In the 17th Pazz & Jop position is tUnE-yArDs with ‘Water Fountain.’ I’m a stickler for writing band names in the appropriate fashion (fun. in all lowercase with the period, for example) but these guys take it a bit too far.
This gal, I should say, because tUnE-yArDs is the stage name of indie artist Merrill Garbus. I put her on the blog once per year because she always shows up on this list (I believe she even topped it a few years back).
tUnE-yArDs first showed up on this blog during a recap of last year’s Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll, in which hundreds of music critics’ top ten lists are combined to generate a list of the year’s best songs and albums.
tUnE-yArDs’ album wound up topping that list, shocking me as I’d never heard of them before. The top song was Adele’s ‘Rolling in the Deep,’ so it’s not as if the list was deliberately non-mainstream. I will be writing about this year’s Pazz & Jop poll as soon as its published.
Over the next two weeks I’ll feature the top ten songs on Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop poll that have not appeared on this blog already.
I love this poll because it appeals to my inner stats geek — the one who, when he had more time, used to aggregate my family members’ top ten movie lists into one master top ten list based on a complicated points system.
Pazz & Jop is the same thing done for music and on a much larger scale — 700 music lovers (mostly professional critics, I assume, though can it be that 700 people are employed as music critics in this economy?) ranked their favorite 2011 albums and songs and all those lists were combined into a master list of over 2,000 songs and 2,000 albums.
Meet Me In Montauk 