"People on the Internet Like to Argue About Music More Than They Like to Enjoy Music": Maura...

“People on the Internet Like to Argue About Music More Than They Like to Enjoy Music”: Maura Johnston and Seth Colter Walls on Genre, 2009 and Pazz + Jop

Seth Colter Walls: Maura! You have an excellent essay in the Voice this week, which accompanied this year’s Pazz + Jop music critic’s poll. Since you and I both submitted ballots for that-and since music critics like nothing more than to talk about what they’ve done and said-I naturally thought we should talk about what we’ve done and said! Let’s start out by telling the people about your essay?

Maura Johnston: Well, ha. I don’t like to start off with self-promotion, but let’s give it a go…

Seth: It’s called “Down With Music Racism,” your piece. That’s very provocative.

Maura: Ah yes. You can thank Jay-Z for that title. He was chatting with Elvis Mitchell in “Interview” about how he wants to break down boundaries of genre — you may remember that over the summer, he and his wife and his sister-in-law were spotted at a Grizzly Bear show on the waterfront. And his sister-in-law — Solange Knowles — is actually one of the focal points of my piece, because she covered the Dirty Projectors’ “Stillness Is The Move.” Which more than a few critics referred to the original as “the best R&B; song of 2009.”

Seth: And you talk about this in the piece, but this is kind of a crazy thing to say, even though that cover is really quite good.

Maura: Mainly because I wanted to hear what other R&B; songs these critics were putting “Stillness” ahead of.

Seth: I think you and I both liked the Maxwell record over and above any other R&B; this year?

Maura: Yes, it was in my top 10! It’s so awesome. But it was No. 14 overall.

Seth: It was my Number 3 album overall. So that was our greatest point of consensus. But even though people have links to our ballots now, let’s expand the albums lists a bit, okay?

Maura: Here is my album list. It is slightly different from what i turned in. Fluidity!

1. Micachu & The Shapes, Jewellery (Rough Trade)
2. Wye Oak, The Knot (Merge)
3. Jarvis Cocker, Further Complications (Rough Trade)
4. Kelly Clarkson, All I Ever Wanted (19)
5. Maxwell, BLACKsummer’snight (Sony)
6. Charlotte Hatherley, New Worlds (Minty Fresh)
7. Alphabeat, The Spell (Polydor Denmark)
8. The XX, xx (Rough Trade)
9. Lily Allen, It’s Not Me, It’s You (EMI)
10. Moby, Wait For Me (Mute)
11. Shakira, She Wolf (Epic)
12. Jenny Wilson, Hardships! (Gold Medal)
13. Amerie, In Love & War (Def Jam)
14. Franz Ferdinand, Tonight: Franz Ferdinand (Epic)
15. Annie, Don’t Stop/All Night (Smalltown Supersound)
Top EP: Cotton Candy, Fantastic & Spectacular (Teen Beat)
Honorable mention for having tons of gems on each edition: Tapemasters Inc’s “Future Of R&B;” mixtape series, which put out seven editions in 2009

Seth: You have Micachu as your number one album. I didn’t get hip to that until later in the year, and it just missed my Top 10.

Maura: Yes, I love that record and did from first listen. It’s pretty spellbinding! It’s also one of those records that I think works very well with headphone-based listening. Like during “Lips,” the kissing sounds as percussion.

Seth: Hawt.

Maura: Have you seen the Crayola ad that uses “Golden Phone”?

Maura: I also love that the ad is for a product that melts together colors.

Seth: Wow. Blowing my mind here!

Maura: Right?

Seth: I love that your list of albums gives me a lot of things to go find now and give a chance. The Jarvis and the Clarkson aren’t for me. (I really found the Clarkson to be disappointing.)

Maura: Aw, I like it a lot. I think it is maybe three tracks too long.

Seth: But Wye Oak and Charlotte Hatherley and Jenny Wilson are all doing it for me right now. And I have you to thank! I’m not sure I would have come across them in my normal way of going about things.

Maura: Well, thank you! And same here!

Seth: Oh, I guess we should let people see my expanded list that I already sent you, huh?

20. Amerie “In Love & War”
19. Brad Paisley “American Saturday Night”
18. Isis “Wavering Radiant”
17. The xx “The xx”
16. Mario Diaz de Leon “Enter Houses Of”
15. tUnE-yArDs “BiRd-BrAiNs”
14. Nadia Sirota “First Things First”
13. Sonic Youth “The Eternal”
12. Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band “Between My Head and the Sky”
11. Micachu “Jewellery”
10. Kylesa “Static Tensions” (Prosthetic Records) 5 points
9. Raekwon “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… Pt. II” (ICEH2O Records) 5 points
8. Steve Lehman Octet “Travail, Transformation, and Flow” (Pi Recordings) 6 points
7. Akron/Family “Set ’Em Wild, Set ’Em Free” (Dead Oceans) 7 points
6. Phoenix “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix” (Glassnote) 8 points
5. Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society “Infernal Machines” (New Amsterdam Records) 9 points
4. P.O.S. “Never Better” (Rhymesayers) 10 points
3. Maxwell “BLACKsummers’night” (Columbia) 14 points
2. Miranda Lambert “Revolution” (Columbia Nashville) 16 points
1. Vijay Iyer Trio “Historicity” (Act Music + Vision) 20 points

Seth: So, neither one of us has Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear or the Dirty Projectors in our top 10 albums list…but lots of other people did, I guess.

Maura: I have also enjoyed the Nadia Sirota album on your list! Which makes me think of something. Your list is an anomaly among the almost-700 critics who voted in the poll because it takes its “Pazz and Jop” title to heart. It has a lot of records that could fall under the rubric of “jazz.” But even though that genre (ooh, there’s that word again) is implied in the poll’s title, music of that sort has rarely made it through to the Big List’s upper reaches in recent years. Why do you think that is? (And do you think it’s related that, if you really wanted to slap a genre on the poll’s top 10, that genre would be “Pitchfork”?)

Seth: Well, if anyone is interested, there is an amazing meta-analysis of all the ballots online, with metrics like “Centricity.” It shows who was most conventional-wisdom, I guess, with their top 10 picks.

Maura: Yes!

Seth: It will astonish no one in the music community to learn that Pitchfork founder Ryan Schreiber has the fifth most “central” ballot to this whole shebang.

Maura: That’s been my favorite part of the poll every year, and it’s done by Glenn McDonald, who actually tabulated the ballots this year.

Seth: Out of about 700 ballots. That ain’t a coinky-dink. You and I are both, um, a bit down the list, let’s say.

Maura: Haha. Yes. Shakira will never get her due 🙁

Seth: My intellectual problem with genre runs like so. I have real trouble ranking things across the following spectrum of things I’m interested in:

hip-hop
top 40
indie
jazz
noise
contemporary classical
R&B;
metal
country
 ???

Maura: Ranking things as in on a list of, say, “the best 10 albums of the year”?

Seth: Yeah, or 20! It’s hard!

Maura: VERY hard and I hate doing it, although i love dissecting others’ attempts to do so

Seth: I didn’t dislike the Dirty Projectors album. But there’s still no way it can make my top 20 when I let in all those genres. And so my question to myself always is: should I segregate?

Maura: Right.

Seth: And I decided not to.

Maura: Well your list seems pretty not-segregated!

Seth: I think it’s important not to for some reason. But also: it’s worth pointing out that Pitchfork reviewed Vijay Iyer’s “Historicity.” They gave it a 7 point something. So okay.

Maura: Not Best New Music. The BNM tag has a lot of importance! As far as perception and what breaks through the clutter. It’s weird, the relationship people have with Pitchfork. I think it has some of the best writers in the biz!

Seth: Oh, totally! Hi Perpetua!

Maura: Eric Harvey, Tim Finney. But the thing is that reading the reviews is a self-directed experience. The thing about these reviews is that people have to click through to them. I mean, not to get all user-experience nerdy, but as someone who ran a music site that covered a wide variety of acts, some of whom were more, shall we say, boutique than others…

Seth: Ha!

Maura: It was hard to get people to click on shit that they just weren’t interested in. (And I mean, Pitchfork can’t exactly go the HuffPo route and say “Megan Fox wearing underwear (Gallery) … just click on through to this Krallice review to get to it!”)

Seth: They should! I would never leave that kind of site, maybe?

Maura: Ha ha! Well then there should be some venture capital lying around for you somewhere.

Seth: But anyway: it’s also not clear that Pitchfork is really “influencing” people as much as it’s said to… so much as it’s reflecting back a taste that’s burbling up from the blogs, etc.

Maura: Yeah, it’s worth noting that “Merriweather Post Pavilion” had been already given the album of the year of ’09 title before 12/31/08. Thanks to the Great Animal Collective Leaking-On-Christmas Miracle.

Seth: Well, I guess that’s called getting in front of the story?

Maura: Yeah. I mean, I think that the whole “genrelessness” claimed by indie is sort of weirdly… aspirational? Like how when you first meet some people they say they listen to “everything” because they want to be cultured. Or sound it. I sound like such a snob. Sorry.

Seth: No no, that’s good!

Maura: But it’s weird, because I think genre became both more and less important in 2009.

Seth: I think here we can drop a disclaimer: People should listen to what they want. If it’s the narrow indie thing, that’s fine. It doesn’t actually have any bearing on your goodness as a person. And yet, if a certain subset of music culture gets a reputation for being open-eared when it really isn’t, that can be frustrating.

Maura: Right. And if you’re going to call something “the best [x],” you should have actual points of comparison for it and not just a bunch of straw men based on a radio-dial flip from months ago.

Seth: One final thought about the Solange/Dirty Projectors cover… and also the Jay-Z appearance at the Grizzly Bear concert: There seems to be a rather limited understanding among the indie set how directly they are being marketed to by such moves. When Solange covers the DP’s, it’s all about “OMG the DPs are getting mass exposure! That’s so cool!” And when Jay shows up to the concert, it’s all: “Hey, this cool thing happened!”

Maura: Yes.

Seth: Yet in lots of other pieces about Jay-Z, for example, we see that he’s a genius businessman. Not to take away from his artistry, but he says as much anyway.

Maura: I think his business acumen is part of his artistry! A crucial part, even.

Seth: Correct. And so, this could be a navel-gaze too far, but I think that the indie set voters — based on their own stated preference for being progressive listeners — need to be aware of being marketed to that directly. If you’re only listening to the mainstream rap or R&B; artists who come to Grizzly Bear shows, you’re probably missing something of equal or greater importance. Just because it hasn’t explicitly walked up to you to say hi. Like Maxwell. Or, in a slightly different context, P.O.S.

Maura: Right. But don’t you think that’s sort of a problem with the Internet in general?

Seth: Uh oh.

Maura: Siren.jpg! I mean, it’s really easy to think you’re seeing “everything,” because there are many metric tons of stuff out there. And part of me wonders if that didn’t at least help shape this year’s top 10. Chuck Eddy’s essay on the takeover of indie had an interesting bit.

Seth: Yeah, about list conformity.

Maura: “Used to be, when you filled out your P&J; ballot, you hadn’t seen very many other Top 10 lists. Now, with websites pretending the year is over well before Thanksgiving and surviving print mags falling in step with their own premature year-end countdowns, it’s hard to avoid peering over your neighbor’s shoulder. A story snowballs through the year, so by December, critics who don’t hear many releases and the ones who’ve heard too many to sort through-enough Pazz & Joppers to pass as a consensus-have had the words “Animal Collective” pounded into their heads so incessantly that boarding the bandwagon seems like a no-brainer.” List creep!

Seth: Probably a million people said the Animal Collective album was the album of the year before I even heard it. I DEFINITELY gave it many more listens than a lot of other albums I immediately dismissed in 2009, since it was so talked-about.

Maura: I think that chatter definitely helped push AC (I feel weird calling them by their Hipster Runoff-bestowed name “AnCo”) into the minds of voters. And this year, when there was just so much music out there that was so readily accessible, just hearing about a record gives that record an advantage. Even if you discount all the “ANIMAL COLLECTIVE CHANGED MY LIFE AND MADE ME CRY” talk. I will say that when I was involved in a pageview-concerned operation, I loved to talk about them, because people loved to argue about them. Hits! The Internet kind!

Seth: Oh, so let’s talk about that, too. I often think that people on the internet like to argue about music more than they like to enjoy music? If I meet someone who really loves Merriweather Post Pavillion, and I disagree, my general instinct is not to descend into a dozen-plus post flame war about which one of us is a clueless hack? I’d rather spend the time trying to discover something new I didn’t know about? But then I’m weird.

Maura: Such restraint! I think your Internet card might have to be revoked. (Just kidding.)

Seth: No, it’s possibly true! Because here’s how the year-end deluge of critics lists affected me: I learned about new shit. That’s what I want to have happen. I think this is the kind of thing critics don’t want to talk about, because they want to seem all-knowing, generally.

Maura: Well I think everyone wants to seem all-knowing. So what did you learn about?

Seth: I did not know about P.O.S. or Kylesa until around Thanksgiving.

Maura: Oh! And both were in your best of the year list! Interesting. So I guess they hit you right away?

Seth: Yes, absolutely. At first, with those choices, I was a little nervous. But with a month’s distance since filing my ballot, I feel like they were very well-considered. Though I would just like to say that I fucking called it on the Yoko Ono record earlier this year, before it came out and everybody started loving it.

Maura: See, how did I miss this? I love Cornelius!

Seth: And she’s gonna be at BAM next month! With this group, plus Eric Clapton and Klaus Voorman reprising their roles as honorary members of the original Plastic Ono Band?

Maura: Whoa. Wow.

Seth: I will say that the passion index is an interesting metric. It’s also cool to see how your vote actually affects outcomes (for once)!

Maura: Democracy: It works when you’re voting with 695 other people!

Seth: If I hadn’t given Iyer’s “Historicity” a lion’s share of my points, and if a couple of other folks hadn’t done the same, it probably would have dropped a hundred positions. At least. As it stands now, it beats out Hospice, which a lot of indie kids have heard about.

Maura: Yes. I just downloaded all of it this morning. I listened to the “Galang” cover, which was fun.

Seth: Two other things on that record of pop note: The Stevie cover, and the Ronnie Foster tune that Q-Tip used as the sample for Tribe’s “Electric Relaxation” on Midnight Marauders.

Maura: Oh wow! OK. I am going to probably listen to these on the train in this afternoon.

Seth: If somebody was like, “Hey Seth, I’m really depressed. And I’ve got nine dollars to spend. What’s the quickest, fastest way I can improve my life in the right here and now, regardless of whatever macro issues I might need to explore in therapy?” I’d tell them to get Historicity.

Maura: I’m not really depressed, but man that is a pretty enticing endorsement.

Seth: It’s ecstatic without being cutesy or gooey. It’s smart without being too abstract. And it’s generally just wide-angle aware of the world in a way that i think is in accordance with how to be an adult in troubling times.

Maura: The phrase “how to be an adult” is very attractive to me, because I feel like a lot of indie, in addition to being defined by sonics, is defined by a weird clinging to… not childhood or adolescence, but maybe pre-adulthood? Like that Girls album.

Seth: Oh fuck yes! Awful!

Maura: Which to my ears sounds very “dude in the dorm who’s kinda deep” but gets praised by people I respect with terms like “vaguely resonant.” Which are terms that translate to me as “dude in the dorm who’s kinda deep.”

Seth: Elsewhere, I probably treated Camera Obscura a little, er, obscurely? “French Navy” is a really great song.

Maura: They are one of those bands that when I listen, I always think ‘I need to listen to them more’ and never do. Why do you think that is?

Seth: Because excelling at tweedom is sort of a curse, in that it never feels particularly urgent?

Maura: That’s an excellent way of putting it!

Seth: Well, anyway: to your question, like, an hour ago: Jazz is just a tough sell these days. About the oppressiveness of jazz tradition, I wrote at my job that “devotion to its past is stealing oxygen from the same room in which the present hopes to draw a breath.” And so for a Pazz + Jop audience, I think it’s important to make clear that you don’t have to listen to the entire output of like, Bird and Diz in order to participate in what’s going on now.

Maura: Right.

Seth: Which is why in the print issue of the Voice, I analogize the Darcy James Argue record to TVoTR’s Dear Science, which was the P+J winner from last year. And which I know Darcy likes a lot, and draws some measure of inspiration from. It’s just to say: people, this is made for you, too.

Maura: Yeah!

Seth: So, to sum up: people should give the Maxwell album a listen. Also we agree about The xx. And the first 8 tracks of Amerie’s In Love & War are UNASSAILABLE.

Maura: Oh I love “Pretty Brown.” I mean it’s totally a wholesale rewrite of Mint Condition.

Seth: Oh… you know what that song has? Esp. in the intro! Revolution-era Prince keyboards! It’s so good!

Maura: Yessss. “Why R U” is one of those songs that I think would have been gigantic in like 1995. I pushed for that song so hard.

Maura: More critical real talk: I sort of jerry-rig my ballot a bit.

Seth: Oh?

Maura: On the singles side. I don’t like having albums and singles overlap.

Seth: Me either.

Maura: But the interesting thing about this year is that albums and singles overlapped a lot. With the exceptions of Jay-Z, Gaga, and Taylor Swift

Seth: If an album is really great front to back, I often lose sight of the single as a transcendent experience. Like, it’s part and parcel. This is what happened to Miranda Lambert’s “Dead Flowers” for me. Which is a great single. But I liked the album as my second-best of the year!

Maura: Oh that’s one I have to listen to! I loved “Dead Flowers” too.

Maura: And I kept meaning to listen to the album.

Seth: Oh, you’re gonna like it when you do. Esp. the banjo-drums-guitar feedback breakdown toward the end of her punked-up cover of the John Prine song.

Maura: Awesome.

Seth: So people should listen to metal, and Miranda Lambert, too.

Maura: And Shakira!

Seth: And the jazz that jazz nerds start obsessing about at the end of the year.

Maura: Yes. All these things.

Seth: Less fighting about Animal Collective? I mean, like ’em if you like ‘em? Don’t if you don’t? But there are probably more interesting ways to spend your time than fighting over that one position? Because there’s too much music to get to, as it is.

Maura: Way too much! I’d really like to hear a lot of the metal that people are talking about. I mean, I think that what happens is that I hear about a record and download it, and sometimes it can get lost in the shuffle (no pun intended) because of its digital-only presence. Does that ever happen to you?

Seth: Yup. I actually had the Kylesa downloaded months before I listened to it. I was AWARE that I needed to listen to it. And then when I played in November, finally, I was all “Yeaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

Maura: Yeah!

Seth: So screw genre, as I think you maybe (didn’t quite) put it.

Maura: I half-put it.

Seth: “The construct of “musical genres” became both utterly worthless and slightly oppressive in 2009.”

Maura: Actually it was Jay-Z who said that. I just rode his coattails.

Seth: Oh, you’re a beat-jacker! Now let’s give people our expanded singles lists. Indie got repped more on my singles list than on the albums list, I suppose:

15. The Big Pink “Dominos”
14. The Breeders “Fate to Fatal”
13. Lightning Bolt “Sound Guardians”
12. Amerie “Why R U”
11. Miranda Lambert “Dead Flowers”
10. Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Young Adult Friction (Slumberland Records)
9. Neko Case: People Got A Lotta Nerve (Anti/Epitaph)
8. Vijay Iyer Trio: Galang [Trio Riot Version] (Act Music + Vision)
7. R. Kelly: Text Me (Jive)
6. Screaming Females: Bell (Don Giovanni Records)
5. Antony and the Johnsons: Epilepsy is Dancing (Secretly Canadian)
4. Brad Paisley: American Saturday Night (Arista Nashville)
3. Phoenix: 1901 (Glassnote)
2. Animal Collective: My Girls (Domino)
1. Big Boi: Shine Blockas [feat. Gucci Mane] (LaFace Records)

Maura: Yeah. The end, finally:

1. The Joy Formidable, “Cradle”
2. Vistoso Bosses, “Delirious”
3. Lady GaGa, “Bad Romance”
4. Natalie Imbruglia, “Want”
5. Brandy feat. Ne-Yo, “Decisions”
6. Annie, “Anthonio” / Anthonio, “Annie”
7. Kelly Clarkson, “Don’t Let Me Stop You”
8. Lady GaGa, “Paparazzi”
9. Alphabeat, “The Spell”
10. Fefe Dobson, “I Want You”
11. Amerie, “Why R U”
12. JJ, “Ecstacy”
13. The Breeders, “Fate To Fatal”
14. Robbie Williams, “Bodies”
15. Micachu & The Shapes, “Golden Phone”
16. Paramore, “Ignorance”
17. Shakira, “Did It Again”
18. Keri Hilson feat. Ne-Yo and Kanye West, “Knock You Down”
19. Miranda Lambert, “Dead Flowers”
20. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Zero”
21. Chrisette Michele feat. Ne-Yo, “What You Do”
22. Impossible Arms, “Here On the Couch”
23. La Roux, “Bulletproof”
24. Esmée Denters, “Outta Here”
25. Justin Timberlake, “Bigger Than The World”

Seth Colter Walls works at Newsweek and is interested in new things.
Maura Johnston is the former editor of Idolator and the pop critic for NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered.