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?

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Popularity: 20%

On my way out of the student store the other day (after an excruciating experience purchasing over-priced textbooks) I came across a bin full of those lovely little bookmark shaped Berkeley Rep fliers, but this time with Carrie Fisher’s smug-looking face on them. Yes, Carrie Fisher as in Princess Leia from Star Wars. At first a bit bewildered, I picked up the flier only to become a bit more bewildered after reading it. Fisher, whose career was arguably ruined by the success of the Star Wars franchise, is to perform her one-woman show Wishful Drinking at Berkeley Rep starting February 8th. I have to admit my first thought was something along the lines of: “Hmm, sounds like something Lindsay Lohan might produce 20 years from now”. That is if she makes it 20 more years.

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Popularity: 20%

My family’s neighbor is a gruff woman. She’s a whole head taller than I am and wears Carharts head to toe. She can saddle a horse in a matter of seconds and collects eggs each morning from the chickens she keeps in the barn. There’s more Colorado in her than I’ll ever have–and I’m a native–but we manage to get along.

The other day I was kicking through a field of horse shit and yucca with her when the Bay Area came up in the conversation. I told her I went to Berkeley and the first thing she mentioned, before the Bomb, before the Free Speech movement, before Ginsberg or Didion or Judith Butler, was the food. Having spent most of her 20s in SF, my neighbor’s most salient memories of that decade were the meals, which, if it reveals a side of her that I overlooked, also speaks to the quality and draw of the Bay Area’s dining scene.

“I’ll never not miss that food,” she said as she half-tackled a haflinger trying to fit a bit in its mouth. That got me thinking, Shouldn’t I take advantage while I still can?

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Popularity: 17%

Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?
Can you hear me now?

Who would ever have thought that the Verizon Buddy Holly’s debut would also introduce the phrase that best articulates the direction industry music heads towards today—into the red, the 11 on the volume knob of your Fender amp, in so few words, LOUD!!!

And I’m not talking Van Halen loud, though they no doubt polished a few eardrums in their time. No, this loud applies to artists from Nelly Furtado to Red Hot Chili Peppers. The artist no longer determines the loudness variable, the consumer (you) does, perhaps not on purpose, but when your tunes play through small computer speakers, what’s soft will play inaudible unless sound engineers increase the volume to such a degree that the soft is loud. And when what’s soft is loud, what’s loud is loud enough to fall the walls of Jericho.

“So What?” you say, “If the engineers crank up the volume, I’ll just crank it down. It’s still the same music, right?”

Wrong.

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Popularity: 100%