If the rock critics of the world have a clubhouse, it has long been the annual Pazz & Jop poll in The Village Voice.
For more than 30 years, critics at magazines, newspapers and Web sites have contributed their Top 10 lists of albums and singles. Along with those lists came voluminous insidery commentary, all digested and analyzed in one monstrous essay by Robert Christgau, organizing the pop universe into an intellectually cohesive narrative. (“It’s Kanye West’s World, Franz Ferdinand Just Live In It,” ran the cover line for the 2005 Pazz & Jop issue.)
But in the wake of the takeover late last year of Village Voice Media, the weekly paper’s parent company, by the New Times Media chain, and the departure of dozens of Voice employees — including Mr. Christgau, 64, who oversaw the Pazz & Jop coverage and was fired in August — a rival clubhouse poll has emerged. And of course it is on a blog.
This week Idolator, a newish music blog owned by Gawker Media, seized on the outrage and disappointment felt by critics around the country who saw Mr. Christgau — and Chuck Eddy, the Voice music editor, who was dismissed in April — as a force of credibility and journalistic continuity, by announcing its own poll, Jackin’ Pop.
“For those who had long turned to The Voice to help guide them through the realm of pop, rock and hip-hop,” the announcement read, “the 51-year-old alt-weekly now had about as much musical credibility as, say, a three-month-old blog.”
The new survey will be organized by Michaelangelo Matos, a well regarded freelance writer who has served as music editor at the Voice-owned Seattle Weekly. (When New Times Media acquired Village Voice Media, it also took its name.) Jackin’ Pop will have some new technological bells and whistles, like demographic breakdowns of ballots, but will largely be modeled after Pazz & Jop. Mr. Matos, 31, said it was as much a homage to that model as a protest against the new Voice.
“Pazz & Jop has always been about intellectual music coverage,” he said. “There are people at The Voice doing good, smart work, but the overall culture does not smile upon it being particularly thoughtful.”
Rob Harvilla, The Voice’s new music editor, who will oversee the continuation of Pazz & Jop, disagrees with that assessment. “I understand the consternation regarding” Mr. Christgau, he said. “And we’re going to have to prove ourselves to the critical world at large. But I think it’s worth doing.”
Ballots for the two polls are to begin going out this week.
The Pazz & Jop model, with easily aggregated rankings and spunky, personal, bite-size commentary, is ideally suited to an online update; The Voice itself has a Web version of the poll (villagevoice.com), in which each ballot can be viewed and cross-referenced.
“Pazz & Jop was kind of a bloggy idea before the Internet,” said Michael Hirschorn, an executive vice president at VH1 and a former editor of Spin. “That kind of obsessive narrow fanaticism has been democratized and spread throughout hundreds of blogs.”
Though the Idolator poll (idolator.com) will be open to some bloggers — Mr. Matos said that anyone who writes regularly about music will be eligible — its main constituency will be professional music critics, the same old-fashioned, old-media elite who contribute to Pazz & Jop. This suggests Idolator is betting that readers are still interested in the idea of professional rock critics and their opinions.
“This speaks to the credibility of The Voice,” said Joe Hagan, a contributing editor at New York magazine who writes about the media. “The Voice really did have such an incredible run as a purveyor of rock criticism, and that credibility is gone with Christgau’s exit. It’s there for the taking.”
To nab that credibility, Idolator first offered the job of putting Jackin’ Pop together to Mr. Christgau. He declined, but said he would contribute to both Jackin’ Pop and Pazz & Jop.
While in other fields there are multiple critics’ polls, Pazz & Jop has enjoyed an almost unchallenged run since it began in 1974. (An earlier version was published in 1971, leading to the hedge of calling it the “31st or 32nd annual” poll, and so on.)
But based on an unscientific survey of far fewer rock critics than the 800 or so who usually contribute to Pazz & Jop — Mr. Matos said he was shooting for 1,200 — the presence of a rival is less likely to cause a rift among critics than a shrug, because of doubts about Idolator’s ability to match the quality and breadth of Mr. Christgau’s work and about the future of rock criticism itself.
“What critics used to do was catch the black holes of culture, things that are not adequately distributed or whatever,” said Alec Hanley Bemis, a columnist for L.A. Weekly, a Village Voice Media paper. “These days they get caught by bloggers far before those critics’ lists come out.”
As for Mr. Christgau, who now contributes reviews to National Public Radio and to Rolling Stone and other publications, he said he was glad to be relieved of the yearly burden of Pazz & Jop, which took weeks of laborious work.
“My wife was not happy that I was fired,” Mr. Christgau wrote in an e-mail message. “But she was overjoyed that Pazz & Jop was out of our lives. We hope to go to Puerto Rico in early January.”
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