Pitchfork's Best Songs Of The Decade

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I'm not going to bother listing all 500 - here's the link: http://pitchfork.com/p2k/ and here's the Top 20:

20. The Walkmen - The Rat
19. R. Kelly - Ignition (Remix)
18. Hercules and Love Affair - Blind
17. Annie - Heartbeat
16. The Rapture - House of Jealous Lovers
15. The Knife - Heartbeats
14. Jay-Z - 99 Problems
13. LCD Soundsystem - Losing My Edge
12. OutKast - Hey Ya!
11. Gnarls Barkley - Crazy
10. Arcade Fire - Neighbourhood #1 (Tunnels)
9. Animal Collective - My Girls
8. Radiohead - Idioteque
7. Missy Elliott - Get Ur Freak On
6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Maps
5. Daft Punk - One More Time
4. Beyonce ft Jay-Z - Crazy in Love
3. M.I.A. ft Bun B and Rich Boy - Paper Planes (Diplo Remix)
2. LCD Soundsystem - All My Friends
1. OutKast - B.O.B

(I voted in this and did a few blurbs, by the way. The top 200 have blurbs and IMHO they are an excellent way of whiling a few hours away)

Comments

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

statisticians will know the answer to this: is the overlap between "it's canon" and "it tops retrospective best of lists" not 100%?

The only way I can think it would be different is when people vote against the idea of canon, which they only do if they know what's canon, which means they need to determine canon, wich they only do if there's a poll like this one!

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

to clarify: individuals can vote against what they consider canon, but unless there is a publicly recognised canon that's known to be known, these votes against will get lost in the noise (for example, will cancel one another out)

occasionally something will bubble up as a "mass vote against canon": but this is only unexpected if its goodness has never been discussed or otherwise manifested socially -- and of course if it has been manifested socially, then there's a chance it's already considered canon!

(short the above: the value of lists like this is to get us to try harder! we need to see shelley clear etc...)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

By the end of the decade everyone knows what's canon! Every year they do lists that determine canon. I mean, I didn't expect it to be anything other than this, hence avoidance. But this just reiterates everything we already know.

IDK I think a list is a really bad way of rounding up a decade: you can do so many more interesting things, esp with web format. Sections on key artists which make an effort to delve into their discography beyond eg "Crazy In Love". Sections on one-hit wonders and lost gems and everything else which might fall down the cracks of history. Competition to pelt Animal Collective with rotten fruit. Whatever. Gonna stop thinking about this now.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

But there's a time-lag between everyone knowing stuff, and everyone KNOWING that everyone knows it: that's what our responses to these lists reveal. (That's what they're useful for, in fact.)

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Everyone knowing that everyone knows stuff is a step too far in unnecessariness! Hmm I wonder if that is a word.

Also blah blah blah re: whose canon and whose values determine this, eg the top Jay-Z song is the rock one, the strong impression that "stepping (self-)consciously outside genre" is to be rewarded &c &c.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

I think that's exactly the kind of thing that needs to be pointed out, and quite dispassionately. I obviously am in no position to do it though!

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

As in, that's a way to extract a "history" out of a list like this, which doesn't really function as one by itself.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

And I don't think it invalidates the list at all - it turned out as I thought, if not better, and I enjoyed the writing a lot. But talking about it would move the list away from "oh I like this song but I don't like that one".

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

Everyone knowing that everyone knows stuff is a step too far in unnecessariness! : no, it's basic games theory. Your judgment how to vote to counter the flow depends on a knowledge of how others will vote.

"Whose canon": it's only ever going to be the canon of who gets to vote in a given poll -- but the identification of this can only be determined after the fact, if people are voting "truthfully" as opposed to consciously tribally (or with a view to determining the state of the consensus; rather than a snapshot of quality). It *is* shallow history (Mr I-hate-history!) but the journalist's role is the first draft of same; not the final draft. Juornalism provides the tipsheet for dissent and counterargument.

Rival lists would be interesting: we need to see some... but what are the Other Tribes? The moment a Lexist School emerges as a list-making organisation (boycotted by you obv: I mean tastewise), all the things you're worrying about will instantly re-emerge within Lexism. They're an artefact of how we fence with the opinions of others -- the aggregate of all the individual dialectics of affirmation and refusal

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

"the identification of this" -- i mean, the identification of whose tribe the poll's taste represents

[chezghost.livejournal.com]

" Your judgment how to vote to counter the flow depends on a knowledge of how others will vote. "

I've been rocking this hard on the poptimists 00s polls but then they are of little consequence/less reach

[koganbot]

I think that what I'm getting at in my dissent downthread is that you've made the threshold too accessible/placed the bar too low for what I think the word "canon" means. Canon is not "tops a poll" or even "tops a lot of polls," but more like, "tops the poll and we don't foresee that it will be dislodged among people like us or successor 'people like us.'" Of course, such canonization is often shortsighted, and even in its time it doesn't require unanimity - I knew rock fans c. 1970 who thought that the Beatles were hopeless wimps, others who thought the Stones were overrated and insufficiently imaginative, and many many many others who thought Dylan was too intellectual to be real. Still, at the time it was hard to imagine how they would be taken down. Whereas it's easy to see "99 Problems" never actually planting itself in a pantheon given that it pretty much only outranks "Big Pimpin'" among voters who don't pay deep attention to Jay-Z. And I can easily imagine Jay-Z and Timbaland not retaining enough cultural presence to hold on, and "Get Ur Freak On" getting lost, or anyway just being another song among songs, though that wouldn't be my judgment.

There was a Timberlake/T.I. track that placed second in Jackin' Pop a couple of years ago. I've forgotten its name, though I could find out in a second and it placed top 50 on the Pitchfork list, but does its future seem assured, its cultural weight a given, a listenership in line for it for the next ten years?

[mcarratala.livejournal.com]

Here's a promise: every time you claim this about 99 Problems, I will repeat that this is just you demonstrating your awesome ignorance of hip hop history for our entertainment.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

here's a promise: every time you repeat this, i will repeat that this is just you demonstrating your awesome ignorance of current hip-hop.

fuck off and stop patronising me.

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Yep, this is the thing - one of the big subtexts on the albums list is "will anything beat Kid A?" and it's not so much because KA is unbeatably amazing, but it hit escape velocity and became canon-and-we-know-it (to the P4K crowd and readership) long long ago. So a vote for or against it becomes a statement on all sorts of things quite beyond the value of KA as an album. (It's kind of the Sgt Peppers effect)

[koganbot]

I assume that there's some tension between Pitchfork writers and Pitchfork readers (though of course neither set is homogenous).

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

Not so much on Kid A - I don't know the mind of all Pitchfork writers but I think I'm the only one who dislikes the record.

(Possibly others feel its overrated.)

[freakytigger.livejournal.com]

As for the readers, when I go and look on music boards to see what they're saying about P4K stuff (usually in the vain hope someone will be talking about my column!), I'm honestly surprised by how often Kid A comes up as a touchstone.