Robert Christgau: Dean of American Rock Critics

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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


1987 Critics Poll | Dean's List 1989