TV on the Radio won Pazz + Jop…last week!
This year's Pazz + Jop cover
Pazz and Jop results were posted a whole week ago, and are thus old news in the blogosphere. But this here blog will be launching its best-of-2008 feature in February 2009, for reasons as diffuse as I’ve been sick for half of January, or I have a job and a life to maintain, or I have actual deadlines to meet, or it’s my fucking tiny pocket of the web and I can do whatever the fuck I want with it. Besides, the Internet makes history immediate, and as long as Christgau’s comprehensive website is running, Pazz & Jop (now Pazz + Jop, apparently), the Village Voice’s annual music critic’s poll, offers a historical snapshot of the year just past. Like most historical snapshots dictated by the whims of a small, fairly insular group, P&J can be infuriating and baffling, but the attempts of rock-criterati to make sense, even achieve consensus, of music-in-whatever-year is reliably enthralling.
They just don’t make music like they did five years ago…
Spectrum Culture has crowned the best albums of 2003! That’s right: 2003. How does a year-end critical consensus look with five years of context? Well, you can view the list here. (Full disclosure: note the byline on the no. 3 album). And compare with that year’s Pazz and Jop results. As if the man currently engaged to Zooey Deschanel needed another reason to celebrate, he apparently recorded two of 2003’s musical touchstones. And while I cannot deny Give Up’s brilliance (as much Tamborello as Gibbard, mind you), I’d swap Transatlanticism in favor of some choices from my ballot that didn’t make the final list: the Libertines’ Up the Bracket, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists’ Hearts of Oak, and the forever underrated Go-Betweens forever underrated penultimate album, Bright Yellow Bright Orange. Quibbles aside, this feature drives home that 2003 was a banner year for pop culture, especially music, one that may eventually rank alongside 1977, 1984 and 1994 for its fertile plethora of cultural breakthroughs. Should the albums list not sell you, just take a look at Pazz and Jop’s Singles list. Plus, 2003 was an amazingly busy death year, with Katharine Hepburn, Strom Thurmond, Bob Hope, Barry White and Gregory Peck all dropping within two very charmed months.
