Vote in the Village Voice Pazz and Jop 1971 Poll

Here is a pre-emptive "No X, No Credibility" list of records that inexplicably didn't make the cut:

Marvin Gaye - What's Going On
T Rex - Electric Warrior
Can - Tago Mago
Funkadelic - Maggot Brain
John Prine - John Prine
Black Sabbath - Masters of Reality
Jimi Hendrix - The Cry of Love
The Doors - LA Woman
Paul McCartney - Ram
Pink Floyd - Meddle
Neu! - Neu!

This was one hell of a year for music. Holy mackerel.

Oh man, I'd have voted for Maggot Brain if it was on the list, but erm, as it was, David Bowie - that is my favourite Bowie album.

I'm surprised how much landmark Krautrock came out in 1971. (Actually, I found that out last month when I was trying to plan my DJ set for 1969 Baby)

Zep!

i believe Marsh and Lester went for Gaye and Sabbath on their ballots, respectively, btw. what was the voting pool like back then, anyhow, 24/25 voters or so?

signed,

too lazy to check

Sly. Love that Zep made last place.

Rod, Carole, Sly or Zep are my faves. A few others are close. I figure Zep might win, so I'll give Rod a vote.

Sticky Fingers.

Here is a pre-emptive "No X, No Credibility" list of records that inexplicably didn't make the cut:

Marvin Gaye - What's Going On

Was this really not an immediate critical favorite?

A year like this is what music should always strive for.

The Kinks. I like most of the left off list better than the P & J one.

and pazz & jop will still always leave out the best stuff

co-sign hunky dory

We did the whole series of these before, starting with Best 1971 P&J Album (POLL Closes 5 May)

anyway, Sly

Oh, that sucks. The P&J was what threw off the search.

yeah, it was a bitch finding that

Would vote What's Going On. Where it is?

there's an idea: poll all the albums that should have made the P&J lists. *runs...hides*

What is Grateful Dead-Grateful Dead. "Skull and Roses"??

The list is woefully incomplete.

They all are.

Voting Killer, though Zep and Sly are probably actually better.

Every Picture over Bowie, Mitchell, Zep, and Sly.

oh, look, I missed Nilsson Schmilsson.

All the prog on the list (Tull, Procol, Yes, Mahavishnu if they count -- all above Zep!) seems very weird in retrospect, btw. As does the high finish for Bangladesh (which my older brother actually had a copy of -- triple album in an orange box, right? Not gonna check). But nothing (maybe in Pazz & Jop history) seems as weird now as Joy Of Cooking way up at #6.

Of the poll options, I'm going with Mahavishnu narrowly over Zep. Of course this decision was way easier than it would have been if I had to pick between Masters of Reality and Maggot Brain.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

A year like this is what music should always strive for.

Yeah, the 70s pwns the 60s so completely.

BTW, great albums from 1971 that didn't make the P&J list > albums from 1971 that did make the P&J list.

The list is woefully incomplete.

― Bill Magill, Monday, October 19, 2009 1:32 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark

Yes it is! I'll second all those albums cited above that didn't make the poll, and add 'Fly' by Yoko Ono, which of course I know would have been voted the worst of '71 by the same silly fools. Thinking of how deeply and truly I love much of this music makes me realize that 1971 (sometimes I think it's 1976) was the zenith of the kind of pop music I like best, and it doesn't even include the unbelievably fantastic AM radio hits of that year.

All of this is beside the point of the task at hand. God how I love The Kinks, and Muswell Hillbillies is thoroughly enjoyable. And dear, dear 'Tapestry.' I adore 'There's a Riot Goin' On,' it sounds like nothing else in the history of Earth. Led Zeppelin IV, I almost have to vote for it, it's ageless and titanic. 'Who's Next,' how the fuck can those hits sound so fresh and thrilling to me as many times as I've heard them in 'classic rock radio' gulags? It doesn't make sense! And 'The Low Spark of the High Heeled Boys,' glorious! 'Sticky Fingers' was never one of my favorite Rolling Stones albums, but it does have 'Sway,' reason alone to vote for it as I bow in reverence to that miracle of that song. Oh God, 'Blue' is on this list! But pick one, pick one..... 'Hunky Dory,' oh yes.

I'm surprised how much landmark Krautrock came out in 1971.

At what point did US rock critics become aware of Krautrock? Did it start to filter over when Kraftwerk became successful, or were there imports knocking around in pretty much real time? I remember a Lester Bangs piece on it but don't know what year it was written.

Let's not forget 'Songs of Love and Hate' by the mighty Lenster.

Went with Muswell Hillbillies, although pretending a choice between it and There's a Riot Goin' On is possible is an act of madness, since they're both personal tops 10s for me. In fact, had I been alive and voting in 1971, I would have given both of them the 30 pts treatment. After that, my list would have a bunch of still very glorious 5 pt also-rans. From the albums that made it in the top 30, I'd also have Who's Next, Sticky Fingers, & Hunky Dory. From off the list, I'd bring in Maggot Brain, Al Green's Can't Get Next to You, Curtis Mayfield's Roots, What's Goin' On, and The Stylistics' debut album. Always shocked (being the tender, naive soul that I am) by the relative paucity of albums by African-American artists. By my count a grand total of three, counting Rebop Baah in Traffic, and Billy Preston's cameo appearance on Concert for Bangladesh.

Also, someone up thread asked about Grateful Dead's Skull & Bones - it's usually listed as being self-titled. The pazz & jop titles comes from the album cover. I'm no deadhead, but it's pretty good. I like it quite a bit better than 69's Live/Dead, probably because there are less ten minutes plus jams (only one in fact) and more fairly straight forward country-rock songs played with just not idiosyncratic touches to be interesting.

Make than grand total of two African-American artists, since Rebop Baah doesn't fit half than descriptor. Basic point still stands.
Also, while Pazz & Jop top 10 has 3 female artists, I have none on my list, so pox on my house too. Don't like the Joy of Cooking album, Tapestry good (would sound great if I hadn't heard the singles 20,000 times), Joni Mitchell album very good but not a favorite. If I were in an activist mood, I could see my way towards correcting the problem by dropping Hunky Dory from my 71 top 10, and replacing it with the Labelle's debut album.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Wow, no love for "Fillmore East".

damn would've given "low spark" or "skullfuck" a solitary vote

Always shocked (being the tender, naive soul that I am) by the relative paucity of albums by African-American artists.

Same here.

Make than grand total of two African-American artists, since Rebop Baah doesn't fit half than descriptor. Basic point still stands.

Don't forget Jaimoe of Allman Brothers or Billy Cobham of Mahavishnu. Interesting that there are five integrated acts, but no all-black acts.

Definitely forgot about Cobham, and had no idea about Jaimoe.

The fact Sly & the Family stone were integrated certainly seemed like one of the reasons rock critics initially took them seriously - it's at least implicitly invoked in the standard Sly narrative that sees the band's rise and fall as allegorical of the implosion of the Civil Rights movement - so I suspect it's a fairly direct factor that explains why There's a Riot Goin' On placed in the poll, while Maggot Brain failed to attract even a single vote.

That's definitely why I voted for Riot.

Obv. not having a problem with There's a Riot Goin' On being on the Pazz & Jop list - I mean, the fact that it was integrated became a talking point about the band, and helped get them taken seriously by rock critics, but being amazing probably helped a lot too.

Yeah probably.

At what point did US rock critics become aware of Krautrock?

I don't think anybody called it that until the late '80s or so. (I lived in Germany in the early '80s, and seeing all those Amon Duul and Faust albums in record stores was a revelation to me, since they'd barely been mentioned in the US press. Though obviously Kraftwerk -- who Bangs wrote about -- and to a much lesser extent maybe Can were exceptions, though even with them I'm not sure anybody wrote like they were part of a bigger German movement.)

grand total of two African-American artists

A situation which hadn't improved much in Pazz and Jop Land seven years later, btw, at which time Xgau made a major issue of it in his essay.

Maggot Brain failed to attract even a single vote

How do you know this? Is every vote cast published somewhere? (It wouldn't surprise me, though -- Funkadelic, unlike Sly etc who'd already had a ton of hits, were pretty obscure at the time. Their album peaked at #108 in Billboard, and I doubt got much radio play, where Riot actually topped the chart for two weeks.)

Maggot Brain failed to attract even a single vote

How do you know this?

http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/pnj/pj71.php

Scroll down.

Cool; not sure I'd seen that before.

don't think anybody called it that until the late '80s

Actually, make the early/mid '90s. My heavy metal book came out in 1991, and I'd resorted to halfway jokingly calling the stuff "unidentified flying rock" (tossing in non-Krauts Yoko, the Godz, Hapshahash the Coloured Coat, and Germans-beloved UFO for good measure); pretty sure that, had I seen the term "Kraut-rock" by then, I would have used it somewhere. And I'd read widely enough about the stuff that, had it been used much in the US, I'm sure I would have come across it. (Neu, for one, where barely mentioned anywhere in the US, I don't think, until Sonic Youth championed them. And in general, I think people underestimate just how obscure at the time some bands were who eventually became oft-namedropped indie cult heroes in retrospect.)

I love the schizoid quality of this ballot:

Jim Lalumia (free-lance). Led Zeppelin: ZOSO 10. Grand Funk Railroad: E Pluribus Funk 10. Black Sabbath: Master of Reality 10. John Lennon: Imagine 20. Yoko One: Fly 10. The Motown Story 10. Beach Boys: Surf's Up 10. Supremes: Touch 10. Barry Drake: Happylanding 10.

Never heard of Barry Drake.

I'm certain Christgau has explained all this somewhere, and maybe the answers to these are common knowledge, but does anyone know:

1) Why was there a three year gap between the first and the second Pazz & Jop?
2) How did it become "4th or 5th," "22nd or 23rd," etc.? Why the indecisive "or" for each one?

From Xgau's 1974 P&J essay:

The last (and first) Pazz & Jop Poll took place three years ago. I announced it as a critics' poll and ended up certifying everyone who entered as a critic. This year admission was by invitation only.

In other words, the '71 poll sort of wasn't technically a critics' poll at all. (Except in cases where it was.) (Hence, that eternal "or," which I believe the Voice no longer acknowledges, since the New Times takeover.)

also:

Early in 1972, Long Island's Newsday hired me as music critic. The CG, conceived since its second installment as twenty alphabetically arranged reviews, wasn't suited to the daily's format; instead, I tied two "record capsules" thematically to my Sunday column and contributed 500-word batches of caps to the review section. This material was compiled by Dave Marsh at the Detroit-based rockmag Creem into a monthly feature. The Creem slot was one reason I lugged my portable phonograph on a long cross-country vacation in 1973 and wrote caps for the remainder of a six-month leave. And when I became music editor of The Voice in 1974, Creem decided to reprint the CG.

that is, he wasn't around to run the thing in '72/'73.

I just picked up the Procol reissue and according to its liner notes, it won the poll that year. It's a good album, but still...

Ah, okay. Thanks.

Interesting that Marcus in those '71 lists linked to has Joy of Cooking at the top of his list -- have never read a word about them by him.

Some 1971 LPs from those ballots I am now officially curious about (many but not all of them by artists I know absolutely nothing about):

Steeleye Span: Please to See the King
Bonzo Dog Band: Beast of the Bonzos
Mose Allison: Western Man
Smokey Robinson & the Miracles: One Dozen Roses
Nils Lofgren & Grin: 1 Plus 1
Marc Benno: Minnows
Stoneground Family Album
Family: Anyway
Soup: The Album Soup
Mother Earth: Bring Me Home
Art Ensemble of Chicago: Le Stances à Sophie
Fairport Convention: Angel Delight
Mordecai Jones
Hackamore Brick: One Kiss Leads to Another (actually, been curious about this one ever since I read Stranded. Savage Rose, too, though I actually used to own that one and got rid of it for some reason, and now I'm curious about it all over again.)
Gordon Lightfoot: Summer Side of Life
John Hartford: Aereo-Plain
McGuinness Flint
Crabby Appleton: Rotten to the Core (might've used to own this one, too)
Daddy Who? Daddy Cool!
Detroit (w/ Mitch Ryder, I guess - I've never heard this!)
Siren: Strange Locomotion
Ian Matthews: If You Saw Through My Eyes
Marvin, Welch & Farrar
Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen: Lost in the Ozone
Colosseum: Daughter of Time
The Fourth Way: Werewolf
Alice Stuart: Full Time Woman

Thanks xhuxk for answering my krautrock question. I did some googling and saw that L. Bangs did have a 1971 article about German rock (tho he obv. didn't call it krautrock at that point). Still don't know which bands he mentioned or who (if anyone) in the US rockwrite establishment paid any attn. to it. It makes sense that people in the US weren't generally aware of KR until the late 80s--mid-90s, and were possibly informed of it by stuff like the Bangs Book--Psychotic Reactions--and Sonic Youth interviews.

Family are great, chuck.

John Hartford: Aereo-Plain
Ian Matthews: If You Saw Through My Eyes
Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen: Lost in the Ozone

I'll rep for these 3 1971 releases--

I assume the best track from the Com. Cody appear on some comp.

The Hartford is an absolute delight, in particular the track "First Girl I Loved." One of my all-time favorite songs.

Here is a pre-emptive "No X, No Credibility" list of records that inexplicably didn't make the cut:

Marvin Gaye - What's Going On
T Rex - Electric Warrior
Can - Tago Mago
Funkadelic - Maggot Brain
John Prine - John Prine
Black Sabbath - Masters of Reality
Jimi Hendrix - The Cry of Love
The Doors - LA Woman
Paul McCartney - Ram
Pink Floyd - Meddle
Neu! - Neu!

― kornrulez6969, Sunday, October 18, 2009 4:44 AM (5 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

This was one hell of a year for music. Holy mackerel.

― kornrulez6969, Sunday, October 18, 2009 4:46 AM (5 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban

:O

1 + 1 and Detroit are pretty good, tho no way are they top ten material. the latter features covers of "Rock 'n' Roll" and future Ziggy track (KJB, take note) "It Ain't Easy."

"Krautrock" is the first song on Faust IV, from 1973.

Good point. But I still don't think it became a widely used genre name until a couple decades after that, at least in the States. (For all I know, in the UK and Europe, the name had always been taken for granted.)

Btw, if anybody missed it, I started a new thread about the P&J-balloted albums I listed above:

What Do People Know About These Not-Much-Talked-About 1971 Albums...

As far as I know, Julian Cope popularized the phrase Krautrock in '95, though it had been used derisively in UK press for some time.

"Art Ensemble of Chicago: Le Stances à Sophie "

That's widely acclaimed as their best album, though I have to admit that I've never been a tremendous fan of the Art Ensemble stuff. Too fragmented for my tastes, taking more influence from 20th Century composition than the contemporary jazz that I prefer, which lean more toward polyrhythms and psych freakouts.

Van Der Graaf Generator - Pawn Hearts

and as others mentioned krautrock like:
Cluster - Cluster '71
Faust - Faust