Pazz and Jop 2010 Results

The Village Voice released or added up the total number of votes for its annual Pazz and Jop (which is Jazz and Pop) poll for 2010. Voting concluded on Christmas even but the tabulations took weeks to do, which is usually the case when you have somewhere between 1500 and 1600 music critics deciding what makes one album in their eyes shine above others.

The voting is rather simple, that is if you have a degree in quick addition. Ten albums are selected, unless you think there were less than ten worthy of your list in which case you can have nine, eight or fewer I believe. A total of 100 points are doled out to use for the 10 albums, no album can have more than 30 points and no album can have fewer than five points. So trying to do the poll on one take and not come up with 112, 106 or 103 is genius.

Anyway this year Kanye West ended up with a whopping 3250 points, or nearly double the amount than the runner-up LCD Soundsystem received. Basically the album has been either widely praised or critics have decided they don't want to look like fools so they will follow all the other critic lists and put that one on top.

The National's High Violet, which I put down as the top album, ended up in eighth spot and Vampire Weekend's Contra, another top ten I had, was fifth.

Part of the fun of the process is not so much the ones on top but perhaps the boost that some could get from being on the list, regardless of whether one, two or three critics decided that an album was worth the repeated listens or annoying/aggravating friends and co-workers into demanding or pleading them to listen to "this" because "this" is good or the next best thing to come along.

This is quite evident when one scrolls down below the rankings around 160, with some albums being mentioned at best maybe by three critics and on average two. A horde of albums have one mention, which is great because it means the following: the hacks are still listening to albums that they are paid and not paid to listen to, they still believe there is quality out there and get some sense of satisfaction finding something brilliant after tossing one mound of mediocre pre-packaged fluff on the CD player or online stream source after another.

The list originally was placed from 1 to 1800 but in recent days has been changed so that they have ties for albums with the same amount of points. So albums that were ranked in the top 700 are now tied for say 155th, which is the way it should be.

Fortunately last year it was a case of paring down the list, unlike other sub-par years where building it up to 10 could be a chore. Hopefully 2011 is more of the former......