"They're Making a List and Checking It Twice, but Why?" by Kelefa Sanneh

(It's also a statement about the slant of U.S. music critics... two assertions... I disagree with both...)

Fiona Apple is half man?

i liked k at first, but i find myself increasingly less interested in his writing.

tho i can imagine some scrubbed-faced intern fact checking it, ha.

i'm back and forth on how i feel about that. theres something to be said for taking on the art and the establishment and trying to push for better..but who's to say im really more right than the status quo

xpost hahahahaha!!!!! yeah cahiers: not afraid to get close to the *cutting edge*. in 1956.

more like middle-aged copyeditors, actually.

i think the indie-centric comment is otm for p&j, especially once you get outside the top 10 (which tends to have your consensus pop picks). i mean, franz ferdinand for single of the year?

Well, in my journalism class in high school I was taught that in newspaper writing you're not supposed to have a "summing up" type of conclusion. Instead you're supposed to put the most important information first, then the next most important, and so on, with the least important at the end. This is so the editors can snip as much as they need to off the end to make it fit into the space they have available.

I also think it's funny that people think the only place you can get the idea to bitch about year-ends lists from is ILM!

"Lists are often presented as a way for consumers to evaluate the past year's music, but it seems unlikely that record stores are overwhelmed with excited readers, lists clutched in sweaty hands, eager to own some magazine's entire Top 20."

On the contrary, I read that record stores reported Pitchfork reviews made or break sales of certain indie albums. Arcade Fire making #1 on last year's poll certainly gave them a huge boost. Same with Clap Your Hands. I guess NYT has difficulty realizing they aren't the center of the universe.

I think the Pitchfork theory is that the boost comes from the reviews, as you say, not from the lists.

I do work at a label and we don't really start manufacturing a bunch more if an album makes a year-end list.

http://www.umanitoba.ca/faculties/afs/soil_science/MSSS/links/Images/cartoons/booger%20cartoon.gif

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I heart Kelefa but I don't really see how this is "puzzling," unless you're taking the "me & my friends don't like it therefore it sux" position

oh wait this is the internet isn't it, never mind

I can't fucking write!

the eic (he was editor when I worked there) and the rekkid revyooze editor are big xgau fans. however, the RR-ed once carefully, gingerly explained over the phone to the old bat that they reserve the right to change star grades…I imagine there was a lot of sputtering on the the other side of the line…

i don't know how much fiddling they did with his copy…mebbe he can fathom that the way one should write for a fuckbook/music magazine is not the way one should write for the VV…

i work at a label (or really a conglomeration of them) and so far to me it seems like these lists are a boost to sales - at least with the few well-ranked albums that weren't selling well already.

If it makes you feel better, I kept misreading the ILE thread "Defend the Indefensible: Parades" as "Defend the Indefensible: Pareles."

(Really? Someone thinks Foo Fighters' latest album is better than Mariah Carey's?)

sort of mocks the headline--why? to prove one is better than the other by the writer's lights, probably.

also, "Lists created by committee tend, almost by definition, to come closer to conventional wisdom, which makes them more canonical but less debatable. (For starters, you can't quite figure out whom to blame.)" He's talking about the Pitchfork list, which is fine except that yes you can figure out who to blame: The writers' lists are printed as well as the poll results.

-- Fastnbulbous (fastnbulbou...), January 5th, 2006.

This is a gross overestimation of the impact of Pitchfork. Yes their "best new music" picks or whatever can make or break indie records sometimes, but that's only with in the very narrow sliver of music industry pie that indie rock is in the first place.

But Stencil sounds right -- I'm sure that while these lists never create platinum artists, they can give a big boost to a more niche-oriented artist or one without massive airplay and marketing.

For example, it doesn't matter how many lists Antony or My Morning Jacket show up on; I've listened and said no (although a friend gave me Z anyway). But when a whole bunch of people on ILM named Ladytron as one of their three top records this year, I checked it out, decided my kid would like it, and bought it for him. (He really likes three or four songs, but thinks there's a lot of filler. It didn't make HIS top-10 list.)

I doubt I am unique (although I equally doubt there are millions more who also do that).

http://www.redshiftresearch.com/p2pstats.asp

If so, then labels waste money on firms telling them made-up junk. You're describing an activity that even the NSA would finding daunting to analyze.

This is much easier to do. It's a shame how a malicious simpletons work has become a profit-making activity.

They claim they have tools. I'm not saying my label hires them. Also, try and remember the other things labels spend money on.

These types of computer-metrics and network monitoring firms always say they have the tools. That's to make the sale to nobs who don't know anything and are gulled by the snake oil of easy answers.

in answer to the question posed by the original headline: because the music business slows down in January and magazines have space to fill, as do arts sections of newspapers. "slow news day" DUH!

(Not illegal downloads metrics, we were honest in admitting we couldn't do that.)

Veronica, did it bother you working for such a corrupt organization? And are, say, Andy Pemberton or Craig Marks or Rob Tannenbaum or _________ inherently corrupt, or are they under pressure? (Don't know if any of those were the EIC and RR in question, but you realize that if they're not, you've kind of smeared them.)

And by the way, I've worked for Bechtel, which some people claim is in bed with the Bush administration; and when the Voice was owned by Murdoch you could say that its profits were helping to support the right-wing propaganda of Murdoch's loss-leader in New York, the Post, so there's a lot of gray here. And also I once got the opportunity to write a review for the Australian Smash Hits and I jumped at it, even though I knew they were going to monkey with my prose and, if they felt necessary, raise my grade. It was a review of Batman; the movie was already playing in the U.S. but wasn't yet available to be screened in Australia, which is why they asked me to review it: they instructed me to include descriptive passages, and my understanding was they were going to then translate what I wrote into Australian. The reason I was thrilled to do this despite its ethical drawbacks was that I knew that writing for Smash Hits would bring out my goofiness.

But anyway, as for what the ethical question here is: it's one thing to take your readers into account, it's another to lie to them in order to make them feel better - though the real issue usually isn't grades per se, but having the magazine interpose its tone of voice between reader and writer, and between reader and subject matter: so Kelefa at the Times is allowed to write about Young Jeezy but not in a way that would make the readers feel Jeezy (or feel Kelefa), though I think Kelefa has managed to insert some of the life of the music into his writing there anyway, subtly using Times style as a comic device that he can work with and around. I admire him greatly, and he's one of the few rock critics I try to read regularly. But still, the Times prose style is a lie.

Something tends to freeze when I write for commercial publications, as if something inside me is forcing me to lie down dead, so this is like, a whole complicated neurotic red-flag issue for me. [And on that provocative note I'll run off to the teenpop thread.]

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-- Abbadavid Berman (Hurtingchie...), January 5th, 2006

I was specifically talking about artists like CYHSY and Arcade Fire, where 10,000-30,000 copies is a big boost, whereas it's hardly a blip for the likes of Kanye West or Mariah Carey. Hardly a gross overestimation.