Popped In Polled Out

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

http://pop.idolator.com/ - Idolator's critic's poll is up. Not a huge number of surprises in the main poll, to be fair (though I wonder if this year their critic base is different from P&J's - it feels more 'webby' (also not surprising).

A cool thing Idolator do is to ask individual critics to make an end of year mix, plus comments, which will be found at the link above (I assume!). I did one for them myself.

Comments

[zenith.livejournal.com]

Oh, wow - that's almost certainly the best looking end of year poll I've seen! Those little trading cards are great!

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Bah I want to get to make a mix. You put Lethal Bizzle on yours but no actual grime :(

'What's It Gonna Be?' has been R1-playlisted so I assume a proper release is imminent; T2's 'Gonna Be Mine' has been 1Xtra-playlisted so ditto.

Matos's essay is great: somehow sums up exactly a whole load of stuff I hated about 07 (the suffocating consensus-fuelled resurgence of indie) and a whole load of stuff I loved (most of what he recommends when not dealing with indie). I continue to be disappointed by consensus taste though.

The playing cards are great! I want to rep even harder for artists I like, just so I can see them presented like that.

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

If you pay me and supply the pics I'll do it.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I am a bit ashamed of my attitude towards grime - I think I stopped listening to it in 05 or so at least partly because I felt so bruised arguing (not about grime) with people who had adopted it as a cause, so I threw the baby out with the bathwater.

But it's a mix of good conversations not of good tracks, and I didn't really HAVE enough about grime for anything to figure!

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

Great write-up Tom - emogum is such a perfect term how have I not seen it til now?

[koganbot]

So far I have read none of the essays but have confined myself to working up the Kogan Affinity Ratings, a list of people who chose three or more items that I chose. I stayed up past my bedtime working on this.

Who is Josh Timmerman? Is he one of you?

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

If he is , we'll soon kick that RHCP love out of him ;)

Nobody voted for the Boney M reissues, I notice. They really did go under the radar, huh?

[koganbot]

I certainly had no idea there were any Boney M reissues. (But I never have any idea what's being reissued, and I usually use the category to vote for comps or special-event new albums that are old material, like the Neil Young live show from '71.)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

The concept of rewarding and ranking reissues is totally bizarre to me. They just seem...unimportant. How is buying a reissue any different to just going out and buying an old album?

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yeah I always find that section impossible! I put a Greensleeves comp on it which I'd just downloaded, just because I wanted something to put.

From a reviewer's POV I like reissues - I'm semi-eagerly awaiting a copy of the Thriller 25th anniversary set - because they're a ready-made opportunity to find a new angle on something old or take stock of it (despite the earlier thread, I'm not anti "test of time" as a test to apply to old stuff!)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

I wanted to put the Lindstrom & Prins Thomas collection of 12"s but it specified that the reissues had to be of music more than five years old, as if anyone listened to music from way back then.

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

Well you do often get extra stuff on CD reissues. Half the time, they're not worth a damn - demos and outtakes that should have stayed in the archives - but the Miles Davis 'On The Corner' thing for example is something like 80% (?) new material.

Rihanna welcomes you into her

[koganbot]

A paragraph I like, from comments by the previously unknown to me (as far as I can tell) Stephen Deusner:

casualty of my earlier year-end lists, where it ranked #2 behind "All My Friends," Rihanna got knocked up to my #1 spot on the singles list after I realized how deviously sexual the song is, despite being as lyrically remedial as Justin's "My Love" and barely even coded as deeply as "Shake, Rattle & Roll." It's not just Rihanna singing "come into me," but more convincingly it's the way she sings the word umbrella, deconstructing it to ella ella and then to its essential Canadian syllable - eh eh eh - a linguistic striptease. It's the most sexually intimate moment in music this year.

Re: Rihanna welcomes you into her

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Stephen Deusner writes for P4K and is active on the staff messageboard there - like most of the people there, he seems like a good guy, and I love that take on the ey ey ey.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

My own ballot seems weird to me now. This year, more than any other year, I had huge difficulty qualitatively ranking music - I mean I've known for years it's inherently absurd but this year it was just impossible. (Mostly because this year was the first I was on a lot of regular PR mailing lists PLUS had working reliable internet access all year: it really was a deluge at times.) Albums were easier - I had 7 or 8 top albums, then a mass of about 20 second-tier ones from which I picked three at random (eg deliberately not voting for MIA because she didn't need it). Tracks...completely, completely impossible. I could have submitted the bottom ten of my top 60 (from which I have excised dance tracks! b/c HOW does one compare eg 'Fiori' to eg 'Potential Breakup Song'??) and been totally happy with it.