Recently by Robert Christgau

Rather than some illusory narrative, let's see if I can bullet-point the final two days of this year's EMP Pop Conference in Seattle. It would help if I knew how to make a bullet-point in this program (or any other). You'll have to settle for asterisks.

*Worst presentation: the first one I saw Saturday, by an academic who will remain nameless, though not genderless. His topic: "What Is the Sound of Revolution? The Auditory Imagination of the American Radical Left." His problem: indicated no knowledge of any difference in historical importance or political acuity between the Weathermen (dead wrong but smart and momentous), Timothy Leary (never a political figure even when he claimed to be), and the Manhattan pseudo-anarchists who briefly gathered under the rubric Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers (marginal publicity seekers without even minimal follow-through).

*Best New Orleans presentation I saw (I was moderating during Ned Sublette's, which my boss at Microsoft thought peachy): Alex Rawls, editor of NO music mag Offbeat, on Katrina protest songs, though he did forget BG's "Move Around."

*NAJP baton pass: Larry Blumenfeld on the struggle of New Orleans marching and Indian bands against Bush's malign neglect and Nagin's police (Larry has a Soros grant to study this stuff) to--quick, run upstairs to Level 3--Douglas Wolk on "The Ballad of the Green Berets" (Douglas specializes at EMP in obscure historical resuscitations).

*What I learned at the panel I moderated. 'Tis better for a young academic to deliver her postgraduatese as if it's a punk song than to humanize her language and be mild about it. Also: Tom Smucker hasn't altogether mastered PowerPoint. Saved by the tech.

*Journos under 30--established Nate Chinen and newbie Tal Rosenberg--made me care about Hawaiian balladry and an Israeli peace song that join hands in the transcendent schlock category. Special award to Rosenberg for best use of the first person at this conference. Supposed to be a no-no, young fella. Shouldn't be. No no-nos.

*Sometimes my old friend Greil Marcus describes music he regards as transcendent that I come away regarding as no such thing. His description of the incredibly bland Tift Merritt's careful rendition of Dylan's "Hard Rain" convinced me completely. He then trumped it with an equally convincing description of the Roots' furious "Masters of War," which he nailed to the wall by playing the music. We were spellbound.
*I hope somebody taped as-told-to king David Ritz's plenum disquisition on the spiritual satisfactions of an amanuensis. Completely off-the-cuff, or so it seemed, and I wasn't the only one who feared it would go on forever because start so anecdotally and indirectly. Finished right on time, with a flourish. Clearly the man has developed an instinct for long patterns of speech.

*The seminal cultural sociologist Richard A. Peterson, who got his Ph.D the same year I got my B.A. and whose 1997 Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity I'd just taught that Wednesday, did an intro for the panel he moderated on "Making Roots Music Pop Heroes" that cut even Barry Mazor's excellent Jimmie Rodgers talk.

I thought maybe this would be the year the academics took EMP over, quality-wise. But Peterson and John Vallier and a few others notwithstanding, the best stuff continued to come from journalists, many of the standouts professionally marginal. I became a journalist because I had concluded there was no better place for someone like me, having quickly learned after college that my talent for fiction was nonexistent, to do lasting work as a writer. Little did I suspect  that four decades later a semi-academic conference would be one of the best places to prove it.

So here it is more than a week after the last EMP Pop Conference presentation I described in "EMP I"  and I thought I should at least augment my notes with my fading memories and record some of what I heard and observed. To start I want to emphasize that if there's an event of this sort in any other arts field I'd like to know about it. This year marked the first presentation by my sister, Georgia Christgau--a journalist turned high school English teacher who wrote rock criticism while earning her keep as a typesetter at Creem and The Soho Weekly News, as the Village Voice's night editor, editing at an ecology mag and a union newspaper and High Fidelity, then finally with the Board of Ed. Rock criticism is that kind of calling, which is one reason I'm proud of it. Two similar pals of mine also presented: my old friend Tom Smucker, who combined a decade-plus of occasional writing for the Voice with a job at the phone company, where he ended up editing a union newspaper too, and my young friend Jesse Fuchs, a game designer who tutors for a living. (Both killed in PowerPoint.) But the point of this preemptive digression is that my sister dragged my lawyer-by-day, trumpeter-by-night brother-in-law along. Like my wife and daughter before him, he arrived with a head full of Seattle tourist opportunities and just about never left the EMP building where the conference was held. There was just too much interesting stuff going on.

EMP 2008 has been one of the most engrossing and exhausting ever, but Elijah Wald's presentation was so NAJP-relevant it deserves its own post. Wald has written for many periodicals but concentrates on books, which anyone who's ever signed a midlist contract can take as one more scary story about the economics of arts journalism. One of his recent books is about the narcocorridos--Mexican and Mexican-American story songs about the drug trade. Wald had another scary story about these story songs, and about arts journalism. I'll try to sum up. Anyone who wants to find out more can do so at or via elijahwald.com.

 

Briefly, it goes like this. In late 2006, a narcocorrido artist named Valentin Elizande was murdered, reputedly--on speculative hearsay evidence--in response to a grisly YouTube video that appeared to threaten a drug gang from a rival province, which was presumed to have finished him off in retaliation, though the video only appropriated his song and had nothing to do with him. Shortly thereafter, a Mexican singer named Zaida Pena was murdered along with two associates. She was not a narcocorrido singer, but one of her songs had a title that could be translated "shot to the head"--an idiom better rendered coup de grace, in this case the experience of seeing her man with another woman. A little later, five more Mexican musicians were killed, including four members of a techno-style band no one could imagine had anything to do with narcocorrdido.

 

No one, that is, except for all the newspaper editors, in Mexico as well as the US, who then assigned stories about how drug dealers--supposedly encouraged by violent YouTube entries, although Wald reports that YouTube has encouraged a move away from the narcocorrido trend because it can be more immediately responsive to the news events traditional corridos often dealt with--are killing off Mexican musicians. Essentially, Wald believes, this is nonsense--only one of these artists, Elizande, had anything remotely to do with the drug trade. He says most of the reporters who've consulted him as an expert, with Fox a significant exception, try to account for the objections he raises, doing a tightrope walk between rational analysis and the sensational story their overseers smell. Most of the stories run in the news hole, not the arts section. Most of them, he says, are the only coverage the newspapers in question ever give Mexican music, which accounts for 50 percent of all "Latin" music sales in the US.

 

Think maybe there's an arts story here? I wish. Wald reports that at a conference he recently attended, several academics thought they might write papers about how the drug trade was killing off Mexican musicians. They were disappointed when Wald proved a wet blanket.

 

Every April for seven years now, Seattle's Experience Music Project has sponsored the EMP Pop Conference, an extraordinary venture in criticism and scholarship that brings together academics and journalists specializing or sometimes just moonlighting in every kind of popular music. In seven years of nonstop presentations, for precisely one 20-minute period have I found nothing I cared to listen to at one of the three-become-four separate lecture sessions that run all day Friday and Saturday plus Sunday morning--there's always something valuable being said somewhere. At EMP, the journalists regularly kick ass. Not only do they write better than the academics, they have better ideas and sometimes even better research. This year's conference kicked off Thursday, April 10. There's still time for anybody nearby who cares about what arts journalists are capable of when they can presume a responsive audiences and no holds barred should come down whether he or she is a pop music fan or not. One way or another, most people are.
 

That said, the keynote can be dicey. In 2007, Jonathan Lethem killed, but Thursday's panel discussion of EMP's excellent current special exhibit, American Sabor: Latinos in U.S. Popular Music, was, well, a panel discussion. Except for Quetzal's Martha Gonzalez, whose mild and rather whiny militance reminded me all too much of her band, I liked all the participants: Los Lobos's almost scholarly Louie Perez, Ozomatli's earnest Raul Pacheco, world's most sophisticated Elvis imitator El Vez, and curators Shannon Dudley and his wife, Marisol Berrios-Miranda, who elevates her warm-heartedness into a convincing intellectual position. But they all tended to wander around the key themes of the mutability of "Latin" identity and the failure of rock's blues-and-country-had-a-baby foundation myth to come to terms to the many different kinds of contributions Latinos have made to it anyway. You know how panel discussions are.

 

Friday, on the other hand, was nonstop. Except during a lunchtime panel discussion about youth activism, I was engrossed from nine in the morning till seven at night, with many of my favorite moments coming from academics for once. After concluding that I might not get full value from the young academic whose Bob Marley presentation would follow those of freelance scholar Garnette Cadogan (a brief history of slavery in popular music) and British academic Jason Toynbee (who had flown in from London via Amsterdam and whose body seemed to have shrunk visibly in the two hours between my encountering him in the hotel lobby and the meet-and-greet Thursday, yet who convinced me that morning that there were deep class implications in Marley songs I'd always passed over), I went upstairs to the tiny Demo Lab to see whether ethnomusicoligist-archivist-librarian John Vallier's "Ethnomusicology's Missionary Position" would unpack, as they say, the one-worlder evangelical zeal that weakens the discipline. Instead I learned that real Christian missionaries had for decades been studying "applied ethnomusicology" in order to write hymns--let's call them Christian propaganda songs--utilizing the scales and instrumentation of various indigenous peoples. That was mind-blowing enough. But at the end Vallier tied this, positively and negatively, to the zeal to which I just referred. A terrific piece of writing in a room that, when I arrived, was about to engage in a heated discussion of whether the graduate-school postmodernese in which the dreadful previous paper was written constituted a dialect of English whose effect and/or intent was exclusion. Vallier's academic prose sure wasn't.

 

Time to go to the Saturday session. I'll report more in the days to come.

 

 

One of my favorite sentences in all of rock criticism is one Ellen Willis wrote four decades ago in "Dylan," to this day one of the finest essays ever written about the '60s and in my opinion a direct precursor of and probably inspiration for Todd Haynes's I'm Not There (I tried to ask him about this at a screening he attended but he brushed me off): "In the sense that pop art is about commodities, Dylan's art is about celebrity." And this is still true--there are daily critics from Ann Powers in L.A. to the much-missed (at the New York paper that calls itself the Times) Kelefa Sanneh who write with insight and empathy about the impact of pop stars' persona and public life on their music, their fans, and the complex whole that is their aesthetic effect.

In other words--I'm not an old fart, really. I'm hep to the jive. No kiddin.

That established, let me merely direct your attention to this link, about AP's plans to increase its arts coverage. For NAJP-ers decrying the shrinkage of jobs in arts journalism, this is clearly good news, especially given such assurances as:

The entertainment vertical is not about gossip, unnamed sources and innuendo or about "peephole" journalism with AP photographers becoming paparazzi

 

Only then you read on to all the revolting talk about "product" ("brand" I admit I've gotten used to) and note that the sentence I just quoted doesn't know the difference between blather and a lie, or want to know. What a bummer for those of us who believe that arts journalism ought to address the popular and the mass--that both remain arenas of enormous creativity, even within the terms Willis established so long ago. Only to write well about them, it is essential to have the ability and desire to distinguish between blather, lies, and countless other species of prevarication. After all, artistic "truth" is often and perhaps always a species of illusion--as some might fruitfully claim, a species of prevarication itself.

At the casual distance that's as close as I've ever gotten to Vice magazine, it's always seemed about 150 degrees from my tastes in hip--too gonzo, too macho, too cynical, too apolitical. But when I attended a screening of the Vice-generated documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad, it was soon apparent that these vices were being put to use. The subject is the only Iraqi heavy metal band on the historical record, Acrassicauda, the Lain word for the black scorpion that infests the surrounding desert, whose impossible-to-remember name goes perfectly with the artless title. ("Honey, what was that movie about the Iraqi metal band called? Oh, I guess this must be it.") Really, if you propose to get to Baghdad by hanging around the Frankfort airport until there's a flight to Kurdistan and scoring a visa after you land because no one will give you one anywhere else, a little gonzo macho will come in handy. And if you end up with a passion to convey how totally fucked the Iraqis are, going in cynical and apolitical will only enhance your cred.
    Acrassicauda are totally fucked. These four probably middle-class guys (it would be nice if narrator-codirector Suroosh Alvi told us more about their families than how totally fucked they also are, but those are the wages of gonzo), including at least one Sunni, one Shia, and one Christian (historical note: once upon a time, most Iraqi musicians were Jewish), formed their band as teenagers six years ago and have gigged at a rate of under one per year. Their first concert was in Saddam's time, when government enforcers insisted that they perform a song about how the youth loved Saddam, an order they cheerfully and cynically obeyed with a thrash throwaway. In 2004, Vice published a story about them, and then, with zero regard for the niceties of journalistic "objectivity," decided it would be cool to produce and film a concert in Baghdad. Only then the airport got bombed and Vice was stuck in Beirut, leaving the filming to some buddies of theirs in Iraq. Once everybody gets through the checkpoints and the electricity comes on again, Acrassicauda's several hundred headbanging fans find a temporary relief from their perpetually repressed rage that is in no way diminished by the fact that the show has to end at seven so everybody can beat the curfew home.
    Vice does eventually get to Baghdad, and though I haven't seen any competing Baghdad films (there were two Oscar nominations, right?), the footage is only enhanced by the fact that, hey, these guys are just trying to make a humble rockdoc. Baghdad is hell somehow co-existing with a recognizable version of daily life. The final third meets up with the band members in Damascus, where they manage to stage another concert and record three Vice-financed demos, which makes them very happy. Their leader lives in a concrete rabbit hole like many if not most of their fellow million-four Iraqi refugees in Syria alone (admitted to US: under 1000). When the co-directors screen the edited Baghdad footage for them in the rabbit hole, they're excited at first. Then they cry. Then they get really mad. That's my idea of great meta.
    I'm not a metal person, but musically Acrassicauda are OK--ace guitarist. In any case, this is one case in which it's OK for whether it's a good story to take precedence over whether they're a good band, a pet peeve of mine. For those in NYC, the New York Underground Film Festival will screen Heavy Metal in Baghdad April 2. The flick also played the Toronto Film Festival. Canada wouldn't let the band in. Might be terrorists, you know.
   

Laura Collins-Hughes wasn't the only ARTicles articler to note that many of plagiarizing Bush-Rove Christian-right ass-kisser Timothy Goeglein's lifts were arts journalism. It struck me from the git as a warning about the pitfalls of the universalist humanism toward which so much arts coverage (including mine, more often than I'm happy about) inevitably tends, especially when it's in need of a sell line or a big finish. That's why I plump for what I like to call impolite discourse--prose with a monkey wrench in it, or at least a few nuts and bolts. Scares away the genteel generalizers (and also, of course, quite a few editors); makes it less likely that your words will be taken in vain. Only it was hard to check my theory out. Many of the pieces the Fort Wayne News-Sentinel identified as Goeglein's sources did not yield to Google (I think I have Lexis-Nexis access from NYU but, typically, don't yet know how to use it), and the Goeglein pieces I spelunked around for seemed to have been taken down by the News-Sentinel, which some may regard as a destruction of the record but makes sense to me.
    Looking over the list a little, however, I noticed that Goeglein often stole from his ideological allies--some of little intellectual moment, like Dartmouth Review's Jeffrey Hart and Robert R. Reilly of Crisis, plus others like Roger Kimball, whose Tenured Radicals I somehow never got around to even though I've launched a fair number of stink bombs at academic postmodernism myself. And though I would have thought Michiko Kakitani's seen-it-all crypto-elitism might have proved useful to Goeglein if he'd given it a little thought, the one he picked didn't require any--it was a review of a book about Mao as mass murderer from which I'll bet Goeglein removed Kakitani's reservations.
    Returning to this problem a few days ago, I did find a Goeglein column still up, a Hoagy Carmichael piece he copped from Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Jonathan Yardley. Here's a relevant passage from Goeglein:

A quarter century after his death, Hoagy remains one of the most beloved composers of the classic American popular music songbook, and with good reason. He was easily one of the most unusual bright lights in a starry field. Why?

Now here's Yardley:

A quarter-century after his death, Hoagy Carmichael remains one of the most beloved composers of classic American popular music, and one of the most unusual.

Real writing-class stuff, don't you think? Yardley feels compelled to come up with that sell line--it is in fact his lead--but has the grace to get through it with a minimum of fuss. Goeglein can't resist embroidering, and look what he comes up with. He adds "the . . songbook" to a phrase that was completely idiomatic before he got his mitts on it, and gussies up with inept boilerplate metaphor the rather weak closing "unusual" that Yardley is about to salvage with some analysis. Later on, fending off the plagiarism police, he does stuff like replacing Yardley's "dominant theme of his music is small-town and rural America" with the marginally meaningful "dominant figure of his music is small-town and rural America." Dude really can't write. I don't think Yardley's piece is great--Carmichael does bring out the pastoral sentimentalism in people. But in a sharp touch, it ends by recommending not just Hoagy's memoir but Louis Armstrong's rather more disturbing (though genial) and racially charged (though genial) Satchmo. Goeglein spares his Hoosiers this encounter with the Other.
    Moral: There's universalist humanism, and then there's universalist humanism. If you gotta do it, try and do it right. But don't be surprised if somebody misrepresents it anyway.

The rockcrit flap of the moment concerns a review by David Peisner of the Black Crowes' not-then-released Warpaint in Maxim, a magazine that discretion demands I mention shares ownership with Blender, where I am currently a senior critic. I do not recall ever looking at an issue of Maxim, although on its site I found a joke about men's collective propensity to premature orgasm winningly candid. But thanks to the folks at newmradio who scanned it onto the Web, and encouraged by its extreme brevity, I can tell you how the review reads in its entirety:

The Black Crowes already sounded like grizzled classic rockers on their 1990 debut. While it was certainly a neat trick for a bunch of wasted twentysomethings to pull off, it hasn't left Chris Robinson and the gang much room for growth. Now that they're legitimately grizzled, they sound pretty much like they always have: boozy, competent, and in slavish debt to the Stones, the Allmans, and the Faces.

It's signed D.P. and carries a rating of two-and-a-half stars.

    Long story short as usual--this is already last week's news in rockcrit, yet unknown to the rest of the artserati--the problem with this review is that Peisner hadn't heard the record in question. The Black Crowes' people, while asserting that the boys never actually read reviews or anything so unsavory as that, was unmoved by Maxim' apology, something about how what was supposed to be a preview was changed into a review by mistake, and demanded that the magazine deliver six buxom hotties to its offices forthwith. In the musical blogosphere and even in newsprint, Peisner was mocked as if he was JT Leroy or new fake Seltzer-Jones, but also defended, as for instance by Hits sachem Roy Trakin:

No Depression is a magazine I expect few people outside the music world have heard of. With its "roots," "Americana" focus (if I'm not mistaken, and I may be, it avoided the "alt-country" tag), it was always a touch corny for my taste. But it was a serious, professinally edited magazine that covered a sector of semi-popular music that gets far less ink in the general music press than its achievement deserves even if you think you hear too much of it on NPR. It lasted 13 years. And now it's shutting down. After the jump, an email from publicist Traci Thomas that includes both her kind words and the magazine's own account of its history and current dilemma. Both are informative and eminently sane. This is a portrait of arts journalism in a field where foundation support and status-conscious individual backers are basically not a factor.

Fact is, one reason I thought to comment--very belatedly now--on the two big rock critics' polls, the Village Voice's Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll and its two-year-old rival, now dubbed the Idolator Critics' Poll--was that it would come naturally. And when NARAS deisgnated one of its more outrageously ageist album of the year Grammyss--for Herbie Hancock's Joni Mitchell tribute, River--plus naming the Foo Fighters in the rock album category, I even had the semblance of a news peg. But it didn't come naturally.

    Long story short for outsiders, I ran  Pazz & Jop for 33 years till it maxed out at 795 voters in 2005. When the Voice fired me in 2006, there was a brouhaha over the fate of the poll, which had evolved into a kind of annual rockcrit forum showcasing backtalk edited from voter comments as well as a breeding ground of meaningful trivia for stat geeks. It wasn't even clear the Voice would continue it. Hence the Idolator poll, which was offered to me and then taken over--against my advice, but only because I knew they couldn't pay him enough for the work involved--by my young colleague, record advisor, pal, and fellow NAJP member Michaelangelo Matos, definitely one of the nation's biggest Pazz & Jop fans. Then the Voice decided to continue PJ under former PJ intern Zach Braff Baron and new Voice editor-critic Rob Harvilla. Many loyalists swore they'd never participate, but I like both these guys and figured it was the Voice's franchise anyway. I voted in both polls and consciously avoided publishing any year-end commentary of my own, just to prove I wasn't an addict. But in April, I did deliver a poll postmortem in lecture form--never published, again by design--at the EMP Pop Conference in Seattle. My general conclusion: good enough Idolator, but PJ still had an edge, because its electorate was more age-balanced, and because Harvilla, while declining to write one of the 4000-word summations I used to add to the mix, had cannily replaced it with 10 mini-essays of remarkably high quality.

   What didn't come naturally this year was reading the pucking things. Having been inside for so long, I took for granted the burst of interest that always followed publication. But I didn't find that I was part of it. I certainly looked at the lists right away, which last year were separated by a month or so and this week only about a week, because Idolator went up later and PJ published earlier. But where last year there was an interesting generational split--TV on the Radio, which won the Idolator poll, lost on points in the closest PJ finish ever--this year the top album was by LCD Soundsystem, a band I like OK but have never quite gotten, followed in PJ by Radiohead-M.I.A.-Winehouse-Arcade Fire and in Idolator by M.I.A.-Radiohead-Arcade Fire-Winehouse. Big deal. There was somewhat more differentiation in singles--Winehouse's "Rehab" won PJ but was only fourth in Idolator, where the winner was Rihanna's "Umbrella" (better record, I say). And generational differentiations surfaced further town in the top 10, where PJ gave it up to old guys Bruce Springsteen and Robert Plant, whose likably overrated albums I preferred to youth faves Panda Bear and Of Montreal, both top 10 in Idolator.

    I could go on about this--for 4000 words, were somebody to pay me an arm and a leg and guarantee me an extra two weeks of life to make up for all that 4 a.m. oil. But that is no longer my place in the firmament. Instead I will simply report that while as always I checked out both charts online going down to 300 looking for records I'd missed--futilely, for the most part--reading the rest of the poll material took me till, well, this morning.

    In place of last year's essays (long by him, short by others), Matos came up with the very online, post-album ploy of asking favored voters--38 I think, it's hard to count things on separate screens and that's close enough for the blogosphere--for annotated playlists. Some of the annotations were moderately snazzy, most first-draft drivel; after a while I was barely skimming them. And the lists, by me, were useless. I tried to find some of Douglas Wolk's more interesting-sounding obscurities--Sylvia Hall's "Don't Touch That Thing" especially--on Rhapsody and failed. I was pleased to infer that Lindsey Thomas was pregnant (if she is/you are, it was only implied, congrats) and constructed a Rhapsody playlist of her list minus a couple, but when I played it I found what I usually find--I liked the things I already knew I liked and didn't get the things I didn't. (What am I supposed to do, keep playing it till some of her faves breaks through, like my computer was a Lindsey Thomas top 40 station? How do file-sharers do it?) Finally, I was pleased to see that Gabriel A. Boylan, not a name I can place, had put together a list of 10 political songs--but less pleased that I already knew seven of them, and that when I tried concluded for about the sixth time that Ted Leo could be Tom Paxton for all he has to say to me. (Jarvis Cocker and Black Lips--will play once more.)

    Pazz & Jop posed a different problem. This year Harvilla assigned not 10 but 12 essays, and the overall quality was lower--Miranda Lambert deserves better, and the dance-music screed by Todd Burns of the late Stylus, as I am not the first to note, was murky and wrong-headed, though valuable in its documentary way for a) telling people with different tastes from his that they should be ashamed of them, which all too many critics feel without being crass enough to say so in so many words (for the record, I highly disapprove of this in both my rap/indie-hating contemporaries and in indie/rap/whatev-propping youngsters) and b) touching on the basic and rarely-explored question of the extent to which certain synthesizer sounds can be perceived as human, a crucial problem in inter-generational aesthetics to which I do not see an easy answer. But when I finally got through them I found a lot of good stuff, including Chris Weingarten on LCD (but not the rest of that jive), Tom Breihan on hip-hop, Harvilla himself on Jay-Z, and two excellent political essays, one by the aforementioned Zach Baron and the other by Julianne Shepherd, who I was dissing here not long ago--both centering on my favorite album of 2007, the year's only masterpiece to my mind and ears, M.I.A.'s Kaya. Kala.

    Then I began the comments and ditched the job for another week. The comments are not what they used to be. Rob Sheffield now sits out, for one thing--he was always good for at least a dozen knee-slappers himself. And in general I noticed Harville and Baron relying on loquacious as opposed to epigrammatic voters I read all too much of over the years. But once the top 10 was taken care of, the comments were better than last year's even so. The short deadline must have hurt--the little matter of ID'ing labels, always a pain in the ass that could never be gotten altogether right, seems to have been abandoned by all concerned. But once again I preferred PJ's age spread--popular music is not the exclusive province of the young. And I noticed one other thing. Last year, both polls pulled in around 500 voters for a total of a little under 800 discrete participants. This year, PJ was up about 50, Idolator down about 50.

    I really don't have a horse in this race. I like Idolator and have no love for the guys who fired me, and of course there would be a certain schadenfreude in seeing PJ fail without me--I resist it, but it's there. But so far Harvilla's doing OK. This time he snuck a shitload of real rock criticism, some of it real political rock criticism, into a paper that used to publish a whole lot more of it than it does now.

    Oh yeah. Hancock finished 80 PJ, 257 Idolator, and is better than I'd imagined before NARAS called my attention to it. Foo Fighters also got some votes and isn't.