Spazzing over Pazz & Jop: A tUnE-yArDs upset!
I was sad to be right about my Grammy predictions, and I am happy to be wrong about my Pazz & Jop (for some moronic reason, I’d not been spelling it with the ampersand) predictions. Not only did tUnE-yArDs’ W H O K I L L score a surprise and deserved number-one finish, my (and many others’) pessimistically predicted winner Bon Iver finished all the way down at number nine. Thus, for the second year in a row, my top album matches Pazz & Jop’s; that happened only once in the previous decade. So much for my predictions: I correctly called only one spot on both the Albums (PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake indeed finished second) and Singles (Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” was of course number one) lists.
For the first time in 13 years, a woman claims the Pazz & Jop-winning album. And for the first time in 18 years, female-fronted acts take both the Albums and Singles races. While I will miss the two black geniuses at which I gazed throughout 2011, I will spend the next year gazing at two strong, defiant, unconventionally beautiful women on the P&J homepage.
The 2011 P&J top 10 albums contains four female acts and three hip-hop acts. Yet for all of the blogosphere and Netcrit biases in favor of youth and progress, it’s telling that not one of the top five albums is by a performer under the age of 30. Could it be that older acts birth greater consensus? After all, aside from tUnE-yArDs, the rest of the top five has been making music since at least the late 90′s.
Overall, the upper reaches of these lists are pretty stellar, making a convincing case for a year that many thought musically bankrupt or lackluster. I have not yet read the P&J essays (I’m expecting plenty of “Year of the Woman” theories and refutations), and I will post more in-depth analysis once I absorb those. But for now, I am gleeful, elated, thrilled that my waning faith in rock criticism, and the rock-crit consensus, has been temporarily restored. Now, let’s see if the P&J pundits can spoil that.
chbomb said,
January 23, 2012 at 10:27 pm
“I have not yet read the P&J essays (I’m expecting plenty of “Year of the Woman” theories and refutations), and I will post more in-depth analysis once I absorb those.”
The pundits did indeed spoil it, especially the female writers, all of whom wrote painfully unremarkable essays on what was a remarkable year (or at least a remarkable P&J poll) for women in pop culture (and cultural criticism). Fortunately for them, they’ll get a bye this year, as various professional and social obligations delayed my P&J response, and there’s no use posting it after tomorrow, when a new Village Voice will go to press and Oscar nominations will wipe P&J from the year-in-review news cycle. So it will exist in WordPress as an unfinished draft, never to be seen by eyes other than mine, which is for the best. No use attacking the fallacies of other writers unless my own writing is up to snuff…
See you next year, Jessica Hopper. Try to write a sentence that doesn’t make me wanna vomit in the meantime…