Pazz and Jop, Chartsengrafs

So how many records do I have on the old spreadsheet at this point?

Oh, about 5000, not counting jazz and classical.

But don’t worry.  I’m not about to go out and buy 5000 CDs. (But that would make one nifty Fathers Day present, wouldn’t it?)

And what’s there amongst the 5000?

Eighty percent of them have only mention, and tend to be very recent records. Most will never get another mention, but who knows which?  Over time, some may show up again on some best of the decade or All time Best List. It’s not likely, but who cares when the sky (65k rows, actually) is the limit?  I’ll be there, waiting. I’ve got (some) time (left).

So I look to those records that keep getting mentioned over and over again and wonder if I’d like them.

About fifteen percent (750) of them have two mentions. If they’re brand new, I may take a chance on them. Sometimes I‘ll get burned by “flavors of the year” - they show up here, think they’re hot stuff, but never move on. If I hold off on them, many will just sit here and rot.

About 3 percent (150) have three mentions. Now we’re talking respectable! You’re making a name for yourself and not just in your own neighborhood. I’m watching.

Less than 1 percent (36) have four mentions. Hmmm. Very Serious. You’re officially “sanctioned”.  Not always a good thing. But I have to really start thinking about you. If I haven’t gotten you already, it’s probably because I hate you on principle.

Only 27 have five mentions. I almost have no choice at this point. You are liked by young and old, gay/staight and maybe more than one race. If I’ve not gotten you it’s because I’ve already gotten too much by you already, or you’re in a genre I’m under-appreciating, like hip hop.

There are twelve CDs with 6 mentions. Buying you feels less like a joy than an obligation. I may have heard too much of you already. When I do get these CDs they tend to be a letdown.

There are eight CDs with 7 mentions. You’re in the canon, I guess. And maybe a bit too established for me to bother going there.  And I may have already heard enough of you on the radio.

There are only three with 8 mentions. Maybe it’s time for me to try hip hop again.  Notorious BIG here I come.

And nine mentions? Just you, Ms. Lauryn Hill. You’ve probably got a brilliant album I just don’t think I’ll appreciate.

But what I’m not mentioning are all the ones that I’ve bought along the way. I’ve done it for those with as few as one mention (or even none, as in the case of favorites from my teen years) because it just “felt” right. And as you can see, I’ve held off on some that I’ve practically got people stopping me in the street urging me to buy.

So Jaybee, you might ask, what’s going on in that head of yours?

Next:  What’s going in that head of mine.

Pazz, Jop and the Even More Embarrassing Present

The Even More Embarrassing Present:

I see that Nutboy’s getting worn down. My strategy is working.

Whenever I’m asked a potentially embarrassing question, I find that a long-winded answer ( not your typical long-winded; Jaybee long-winded - I’m a professional) usually lulls the questioner into a state of passive acceptance.  Sort of summed up as “Whatever, just shut the f*ck up.” I even used it on myself once.

By the mid nineties I was married with two young children. And despite my best efforts, I was feeling more than a little out of touch with music. As the years went by, the Pazz and Jop winners were becoming less and less familiar to me. There was some information out there but the web hadn’t really kicked in yet. At least, not for me with my land line and 56k modem.

By 1997, that list I was carrying around - virtually unreadable and ripping at the folds - now contained just those hard-core-impossible-to-find-anyway records. And new records were coming out, and the yearly Pazz and Jop results were piling up.

So during a week when I was in between jobs (note to self: quit jobs more often) I had a day or two to mess around, and I decided to transfer my written list to a spreadsheet. Then, when I should have stopped to rent some porn, I instead pulled out all of the old dusty Pazz and Jop articles I kept, and compile them into the spreadsheet, too.

At first, I didn’t enter everything – I couldn’t type that fast. But I did take the high vote-getters. I also added Christgau’s list, using his skepticism to counterbalance the other critics.

Then, whenever a special poll came out (Rolling Stone’s Best of the Decade, Elvis Costello’s 500 Albums You Should Hear etc.) I’d add them, too, but even more importantly, I’d track the number of mentions each record got.

And suddenly, names stated to jump out at me: Belle and Sebastian, Moby, Stereolab, Air.
Their records would appear over and over again, and now I could see it.

Other polls came out:
Local Americana station’s Best of the Century
Paste Best of the Decade
Metacritic’s Best of the Year

And I kept adding them.

Now I had a list all right! A list on steroids! And the rest, as they (don’t) say, is history.

And now that this stuff is published on line, it’s a lot easier to cut and paste, so the level of effort has dropped to below CNO (Complete Nerd Obsessive) levels.

I also broke out two other lists for jazz and classical.

And it goes on.  

Now this all may seem a bit silly. It does smack of a phrase I heard in Richard Linklater’s Slacker - "premeditated fun".

But damn! I still want magic. And magic, as we know, is inherently unpredictable. But that isn’t going to stop me from squeezing as much of it as possible out of what is left of my life.  

What I’m saying is that it works for me.

So when I’m in the mood for new music, I can look over my spreadsheet and see which records did great in year-end polls, which ones keep popping up in the All Time of Best of Decade polls and consider getting them.

And ordering on Amazon, Barnes and Noble or iTunes is frighteningly easy. Those hard to find records just aren’t anymore. They can be delivered to my doorstop in a week or two.

Mind you, browsing in a record store is a completely different thing. Not being able to carry around a laptop in the store, my reflexive reactions kick in, and I sometimes get things whose poll placement means nothing to me.

I guess the next step is to bring an ipad with me, but then I’ll look like I work there. And I get enough of that at Costco.

Pazz, Jop: An Embarrassing Interlude

Probably a redundant title as most of my interludes tend to be of the embarrassing variety.

Anyway, in the summer of 1989 I was changing jobs and was asked what I'd like as a going away present.  I didn't have a CD player yet, so I thought I could use this gift as a jump start on a CD collection. (Ever hear of DAT?  No one else has either.  It stands for digital audio tape and it was considered a better technology than CDs, so I was waiting for CDs to die out and DATs to take over before committing to a new technology. I always was a betamax kind of guy.)

So, I thought, why not just give them the list I’ve been carrying around for the last few years? They could get me whatever I hadn’t already gotten! Genius!

Ah, but that list was folded, frayed and stained with hot sauce. Pretty nerdy, if not downright weird. I’d have to re-write it, as if it belonged to a normal person

But it occurred to me that if I hadn't succeeded in finding these obscure records after years of trying, what made me think these well-meaning amateurs would? To my horror, I realized that they'd quickly give up and get me a tie instead. So I’d have to guide these very good intentions in a way that ensured that they weren't wasted.

So I created a prioritized list, which went something (exactly) like this:

1. New CDs I’d like, taken directly from my first list. (ie. Joy Division's Closer)
2. CDs to replace some albums I had that were really old and scratched. (Beggar's Banquet)
3. CDs of records that I had shared with my brother but didn’t have the nerve to steal when I moved out. (Europe 72 by the Dead)

But this just describes what I wanted, not why one type was better than the other. So let me now give you the Jaybee translation, which I actually had the nerve to tell of of the befuddled gift givers:

1. I’d like you to really try to get these records. I know that they’re harder to find because amazon.com hasn’t been invented yet. But I don’t want you settling on the easier ones in section 2 and 3 unless you give these the old college try.
2. Okay, you did your best with the 1s. Now you can try for these, which will be really nice to have in a pristine version. But give it a good shot before moving on, okay?
3. All right, I believe you when you said you did your best, and although there are other records I’d prefer, I’m perfectly happy with these. Are you sure you went to the record store I recommended? And remember, no tie!

By the time they gave me the gift they were happy to see me go. But I got the CDs I wanted.

And this was just the beginnings of what I came to call my Gift Management Strategy, which had a rough start but ultimately found its home in my Amazon.com wish list.

If it hadn’t, I would have been bludgeoned to death in my sleep (I would hope) by now.  

There’s still time.

Pazz and Jop, Part Cinqo: My First Time

“So what about Pazz and Jop?!?”



That’s Nutboy, getting impatient. He’s right. For the last few weeks I’ve been writing around Pazz and Jop rather than about it. But that’s me. I’ll tell you about the history of watches when all you asked for was the right time.



My first Pazz and Jop was for 1978. Entitled “Triumph of the New Wave”, it confirmed what I was beginning to suspect - that this punk stuff was not about to go away.



It was the year of The Clash’s US breakthrough Give ‘Em Enough Rope, Blondie’s pop breakthrough Parallel Lines, Elvis Costello’s spite breakthrough This Year’s Model, Talking Heads Jaybee-life-changing More Songs About Buildings and Food, and the Ramones best-commericial- breakthrough-they-could-hope-for Road to Ruin. Plus Nick Lowe and Brian Eno, with their hands in everything.



It was not half bad for those thirty-ish oldfolks either. The Stones resurgent Some Girls, Neil Young’s beautiful Comes a Time and Springsteen’s not-great-but-after-a-three-year-wait- we’ll-take-it Darkness On the Edge of Town.



And many, many more.



After my wandering the desert for a long time, here was an oasis of music, and a treasure trove of information all summed up in one handy place. I was immediately addicted to it, and would look forward to it every year after.



And then, at the end of 1979, Robert Christgau gave a great summation of the decade, that only whetted my appetite for more.





The List:



So I had a lot to work with to catch up on what I missed in the 70s. But going forward I’d be keeping an eye out for other handy sources of music info.



In 1981 I got the “Rolling Stone Album Guide” and “Christgau’s Records of the Seventies” - the former a compendium of miscellaneous critical voices, and the latter one person’s voice, prejudices and blind spots and all. “Rolling Stone” had their star system – five for a masterpiece, four for excellent etc. Christgau had his grade system - A+ masterpiece, A for great, etc.



I pored through the two books looking for treasure, and there was plenty. If anything the problem was where to start.



And there were the disagreements, too. I’d long ago come to terms with critical disagreements. But even so, I couldn’t help but notice that there was some consensus.



So one night, while my friends were doing fun things like watching porn on the VCR, I was comparing these two books, looking for records that rated both five stars in Rolling Stone and an A or better in Christgau. I ended up with a list of about fifty records, and still think I had a better time. But that’s what a nerd would say, isn’t it?



I had officially become “that weird guy in the record store”. But it sure beat trying to carry that stuff around in my head.



And I’d spent the better part of the 80s using that list - and subsequent Pazz and Jop results - to find new music.

Pazz, Jop etc, Part Quarto: Hearing Voices

By the late seventies I started to notice that the Village Voice, and Robert Christgau in particular, had no patience for mellow singer songwriters like James Taylor, or overly serious progressive rock bands like Genesis.  They were about rock and roll in all its ebullience and pock-marked beauty.  To my horror, I would see seemingly simplistic rock and roll records like the New York Dolls being rated over my oh so serious heroes like Jackson Browne.

Wow, was that like a bucket of cold water! They really seemed to enjoy bashing anything “tasteful” – in other words anything that I’d be tempted to put on to impress my parents that rock music was serious.

To be fair, Creem magazine had always shared this aesthetic, but when I was reading it back in 1973, I thought it was in thrall to the glam rock fad going on at the time. But it turned out to be part of a grander tradition that had also looked askance at the psychedelic era (which, let’s face it, didn’t age very well) with it’s long guitar solos and hazy pronouncements that said little more than “there’s a weird smell in the bathroom.”.

All of this upended my thinking. So there were difference schools of thought! Which led to the question: if the critics themselves didn’t agree, why listen to any of them?

Was one school of thought any more valid than another?  Well, yes, I thought. The one you found yourself agreeing with, right?  But not so fast. Didn’t that just make it another dead-end tribe? Yes, unless it challenged you and taught you things. Then it was something better. It helped you avoid the trap of listening to the same thing over and over again.

But it also meant meant that you shouldn’t expect to absolutely love everything the first time you heard it. I have a long history of not getting things the first time around. But sticking around has almost always paid off.

The Voice helped me look back at the 70s in a new light, and encouraged my hesitant forays into punk rock.

My first was Talking Heads More Songs About Buildings and Food, based on a rave from Robert Christgau. The first time I put it on, I heard maybe four good songs surrounded by a lot of weirdness. But those four were enough to keep me hanging in until I got the rest (“Found a Job” being the most audacious, and maybe now my favorite.) Within a week I loved it all, and it remains one of my all time favorites.

And there would be others that seemed even more forbidding, like the Sex Pistols. I listened anyway. Some things I never got (Pere Ubu), but so what? Half the fun was the exploration. The trick was to not get discouraged. Just learn something about the music, the reviewer and maybe myself.


And move on to the next record.

Pazz Jop, Part Twa: Friendly Critics, Critical Friends

You can rely on your own tribe for only so long.

I could get the Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir solo albums because I was already a Deadhead, but maybe I should have stopped before getting to Mickey Hart - a great drummer, but maybe I didn’t need to have yet another version of “Playing in the Band”.

And known territory was by definite safe.  Too safe.

I forayed into singer-songwriter territory via Jackson Browne, scoring a win with Warren Zevon, and what seemed like a win at the time with Dan Fogelberg (it was good to get that off my chest). I barely missed the rest, thank god.

But this was just making me more knowledgeable about the types of music I already liked. I sensed there was more, and so began to check out some of the popular rock magazines of the day.

I’d like to say that I only got the coolest ones, but there were more than a few “16” magazines lying around from my Monkees days. (I didn’t know "16" was meant for girls, I swear!)

I had to be careful which magazines I brought home because some had dirty words in them. Plus they cost money.

First there was Circus, which was full of puff pieces on whoever was “in” at the time. You know, kind of like how Rolling Stone is now.  But they did have a decent review section.

Then there was Rolling Stone, Creem and Crawdaddy. They were less juvenile, which is what I wanted, even if I was still one myself.

I’d notice the ads for records. There would be quotes that sometimes caught my attention, like "Springsteen is a truly great songwriter", "Little Feat are the best band in America" or Elliot Murphy's Aquashow being compared to Blonde on Blonde.

And I'd read reviews, which, at the time, I took at face value. As dumb as it is to say now, I assumed that one review would be the same as another - that there was a universal standard being applying to the music, instead of the reviewer's subjective taste.

So I’d get some records that would annoy people, and take heat for “listening to critics” - unfairly, I think, since I never “decided to like something” because of a review I read.

Advice, whether it comes from a friend or a critic, may get you to buy a record, but it won’t get you to like it. So is reading a critic any worse than listening to a friend’s advice?  Admit it, it’s usually better.

Were those critics “reliable”? It depends what you expect to get. If you think reading someone’s opinion of a record is going to infallibly predict your own reaction to it, then no. But if you read one looking for evidence that the person listened to the record more than a couple of times, thought about it, and formed coherent thoughts about it, then yes, you can find someone “reliable”, assuming you understand that there’s ultimately no accounting for taste. But if you look for a way of thinking that rings true to you, then you’re on safer ground.

And if you aren’t into opera, but find yourself reading Opera Digest (Why? I don’t know.  You tell me. But hey man, hat's off to you.) don’t buy the record that is “the best opera record of the year”. Get the “ideal introduction to opera” instead.

If anything, I was more likely to fool myself into liking something because I liked that artist’s previous work. Like most young people, I was looking for heroes, and tried to convince myself that everything they did was “great”.

Another viewpoint is valuable to shake you out of such thinking. Maybe the best thing is to find a critic who will tell you that everything you thought before was wrong.

Next: Hearing Voices

Pazz, Jop, Spreadsheet, Etc: Part Duh - Get a Job!

When I turned sixteen, I finally broke down and got a job, like my Mom wanted.

She’d been pestering me for so long that it never occurred to me what I'd do with the money once I made it. If she'd have thought of the music angle I would have dropped out of kindergarten. 

At the time, my brother and I had, at most, 40 albums, so getting a new one every couple of weeks would be. Just. Awesome. (In the pre 21st century - and as such, undiluted - version of the word. And I'm a prime diluter - nowadays I'll call a halfway cold beer awesome.)

I could more or less buy whatever records I wanted so long as I didn’t go off the deep end. I didn’t want another comic purge.

But which ones did I want? It was getting harder to find out.

When you bought a single you knew exactly what you were getting. With an LP who really knew?  How to find out?

Should I have counted on friends to point me to certain bands? I guess so, if I ended up liking the music. And that if was getting bigger all the time because everyone was breaking up into their own different musical tribes (Led Zeppelin, Allman Brothers, 70s Soul, etc.) and it didn’t look like we’d all be reuniting any time soon.

Next: Frying, Fires, or Good-Bye Mom, Hello Robert Christgau