poptimists | Pop Science The Revenge II: Twiddling Thumbs Department (Reply)

After my groundbreaking work on the Spice poll, I decided to apply my efforts to the Different Class by Pulp one. This was a bit less exciting. :( (FSVO "exciting" anyway)

The results:

Album Value Factor (this was known as "rockism factor", it's the percentage improvement on a collection of tracks when unified into album status): 8%. Different Class does indeed 'work as an album'.

Individual gaps:

mostlyconnect saw a huge 35% jump in quality when considering the work as an album:

wizzy_w and

hauntedballroom also find their opinion swayed positively by the album format.

katstevens and

awesomewells, however, are put off by the album format, though to a comparatively minor degree.

Singles band: Pulp picked their singles fairly wisely but there's only a 0.7 point uplift between non-singles and singles. A very interesting result here though is

alexmacpherson's individual gap: he likes the singles THREE TIMES as much as non-singles on average. In the other direction

hauntedballroom and

ninebelow spurn the commercial blandishments of the singles marketplace and like the album tracks a lot better.

Key track: What is driving opinion of the Pulp album? The much-neglected tail end of the record turns out to play a crucial role. The track that most closely correlates with overall opinion - and therefore the SECRET HEART of the album - is "Bar Italia" (a 0.67 correlation), with "Monday Morning" and "Underwear" not far behind. "Disco 2000", on the other hand, stands on its own - there is no significant relationship between your opinion of it and overall album quality.

Incidentally there's a big difference here from Spice: the Spice Girls' album quality is more strongly driven by its singles than its album tracks, whereas the reverse is true for Pulp - an individual opinion of Different Class is far less swayed by the hits it contains.