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The 15th (or 16th) Annual
Pazz & Jop Critics Poll
Dancing on a Logjam:
Singles Rool in a World Up for Grabs
When last we sat down for a serious chat, it was the end of
the world as we knew it, and I felt fine. The Pazz & Jop Critics'
Poll, conceived as a goof and evolved willy-nilly into a
barometer, was plainly in a jam--a "logjam." On the album chart,
which dated back to posthippie 1971 or 1974, a plethora of well-crafted
yet ultimately inconsequential records by postpunk post-Amerindies
confounded electorate and dean alike; on the singles
chart, instituted in 1979 after the twin '70s movements of punk
and disco jolted rock and roll back toward its original format
and function, late-released songs from charting albums crowded
out the striking yet ultimately arbitrary moments of passion that
emerged on individual ballots. A crisis of consensus had moved
the Poobahs to dispense with the EP chart and was also evident in
sparse video voting. There were lots of great reissues, most of
which nobody had heard.
Yet I really did feel fine, if only because I had just
written something moderately cogent and very entertaining about this
mess, and obsessed the way I usually am in February, I made grand
plans to bring Pazz & Jop into the present, or future--plans cut
to fit the moderately cogent and entertaining objective correlative
of my good cheer. By which I mean the inevitable internationalization
of a world-pop hegemony that's been American
since the end of World War I--new vistas, fresh blood. Baboon
Dooley notwithstanding, I didn't expect the impending flood of
U.S.-released "world-beat" to show up on the voters' 1988 chart:
when I say internationalization is inevitable, I'm talking
decades or generations rather than years, and I'm also talking a
pluralism resistant to electoral quantification--more different
kinds of good music than any sensibility can make sense of,
created for the most part in blissful disregard of crippling
late-capitalist doctrines of artistic decorum (though embracing,
I'll bet, crippling late-capitalist chimeras of superstar glory).
Solution: a plethora of minipolls, panels of specialists
reporting on African music, Hispanic music, Caribbean music,
Amerindies, Europop, jazz, disco, whatever--even videos! Sounded
pretty snazzy, assuming the cash cow you hold in your hands would
allot personnel to the project--since I maim my marriage every
winter with computation, analysis, and shitwork, I wasn't about
to devote the fall to beseeching specialists.
So instead I spent it pondering my future in journalism,
just like my colleagues at said cash cow, which on January 4 came
under its eighth editor since 1974. And quite a decent chap he
seems to be, cough cough, but there was less than no way to know
that then, and--more to the point--no way to budget any grand
plans. Hence I was doomed to pore over the usual graph paper and
dot-matrix screeds in a year that would make the 1987 logjam look
like Beatlemania. I couldn't even figure a winner until a college
student I know transformed Tracy Chapman into an instant favorite
by dropping her name. I didn't look forward to enumerating the
shortcomings of this young black female lefty of unspecified
sexual preference and double-platinum sales. But at least she was
all those worthy things, and something new to boot, and thus
better copy than Talking Heads, R.E.M., or U2, whose well-crafted
but ultimately inconsequential albums would presumably vie for
place and show with the sonic youths of yesteryear, 1987's 14th-
and 12th-ranked Public Enemy and Sonic Youth. As for the other
front-runners, maybe some legends--plenty of them out there
shaking their bones. But all the contenders felt like 11-to-20
material to me. For the first time, I didn't have it in me to
handicap a top 10.
As it turned out, my confusion was a premonition; statistically,
the 15th (or 16th) annual Pazz & Jop Critics' Poll was the
strangest ever. The album chart was completely dominated by three
candidates: Tracy Chapman, Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation,
and the overwhelming victor, Public Enemy's It Takes a Nation of Millions
to Hold Us Back. Not that victory was overwhelming in absolute
terms--though Public Enemy did break 1000, only the Clash in 1981
and Talking Heads in 1985 won with fewer prorated points, and
several second- and third-place finishers have done better than
1988's number one, not to mention 1988's numbers two and three.
And Sandinista! and Little Creatures were winners by default,
perched uneasily atop a neatly graded heap of less-equal works of
art.
This year, Public Enemy is an actively controversial
positive choice: its 295-point margin is just 13 shy of the total
accorded fourth-ranked Midnight Oil. Which brings us to the nut:
Midnight Oil would have been 12th or 13th in a normal year. The
collective judgment is that only three major albums appeared in
1988--the lesser contenders felt like 11-to-20 material because
that's exactly what they were. The 212 voters divided albums four
through 29 by a mere 128 points, from 308 down to 180, a
differential negligible enough to be bollocksed utterly by a
couple of partisans; indeed, perennial ballot-box stuffer Greil
Marcus upped Randy Newman two places and Keith Richards three
with his strategic 30s, and if the next two days' submissions had
made our deadline, Brian Wilson would have finished not 12th but
sixth. Strangest of all is that U2's underrated if grandiose
Rattle and Hum squeezed in at 21st, with two fewer points than
the sophomoric October got in 1981; Talking Heads accrued 193
points for Naked, an honest if less than sustaining internationalist
gesture hailed as a leap forward from 1986's quasi-roots-rock
True Stories, which got 187; and R.E.M., top 10 with
all five previous albums, tied for 35th with their Warner Bros.
debut, Green. Executive Poobah Doug Simmons, whose heart has
never bled for the Georgia obscurantists, was appalled by this
rank injustice. "But they've done nothing wrong," he cried.
Except maybe living too long, but we'll have to put that on
hold, because the evolution of one album logjam into another is
only half our strange story. The bigger half takes place on the
singles chart, which a year ago seemed at an impasse. The old
Pazz & Jop plaint that singles matter more than albums seldom
shows up in the results; just as there's too much "world-beat" to
absorb much less agree on, singles fans have so many options that
rarely do they unite to overcome the casual nod vouchsafed the
album cuts respondents remember from their hours with the car
radio--their autumn hours, usually. I should note that in a
classic Pazz & Jop fuckup, our original invitation requested five
rather than 10 singles, which may have skewed our results a
little. We rushed out a correction, but one in 10 ballots didn't
comply, a dozen of them from out-of-town, where the car-radio
vote is strongest. An unfuckedup invite might have helped U2's
"Desire," Talking Heads' "(Nothing but) Flowers," Living Colour's
"Cult of Personality," Prince's "I Wish U Heaven," and either
of two Pet Shop Boys singles (though they're hardly an out-of-town-type
band), all of which received 10 votes along with
Stetsasonic's "Talkin' All That Jazz," Johnny Kemp's "Just Got
Paid," Steve Winwood's "Roll with It," and the Godfathers'
"Birth, School, Work, Death." But that's not the trend. For the
first time in years, even critics who don't have much use for
dance/rap chose real singles rather than album samples, so that
"Roll with It" (one album mention) and "Birth, School, Work,
Death" (three) and Joan Jett's "I Hate Myself for Loving You"
(two) and Pursuit of Happiness's "I'm an Adult Now" (three) and
Edie Brickell's "What I Am" (well, nine) all beat out, for
example, Brian Wilson's "Love and Mercy" and Randy Newman's "It's
Money That Matters."
Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car," an unrelenting, unbombastic
escape-to-nowhere so pithy and sisterly that several respondents
claimed the long-player rides its coattails, got its landslide,
one of just 10 top-25 singles from top-40 albums. That compares
to 15 in 1987, 11 (all in the top 14) in 1986, and 13 in 1985,
while in contrast last year's singles chart made room for just
two rap and two dance records, with only "Pump Up the Volume"
from a non-album-chart group (and Eric B. begging to differ).
This year, as AOR thrashed about and top 40 sunk deeper into
a pap cycle, Teddy Riley's versions of Keith Sweat and Bobby
Brown and Spike Lee's version of E.U. all placed, as did Ofra
Haza's sabra-cum-Yemenite stomp "Im Nin'alu"/"Galbi," the sole
"world-beat" finisher anywhere, which as it happens could also be
heard in bits and pieces on Eric B. & Rakim's "Paid in Full"
remix. And get this--"Paid in Full" was one of nine raps
selected.
That's nine--nine!--when the previous high, reached once,
was four. Rob Base & D.J. E-Z Rock's nagging, whooping James
Brown rip-out "It Takes Two" was beyond question the rap single
of the year; anywhere reachable by boombox, it was in the world's
face louder than "Don't Believe the Hype" from March to October,
and it ended up an easy second in our poll. The other eight
finishers leaned toward crossover while showing off the genre's
range. "Parents Just Don't Understand" is a shameless bid to
suburban wannabees, "Colors" a shameless bid to inner-city
moralists, and "Wild Thing" just shameless. But both Salt-n-Pepa
entries feminize an intrinsically male-chauvinist genre with spunk, soul,
and imagination, "Follow the Leader" stands in for a
virtuosic, underrated album, "Paid in Full" is the big payback,
and "Don't Believe the Hype" is the slogan of the year.
Anyone who knows much about the business of music may
suspect a con here--how can the single be an augury when as a
consumer item it's staggering to its grave faster than vinyl? But
don't, don't, don't you-know-the-rest. The death-of-the-single
line is self-fulfilling paranoia in a biz that's forever scoping
stillborn trends and a visceral response to the rack-space crisis
created by its frantic promotion of two new formats. Which in
their CD-single and cassingle minivariants are getting to second
base with the convenience seekers who've made cassettes America's
musical long-form and CDs its measure of aural luxury. The 45 may
be a promotional fiction and the gold 45 a relic, but in 1988 the
single maintained the dollar volume bizzers live by, with a
little help from the above-mentioned miniformats and a lot from
the 12-inch, a high-profit item that happens to be the basis of
the entire contemporary dance scene and its attendant promotional
alternatives. D.J. CD and even cassette manipulation will no
doubt come into their own (though they'll be hell on scratching),
but for the nonce an industry greedy for avenues of exposure
isn't gonna kill off disco.
So in effect the single, like vinyl itself, is turning into
a specialist medium. It took the crash of 1929 to finish the
cylinder, which had been a dodo for decades, and though vinyl
will get harder to find, it won't disappear for a long while even
if it dips well below its current 20 per cent market share; maybe
soon almost no one will sell little records with big holes in
them, but 12-inch singles will persist for as long as the D.J. is
a cultural hero, and like vinyl-only oldie and indie LPs, they'll
be sought by seekers, critics' meat for sure. Fact is, as many
locals as out-of-towners listed only five singles, and for the
same reason--they didn't give a shit. New York is a 12-inch
stronghold, but the New Yorkers who failed to amend their ballots
favored promotional fliers like "Slow Turning" and "It's Money
That Matters" and obviously didn't figure good citizenship
required them to rerack their brains for another five. In fact,
more than one old new waver suggested changing to a song-of-the-year
category to avoid vexing questions of commercial
availability, but I like the way things came out.
This may also look like a con, especially to the dance-sucks
brigade. "Very aesthetic, a little short on black music," I wrote
of the first or second poll back in 1974, and ever since I've
been climbing on my soapbox preaching punk-disco fusion,
funkentelechy, world-beat, etc. But if I sometimes seem a little
repetitive, that's because history doesn't change direction
annually no matter what the trendmongers want. Sure it was a Year
of the Woman/Year of the Protest Song, sorta; we'll get to that.
But the numbers put something else first. To oversimplify for
clarity's sake, they divide 1988's popular music into a meaning
function, reflected in all its weary (and compromised) ambiguity
by the album chart, and a pleasure function, reflected in all its
subliminal (and cooptable) subversion by the singles chart. If
the split were absolute, of course, the end would be at hand--the
whole idea of rock criticism is that if pleasure and meaning
aren't made one then meaning will fail, not just as persuasion
but as meaning. So say this dichotomy is close enough for rock
and roll. Although Tracy Chapman's single does pick up speed,
it's one of the most meaning-laden in poll history, while her
album, if far from party-girl whoop-de-doo, proffers more simple
enjoyment than Anthony Davis, Dick Hebdige, Jean Baudrillard, Kathy
Acker, Andrei Tarkovsky, Z magazine, or 7 Days.
Several of our rap singles make social
statements, and several of our rock albums turn hanging loose
into a middle-aged manifesto. Yet in general, the singles are
about the future of fun, and the albums aren't.
So even though only rap/dance inspired widespread optimism
among our respondents, the meaning-laden winner was the sole rap
album in the top 40 (last year there were three). What's more,
Womack & Womack are the only black finishers who could be said to
play to a black audience, much less to the black dancers who put
new beats in action: we're talking women's music, fusion-with-brains,
metal-with-brains, crossover blues, and, well, Prince,
his official album a major dink after last year's poll-sweeping
Sign "O" the Times, his "black album" (clandestine copies of
which finished eight points, five mentions, and three places
behind 17th-ranked Lovesexy) withheld from public scrutiny out of
fear it was well-named. And while over the past few polls not
many black pop albums have deserved much better than the nothing
they got, this time I'm not so sure.
With hip-hop preoccupying a growing minority of young
critics, rap albums did flourish twixt 41 and 100: meaning-laden
Big Daddy Kane and Boogie Down Productions 45th and 47th, party-smarty
formalists Eric B. and EPMD 54th and 68th, and girl-group-and-proud
Salt-n-Pepa 73rd. But signficantly, only Kane and EPMD
got any support at all from our 19 black voters, who preferred
the street-sweet new jack swing of Teddy Riley ("same old
crossover-cowardice in [a] brand-new suit," saith white Schoolly
D fan Chuck Eddy), giving 75th-place Keith Sweat four out of five
mentions, 91st-place Al B. Sure! five out of seven, and Riley's
own 83rd-place Guy three out of six. For those closest to the
heat, the producer's cool, rapwise elaboration of Jam-Lewis
signified, and what it signified was something like "B-Boys Can't
B Boys Forever." In the grand tradition of unreconstructed
adolescence, rock critics consider this defeatist. My bet goes
with the wisdom of the ages.
Opting for Women and/or Protest, meanwhile, was an altogether
different subset of critics, with not a single one of
the 31 who backed fifth-place Michelle Shocked, for instance,
naming any of the rap also-rans (and vice versa). Leaving out
pornotopian egalitarians Sonic Youth (who this year as last did
much worse with women voters than with men) and including Björk's
Sugarcubes and Linda's Womack & Womack, eight women finished top-40,
as many as in 1986 and 1987 combined, but what I find
especially significant is that five of them--Chapman, Shocked,
self-determined white blueswoman Lucinda Williams, neotrad
outsider K.D. Lang, and pristine depressive Margo Timmins--can be
described without stretching as folkies, five more than in 1986
and 1987 combined; all-singing all-songwriting Sam "Talk About
Born Again, My Christian Name Used To Be Leslie" Phillips (69th)
also fits the category. Right, Roger Moore, they're not all alike
in the dark. From rock and roll to new-age world-music (and from
good to bad, which isn't the same thing), Etta James (62nd) and
Voice of the Beehive (96th) and Toni Childs (44th) and Edie
Brickell (60th) and the Primitives (72nd) and the Bangles (87th)
and Sade (71st) and even the Bulgarian State Radio and Television
Female Vocal Choir (50th) aren't folkies. (Maybe the Miriam
Makeba of 87th-place Sangoma is, or the Ofra Haza of 88th-place
Seven Gates of Wisdom, but not to Americans--and not in the
American sense.) Nevertheless, folk music was what Year-of-the-Woman
coverage was really about.
None of our five folkie finishers projects a Baez/Collins-style
purity, or comes on like one's sainted mother--often punky
or dykey, always autonomous, sometimes even funny, they're very
post-Joni (two mentions), and not just because they write their
own. But men liked them a lot. The only female finishers afforded
disproportionate support by our 39 female voters were rock and
roll heroine Patti Smith and new wave pretenders the Sugarcubes;
Michelle Shocked and Lucinda Williams did significantly worse
with their own gender, and neither Womack & Womack (I blame
Cecil) nor the Cowboy Junkies (I blame Margo) was named by a
single woman. To an extent this may reflect new wave origins and
loyalties--punk opened the music to some-not-enough female
critics as well as some-not-enough female musicians. But beyond
liberal guilt and headline lust, male journalists were happy to
make 1988 the Year of the Woman because the folkie madonna, wise
and soulful whether calm or passionate, once again seems a
comforting idea to the kind of white postboy disquieted by rap
and disco.
One reason for all the Protest play is that an equally
reassuring aura surrounds folk music's straightforward literary-political
aesthetic, epitomized by 42nd-place Folkways: A Vision
Shared, in which stars and legends underwrote the Smithsonian's
(i.e. the federal government's) Folkways purchase by covering
predominantly political titles from the label's most trenchant
fellow travelers, Huddie Ledbetter and Woody Guthrie. Although
politics are heaviest among the leaders--of our top five, only
Sonic Youth, whose anarchism laughs at ideology, aren't staunch
lefties in art and life--this was a year in which Richard
Thompson and Patti Smith and R.E.M. essayed more or less conventional
protest songs, in which Living Colour and Metallica aimed
to focus metal's antisocial tendencies, in which all but maybe
half a dozen charting album artists imagined an audience that
resented or despised the suicidal inequities of late capitalism.
This is nothing new in Pazz & Jop, but it keeps
intensifying, and from Midnight Oil nurturing their muse in the
outback to U2 preaching roots they hardly knew they had (not to
mention Van Morrison taking up with Irish folk ambassadors),
folkie notions of tradition and solidarity have come to
constitute a collective vision of sorts. To a large extent I
share it myself--unlike, say, Greil Marcus, an enemy of capital
who hears sanctimony dripping from almost every artist I've named
and says a pox on all of them. But straightforwardness has
serious limits, and even Michelle Shocked, easily the most
wordwise of the latest crew of singer-songwriters, gets tired
pretty quick by me. There's not enough fun or adventure in
them--not enough pleasure function, not enough music.
Rap/dance singles weren't the only quality product to
address this familiar problem in 1988. Glance again at the top of
the album chart and note an accidental but entertaining trio of
groupings. The top five is fresh meat, young or at least new (if
Peter Garrett isn't pushing 35 he either suffers too much or does
drugs on the sly). Then we have Pere Ubu and Was (Not Was),
first- and second-generation new wavers who avoided the sweepstakes
so long it looked like forever. And after that there's the
most incredible procession of old farts in Pazz & Jop history:
seven artists who predate punk by at least nine or 10 years,
their mean age 46, the youngest
39-year-old Richard Thompson. They got it up, too--except
for poor simple Brian Wilson, every one deserved to beat
U2, R.E.M., and Talking Heads. Ornette is as ageless as any jazz
or pop musician in history, and this year like never before he
was both. Richard Thompson finally recovered from walking out on
Linda, and while I'm Your Man was only a half-step up from 1985's
unnoticed Various Positions, Leonard Cohen never got old because
he was never young and thus remained ripe for rediscovery by the
eight under-30s who selected him Dutch uncle. Randy Newman
supposedly got more personal and certainly got more pissed,
moving the old-sourpuss faction to shower him with points. And
Keith Richards and the Traveling Wilburys boogied.
Both Talk Is Cheap and Volume One smelled bad out of the
box, and bigots will claim they stink forever. But if you think
you're gonna hate them too, you may be in for a surprise. Though
I don't know what place Talk Is Cheap deserves in my life, I'm
happy to attest that somehow Richards has created generic
classics--the kind of stuff you always forget until you hear it
again and figure for public domain even after somebody copyrights
it. As for the Wilburys, what could be more obscene than five
overrated "superstars" getting together for some "fun" and then
trying to foist it off on the suckers who made them rich and
famous in the first place? Yet what we have here is not only Bob
Dylan's best record since Blood on the Tracks but a group that
does as much for George Harrison as the Beatles, and even without
Roy Orbison (who despite the gush is pretty much a fifth wheel) I
sometimes find myself wishing they'd make a career of it--keep
them out of harm's way. Keith and the Wilburys address the future
of fun. They make flesh Mick Jagger's insulting contention that
if Howlin' Wolf could do it till he dropped, so could the Stones.
They assume that great grooves need not surrender all pleasure
function just because their novelty no longer tickles your fancy,
and prove it with a spirit that renews one's faith in humankind,
for if it becomes possible to share a laugh with Jeff Lynne, then
fellow feeling can know no bounds.
Professionals so entrenched they're beyond careerism, our
exemplary boogie-men stuck to their guns with nothing up their
sleeves, while former untouchables R.E.M. and Talking Heads were
worn and torn by the biz. R.E.M. experimented with verbal and
rhythmic specificity, a gutty move for a band whose sizable cult
was built on murmur and airy flow, but the holes in their
songwriting showed, and it cost them; David Byrne concealed the
ricketiness of his current compositional practice by riding in on
soukous's jetstream, but the trick didn't stick, and a record
that looked sure top-10 in March finished 24th. Both bands were
left behind by new wave stalwarts staving off midlife crisis. I
refuse to write off proven artists of any era, but the thirties
are a scary age in rock and roll, and I sense a changing of the
guard. The dyed-in-the-wool rockers who cheered Richards and the
Wilburys will plump for the same beat in perpetuity, but punk
graduates are trapped in the tradition of the new--hard for
bohemians who discovered hippie conservatism and their own
mission simultaneously to sit tight in a logjam, settling for the
same old well-crafted, revitalized shit. Such are the long-term
perils of new wave commerce. Interesting, isn't it, that rather
than getting rusty during their long layoffs on the biz's fringe,
Was (Not Was) and Pere Ubu jes grew?
And with a few omissions, that's how rock's meaning function
breaks down in 1988. Of course, as the ambiguously entitled "Hit
List" attests, some would call the omissions the story--ironic
pop hedonists the Pet Shop Boys, unironic pop hedonist George
Michael, lying sons of bitches Guns n' Roses. No consensus
doesn't mean no passion--to recall a church-library title that
revealed the errors of Mormons, Unitarians, Swedenborgians, Roman
Catholics, and other misguided souls to a 10-year-old
Poobah-in-the-making, it's a "chaos of cults" out there, and some claim to
want nothing better. At a tiny London symposium celebrating the
literary event of the rock year, Simon Frith's
Music for Pleasure, the delegate from Rough Trade, this year's
only album-charting indie except Capitol-distributed Enigma, indignantly
denied that music had anything to do with movements--The
Disparate Cognoscenti, her label's new compilation is called, and
though I'd rather buy a bridge myself, embattled individualism is
what holds the latest generation of diehard bohemians together
and tears it apart. Punk-cum-Amerindie Gerard Cosloy, who
signalled his disdain for consensus by joining a record 41 late
voters and dubbed his own label comp, harrumph, Human Music,
comes clean in "Future (No Future)": to hell with "the music's
potential impact on the rest of popular culture."
Out of respect for Amerindieland's subcultural ideals, we
brought back EP voting, and though boho hero Bruce Springsteen
won with the worst record he's ever made, deserving young indies
did get free publicity--New York's Caroline, Boston's Taang!, and
Seattle's Sub Pop joined the eternal SST with two finishers
apiece. Embattled individual artists Mudhoney and Bullet LaVolta
turn out to be better-than-average garage bands who may go
somewhere and may fall off the edge of the earth, Poi Dog
Pondering's word-of-mouth is better than its distribution, Pussy
Galore and Live Skull are easy to spell, and let's do this again
soon. Even with seven votes good for fourth place, the results
were more meaningful than in reissues, which more than ever
rewarded size: three of the top four were triple- or quadruple-CDs
whose exhaustiveness could not but bowl over young crits
filling out their collections and middle-aged audiophiles-come-lately
seeking permanence in a troubled world. Far be it from me
to put down Chuck Berry--given the chance I would have named a
son after him. But let it be noted that MCA has both the most
generous review-copy policy of any label doing serious catalogue
exploitation and four of our 10 winners. Me, I still prefer the
briefly available Great Twenty-Eight and 1964's St. Louis to
Liverpool, my (second) copy of which is badly worn. When the
dubious Chess original-reissue program gets around to the latter,
which like most original Chess LPs runs well under 30 minutes, I
hope I get one free.
For most voters, internationalization will arrive late if at
all, but unless this is just an abnormal year, which is possible
(will they still yawn after the Replacements go pop and Lou goes
political?), a pluralism resistant to electoral quantification
may already be upon us. The Poobahs' uncouth requests for
demographic detail met with somewhat wittier resistance this year
(see both "The Personals" and "I Gotta Be Me"), most of which I
blame on the refusal of would-be autonomous subjects to recognize
the determinations (a Raymond Williams concept that does not
imply absolute causation) we're all subject to (plus perhaps fear
of math) (and, oh yeah, ressentiment). Ira Robbins has always
been obtuse if not defensive on this issue, and--racist? moi?--Armond
White isn't much better, but note the japes of my cranky
pal Greil, who complains that he could have listed many
additional categories that impinge on his musical proclivities.
No doubt. But unlike blacks and women, doowop fans aren't
systematically oppressed in this society, nor excluded from
journalistic discourse, and though I'm sure some diddybopping
anarchist out there thinks market-researched reissues exemplify
consumer-capitalist exploitation, I trust he or she doesn't find
math so scary that distinctions of degree lose all meaning. Of
the additional categories White sarcastically proposes, only
"Greeks" wouldn't produce interesting results; I'd add "gays" if
homosexuals' right to privacy didn't come first, and have yet to
get a single critic to admit he or she's a bigot. But
acknowledging oppression--and in the case of blacks, a
fundamental artistic debt--is obviously the main idea.
So though we skipped the whippersnapper-graybeard breakdowns
this year, our much-maligned all-black and all-female polls
appear once again under the wise-ass headings "No Whites Allowed"
and "Boys Keep Out." Wonder whether Robbins will think it's, er,
superficial for black voters to get behind 15 black acts (though
three did give it up to Iceland's musical ambassadors, for five
points each, and many other white artists were mentioned as
well). I mean, come on--do I have to keep restating the obvious?
Speaking generally, demographically, quantitatively, black people
are privy to a musical culture that fosters shared "personal
values," values that whites, acculturated to believe their shared
values are "objective," are forever adapting after a decade or so
has safely passed, and that's reason enough to find out what
records our statistically unreliable sample of black critics has
fastened on. Womens' musical culture is far more indistinct no
matter what Olivia Records says, and female cognoscenti are even
more disparate than black, but with two of rock and roll's most
sexist subgenres in critical ascendancy, it's worth knowing that
our 39 women voters put the rap group behind the feminist and
awarded double points to the unmacho metal band cited by one as a
male chauvinist scam. Panels of experts are a good idea, but
it'll take a lot to convince me that minority minipolls aren't a
better one.
As for your faithful Dean and Poobah, well--I, too, gotta be
me. Once upon a time my ballot was a bellwether, but in 1988 I
was a weirdo, an isolated internationalist--only four other
voters put as many as four non-AmerBrit albums in their top 10s,
never mind black African. About a quarter of my 60 or so gooduns
were African, so many I can break them down by region--eight
southern (Graceland fallout), five central (give me the chance
and I'll make it a dozen), two west (can't fathom the groove);
several are quite obscure, and one--my favorite, which I never
heard of till last January--came out three or four years ago. I
also named records from Brazil, Argentina, the French Caribbean,
good old English-speaking Jamaica, and an English-born Indian who
sings in Urdu, and if Amerindies are irrelevant, I am too--in
addition to the above exotica I went for 10 rock albums, three
rap albums, two jazz-rock albums, and a blues album from
independent entrepreneurs, while maybe a dozen of my recommendeds
qualify as straight major-label product and maybe half of those
were hits. Yet for all my weirdness I'm down with the Pazz & Jop
consensus in all its contradictions.
What sustained and exhilarated me in 1988 was the slick,
deep, joyously cosmopolitan body music of the Paris-Kinshasa
connection--except maybe for Lucinda Williams's joyously
uncountrypolitan blues, no domestic remedy approached the sheer
playability of Omona Wapi and Zaire Choc. But there was nothing
like the Pazz & Jop top two for pondering Michael Dukakis or
one's future in journalism--they stiffened the backbone, toned
the blood, unlocked the pelvis, exercised the gall bladder, and
gave the mind something to shout about. If Farrakhan's a prophet
my dick's bigger than Don Howland's, but that doesn't make Nation
of Millions anything less than the bravest and most righteous
experimental pop of the decade--no matter how the music looks
written down (ha ha), Hank Shocklee and Terminator X have
translated Blood Ulmer's harmolodic visions into a street fact
that's no less edutaining (if different) in the dwellings of
monkey spawn and brothers alike (and different). Nor was Sonic
Youth's nation holding them back. For one thing, it ain't big
enough. Even though their commitment to chaos has outgrown the
imitative fallacy, they show no signs of relinquishing their
antistar status in commercial fact, and given the contradictions
of consensus these days, there's something reassuring in that. No
way their marginality seems slight. I eagerly await their
transmutations of George Ade, George Clinton, and Marxism-Leninism.
Had I located a physical copy of the thing, my single of the
year would have been more esoterica--"N'Sel Fik," a funkadelic
love contract by Chaba Fadela and Cheb Sahraoui said to have been
the biggest record in the Arab world in 1985. Having never taken
my Africanism across the Sahara, I've been known to dismiss rai
as a Gallic fad, but when Virgin's Rai Rebels compilation
arrived, the internationalist professional in me put it on and
promptly had a mystical experience. And in the ensuing months,
the high has neither faded much nor spilled over into the rest of
Arab music. All of which is exemplary in its intensity and
serendipity. People complain when I call their tastes in singles
arbitrary, and I certainly don't mean they pick them out of a
hat. But tastes are so undetermined, especially over a span of
three to eight intrinsically repetitive pop minutes, that on a
collective level they're arbitrary in practice. No matter how
acutely an autonomous subject rationalizes some special passion,
it's unlikely that even half of his or her readers--presumably
all parties to the aesthetic consensus that distinguishes the
most mutually contemptuous rock critics from Allan Bloom or
Michael Dukakis--will be induced to share it, and there's a
significant chance that nobody will know what the fuck the
impassioned is talking about. So if on the one hand street and
radio and dance floor make singles seem very communal and all, if
"Fast Car" is a social fact and "It Takes Two" and "Don't Believe
the Hype" inescapable in the land of the boombox, on the other
hand singles underline our, harrumph, existential solitude, and
hence all the contradictions inherent in, harrumph, our social,
subcultural, and political alliances
So if despite my isolation I'm down with the Pazz & Jop
consensus in all its contradictions, that's fine with me--can't
hardly help it. The eight rap records among my top 10 singles
constituted a personal high, and though four made the big list,
others were off the wall--wrong Bobby Brown (could be), wrong
EPMD (baloney), otherwise unmentioned 12-inch by the ordinarily
ordinary Chubb Rock. I regret that I don't hear more of them,
especially on the dance floor--"father of three-year-old" and "wife
needs sleep" are near the top of my list of impingements. But
that would only make my list weirder, just like everybody else's.
In a crisis of Consensus, everything is up for grabs. Chuck Eddy
said that. The party's not over yet. Guy said that.
Village Voice, Feb. 28, 1989
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