CRITICS VS. READERS: THIS TIME, IT’S MUSICAL
Of the 50 records listed in each of our two new-release polls this year — one our fifth annual No Depression Critics’ Poll, the other our first Readers’ Poll — only one album appears in precisely the same spot on both: Kelly Willis’ Translated From Love, pretty much right smack in the middle at #26.
Whether that suggests Willis somehow struck some kind of golden mean, I’ve no idea, but inviting our readers to the party does afford us some intriguing perspective on the choices of our critics.
Consensus at the top belongs to Wilco (#1 readers, #3 critics), Patty Griffin (#2 readers, #5 critics), and Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band (#5 readers, #6 critics), not unsurprisingly. More illuminating is the presence of two records by female soul singers in our critics’ top five (#1 Bettye LaVette, #4 Mavis Staples) for discs that rated considerably lower with our readers (#38 and #45, respectively). It’s a fair bet that the Drive-By Truckers’ fan base overlaps pretty heavily with both our readers and our writers; the latter seemed more swayed by the DBTs’ collaboration with LaVette, while the former championed ex-Trucker Jason Isbell’s solo debut (at #6).
One wonders just how much timing has to do with the lists’ differences, in some cases. For instance, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss placed #2 with the critics, many of whom probably heard advance copies a month or so before the record’s October 23 release date. By contrast, the readers’ mid-November voting deadline meant many of them had significantly less time to acquire and/or listen to the album, which may have had something to do with its #14 rank on their list.
Overall, the surveys overlapped a tad more than half the time, with 28 records appearing on both lists. Isbell’s disc was the highest on the readers’ list not to be ranked by the critics; conversely, the highest critics’ pick not making the readers’ list was Feist’s The Reminder.
As for the rest, have fun mixing and matching, comparing and contrasting. And thanks especially to all of you who took the time to chime in with your lists.
–PETER BLACKSTOCK
A VINTAGE YEAR
Nobody much plans for middle age. Youth will be over-served and our mature years are to be feared and ignored. The rest is a matter of ducking and covering, stumbling a blind marathon, enduring life in an artificially green wasteland.
A slow, steady diminuendo.
The angry young man fell out of fashion at some point in the late 1990s (at least for middle-aged white guys who don’t listen to rap). I blame the Backstreet Boys for that, them and the cult of happy greed they were employed to sell to our lottery-drunk culture. I also blame generations of angry young men who had little to offer but their fury. (And that would, in part, be my excuse for not listening to rap.)
How many long nights did I spend trying to fashion that fury into something useful, something presentable? Trying to put it to bed. The world will not bend to my will. I recognize the errant arrogance of that sentence. Its hopelessness, and its optimism.
And yet.
And yet, this year, I found that carefully banked rage to be nurturing. To be necessary. To be exhilarating.
But to do that I had to step aside, and listen. Listen to the regal, wise, seemingly gentle Mavis Staples — who comes from an ecstatic tradition I can only admire from afar — listen to Mavis Staples declaim about the enduring wrongness of racism throughout the brilliant We’ll Never Turn Back. Listen to the passion and strength in that still-magnificent voice. And, yes, the fury, for she has seen and done far more than I ever will, and she has God on her side.
Or Bettye LaVette, now 61 and posing topless for her press photos. Perhaps it hasn’t been the career she might have wished for, but what a gloriously well-schooled and inescapably savage voice. Nothing left to hold back.
Or Patty Griffin, whose age is a matter of record but of little consequence since she is younger than me. There is far more joy than fury in Children Running Through, and perhaps sadness, for her age mitigates against children of her own. But it is an album filled (again) with passions and knowing, a muscular, unbelievably confident announcement of self. Of arrival, though clearly she was already on center stage.
Or Lyle Lovett, a couple years older than me and mostly counted out, I suspect, as a charming entertainer past his creative prime. Hardly. It’s Not Big It’s Large is the guttiest, most personal — most mature — album he’s ever made. And it swings.
A handful of younger artists made my personal list, notably the exceptional Canadian singer and songwriter Romi Mayes and newcomers Eilen Jewell and the Cave Singers (though the last two play forms of old-time music), but I will take my cues — my lessons for living, for creating — from the old folks ignored by most marketeers.
And the old folks, still rocking ungently, still cradling their considerable passions, still conceding nothing, they had one hell of a year. Porter Wagoner (and Johnny Cash) and Steve Earle still light the way: Do the work. Just do the damn work.
–GRANT ALDEN
