The Tris McCall Report
Critics Poll 2005 -- Famous Last Words
The experts agree: a pint of plain is our only man.
The name "Critics Poll" started out as a joke. At the high school I attended, everybody had a mean nickname, and every group of friends did, too; name-calling was a varsity sport. If you ever want to know how I developed such a bad attitude, ask Jonathan Dayton. Anyway, just as there were Japs, and Guidos, and Brickheads, and Muscle Jews, and Burnouts, there were also Critics, and that was us. I was the same jerk then as I am now, so to tell you the truth, I was pretty into it.
I lived in suburban New Jersey, but I read the Village Voice. Those bums had a Critics Poll, every year. My reaction: what are they doing with a Critics Poll?, we're the damned Critics. Moreover, neither they nor anybody else seemed to like the albums we liked. I'd already learned that arguing about music was fun as hell, and could pass the time in the back of biology class. I figured we'd institutionalize it: get together at our favorite hot dog place, scream at each other, write down our favorite albums on the back of the placemats, and call it the real Critics Poll.
That was 1988. We were in high school then; later, we all went to collich, and I got my collich friends in on it, too. For the first five years or so, we had about twelve voters. We hit our low point in 1995 -- I was out of school and peddling my ass, and grunge had really dampened my enthusiasm for popular music. Rap was going through a serious phase just then; there was a sense that poker-faced stuff like The Roots was the future. I was listening to old folk records; stuff like Maddy Prior and June Tabor. I didn't push it that year. We did a poll, but only six of us voted.
Then a funny thing happened. Well, three funny things, all related. First, pop music pulled out of the "alternative" rut it had been mired in ever since Nevermind resegregated radio. Second, I started writing reviews for Jersey Beat, which meant I had to pretend to be interested in contemporary rock. Third, and most importantly, I got my first e-mail account, through a company called Erols. They don't exist anymore; don't bother looking them up. But at the time, it was a liberation. It meant that we didn't all have to be in the same geographical location to do the poll, and nobody needed to splurge for a stamp. I sent out e-mail asking for top ten lists, compiled the results, and called that Critics Poll VII.
Participation began to increase annually. We developed a few more traditions: for a few years, we insisted on filling out our own ballots on Superbowl Sunday (now Critics Poll Sunday). I solicited ballots from the people on my personal e-mail list, and at the end of January, I sent the results to everybody who'd voted. Some years, when I was feeling particularly anti-social, I didn't even bother letting anybody know who'd won. It was a purely personal exercise; listmaking for the sheer ill bang of listmaking. I kept all the ballots in the pink filing cabinet.
Then, in 2003, I bought a domain, and started the Tris McCall Report. I thought it might be amusing to learn the HTML coding for form submission, and to put an online version of the poll on the site. But once I started going public with my writing, a very obvious thing that I didn't expect began to happen: people who didn't know me from a jicama root began to read my writing, in substantial numbers. And, of course, if you haven't met me, and you don't know from hard experience that I'm kidding a good 90% of the time, you'd read Critics Poll and think, oh, that must be a Poll of Professional Critics. It must be somehow authentic, a sampling of genuine expertise.
Well, I don't take rock and roll all that seriously, and I sure as hell don't take rock criticism seriously; I love them both way too much to do that. If you yourself love music, and you've got an opinion on it (and who doesn't?), then, to me, you're as much a Critic as anybody else. One of the horrible things that has happened to the Internet over the past few years is that it's started to professionalize itself: instead of lunatic screeds on why the Bay City Rollers are the greatest band in the history of the world, we've begun to get institutionalized music magazines that resemble the print publications that we went on the web to get away from. I don't think there is any such thing as a pop music expert, and I don't think there are any correct answers, and I think that if you're not having fun and goofing when you're writing and arguing about music, it's probably time to retire your record collection and start work on that six-volume biography of Grover Cleveland.
This year, there were 128 voters in the poll. That's a bunch. More people are reading this recap than ever before, too; these results have been posted on websites and broadcast over the radio. And just as Billy Idol was able to make himself an idol just by calling himself one, our Critics Poll has begun to attract published critics. Rock writers from New Jersey's newspapers now submit ballots. Webloggers and 'zine publishers do, too. A few weeks ago, I discovered that if you search the words "Critics Poll" on Google, our poll is the fifth discrete entry; if you plunk "Critics Poll" into the image search, the first thing that turns up is a shot of my mug.
All this adds up to a legitimacy crisis for the enterprise. We're certainly not a panel of experts, but we're not a bunch of dudes horsing around anymore, either. (Increasingly, we're not even a bunch of dudes, period: forty percent of this year's respondents were women, up from a big fat 0% when we first started out). The poll has become too big -- and, to be truthful, too anticipated by many of our voters -- to return to a private, filing-cabinet existence, but it's also too small and too narrow to be representative of anything other than our own reflections. When I first started writing up the poll, I knew all my addressees personally; so that meant that if Tales Of Great Neck Glory came first, I could come up with a pretty decent explanation for why that had happened. These days, those simple chords aren't so easy to find.
So I'm not exactly sure where we go next. I find the jumbo polls to be too inclusive and too wide-ranging -- there's almost no chance that an oddball album can buck the statistical odds and place in the top ten. The smaller, publication-specific polls have become almost absurdly predictable; if you've even got a passing knowledge of rock marketing, there's really nothing to learn by reading them. I enjoy the exercise of writing this stuff up -- this is now the third year I've done it, and I do it because it's fun -- but I find myself wondering if the decision to automate the balloting hasn't undermined my original intention for doing this.
We make top ten lists despite our sure knowledge that it's a silly endeavor. There's no such thing as a "#1 album"; there are favorites, and then there are records that strike us as important, or telling, or beautiful. But lists help us to organize and clarify our own priorities, and to understand why we value what we do. As I mentioned, this year's Decemberists album placed high on the poll without garnering much enthusiasm; it beat out records that were clearly more meaningful to those who voted for them, but which did not have the benefit of a carpet-bombing publicity campaign. I think of this as the Pazz & Jop disease: albums everybody knows invariably land ahead of albums that are fiercely loved by a small handful. We're nowhere near as bad as that, but still -- Critics Poll XVI followed the same folly to conclusions that I felt were, for the second year running, all too ordinary. The fault is not in the voters, but in the process, and in the scoring, and probably in the nature of that foul beast Democracy. For Critics Poll XVII, I need to do better.
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I didn't expect to get so many responses; I thought we'd come in around 70 or 80. In 2004, I received many, many first-time ballots from Jersey City residents who were regular readers of this site during the big sell-out of the Arts Center at 111 First Street. Almost all of those people have since left Jersey City, and my sense is that they've put the town behind them like a bad dream.
So what happened to compensate for the loss of those twenty to thirty ballots? Well, for starters, everybody who had ever voted more than once sent me a list this year. This is the part of doing the Critics Poll that I look forward to the most: seeing how you regulars called it, guessing at your evaluative logic, laughing at your wise-guy comments, arguing with you over e-mail in side conversations that heavily inform the year-end write-ups. Regulars live all over America; many of them started as New Yorkers and have since moved elsewhere, but others are people I've never even met, people who've only encountered the confrontational side of my personality.
Nevertheless, where I am and what I'm up to still has an enormous effect on who votes in this poll. In '04, I spent the year trying to uncrock Jersey City; thus, I got a bumper crop of ballots from Jersey City. I spent 2005 in the rock, and at the end of the year, the rock spoke back. Members of the Axis Of Tweevil -- that collection of indiepop bands and fans that has coalesced around the continuing misadventures of My Teenage Stride -- participated in the poll for the first time. Actually, some of these guys did vote in '04, but in '05, they all voted (ironically, Jed Smith was one of the only Axis members who didn't send a ballot, though he kept threatening to.) More working pop musicians voted in the Critics Poll this year than ever before.
That helps to explain the success of Twin Cinema -- the New Pornographers are a pop musicians' band. They're not afraid to flaunt their chops, and they don't shy away from baroque arrangements of simple melodic ideas. Without Tweevil support, the New Pornographers still would have won the poll, but it would have been a much tighter finish; Spoon, that perennial favorite of the Jersey crowd would have finished points off the pace. Other indiepop bands helped by the Poll's changed demographics: Of Montreal, The Clientele, Broadcast, Jens Lekman.
Right about now, Bill James would run an instructive summary chart. Let me do my best for ya.
It's probably no longer accurate to think of this as a Jersey poll. The Pernice Brothers, a yearly Garden State favorite, were the band most disproportionately favored by voters on this side of the Hudson; remove the furriners, and Discover A Lovelier You finishes third. Conversely, discarding the Jersey votes launches Fiona Apple into the top five.Women were much more likely than men to vote for M.I.A. and the White Stripes; men were much more likely than women to vote for The Hold Steady and Sufjan Stevens.
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One last word about Sufjan Stevens, and then I promise I'll leave him alone until I'm further provoked. I think he's an excellent musician and a good songwriter, and I do like much of Illinois. But this year, all the hucksterism and gimmickry really began to grate on me. You don't need to have majored in public relations to figure out why he chose Illinois as the subject of his interminable -- yet fundamentally cursory -- study. Even the phony controversy over the Superman cover pissed me off. It was my expectation that professional musicians would try to beat file-sharing by making flimsy excuses for concept albums, but I wasn't expecting things to get quite so crass so quickly.
What I don't understand is why more people from Illinois aren't offended by this. Maybe I'm just defensive, but if some Brooklyn hipster sat up one night with a search engine and a copy of some crappy old folk history of my state, and tried to make an album out of that, I'd come back swinging like 50 on "In My Hood". I don't have any relationship with Chicago at all, so I'll leave it to Common, or Urge Overkill, or Dusty Baker, to fire back. But I'll tell you this much: I might not be able to play, or sing, or arrange a pop song like Stevens can, but I can write a little. If he doles out this sort of slipshod treatment to New York or Pennsylvania -- or even Massachusetts -- he's really going to get my Irish up. And if he comes within 500 yards of New Jersey, I promise you all a lyrical battle you will not soon forget.
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Speaking of 50, it is difficult to be underrated when you sell a zillion records. Yet somehow that's happened to 50 (not that anybody ought to be shedding any tears for him). Despite a public profile only slightly lower than the President's, 50 Cent gets no respect as a vocalist, a lyricist, or as a conceptualist. A few readers wrote to me, incredulous, asking how I could have named "A Baltimore Love Thing" one of the year's best lyrics. Chances are, you haven't heard The Massacre and Get Rich Or Die Trying a trillion times apiece. But I have, and since I've had that experience, there are two things I can share with you: first, both albums are growers that shine brighter and brighter the closer you get to them, and second, "Baltimore" is the best encapsulation yet of 50's worldview.
Anyway, none of that is what I really want to talk about. I've praised 50 Cent as a rapper before, but this year it occurred to me: his real strength may be as a singer. 50 sings all of his choruses, and also the choruses on many of the other G-Unit singles. He does this not (just) because he is a monomaniac, but also because he can discharge a sung hook better than any R&B vocalist this side of Nate Dogg. His vocals ain't too mellifluous, and he never exactly pushes himself -- but he always sounds great, and he's got that elusive ability to sound tough as fuck while he is crooning. Think of any 50 Cent single -- what's the first thing that pops into your head? Chances are, it's 50 singing; singing so well, in fact, that you don't even know he's singing.
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Several of you predicted that New Orleans would be the place that the next pop music boom would come from. To paraphrase 'Ye, is you smoking reefer? Top eleven reasons New Orleans will not experience a big pop music boom in 2006:
11. Mannie Fresh has left Cash Money Records,
10. C-Murder's album, the best ever released by No Limit, did not sell,
9. Quintron is the only New Orleans rock band of any stature,
8. Master P is off playing CBA basketball somewhere,
7. B.G. has relocated to Detroit, or someplace like that,
6. George Bush doesn't care about black people,
5. Brian Williams has pissed off everybody in the South, and is most likely going to spend more time litigating than rapping,
4. Despite Lil Wayne's elevation to CEO of Cash Money, there's still a very good chance he's going to jump ship and record for Def Jam South,
3. As we learned from the "Draped Up" remix, there are about seventeen thousand great Houston emcees moving on to the mainstream radar,
2. Reports of Juvenile's new "serious" side have been greatly overrated,and the number one reason that New Orleans will not be booming in '06:
1. The fucking city has been destroyed, people.
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Tom Snow used to play music with me in college and in an old psychedelic band we had called The Favorite Color. If you ever see The Favorite Color album anywhere, pick it up; it's really cool. He left New Jersey in the mid-nineties, and currently lives in Boston. Tom has been submitting Critics Polls since '93; this year, he basically called the poll. Here's his top ten:
1. Of Montreal -- The Sunlandic Twins
2. Spoon -- Gimme Fiction
3. The Clientele -- Strange Geometry
4. New Pornographers -- Twin Cinema
5. Fiona Apple -- Extraordinary Machine
6. Kanye West -- Late Registration
7. Art Brut -- Bang Bang Rock And Roll
8. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah -- Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
9. The White Stripes -- Get Behind Me Satan
10. Wolf Parade -- Apologies To The Queen Mary
He also gave the Decemberists their requisite honorable mention, and had Amerie, "Golddigger", "Hate It Or Love It", and "Since U Been Gone" on his singles list. Correspondence between Tom's ballot and the poll results hasn't always been tight, but sometimes lightning strikes. If we had a door prize, he'd get it.
Okay, everybody, thanks for tuning in. Same time, next year..
View the album list
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