Today, the Village Voice announced the results for Pazz & Jop, the 35th rendition of their annual poll tabulated from ballots filled out by 576 music critics. If it seems too late to run a 2007 best-of list, it’s really not. Although we’re nearly at the end of the first month of the new year, I still haven’t finished mining through all of 2007’s polished gems and diamonds in the rough (not to mention the endless amounts of worthless debris that gets passed off as music).

I used to be obsessed with classifying my musical tastes in list form, my personal desert-island-top-n. Even so, I won’t be indexing my Top 10 of 2007, and not just because it’d take me until April to figure it out. Pazz & Jop, as well as Idolator’s spin-off Jackin’ Pop (right, the name’s been changed, much thanks to the commenter—Ed.), ostensibly aims to reach the critical consensus through a roll call of hundreds of established writers—the creation of the official pop canon. But at what point does the institution become arbitrary?

For one, publications don’t require staff agreement to publish lists, so what you’re getting isn’t necessarily a round-table discussion or even an AIM convo between all the staff and freelance writers. It’s more than likely that a little bit of fudging-the-numbers is going on, if there’s even a survey involved. Not like it matters. If you really want the computerized critical consensus of the majority of publications, you could head over to Metacritic, whose reviews calculate the average scores attained from a plethora of publications, from AllMusic to the Fader to Pitchfork.

The problem is that the best-of concept itself is becoming outmoded. A lot of fuss is being kicked up over the changing state of the record industry, and, for better or worse, everyone’s left to deal with the mass access of thousands of records released per year (and whatever hot new undiscovered stuff streams on MySpace). On the one hand, it makes the role of the critic that much more important—to pick the ripest fruit for preservation, if you will. On the other hand, we’re looking at a consensus when it doesn’t really exist.

We at the DC are, of course, not immune to the best-of hullabaloo—we publish our very own year-end inventory in December. The upside to lists like these is the identification of trends in pop criticism: Clearly, 2007 was the year of electro-flected dance hype, from M.I.A. to LCD to J.U.S.T.I.C.E. Yet keep in mind that what they really indicate is the editorial mood of the publication, telling you what you should like as their key demographic reader, as evinced by their key demographic editors/writers.

As every fan(atic) will tell you, finding your own Top 10 is a spelunking excursion leading to infinite caverns, dead-ends and the narrowest of passages. So close the magazine, minimize the browser and snap on those headphones.

—Soo Oh

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