Gawkerlet Idolator has posted its "Idolator Pop 07" feature, a follow up to last year's Jackin' Pop poll, which was, as the name suggests, pitched as a cumshot in the eye of Village Voice Media for shit-canning Pazz & Jop mastermind Robert Christgau. Like P&J, Idolator Pop 07 is a poll of music critics; essentially an aggregation of the aggregators. Inconsistently Updated is not precisely proud to note that Idolator's top album and single of the year match my own picks of about a month ago (here and here); furthermore I had six of the top ten albums in common, and five out of ten singles (wrong Feist). Does that make me the end product of some indie hive mind? Perhaps.
The real question, though, is whether 2007 was a year of tremendous consensus because some truly delectable cream floated to the top, or because the field was so incredibly weak, leading everyone to settle for the same ten to fifteen records out of boredom and exasperation. Certainly last year saw a lot of familiar favorites putting out strong records - LCD Soundsystem, M.I.A., Kanye West, Spoon, Arcade Fire - that everybody seemed to agree on, and these albums dominated the year-end lists, much to the chagrin of those who actually pay some attention to the deluge coughed up by the internet between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Exacerbating the ennui was the lack of new blood: the big debuts were Battles (Mirrored, #11) and Amy Winehouse who, despite (or perhaps because of) image problems, placed in the money both for albums (Back to Black, #5) and singles ("Rehab", #4). No one else who wasn't already on the radar appeared to make a sizable dent.
The big winner was James Murphy, who, after getting the all-time shaft from Pitchfork (which proved its indie conservatism by privileging the bedsit over the dance floor) posted the #1 album, and scored three singles in the top twenty. But surely you don't require me to wax rhapsodic about LCD Soundsystem, and so I refer you to Idolator editor Jess Harvell's piece on Sound of Silver.
The big surprise was Britney Spears, who will doubtlessly be cheered to note, provided whatever padded cell she's presently in has WiFi access, that, according to assorted pro and semi-pro cognoscenti, she had the 32nd best album of the year in Blackout, and the 29th (tied with 8 others) best single of the year in "Piece of Me". Spears has been only accorded scant respect from the critics before (almost all for 2003's excellent "Toxic"), so it's nice to see that Child Protective Services aren't the only ones who've got her on a list this time around.
In addition to the traditional album and single categories (oh, and reissues: Young Marble Giants topped The Complete "On the Corner" Sessions, which should give you some idea where the electorate's allegiances lie), Idolator also had an "artists" category, posted with only a cryptic "It's up to you" by way of explanation. This, of course, is a double entendre, honoring winner Radiohead's pay-what-you-like distribution scheme for In Rainbows while at the same time acknowledging the complete subjectiveness of the category. Yet it seems that voters didn't really take it in any new direction, instead preferring to reshuffle their album top tens around (though it's worth noting that Bruce Springsteen, whose Magic placed #24 (!), landed at #6 here).
Like Pazz & Jop, Idolator uses a weighted system to determine the final placement of albums, allowing voters to not only list their top ten, but divvy up a certain number of points among those ten records, singles, or whatever anyway they see fit. Unlike Pazz & Jop (though Christgau would often make mention of this in his valedictory piece), Idolator publishes an "enthusiasm" top 40, rearranging the albums that received more than 150 points in order of most points-per-voter. Overloading an album with points is a time honored trick among voters trying to a) secure a relatively obscure, but worthy artist a mention in the lower reaches of a list, or b) trying to run an album up the flag poll over more generally, but less passionately acclaimed competition. This is the practice that let the old farts peopling last year's Pazz & Jop vault Bob Dylan's Modern Times, a solid but unspectacular effort, past TV on the Radio's Return to Cookie Mountain and into the #1 spot. Here Spoon, whose Ga^5 finished #6, are a surprising #1, followed by perhaps an even more surprising Bruce Springsteen at #2.
(ED. Okay, so the above paragraph is only partially correct. According to Idolator's explanation of the poll's mechanics, there are only two ways to parcel out your allotment of 100 points: you can either opt to award them in descending order (15 points for #1, 14 points for #2, so on and so forth until you get to 5 points for #10) OR you can just assign 10 points to each album. I approve of this system because it prevents a handful of elderly guerrillas from contaminating the sample, and it addresses the concerns of the oh-so-weak-at-heart who just can't imagine privileging one of their favorite albums of the year over another, like they were their kids or something. So you can either disregard the above paragraph, or read it as a critique of Pazz & Jop, which I believe still allows voters to go for broke and spoil the soup.)
In a few weeks Pazz & Jop will be out and we can finally put 2007 to bed and focus on 2008. Which is important because here we are, not two weeks into January and The Magnetic Fields went and put out a contender for Album of the Year.
