Metapollism

The results in the 2006 Village Voice Pazz & Jop poll came out today, and Bob Dylan's Modern Times was the winner. Dylan has won the P&J poll every year that he's made an album in the past decade.

This year the Voice's authority as the poll of record was challenged by the idolator blog and their own Jackin' Pop poll. I like that term "jackin' pop" because one of its double meanings is a great euphemism for end-of-year critics polls.

It's hard to determine which poll is more authoritative because they both had around 500 voters, and the consensus from both polls were nearly identical, with eight of the ten albums in their top tens being the same.

Idolator 2006 Jackin' Pop Critics Poll (497 voters)

1. Return To Cookie Mountain by TV On The Radio
2. Fishscale by Ghostface Killah
3. Boys And Girls In America by The Hold Steady
4. Hell Hath No Fury by Clipse
5. Ys by Joanna Newsom
6. Modern Times by Bob Dylan
7. St. Elsewhere by Gnarls Barkley
8. Silent Shout by The Knife
9. Fox Confessor Brings The Flood by Neko Case
10. The Life Pursuit by Belle & Sebastian

Village Voice 2006 Pazz & Jop Poll (494 voters)

1. Modern Times by Bob Dylan
2. Return To Cookie Mountain by TV On The Radio
3. Fishscale by Ghostface Killah
4. Boys And Girls In America by The Hold Steady
5. St. Elsewhere by Gnarls Barkley
6. Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not by Arctic Monkeys
7. Hell Hath No Fury by Clipse
8. Fox Confessor Brings The Flood by Neko Case
9. Ys by Joanna Newsom
10. Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards by Tom Waits

Hard to tell which poll has more pull. I've always thought that the best way to determine the critical consensus "best albums of 2006" would be to feed a bunch of polls into a database, with the albums that show up highest ranked in the most polls being the best by consensus.

Metacritic does something like that, but their "best-reviewed albums of the year" tend to be more things that a small number of reviewers liked a lot rather than the albums liked by the most reviewers. I think the ideal way to find a critical consensus would be to treat metacritic's individual critic's top-ten lists like electoral votes in the "hot rox metapoll" a poll of polls to determine which albums appeared in the most polls with the highest rank.

Luckily, metacritic does all the leg-work by putting together all these top-ten lists in a readable format, so all you need to do is cut and paste that into a text file and write a little perl script to parse the file and determine the votes and rankings. Since this is an electoral vote, I restricted the list to American polls. One of the reason the colonists dumped all that tea in Boston Harbor was so the Arctic Monkeys wouldn't top our album polls 230 years later!

The scoring is based on the loud-fans poll, with each vote counting as 11.01 - (ranking), so each #1 gets 10.01, each #2 gets 9.01, etc. By that scoring system, here were the most awesome albums of 2006 by virtue of appearing in the most polls.

2006 Hot Rox Metapollism Top Ten

1. Return To Cookie Mountain by TV On The Radio (182.23)
2. Ys by Joanna Newsom (117.21)
3. Fishscale by Ghostface Killah (106.18)
4. Boys And Girls In America by The Hold Steady (93.15)
5. St. Elsewhere by Gnarls Barkley (80.11)
6. Modern Times by Bob Dylan (69.12)
7. Hell Hath No Fury by Clipse (62.11)
8. Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not by Arctic Monkeys (61.08)
9. Fox Confessor Brings The Flood by Neko Case (58.14)
10. The Life Pursuit by Belle & Sebastian (57.11)

This critical electorate consensus is nearly identical to the Pazz & Jop and Jackin' Pop top tens, having a 9/10ths overlap with each poll. Turning the poll inside out, we can determine which polls are the most "normal" (statistically speaking) with their top-tens being the highest ranked among the consensus. Ranked by normalcy, the Village Voice has a slight edge over Idolator.

Most Normal Polls in the 2006 Hot Rox Metapoll

1. Village Voice Pazz&Jop (852.38)
2. Idolator Jackin' Pop (841.39)
3. Spin (700.09)
4. Pitchfork (687.11)
5. PopMatters (669.02)
6. Rhapsody (662.09)
7. Rolling Stone (630.01)
8. Tris McCall Report (621.03)
9. Shaking Through (618.04)
10. Stylus (606.98)

The 182.23 points for TV On the Radio in the 2006 poll is still short of the consensus best album of 2005, Illinois by Sufjan Stevens. Sufjan was on 3/4ths of the polls in 2005, and dusted the competition with 208.30 points. Illinois is the most acclaimed album of the 2000s!

2005 Hot Rox Metapollism Top Ten

1. Sufjan Stevens - Illinois (208.30 points)
   
2. M.I.A. - Arular (133.20)
3. Kanye West - Late Registration (113.18)
4. Antony & The Johnsons - I Am A Bird Now (93.16)
5. My Morning Jacket - Z (86.13)
6. Sleater-Kinney - The Woods (76.12)
7. The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema (74.12)
8. Fiona Apple - Extraordinary Machine (73.12)
9. Bright Eyes - I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning (67.11)
10. The White Stripes - Get Behind Me Satan (66.12)

By the way, the term "metapollism" doesn't google, so I may have just invented a new word!