Hip Hop gets rich and rock’n’roll refuses to die trying: the winners of the 30th (or 31st) annual Village Voice Critics’ Pazz and Jop Poll of the best music of 2003. Outkast kast their spell with the Voice critics just as they did with the Grammy judges. I heard Robert Christgau (who runs Pazz and Jop) interviewed this morning; he felt that Coldplay’s taking the Grammies best song award represents a backlash by rap-hating critics against a divided hip hop constituency. He sounds abit relieved, because he hasn’t been sparing in decrying his own poll’s unfairness to black music. Here are the album winners and the song winners.
As an aside — in an iPod and Kazaa universe, are albums more and more irrelevant? As a consumer of music criticism, I usually wanted to know if an artist’s attack could sustain itself before I would want to buy a disc. Not always; I was not infrequently known to buy a CD for a single song. A song-oriented consumer public who no longer buy “albums”, however, might mean artists have less incentive to record throwaway filler. Every song’s gotta be good to make it on its own merits? Still, there might be no more ‘concept’ albums, and no attention being paid to sequencing songs on an album. I can’t help wondering whether this will further erode our collective attention span for artistry down to the four- or five-minute level. When was the last time, perhaps apart from a classical performance if that’s your thing, you actually sat for forty or sixty minutes and listened to an entire album as the artist intended? I do, but that is because I have a fifty-minute commute some days.
For a stroll down memory lane, here are Chart Attack’s summaries of the 2002 and 2003 Pazz and Jop results (from a Canadian perspective, incidentally). Last year at this time Wilco were riding the wave of enthusiasm for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot; Christgau couldn’t claim they stole anybody’s hip hop thunder. I eagerly await some new music from them. And was it last year that Norah Jones’ first album captured Grammy hearts? Why is there no buzz about her second recording, arguably better, this year?
Addendum: Seth Mnookin writes in Slate about why we’re not hearing much about Norah Jones’ second album. He says the first time around the record company used a dicey strategy of heavily promoting her but then downplaying their promotional efforts so she could come off looking like a homegrown sensation whose popularity was made by word of mouth, “the Howard Dean of singer songwriters.” This time around, “Jones and her handlers don’t need to ask for coverage; instead, she’s being carefully parceled out…,” the pretense being that she’s not being marketed at all. Mnookin says Jones is trying to shape herself as an artiste who is not interested in commercial success, and predicts that the second album, which he feels is not in the same mold as the first in important respects, will in fact not be as successful. Although yesterday was its official release date, I’d given many of its songs many listens already before buying the disc today, since they’ve been on the P2P networks for several weeks at least. Different it is, but no less compelling. [thanks, Curt]
