find stuff I loved. U2 and REM squarely to blame.

This is also the first time the Grateful Dead have been required on a Poptimists poll. A landmark of sorts I feel!

[koganbot]

Grateful Dead tune is not bad. (Though not as good as "The One I Love" and "With Or Without You."

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

The Joshua Tree tune I really like is "Where The Streets Have No Name" (which I liked before the Pet Shop Boys covered it, honest). I would have ticked that.

I might have ticked "End of the World" too until two years ago, but the enthusiasm of a very irritating former boss for this era of REM has increased its toxicity. "The One I Love" I disliked a great deal even when I was a big REM fan.

[blue-russian.livejournal.com]

Almost all of this is pretty good, but I guess I agree about having a hard time "loving" most of it. More strong but fuzzy feelings about the artists than anything else.

The Reason "Bring the Noise" Did Not Win

[koganbot]

The reason "Bring the Noise" did not win is rather simple; most of the voters hadn't heard it. It hadn't got radio play, it was nothing but a 12-inch single by a group whose first album had gotten little notice and whose overwhelming second album was months away. In any event, I hadn't heard it. (Not that it was a guaranteed victor over "Sign O The Times," though I think it'd have won if enough people heard it. I don't know anybody who doesn't like it, though I suspect I'll run across a few today.)

Anyway, after several months of trustworthy hype, Public Enemy got big.

Frank Kogan's Pazz & Jop ballot, 1987

[koganbot]

1. Company B "Fascinated"
2. Spoonie Gee "Take It Off"
3. Spoonie Gee "The Godfather"
4. Vivien Vee "Heartbeat"
5. Eric B. & Rakim "I Know You Got Soul"
6. L.S. Fresh "You Can't Get No Pussy"
7. Exposé "Point of No Return"
8. Deborah Allen "Telepathy"
9. Roxanne Shanté "Have a Nice Day"
10. King Sun-D Moët "Hey Love"

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

I'm rather surprised that I still haven't warmed to the Joshua Tree singles, I'm all over thheir work from this period otherwise (including the rest of the album). With Or Without You always stood a little higher than the other two, though.

Re: Frank Kogan's Pazz & Jop ballot, 1987

[koganbot]

An amazing year, considering that I started it off by declaring that music sucked. Missing from my albums list, and from pretty much everybody's but Chuck's: Appetite for Destruction, which hadn't yet scored a hit. Missing from most people's list including mine: any glammetal whatsoever ('cept it made my videos list, which I'll post if things get too quiet).

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

the other way around for me. i like precious little u2, and this about covers it. not even typical of the songs i like generally, so quite odd.

Re: Frank Kogan's Pazz & Jop ballot, 1987

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

i had to check on everyhit, but GNR didn't chart in the uk 'til 88. it hit me VERY BIG when they did though...

(ie next three years for me are "confessions of a teenage metaller")

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

What a rub year compared to 1986! I struggled to tick 8. UK charts on the other hand were full of gold - Mel&Kim, Rick Astley, SINITTA!!!

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Also listening to at the time: Curiosity Killed The Cat.

At the time

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Graduated from Uni at end of '86, so 1987 was my first year of paid employment. Was particularly excited by the effect that turntablism and sampling was having on mainstream pop. My #1 album by a country mile was the JAMS withdrawn LP, 1987 - What the Fuck's Going On?. My copy is slightly scratched but must be worth $$$$$ by now. Hearing "Bring The Noise" towards the end of '87 was another momentous event. I'd put this at #1 now. But "Birthday" is arguably just as remarkable.

Top 15
1. "Pump Up The Volume"
2. "Bring The Noise"
3. "Sign 'o' The Times"
4. The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu - "All You Need Is Love"
5. The Sugarcubes - "Birthday"
6. "I Know You Got Soul"
7. Coldcut - "Beats + Pieces"/"That Greedy Beat"
8. The Fall - "Australians in Europe"
9. The Smiths - 2I started Something I Couldn't Finish"
10. U2 - "Where the Streets Have No Name"
11. Abigail Mead & Nigel Goulding - "Full Metal Jacket (I Wanna Be Your Drill Instructor)"
12. Public Enemy - "Rebel Without A Pause"
13. The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu - "The Queen & I"
14. Big Black - "Things To Do Today"/"I Can't Believe"
15. Zodiac Mindwarp & The Love Reaction - "Prime Mover"

[epicharmus.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I shouldn't've ticked any U2 singles. My eye sorta passed over them like a speck of dust on my monitor. I've felt all sorts of things about them (the singles, I mean), but I ended up putting a vote for Alexander O'Neal (I bought the "Fake" 45 back in the day, I'm old skool) rather than suss out just if all my ambivalent feelings edge closer to love than like or dislike.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

haha 'The One I Love' is one of the few REM tracks I have any affection for, and I ticked it, but I have always always loathed 'It's The End Of the World...'

My name is Luka, I live on the second floor

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I heart Suzanne Vega! No one else has done librarian-pop quite as well.

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

Cor, George is doing very well with Faith. It is a terrible video though, he has a habit of making himself look less attractive than he is.

[byebyepride.livejournal.com]

I think most of this is pretty good, and I bet some of the stuff I haven't heard is good too!

I didn't hear GnR until spring of 1988 when they totally blew me away. I have a copy of the original UK release Welcome to the Jungle, but I think I bought it off some kid. Summer 1989 they were unavoidable, and I'd had a year off them to myself before they were all over radio 1 (although I see both the 1988 singles charted at 24; but 1989 they reached 6, starting with Paradise City...)

Re: At the time

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I got 'What the fuck's going on?' off BitTorrent whilst searching for Monkees, because I'm a sucker for gratuitous obscenity and considered it pretty fucking genius, frankly. ^^

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

A couple of people have pegged "Sign O The Times" as most important, which intrigues me, as Prince was already huge, and he never really did much of the 'social commentary' style stuff again afterwards, so SOTT sounds more like an intriguing one-off than a milestone.

I can understand people naming it as best (I've come to prefer both the other ones here though).

Re: At the time

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Right at the end of the year the JAMS issued a version of 1987 called "Edits" which blanked out all the illegal samples (but included instructions on the back cover of the record about how to recreate the original LP yourself). As "Edits" contained less than 25 minutes of sound, it retailed for the price of an EP!

Dean's Essay

[koganbot]

"Radio is a good, weird machine," Greil Marcus insisted last year, and this year the theme was reflected in the singles lists of many critics who've never met--for instance, Frank Kogan, Rob Tannenbaum, Chuck Eddy, and Ted Cox. All were Amerindie partisans five years ago, and to an extent they still are, with Cox and Tannenbaum in the Lobos-to-Hüskers tributary and Eddy and Kogan down with noise bands like White Zombie and Pussy Galore. But for singles they listen to the radio and get off on getting manipulated. Cox and Tannenbaum go for pop-to-schlock, Fleetwood Mac or Eddie Money, while Eddy and Kogan list a lot of street-rap. But all fell for diva/girl dance records that five years ago they almost certainly would have dismissed as, dare I say it, disco: Whitney Houston, Deborah Allen, Company B, Exposé.

(PRAISED as disco, more like.)

But if Eddie Money and Spoonie Gee are blips, they're blips that add up to something. Cox and Tannenbaum move from meaningful, sonically distinct Amerindie songcraft to pragmatic, factory-tooled songcraft to physically manipulative (but liberating) dance-pop; Eddy and Kogan move from desperate, sonically enraged Amerindie noise to streetwise, beatwise noise to physically liberating (if manipulative) dance-pop. All respond to rhythm as meaning--or at least as a component of rock and roll's musical vocabulary that the various unmistakable Amerindie sounds fail to account for. And all confront rock and roll's significance-deadening crisis of overproduction by moving beyond mere critical consensus to the pop consensus at its most democratic, anonymous, and perhaps even arbitrary. Being critics, they may well get into the lyrics of their favorite disco songs as well, although not as spontaneously as Brian Chin gets into "You Used To Hold Me." But it's fair to say that the elation they feel is the elation of escape--not just from their troubles, as Cox believes, but from a critical dead end.

As someone who's always believed the stupid pleasures of mass culture deserve more respect than they get from intellectuals of any political stripe, I'm very sympathetic to this tendency. I suspect it's prophetic, too, which doesn't necessarily mean it will ever be fully reflected in the Pazz & Jop consensus. But it does partake of a certain voluptuous beat-me beat-me passivity that I find suspicious as the reign of Reagan drags to its enervating close. And insofar as it represents a programmatic rejection of the quasi-literary song aesthetic (as it does for Eddy), I'm not ready to go along. Just in case it seems I've been saying there are no more good songs any more, let me emphasize: I've been saying there are more than we know what to do with. Maybe, just maybe, we can solve this cognitive problem, and we definitely shouldn't give up on it yet. I mean, every day I hear songs that not only mean something but get me off. That effect rarely endures the way it's supposed to, sometimes because the song (words and/or music) wears out, sometimes because it's rendered moot by the competence and worse of the LP where it appears. The thing is, why should it endure? As a peculiarity of a novelty-obsessed youth genre, the belief that rock and roll should get you off forever--that is, change your life on an approximately semiannual basis--has essential uses and attractions. But it's also a romantic delusion. As Randy Newman put it: "Everybody dies."

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

Maybe it's just cus this is the first Pazz and Jop which I was birthed for any of the year in relevance but I thought this was quite a fine collection and contains many songs I thoroughly enjoy although I am surprised by the amount of George Michael. I can see he's somehow important but I find his music a little... irrelevant, really. This is probably showing my age/attention span, though.

That said, 'Careless Whisper' is bloody genius still.

ps: Hurrah for X! I've been trying to tell people my age that they aren't some figment of my imagination for years.

Re: Dean's Essay

[koganbot]

All right, this is one of those times where Xgau hovers near an idea without quite getting there. In other words, I don't altogether understand what he's saying. But among other things he's projecting an internal tension of his own onto me (at least) and onto rock criticism: That is, he, Xgau, thinks (thought) there was a tension between significance on the one hand and pleasure on the other, so he is working hard in his essay (and in his work in general) to overcome that tension. And one of his problems is that he hasn't thought through what he means by "significance," so he uses it as a stand-in for a vague constellation that can mean anything from "socially significant" to "poetically impressive."

(Whereas I was working from different maps altogether; not "pleasure" vs. "significance" but stuff like hallway vs. classroom [though I hadn't come up with that metaphor yet], and I wasn't buying into the classroom's right to define "significance" or the hallway's right to define "pleasure" - whereas I think Xgau fell whole hog into those def'ns, and then worked with difficulty to extricate himself.)

[koganbot]

Well, remember, this list is not from the American charts but from American rock crits, who weren't voting for much Stock-Aitken-Waterman (much less for the Italo-disco or freestyle that was making it onto my ballot).