Current music:

The Arcade Fire, Funeral

HIPPY-HOPPY, PAZZY-JOPPY: MY TOP RECORDS OF 2004

After more than a dozen years of making year-end top 10 lists, I finally get to share them with more than a dozen people.

I wonder if the other 792 critics who took part in the 2004 Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll procrastinated as badly as I did.

It was 3 January 2005, about 4 p.m. My suitcase was still packed, my jacket tossed over a chair. Our plane back from Chicago, where we'd spent New Year's, had touched down just over an hour before. I'd left Emily in the city to have drinks with friends, while I sped home, flipped on my laptop and frantically shuffled CDs through my stereo and cycled my iPod's dial like a drug-fueled mouse on a wheel.

The e-mail I got from Chuck Eddy at the Voice in early December had declared the 3rd as the deadline, but back then I didn't believe they'd stick to that (two days after New Year's? everybody's back-to-work day? no way). Then Eddy's post-Christmas followup e-mail sounded even more severe. I figured, as the new guy, I'd better be punctual for once in my life.

By 5:00 – well, maybe 5:15 – my top 10 picks for the best albums and singles of 2004 were in. Here they are:

2004 ALBUMS

1 Danger Mouse, The Grey Album (djdangermouse.com)
2 Kanye West, The College Dropout (Roc-A-Fella)
3 Franz Ferdinand (Domino/Epic)
4 TV on the Radio, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes (Touch and Go)
5 Scissor Sisters (Universal)
6 Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose (Interscope)
7 Green Day, American Idiot (Reprise)
8 Kelis, Tasty (Star Trak/Arista)
9 Madvillain, Madvillainy (Stones Throw)
10 U2, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb (Interscope)

2004 SINGLES

1 Franz Ferdinand, "Take Me Out" (Domino)
2 Jay-Z, "99 Problems" (Roc-A-Fella)
3 Avril Lavigne, "My Happy Ending" (RCA)
4 Gretchen Wilson, "Redneck Woman" (Epic Nashville)
5 Prince, "Cinnamon Girl" (NPG/Columbia)
6 Modest Mouse, "Float On" (Epic)
7 Nelly featuring Tim McGraw, "Over And Over" (Curb/Derrty/Fo' Real)
8 Mario Winans featuring Enya & P. Diddy, "I Don't Wanna Know" (Bad Boy)
9 JoJo, "Leave (Get Out)" (Da Family/Blackground)
10 J-Kwon, "Tipsy" (So So Def)

Amazingly – considering I came up with them in less than 90 minutes – these lists have stood up pretty well. I thought my haste in compiling them would make me regret them later. And sure, I kind of wish I'd heard the Arcade Fire record sooner, that I'd heard the M.I.A. single at all. But by and large, rereading my lists this week, as the Voice's Pazz & Jop issue hits New York newsstands and my very own P&J page goes live, I am pretty happy with them.

As it turns out, my lists may have been a little too "good." I am the third most Critically Aligned critic in the country, according to this website by Glenn McDonald. A Pazz & Jop participant and obsessive, McDonald is not affiliated with the Voice but has been processing the P&J numbers for the last few years to see which of the hundreds of participating critics agree most closely with the final, aggregated results.

I've been following P&J for years myself, and I've noticed that every year almost all of my (unpublished) top 10 albums make the final list, usually pretty high up. Now, I have mathematical proof: I am, very nearly, the Everycritic. Had I actually voted for the Arcade Fire record – and had I liked Brian Wilson's SMiLE – I might have had the title to myself. I'm not sure I'm proud of this.

The mere fact that someone is running stats as if rock critics were baseball players might suggest to you how closely Pazz & Jop is followed, in certain rarefied circles. I was telling Emily last night that being a rock critic and getting invited to take part in P&J is like being a comedian and being permitted to join the Friars' Club. Sure, more civilians have heard of the Friars than have heard of Pazz & Jop, but unlike rock critics, comedians are on TV.

Full disclosure: I asked to join P&J, on the recommendation of my college friend Ted, who's been taking part for years. See, it really is like joining a country club. A very geeky, pale, unathletic, Libeskind-glasses-wearing country club.

Every Feburary, you've got the Grammys. The week before, like clockwork, hundreds of critics have their say in Pazz & Jop, as a kind of corrective to the Recording Academy's cheesy tastes. Saying that P&J is hipper than the Grammys is like saying Wonder Bread is more nutritious than Cool Whip. Critics may be cooler than Grammy voters but they are also doctrinaire as all get-out, and P&J is basically their annual exercise in groupthink, anointing those records that fall in that sweet spot of Critically Acclaimed Indie-boy Fetish Properties. White rock acts cannot be popular, unless their last name is Dylan, Springsteen or (this year) Wilson. Hip-hop acts can be as popular as they want. Affirmative action is alive and well in rock criticism.

The New York–centric poll is widely followed, jealously dismissed and casually sneered at by record geeks nationwide. If you're a published U.S. rock critic, you are required to pretend not to give a shit about Pazz & Jop while secretly campaigning to take part in it, after which you are required to act even more like you don't give a shit.

I admit, and have admitted for years, that I do give a shit. I will probably never have a review published in Rolling Stone – another milestone I'm supposed to pretend not to want – but I've always felt it would validate my career (well, my busman's holiday) to join the P&J brethren. If there's one thing critics love doing, even if they strenuously deny it, it's year-end top 10 lists. As both a rock critic and a Billboard chart–following überdork, I like doing them a little too much.

Not counting high school and college, I've been a published music critic for more than 11 years now. Including college, I have produced year-end top 10 lists for 15 years. For at least half of those years, the only people reading my lists were a few dozen friends. It seemed a shame to be agonizing over top 10s every year if only my beleaguered friends – kind enough to read the e-mails I shoved into their IN-boxes every February – could see them. (About five years ago, I had one friend who wrote back, like, "Thanks for this, but when in a million years will I ever know what you're talking about?!")

It's ironic that I was finally invited to submit votes to the Voice in 2004, the year in which I did my least concert-going and record-reviewing since I was a teenager. I lost a couple of reliable writing outlets last year, as both CMJ and Billboard moved much of their writing in-house. Besides, with an apartment to buy and a wedding to plan, I was pretty distracted and bound to be a little behind the curve. Maybe that's why I ended up gravitating, more than usual, toward records that came pre-hyped. Not that I'm ashamed of the records I picked. And I sure as hell am not alone.

There's no getting around the fact that my tastes intersect with Pazz & Jop. Since 1990, my #1 album has agreed with P&J's five times (Nevermind, 1991; To Bring You My Love, 1995; Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, 1998; Play, 1999; and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, 2002). Another seven times, P&J's #1 has made my top five (Fear of a Black Planet, 1990; 3 Years, 5 Months and 2 Days in the Life of..., 1992; Exile in Guyville, 1993; Odelay, 1996; Stankonia, 2000; Speakerboxxx/The Love Below, 2003; and The College Dropout, 2004). Only Hole's Live Through This (1994) and Bob Dylan's last two records (1997, 2001), P&J poll-toppers all, failed to make my lists.

I'm not trying to achieve such close consensus with the nation's critics. It just happens, every year. So it could be argued that adding me to Pazz & Jop does little to shake up the results. Knowing that Kanye West's #1 finish in P&J was a foregone conclusion, I tried to be interesting by slotting that undeniably great album at #2 on my list and naming my most-played album of 2004, Danger Mouse's stunning, illegal The Grey Album, as my top pick. But then, stacking my list with such critical faves as Franz Ferdinand, TV on the Radio and Loretta Lynn put me back in lockstep with the mob. Six months ago, I predicted here on LiveJournal that Franz's single "Take Me Out" would top critics' polls at the end of the year, and that Jay-Z's "99 Problems" would place second. This week, I am proved right – and so my singles list falls in line, too.

And so what? Music hits multiple pleasure centers: physical, spiritual, cerebral. Kanye West and Franz Ferdinand, the critical darlings of 2004, hit all three. Franz's "Take Me Out" made your body move (ever try walking down a New York street while it's booming from your iPod? you feel like such a badass) as surely as Kanye's "Through the Wire" made your head bob. West rapped about Jesus walking; Franz sang about guys who could turn them gay. West's skits made you feel smart for blowing off grad school; Franz's arch humor made you feel like you'd never left college. Should we feel ashamed for loving these records?

Movie critics have taken a beating since the fall for getting in line behind Sideways, a blue-statey, wine-darky, middle-aged-cranky ode to people who look, think and act like movie critics. This week, I feel more empathy for those lovable losers than ever. It's hard to get past one's own biases as a critic, to remain unmoved by the cultural products that embrace your geekdom and make you feel smart. And just 'cuz a bunch of critics speak with suspicious uniformity doesn't make the objects of their affection bad.