The 25th (or 26th) Annual Pazz & Jop Critics Poll

La-Di-Da-Di-Di? Or La-Di-Da-Di-Da?

Soft New Flow Races Big Old Beat Into the Racial Present

The 25th or 26th Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll was the most closely contested since 1984, when Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. held off Prince's Purple Rain in another race between rock-solid Americana and visionary funk. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, or, as future Newt Gingrich revolutionary Sonny Bono put it in 1967: "La-di-da-di-di/La-di-da-di-da." The beat does go on: stubbornly, intractably, the racial polarization that America's popular music is thought to heal and subsume rises up in new convolutions. Yet God knows the beat changes as well. Recall, for instance, the rhythmic profiles of those classic albums, Springsteen busting loose from his four-square whomp into what was nevertheless only a kickier arena-rock beat (accommodating--were you there?--a dance remix), while Prince showed Uncle Jam and everyone else how a funk band might play rock music. Do their beats--both of which happen to derive from disco ideas about drum sound--go on?

Fact is, neither Lucinda Williams's upset winner, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, nor Lauryn Hill's inspirational runner-up, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, is nearly as unrelenting as Bruce and Prince's benchmarks--and neither are our matched three and four, a rock and roll record Bob Dylan cut 32 years ago and a folk-rock record his godfather had in his head long before that. No matter how it was heard by the folk fans Dylan was "betraying" (riling up?), Live 1966 isn't "fucking loud" even by the timid standards of the time. It's on the go and ready for anything, powered up to move a crowd or audience but not--unlike Bruce and Prince--a populace or mass. One great thing about Mermaid Avenue is the way Wilco's beats recreate the unkempt spontaneous combustion of Dylan's folk-rock as matter of ingrained commitment--just as it's the triumph of Williams's blues/country to simulate spontaneity itself, a delicate trick she risks drowning in a rhythmic strategy that muffles her old arena-ready snare but not the big bad beat. Hill's soft flow counteracts the hardcore thrust that's claimed blackness for years, recapturing and redefining a racial present by reviving and reconstituting a racial past. Yet despite what roots aesthetes and pop-rap utopians might hope, none of these developments equals "progress."

Last year, our winner was Time Out of Mind, in which Dylan realized his old dream of writing songs so simple-sounding you could have sworn they'd been there forever. But we also homed in on twin "pop events," as I waggishly designated not just Hanson's "Mmmbop" atop our singles chart but Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music atop reissues. Taking a cue from inveterate Pazz & Jop kidder Chuck Eddy (who became the Voice's new music editor just as 1998's ballots were being inputted), I even suggested that Hanson's Okie fluke was in some respects an heir to many of the oddities Smith canonized into a folk and eventually rock tradition. And I offered but one pronunciamento: "a terrible year for the rock `vanguard.'"

In 1998, all this came to pass. While our poll certified traditionalist art every bit as committed as Time Out of Mind--or as artist-of-the-decade PJ Harvey's concert-ready seventh-place Is This Desire?--the "vanguard" vaporized. Pronunciamento or no pronunciamento, 1997's top 10 had room for proven noizetoonists Pavement and Yo La Tengo, sample-delicate transnationals Bjork and Cornershop, indelibly punk Sleater-Kinney and incorrigibly prog Radiohead (now regarded in Britain as potential challengers to the greatest rock and roller of all time--you know, David Bowie). In 1998, with alt mopeburger Elliott Smith convincing the machers at DreamWorks he could be the Beatles, the closest the top 10 came to paradigm shifters was Air and Rufus Wainwright, whose very different projects mine the nonrock past to reconstitute schlock, kitsch, and the masterpieces of Western civilization. And mmmpop's playful synthesis of past and future was rejected out of hand: although Hansons-with-penises Next and the Backstreet Boys were hot stuff on Billboard's singles chart, they didn't get near ours.

But I've been avoiding something. Not black music, not yet, because this year hip hop includes Rolling Stone artists-of-the-year the Beastie Boys, who came in ninth with their first rap album in nearly a decade--and their best album in just as long, according to me if not Pazz & Joppers, who voted 1992's guitar move Check Your Head fifth. Fact is, I admired Hello Nasty's beat-driven, old-school/new-internationalist avant-pastiche more than the two hip hop amalgams that topped it. But given the demographic deficiencies of the 496 critics in our largest electorate ever, it's striking that our respondents preferred not just Spin artist-of-the-year and prepoll favorite Hill but the one top-10 finisher no one was handicapping 12 months ago: Atlanta's OutKast.

In an exciting year for most critics who were at all proactive about rap--a professional (and spiritual) achievement that remains beyond way too many of them--the desire for a consensus album that wasn't the pop-certified Miseducation boosted Dre and Big Boi, regional role models whose two previous releases attracted little outside notice. Coastally, New York maintained its dominance, from old classicists Gang Starr to new classicists Black Star, from Hooksta Jay-Z to 67th-place Bigsta-not-Punsta Big Punisher. But there was a bigger reason rap whupped rock commercially (again) in '98: the Dirty South took it to the cleaners. The behemoth was No Limit's New Orleans thump-and-thug factory, which put a phenomenal 27 albums on Billboard's r&b chart (Def Jam had 18, Bad Boy nine, no major more than 12). Laying minimal syncopation beneath minimal socialization and no more liberal with promos than with anything else, No Limit amassed three mentions total, but a precursor of its blackstrap flow got much respect: the sticky muck where Organized Noize root OutKast and 63rd-place Goodie Mob. OutKast's live slow jams are basically an evolved G-funk with denser instrumental cross-talk, no less street for putting organ rumble or soundtrack keyb where the eerie tweedle used to be. But their Southernness signifies, evoking Booker T., endless Gregg Allman ballads, humid afternoons with horseflies droning over the hog wallow.

Catch is, I'm not sure I've ever seen a hog wallow, certainly not in the South, and I doubt many OutKast voters have either. For Northern whites, the Dirty South is exotic in an all too familiar way--whenever pop fans seek "tradition" they flirt with exoticism, which often leads them south, although seldom to a drawl as ripe as Dre's. Hip hop remains disruptive by definition--even at its hookiest, it looks askance at melody and the white man's law. But in a year when rock noizetoon went, well, south, it's fitting that our two hip hop chart-toppers pursued versions of organic r&b; Gang Starr and Black Star also went for a smoothness, leaving Jay-Z and the Beasties together to trickerate the spiky stop-and-go with which so much of the deepest hip hop has complicated its booty-bump. In white people's music, familiar names sang similar tunes. Faux rapper Beck made a vrai folk record. Hole and Madonna impressed critics who disdained Savage Garden and Will Smith with albums designed for radio--albums that with no atheism aforethought I found barely convincing on their own unexceptionable terms. Liz Phair evolved from iconoclastic indie babe to quirky singer-songwriter and sold zilch, Sheryl Crow evolved from lowbrow singer-songwriter to middlebrow singer-songwriter and sold a million. Garbage's computer-tooled hooks were marketed as sex toys and swallowed that way. And drummerless R.E.M., charmless Pulp, and boundless Bruce all did what they'd always done, only worse. Either this wasn't a year when critics wanted to get all bothered, or it wasn't a year when musicians figured out interesting ways to bother them.

Right right right, the "year" is arbitrary. In 1996, for instance, we had five Brit finishers, in 1997 a whopping 16, in 1998 six--statistics whose cumulative predictive value is approximately zero. And since I'm oversimplifying as usual, let me grant exceptions to the conservative trend. Massive Attack's mixed-up slow grind Mezzanine and Cornelius's tripped-out spinfest Fantasma filled in, soulfully or giddily as was required, for two techno heroes I had judged, whoops, "certain to return in 1998"--morose 70th-place Tricky and pretentious 59th-place DJ Shadow (d/b/a Unkle, or UNKLE, told you he was pretentious). The Eels and Vic Chesnutt scored with concept albums, which may not be progress but I guess is art. The worked-over lo-fi songsmanship of Neutral Milk Hotel convinced alt diehards that maturity can be just as weird as growing up. The straighter, craftier Quasi and Belle and Sebastian kept up good subcultural fronts; Mercury Rev and the Pernice Brothers conjured pretty from sad; iconic indie babe Chan Marshall was lauded for being less miserable than she used to be, rather than happy or something shallow like that. Black Star were so underground they debuted at 53 in Billboard, subbasement for hip hop even if Air and Rufus never breached the Hot 200. Ozomatli's kitchen sink made the world safer for, if not rap-in-Spanglish or rock-en-español, at least rap and salsa on the same CD. Nas's trumpeter dad Olu Dara performed a similar feat for, omigosh, jazz and r&b. Robert Wyatt schlepped. And Marilyn Manson cracked our chart in the very year he first sported prosthetic breasts.

Nor was our traditionalists' fondness for the old ways the stuff of William Bennett's dreams. Recognizable emotions, tunes you can count on, and a little continuity don't add up to a blueprint for revanchism. In rock, these preferences--which have no politics no matter what Adorno types think--naturally combine with a chronic attraction to outsiders. So we end up with a faith that what glues the semipopular audience together (and maybe the big one too) is that we're all a little lost, in life or in love as a synecdoche for same--and our will to defeat that dislocation, in fun first and then, as the fun comes to know itself, art or even community. The terms of this faith may be simplistic--I've been kvetching about self-pity and outlaw romanticism since the Beatles said yeah-yeah-yeah, and I still hope Lucinda Williams outgrows her weakness for guys who die before they get old--but they're not reactionary. As I've said before, this is what another Williams, Raymond, called residual culture, preserving as art democratic usages whose human value outlasts their economic fungibility. The techno, alt-rock, and hip hop sectarians who suspect otherwise are kidding themselves. But if people didn't kid themselves, nobody would ever try anything new--which would mean, oddly enough, that not only would the innovations of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill and (in its time) Live 1966 be impossible, so would the reinterpetations of Mermaid Avenue and Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

No matter how conservative they are or aren't, our top four all change the world just by adding something good to it. Hill and Dylan's flaws as product--the schoolmarm skits that can't be programmed away, the mannered acoustic set you buy to get the historic electric one--are external to their musical achievement, which is epochal even if Hill doesn't yet sing or write in Williams's class. The other two are even better: democratic art music whose very clarity is uncannily evocative. The Bragg-Wilco-Guthrie is a miracle so undeniable it didn't catch a single dis, the Williams an album-of-the-decade candidate whose perfectionism made my heart swell long after it should have started annoying me instead. And while I also love the way Sonic Youth--who finished a tragic 41st because I shifted two of the points they deserved to a late-breaking Afrocomp that deserved them more--married their restlessness to their concord and made domesticity sound like the adventure it is, I note that even as they refurbished their avant-gardism they were doing a solid for family values. That was the kind of year it was. Although she presents herself as Other, popwise and racewise, Hill expresses thematically, or maybe I should just say verbally, a felt need that's pursued formally, or maybe I should just say musically, by Williams, Bragg & Wilco (not Guthrie), and Dylan's faithful (not Dylan, not in 1966).

Perhaps it is finally time to mention what once would have been headline news, which is that our complementary standard-bearers are both women. The 10 female finishers, including nine repeaters and three former poll-winners, fall within what is now Pazz & Jop's normal range, but the one-two punch is a first. With Williams, always pleased to be one of the boys, gender identity takes the retro taint off--her fanatical integrity, her undaunted autonomy, and the ready empathy she extends to her female characters all testify to the elasticity and life of a deeply male-identified form. But it's Hill who talks the talk, a talk that wouldn't have the same knowledge or moral authority if she were a man--Hill whose family values begin with single motherhood, who doowops so sexy as she breaks down that thing, who links her passion for specifics to a cultural tradition she's proud to name, and who, unfortunately, gives it up to God.

Though the latter has a more honorable history in black pop than in white (Madonna, this means you), that doesn't mean an atheist has to like it--Al Green she ain't. But as Madonna knows and Courtney may be figuring out, God sells--a lot better, these days, than the secular aesthetic of homely fact and nailed particularity that make Car Wheels on a Gravel Road such an inexhaustible pleasure for a this-worlder like me, who really would much rather the best record of the year or decade pointed toward the next one instead of time gone by. In fact, maybe God is the aptest shorthand for that felt need--if you crave something stable to hold onto, many would say there's none better. For the rest of us, however, the question remains: Why is the need there at all?

Media overload is a reliable excuse. A newer bromide fingers premillennial tension: rather than gliding into the 21st century, some hold, we're sailing sheets to the wind and scared shitless back toward the 19th. Another would echo William (not to mention Tony) Bennett and blame the very '60s others resent Lucinda and the rest for reminding them of--after [subtract 1967 and insert result here] years, it is said, even rock and rollers have seen through countercultural license and futuristic foofaraw and long for bedrock values. A less ideological second cousin of this theory would point out that the older the music gets the more adults love it, creating a deepening pool of fans capable of identifying with all the adult rock and rollers who've gone before. Having watched I don't know how many punks and hip hoppers and alt-rockers (although not--yet--techno babies), both personal acquaintances and poll respondents, learn to hear the parent music they once dismissed, I buy that one to an extent. But I would add the less benign corollary of formal exhaustion. Rock and rollers end up recycling the musical past because they have so much trouble conceiving a musical future that doesn't repeat it--not without trusting experiments so unsongful or sonically perverse that calling them rock and roll will put off the core audience of snobs who might think they're cool.

Yet although the Monster Magnet thingy is cute, although Pearl Jam and Rancid and Local H did what they'd always done only better (41-50: Sonic Youth, Willie Nelson, Local H, Pearl Jam's Yield, Marc Ribot, singles champ Fatboy Slim, Tom Zé, the underappreciated Alanis Morissette, Nick Lowe, and all them McGarrigles), although Alanis's grand gestures may yet be heard, although some fantasize about glam, although you never know, guitar bands got nowhere looking backward either. By January, corporate revanchism was sending dozens of them scurrying back to the indies. And while a few alt ideologues with long memories (that's Kurt with a K, chief) noted the structural advantages of this development, none of the aforementioned indie-rock chartbusters provided hope commensurate with their pleasure. Conceivably, the oddball populism of the four-CD Nuggets box that tops our typically product-driven reissues list will bear fruit. When it happens, I'll let you know.

History did have other uses, however. Elvis Costello's Burt Bacharach collaboration proved not a fussbudget's wet dream but his liveliest album since his James Burton collaboration. And while Bacharach is rock and roll by association, our retro progressives unlocked altogether alternative pasts. In the process of concocting the techno album and/or flavor of the year, the flaneurs of Air performed the amazing trick of making loungecore signify for its aperitifs, while Rufus Wainwright went ahead and reimagined American popular song just so he could avoid echoing his famous forebears. And though he hasn't brought the rehab off yet, I'm predicting that this piano man, opera queen, and born comedian will never front a guitar-driven four-piece--and trusting that our voters will cut him that slack. For even though neither Air nor Wainwright has anything to do with rock and roll, it wasn't the children of Sondheim and Jonathan Schwartz who cheered them on. It was the rock critic cabal, on the lookout for hot fresh novelty. That's why I take as a hopeful portent the scant 10 mentions our voters afforded the entire recorded output of the "swing" "movement" art directors so adore.

There is, however, a simpler way out of this latest (not final, surely?) installment of the rock-is-dead saga, and after 20 years of bitching I'm still bummed that our novelty hounds don't access it more freely. I mean black music, but with Maxwell, Seal, and Kelly Price disappointing their constituencies, black music meant hip hop, at least albumwise. Whatever conservatism the rap on our chart shares with the rock, none of it--including the Big Pun, Goodie Mob, Method Man, Redman, Coup, Public Enemy, and DMX entries that trail down to 100--evinces comparable cultural desperation or fatigue. This goes beyond the recombinant r&b of Hill, whose great idea was to lively up Afrocentric pieties from gospel to Stevie Wonder into a polyrhythmic pop fusion too beat-savvy for hip hop to resist, and the ATLiens, whose urban swamp boogie is rap-rock every bit as heavy as the bohrium and dubnium compounds hardheads hyped circa the Judgment Night soundtrack. The spare old-school beats of Black Star, for instance, proceed from a first-convolution self-consciousness that suggests not raw punk minimalism but the elegant intelligence of artists secure in a broadly conceived heritage, kinda like early Bonnie Raitt. DMX would be the punk, in the anthemic mode of Sham 69. Pun and Method Man are vocalists first, stylish soul men delivering the goods over new grooves for the ages. Public Enemy's prophecies are undiminished by their lack of honor in their own country; the Coup's tales of living unlarge are as thought through and old-fashioned as their beats. Gang Starr are patently proud to show off their skills again. And Jay-Z is as deadly a New Don as rap has ever thrown up.

Not that I still hope rock critics will take a cue from rock fans and master such distinctions themselves. That would involve enjoying hip hop, in all its . . . well, its nastiness, its materalism, its sexism, its . . . socially regressive tendencies! As a proactive white listener for 18 years, I'm not claiming it always comes naturally. Gang Starr's beats are way too subtle for me, and when Big Punisher guns down two "bitch" "niggas" in his "Packinamac" skit, I hope he gets punished big, though I'd trade that for one less teenager packing a MAC. But even so Capital Punishment stakes a more virtuosic, full-blooded claim for its subculture than, to choose a funereal jape that gets my goat, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Over and over I'm drawn to internalize a world that's only central to me insofar as I love music (although it would be of concern to me as a citizen regardless)--a world so rich musically, in terms the pop charts make clear many Americans understand, that that's enough. Granted, it was only a final bout of Pazz & Jop relistening that pushed me up close and personal to OutKast and Jay-Z albums whose skills I'd resisted even after I learned to hear them. But hard-won pleasures are sweet, as I'm doubly aware because the same thing happened with Air, and with so many voters complaining they didn't know where their next thrill was coming from, their failure to avail themselves of these didn't just seem, er, racially unadventurous. It seemed critically irresponsible. It seemed chickenshit. It seemed deef.

Or maybe it was merely refined. Just because our panel was more inclusive than ever--up another 12 percent after leaping from 236 to 441 in '97--doesn't mean it was any less refined. No sir. Glom our singles chart, which in the greatest year for pop cheeze in memory ignores such wizzy delights as Savage Garden's "Truly Madly Deeply" (biggest lies, biggest airplay, one vote) and Next's "Too Close" (biggest boner, second biggest sales, five votes) in stalwart defense of the high seriousness delivered to the masses by Fastball and Semisonic (albeit typified by Sobmaster Shawn Mullins, whose lament for a rock princess tied for 36th). No point moaning about Public Enemy and Aretha Franklin lingering just below our top 25. My beef is the critics' hostility to kiddie pop as a site of the artistic excitement that's so often coextensive with bizmanship. The beat changes, the beat goes on. Dismissing "Too Close" in 1998 is the precise equivalent of dismissing "Yummy Yummy Yummy" in 1968, and loving the Spice Girls without considering the Backstreet Boys is the most condescending kind of pop-feminist p.c.

Lauryn Hill lost out here as well. "Doo Wop," her radio-readiest cut as the single continued its evolution toward promotional fiction, was edged out by a hunk of cheeze rather than a work of art, but there's a crucial similarity. Just as Lucinda Williams's matrix is the blues, Norman Cook's is the rap-rock cusp--both are white artists reinterpreting and recycling what they don't hesitate to identify as black music. "Right about now the funk soul brother," repeats and repeats and repeats a distinctly black-sounding voice in the greatest techno sucker punch of all time. If you want to unpack the beaty fun of the thing, call Fatboy Slim's "Rockafeller Skank" an innocent celebration of rock and roll race-mixing--and note that all but one of the few black voters who were charmed enough to list it were what most would call rock and rollers, as opposed to black music specialists. As Miles Marshall Lewis and the "Cracking the Code" comments file illustrate, they often hear these things differently.

With new hip hop mags everywhere, we didn't attract enough black voters this year. We never do, for much the same reasons general elections don't, but 1998 was a little worse. That's why I didn't enjoy our neck-and-neck race as much as you might have expected from the 10 bucks I bet back in August on what I still consider a battle between sui generis aesthetic triumph and button-pushing pop-political smarts. Lucinda won clean with an album that deserves every push it can get, but I worried that her victory might be unrepresentative anyhow--even if only of rockcrit's illusions. And eventually, longtime Pazz & Jopper J.D. Considine's complaint that there couldn't possibly be 500 critics who heard as much music as he did inspired me to run a minipoll of a 125-voter panel chosen with three criteria paramount: well-integrated (21 rather than 8 percent black), well-exposed (mostly committed fulltimers), and, well, insightful (people I actually want to read). Never mind who was on it. Just believe me when I say that beyond a hip hop surge I had no idea what to expect of their consensus.

Right, Lauryn won. What amazed me, though, was how big she won: so big that when I reduced the black vote to a pre-Civil War zero, she still won. Top 10: Hill, Williams, OutKast, Bragg & Wilco, Air, Dylan, Smith, Harvey, Wainwright, Jay-Z (Madonna was 11th). On the chart: Big Pun, Goodie Mob, Public Enemy (90th on the real list), Saint Etienne (55th), Tricky, Tori Amos (73rd). Off: Mercury Rev, I-did-too-mention Gillian Welch, Wyatt, Monster Magnet, Pernices, please-don't-hit-me Marilyn Manson. Despite Mercury Rev, a serious glitch, I prefer this vision of pop '98, not just because it gave hip hop the hope and respect it earned, but because the writers I want to read usually feel the way departing music editor Eric Weisbard does in his essay--they care about pop. So of course they loved Lauryn Hill.

The problem with this is that critically, as opposed to journalistically, caring about pop is kinda rearguard itself, because the pop consensus has been seriously weakened by market forces. I'll continue to bitch about it myself, and conceivably the beat will change yet again. It's more likely, however, that the monoculture is history. In an era of millisecond information dispersal and electronic boutiques, it's no surprise that progressive artists whomping the so-called mass into some semblance of unity have fallen from view, or that insinuating pieties play the role of visionary funk, the progressive way to move the populace. But that doesn't mean Hill's pop-rap will count more than any other kind of realized democratic art music in the end.

So la-di-da. Or as the later incarcerated Slick Rick put it back when he was billing himself M.C. Ricky D, la-di-da-di.

Village Voice, Mar. 2, 1999

1997

Critics Poll | Dean's List

1999