Pitchfork's Favourite Albums

There is one thing to consider, and I'm surprised you wouldn't have thought of it already, Tim. Making these kinds of lists is a political act. If you like an album and want it to gain recognition, it behooves you to place it higher on your list. But it ALSO behooves you to pick things which will benefit from being on your list, in that they will probably appear on other peoples' lists. I'm not saying that this completely determines the lists, but it seems that it gives them a little push in the direction of the highest-profile indie-favored releases of the year.

God - one look at those lists reminds me why I don't look at that site very often. No offence lads, but couldn't they be a bit more explicit about the type of albums they are considering?

Tim's point is something I actually find quite likeable about the list, this sense that the Pitchfork crew are all buddies enthusing to each other about the same albums. It's a pity that gang-of-mates mentality doesn't translate to the site more in my opinion, though the reader mail page is a definite good thing.

Tom has a good point here. Pitchfork's professionalism seems one of their worst aspects -- they aren't just writing about music they like, they're self-consciously setting themselves up as cultural mavens. This reflects on the question of music critic as "filter" and the more general point that the success of critics such as Bangs and Meltzer. The idea being, I think, that music criticism, and all criticism really (I think lit and "ahrt" crit has a great deal to learn from music crit) have two sides, the technical side (which pitchfork tend to fail at) and the aspect which relates the technical to larger questions which fall under the rubric of "culture and taste" and which a humble voice is more suited for. Expertise on one aspect does not translate to the other. Or something like that. Pitchfork feels too little like a dialogue and too much like pronouncements from on-high.

Also, do they have a vision, or just a tendency towards "landmark" albums -- I mean, is it more defined than that in terms of what they look for in such albums, the place they feel such albums have in society? Is it, then, an aesthetic, or simply a quirk?

Looks like a straightforward proclivity for twentysomething indie rock to me.

Pitchfork state "2000 was an exceptionally good year for music, possibly the best since I first started Pitchfork in 1995."

I would totally agree, infact I believe year 2000 is amongst the top 3 years for music in terms of quantity of creative music in the past 15 years.

Anyone who disagrees has had their head and ears buried in sand all year - like a dumb ostrich - ignorant, culturally unaware, i.e to busy reading rubbish in Q/ Rolling Stone/ Spin, listening to MTV and commercial radio.

However rather than cosy consensus year 2000 has been a diverse, interesting and divergent year for creative music - splintered into many genres and hybrid areas of music.

I will be presenting rather than a TOP 20 like Pitchfork, a TOP 40, and indeed 75% of Pitchfork's overall top 20 will not figure in my chart. So there.

There are some individual Pitchfork's writers chart choices that I will be including though, and there are also a fair number of albums that I previously highlighted on my recent Top 30 albums that I would like to check out list - that Pitchfork also mentioned. Hint shopping trip on Saturday!

However I will say at the moment my top 3 choices are not featured on any of the Pitchfork's album choices.

Please remember check back on Sunday to find out. This will be one end of year chart - you need to check out - orginality, opinions, and informed knowledge of creative music across the sound spectrum.

http://djmartian.blogspot.com

I don't think anyone from Pitchfork hangs out here, so I may as well chime in (of course, I'm not speaking for the magazine here.) Re the general repetition among the writers' lists, this probably has something to do with the thrust of Pitchfork's coverage. Pitchfork is primarily an indie rock mag, and most of the writers became aware of it through a general appreciation of indie rock. So it makes sense that many of the same high-profile (and hopefully high quality) indie rock releases would wind up in a lot of individual lists.

The Gas thing was a bit of an anomaly that had something to do with us being friendly. One person heard it and liked it a lot (that would be me in this case), emailed another Pitchfork writer, and so on. I'm sure this happened with some other releases, too.

I don't think it's that strange that almost every writer listed things like Lift Your Skinny…, Kid A and the Sigur Ros release, those were good records that everyone had a chance to hear. Stuff that is more obscure tends to get scattered among different people, and is unlikely to show up on the composite list (unless it "makes the rounds" as above.)

If you sit and write down your 20 favorite albums released this year, not counting reissues and compilations, you'll probably find more common ground than you think. So much of the music I buy day-to-day wasn't released this year, and so much of the review stuff I heard wasn't particularly interesting.

Not sure about the perceived tendency toward "landmark" albums. I guess I don't see it that way at all.

(in regards to Josh's initial post) Josh you're absolutely right - which is why I wasn't surprised to find Radiohead, Grandaddy, GYBE!, Sigur Ros etc. etc. on there time and time again. That's why I chose Gas as my example - there's an album which, excepting the fact that it's tied in with a lot of the indie-techno that Matador releases (Pole, Burger/Ink etc.) is pretty much at direct odds with Pitchfork's usual fare. In that sort of area I expect more diversity of opinion, and with Pitchfork's indie leanings, outright distaste for it (BTW you'd abhore Gas, Josh. 4/4 beats galore!). There's no benefit to the Pitchfork cause in pretending to like it, unless they're trying to prove their diversity in pointlessly tokenistic ways.

I'll accept Mark's reason, but it kind of suggests that Tom's right; these guys are just a couple of friends sharing albums. In which case I find their superiority, over-confidence and "landmark album" tendencies to be even more unfortunate than usual.

"Pitchfork feels too little like a dialogue and too much like pronouncements from on-high."

I think that Pitchfork as it is designed is not meant to be a dialogue, it's simply a review site. It's a lame argument, an awful logical. And about a record place in the society... really? can you be more specific? Is there such thing as a record's place in the society? About the list... it's pretty normal, what should be expected in the top 10. (sorry about the bad writing)

Dylan

Did anyone notice that Frank Kogan (of all people) quoted a Pitchforkmedia review in his newest Village Voice column? I think if you're expecting a pitchfork top 20 to be surprising, you're expecting the wrong thing. I was reminded of a couple of albums I forgot about that were great (The Hot Snakes, Les Savy Fav) and saw a zillion other albums I have no interest in hearing. I agree that I wish pitchfork would be a bit more, um, dialectical, perhaps, and less like CMJ, because I don't really like indie rock but I am interested in those people who do. In fact, I'd rather read an interview with Brent D. than one with David Fucking Grubbs, but maybe that's just me. It's part of what made Maximum Rock and Roll interesting; they had the quadrillion punk reviews, but they also had those personal columns, and all those great classified ads from jailed punkers looking for correspondence. Maybe pitchfork should run personal ads.

Tim, when you write

"In that sort of area I expect more diversity of opinion, and with Pitchfork's indie leanings, outright distaste for it...There's no benefit to the Pitchfork cause in pretending to like it, unless they're trying to prove their diversity in pointlessly tokenistic ways."

I think you're misunderstanding what this list is. Four people liked that Gas record enough to include it on their lists (out of 12 or so), so having it on the composite is not an endorsement by the staff as a whole. I'm sure plenty of Pitchfork writers would (and do) hate Gas. Maybe even the majority.

Not really sure what you mean about whether Pfork writers would "pretend" to like something, and I doubt very much that that happened with these lists. What would the point be? It was all just simple math. Maybe the sample size was too small or something.

And you make the idea of "friends swapping albums" sound like we're exchaning kiddie porn or something. Sure, that's what Pitchfork is, friends swapping albums, talking about them, writing about them. So what? Maybe I'm too close to the thing, but it just doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

The Pitchfork writers' choices are quite scarily identical to each other, and needless to say quite meaningless to me (respect to the free spirit who put Max Tundra in the top 10 though; believe him, if nobody else). Give me a wide range of totally divergent tastes in one place - a magazine, whether physical or online, where virtually all the writers' tastes are narrowly homogenous is a magazine without life, without future, without anything.

Pitchfork *can* be well-written, of course, and it often is, but I still get put off by the whole ugly consensus of it all ...

Er, what Robin said.

I applaud the whole album-swapping thing, it's just a shame that the underlying smug definitiveness is there, as if all the writers are under the illusion that they're working for The Wire, self-consciously mapping every inch of music rather than merely mining a small plot of extensively, bar a few incongruous exceptions eg. Gas.

2000 was less of a consensus year than any other. Looking at the top five or so entries, it feels like Pitchfork are trying to invent a consensus that wasn't there on the back of the thirty or so albums they happened to listen to this year.

I think you may be reading more smugness into the list than is warranted. Is it supposed to be smug because they agreed, more or less, on the top albums, or because of what they agreed upon? (You could take it from the review blurbs for each album, but I think that overall it's better to look at the personal lists en masse for the sort of thing we're talking about.)

Okay, if insofar as Pitchfork claims to be covering all music (and I don't get that impression), that's wrong. Agreed. I think of it more like "We asked each Pitchfork writer to rank his/her favorite 20 albums in order, and here is the tally" than "These were the 20 best albums released this year." If something on the site gave you the latter impression, it should be excised.

And now, here are Sammy Hagar's ten favorites of 2000:

1. Nine Inch Nails, The Fragile 2. A Perfect Circle, Mer De Noms 3. Radiohead, Kid A 4. Sting, Brand New Day 5. Red Hot Chili Peppers, Californication 6. Fuel, Something Like Human 7. Eric Clapton/BB King, Riding with the King 8. Cat Stevens, The Very Best of Cat Stevens 9. ZZ Top, XXX 10. Sammy Hagar, Ten 13

I didn't know that ZZ Top released an album this year!

Looking at the Pitchfork site today I see the Top 20 feature described as "The 20 Best Records of 2000." Right, um, so, uh, I guess that's where people got that impression. That is a problem.

I think Bob Segar said, "I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then."

seger!

How embarassing.

oh god i had no idea this was 3 years old until the end

fiddling with the volume doesn't change what's on the record