P+J - Reissues -- Why Not a Separate Category?

something like last year's talking heads reissue/expansion of The Name of this Band is Talking Heads.

not really new, not really old.

but basically ignored by the poll, save a few votes.

as soon as i no longer work here, i will fight for the return of not only the reissue category, but the EP category, the video category, the dance compilation category, and the "local bands" category as well. and i will demand that a category for CD/DVD dualdiscs be added. (fuck ringtones, though. ringtones just suck.)

as long as i DO work here, i'd prefer to keep it the way it is. it's enough work as it is!

(and besides, "dick-size contest for well-promoted luxury boxes and tokens of retro hip" was pretty accurate. those reissue top tens from the old days looked totally ridiculous. but it was still fun to VOTE for the things. box sets and anything by os mutantes and esquivel should have been automatically disqualified, though.) (also, the whole problem of determining "what counts as a reissue" is a lot harder than you'd think. those grey areas would drive me nuts!)

xp

neither do you, Chuck. your computers do it.

wrong. my computers START it. and i sort out the stuff they don't get. (carryover votes, ballot discrepancies, remixes, addition errors in all the ballots that AREN'T filed on line, etc.) believe me, i still do PLENTY of math.

As for EPs, I'm not sure how they fit into today's (mostly) post-vinyl music world. That is, bands that release what they probably actually call "EPs" are a relatively limited bunch, if not in quantity than certainly in accessibility (in the most literal sense).

Believe it or not, I have an editor who actuallly had to be told what an EP was when I first started writing for her!

I understand why they're so hard to categorize/compute, but the reason the recent lack of a reissue category frustrates me is that there are so many albums I listen to each year that I could never consider 2004 (for example) albums. Go-Betweens, Echo and the Bunnymen, the dick-size Goodbye, Babylon box, a lot of those Rough Guide discs, that Homosexuals 3-disc set, Talking Heads ... heck, technically speaking the first Slits album was only just released in the U.S. And so on. But I do sympathize, Chuck. Reissues, however you define them, would probably prove even more esoteric and hard to organize than regular releases.

No way. There are crazy numbers of EPs coming out lately on cd. They are usually glorified demos by brand new bands. I think it would be a great idea to resurrect the EP category, if just to give some space for new blood.

xp

but seriously, guys, really now.

Don, I suppose it's a matter of perspective - is the poll about the music from the past year, or is it about whatever the record industry put out in that time? Live 1966 may have never been officially released and Smile may be reworked/rerecorded, but they are old songs/recordings which have been bootlegged and available to fans in one form or another for years. They come with the benefit of hindsight and context. It's sort of unfair to put canonized work up against music that is actually from 2004.

it's an album. by p&j rules, anything over 25 minutes is an album; if it's got three or more distinct songs (as opposed to, say, remixes of the same song) and it's less than 20 minutes, it's an EP. in between 20 and 25? er, judgement call. so all those hour-long jean grae and underworld EPs these days wouldn't be eligible. (i think the poobahs stretched the limits a *little* now and then back in the '80s; U2's *under the blood red sky* or something like that might have placed at 28 minutes or so once. But 40 minutes = album, no bout adoubt it.)

(But anyway, the EP tally ain't actually coming back -- not under my clock anyway. Or Bob Xgau's clock, for that matter, and he cringes whenever I even bring the topic up, believe me -- basically, every year around Thanksgiving. So this is all completely theoretical, y'understand.)

Can I just single this out and say 'yay'?

As for the discussion in general, it seems to me that the way we hear music is always as a continuum -- old stuff we come across whether it's reissued or not. An interesting but utterly unwieldy approach would be to vote for your true top ten of the year whether it was old or new, reissued or not. It would also be a complete mess. The construction of the poll is artificial at base but it's an understandable artificiality -- the limits are obvious but there. If they weren't there, probably the album I would have voted for the last few years would be the Cure's Faith going by the standard of how often and how regularly I listen to any one thing during the year.

I just think that if you're going to do something like this poll, it should have clear parameters - Smile counts on a technicality cos it has been reworked/rerecorded, but Live 1966 is very plainly a relic and had nothing to do with new music from the year it was reissued.

I really loved the Cristina reissues, and they were totally new to me, but I'd never consider them to be from 2004, cos they just aren't.

Can I single it out and say that I don't get it? I've only heard a few Bloc Party songs, but a couple of them were just kind of nothing and the other one had a couple of nice bits, but not as many as an average Franz Ferdinand or Killers song.

well, a couple days ago I hacked out this show preview blurb about them, for whatever it's worth:

"These buzzbin-bursting Limey lads are bespectacled, biracial, herky-jerky, hooky, kooky, kinda cute, and reportedly political, even though their fave lyric subject seems to be eating food. Their drums dance and dub more than Franz Ferdinand's or the Killers', and their singing is girlier and prettier even if it's hard to pinpoint which old new wave band the nasal hiccuping recalls: Adverts, Cure, Buzzcocks, Jules and the Polar Bears? Definitely not Gang of Four, though."

(The mp3s on their web site are actually better than I thought at first listen.)