PAZZ AND JOP STAT BREAKDOWN

Here's the link to the poll itself, and all the affiliated essays 'n' whatnot.

Here are the 10 albums I voted for, with their placement on the final list:

1. Ayumi Hamasaki, Rock 'N' Roll Circus (#1001)
2. High on Fire, Snakes for the Divine (#162)
3. Rick Ross, Teflon Don (#34)
4. Iron Maiden, The Final Frontier (#273)
5. The Sword, Warp Riders (#179)
6. Kylesa, Spiral Shadow (#86)
7. Ratt, Infestation (#407)
8. Yakuza, Of Seismic Consequence (#673)
9. Flesh Consumed, Ecliptic Dimensions of Suffering (#1023)
10. Kill the Client, Set for Extinction (#1151)

Of those, I was the only voter for Ayumi Hamasaki, Flesh Consumed and Kill the Client.

I also sent in a long-ass comment, as follows (the parts they actually used are in bold):

Though I’m proud to vote in Pazz & Jop every year, it always ends up exacerbating my feelings of alienation from my so-called peers. I’ve never heard 80-plus percent of the music that winds up filling out the year-end lists published on Pitchfork, the AV Club and here at the Voice. (This year, I heard seven of Pitchfork’s Top 50, and two of the AV Club’s Top 25; I fully expect to have heard no more than two of the top 10 Pazz & Jop albums, and a maximum of five of the top 20.)

I’d like to offer my peers a deal: If you listen to Rotting Christ’s AEALO or Decrepit Birth’s Polarity (#s 7 and 9 on my year-end Top Ten for MSN Music) and find something thoughtful to say about either one, I’ll try and do the same for Kanye West or the Arcade Fire. If you listen to Ayumi Hamasaki’s Rock ’n’ Roll Circus, I’ll try my damnedest to make it through a whole Robyn song.

At one point, I was accused by a friend and colleague of “always us[ing] your ignorance of pop music as a pole to raise your flag upon. Like, I can't fault anyone for not caring about Adam Lambert, I'm faulting you because you constantly think it’s grounds for bragging rights. And yeah, you are def right about the music audience getting more stratified and retreating to more insular worlds, but I generally see this as a BAD THING and it’s hard for me to wrap my head around not wanting to see these walls topple.” And I admit that 2010 really sent my snarky D-bag side into overdrive, to the point where I was commenting on Facebook about how glad I am that I don’t get paid to care about Taylor Swift. But here’s the thing: My so-called peers don’t get paid to care about what I listen to or write about, either, with one or two exceptions, and they’re fine with that. So why am I expected to care about what I’m supposedly “missing”?

I write about what people are willing to pay me to write about. That’s mostly metal, with some side trips into jazz and Latin music. That takes up enough of my time that I listen almost exclusively to what people are willing to pay me to write about, with one or two exceptions, notably Japanese pop. In this way, I have been the beneficiary of cultural balkanization. Since most of the other critics filling out Pazz & Jop ballots are all busy listening to the same three dozen records, I can keep my calendar pretty damn full just by writing about stuff that sells as well as or better than the music reviewed on Pitchfork, stuff with a very real fan base that buys CDs (I know, right?) and T-shirts and tickets to shows, but that isn’t remotely cool in Voice/Pitchfork/Brooklyn Vegan/AV Club circles.

I’m far from unaware of pop music. I really liked the Diddy-Dirty Money and Rick Ross albums. I like Kelis and Kylie Minogue and Pink (though to my ear she’s never topped her third album, Try This, the one nobody else liked). M.I.A. isn’t pop music (she’d have to be popular—as in, sell some records—for that to be the case), but I’ve listened to every one of her half-baked, jabbering records at least twice. Outside of R&B-based pop music, I like Brad Paisley, and I liked Jamey Johnson’s The Guitar Song, though That Lonesome Song, from 2008, was clearly the better, more cohesive album. But for the most part, when I keep up with the so-called mainstream, it’s through videos. I don’t listen to the radio (terrestrial or online), but I watch MTV, VH1, Fuse and mun2 (the latter of which offers a killer hour-long show of norteño/Tejano videos everyone reading this should check out), and I’ll click links to videos on YouTube when I spot them on Twitter or message boards.

That kind of casual, semi-passive osmosis is how I know I haven’t missed anything by never listening to a whole Kanye West album. He’s a pop artist, so presumably his singles represent the best of his work, the stuff he’s presenting as the bait to lure listeners in. But I’ve seen the videos for every one of his singles, all the way back to “Through the Wire,” and not one of them has ever done a thing for me. I’ve had the same reaction to Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Ke$ha and just about everyone else who sold what passes for a lot of records in 2010, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to state that if I can’t make it a full minute into your video without switching the channel, I’m not gonna listen to your album.

Here’s the real problem, though. The Big Lie of generalist pop criticism (people who claim to cover “everything”) is actually two lies bound together. The first is that when you write about Kanye West, or whoever his equivalent will be in 2011, you’re writing about “mainstream” music. West, like every other musician on earth, is a niche artist—he may have millions of listeners, but there are untold millions more who have never heard him, may indeed have never heard of him. There is no mainstream. Critical consensus is built through publicity campaigns—writers (still, mostly) get records for free, and then they talk to each other about those records on Twitter, on Facebook, via email, and sometimes in person. And gradually a collective verdict emerges, with the token dissenters oftentimes anticipated and always genially taken into account, all under the unquestioned assumption that this is a record which Must Be Discussed. Which leads to the second lie, which is that the three dozen or so records that become The Sound Of [Year] cover all the bases. That outside the small pasture in which the pop critical community is carefully fed, tended and groomed by the labels and the publicists (and the musicians themselves, now), nothing of importance is happening. If the few dozen critics who write for the ever-shrinking roster of magazines and websites that cover “mainstream” music (including the “indie” division) don’t know about it, it must not be worth knowing about, basically.

But that’s absurd, and my own career path proves it. I write about metal five days a week for MSN Music. In mid-December, I posted a list of the 40 best metal albums of 2010. Mainstream and indie-minded critics, who consider themselves conversant in music, have probably heard as few of them as I’ve heard albums on their year-end lists. The music I spent all of 2010 listening to barely exists, as far as my so-called peers are concerned. And yet, I’m the one who’s considered ignorant when—if—these matters are discussed. The idea that metal (to pick only one) is a specialized genre, but “pop” is the mainstream, the baseline from which all other deviations are calculated, is utterly wrong. I’ll close with my response to the accusation quoted above, which could serve as advice to next year’s crop of eager children looking to break into the writing-about-music-for-money racket:

“Generalist, buffet-table pop criticism is dead. Specialist genre criticism is all that matters anymore, because listener communities are atomized, self-sealing and frequently hostile to outside input. I know who I'm writing for, and more importantly, I know who I'm not writing for. And I'm not gonna pretend to give a flying fuck about Taylor Swift or Kanye West just because all the other writers on my Twitter feed still think platinum-selling records ‘say’ ‘something’ ‘about’ ‘the culture.’ There is no monoculture. Pick a niche and grind it out.”

TOM PETTY, THE MASSES AND ME

I went to Madison Square Garden on Wednesday night to see Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, with Buddy Guy opening up; if you want to read my more formal review of the show, which was excellent, it's over here.

I've seen a bunch of concerts at Madison Square Garden over the years—Dio, Radiohead (twice), Coldplay, Iron Maiden (also twice), Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Nine Inch Nails, AC/DC, Bob Seger, Metallica, Mötley Crüe...a surprising number of shows in all, considering how ambivalent I am about the whole arena experience.

Some of the music I listen to is really popular; I have a shit-ton of classic rock in my iPod, along with a bunch of classic hip-hop, loads of big-name metal bands, et cetera, et cetera. Some of it's not popular at all. This has never really concerned me—I don't spend much time thinking about whether other people like the stuff I like. (This is very different from thinking about why I don't like stuff lots of other people do like, which I do all the time.) When I write a review, for example, there's an element of the utilitarian "consumer guide" to it, but I'm not really trying to convince other people that they should buy the album in question, even if I write that way sometimes. I'm just saying that I think it's good, and trying to explain why in some kind of coherent way while avoiding masturbatory theoretical bullshit.

Because of my lack of interest in music's relative popularity, the atmosphere of a massive arena show, with thousands of people screaming and singing along, doesn't really have much effect on me one way or the other. I don't care that all these people standing around me like Iron Maiden as much as I do; I just care that Iron Maiden is one of the best live acts in music, that they put on a fantastic, well-paced, consistently entertaining show. Sometimes, though, it can provide an element of surprise that's fun.

At the Tom Petty show, for example, I was surprised to see people singing along with such fervor to slow songs like "Free Fallin'" and "Learning to Fly." I like "Free Fallin'" a lot, that first verse is an absolute killer, but I'm a much bigger fan of some of Petty's earlier, meaner songs. He's got a real talent for creating evocative, minimalist images. Think of the first two lines of the song he opened the set with, "Listen to Her Heart": "You think you're gonna take her away/With your money and your cocaine." You know exactly who that guy is. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker would have devoted a whole song to painting that asshole's portrait; Petty conjures him and dismisses him in two lines.

I like that side of Tom Petty more than the jangly balladry that inspires girls to sing along and hug their boyfriends at his concerts. And/but watching that audience reaction made me think mine was a minority opinion. It reminded me that Tom Petty hasn't been that snarling guy for quite a few years now (though he still transforms into him from time to time, like on "It's Good to Be King" or "I Should Have Known It"). And that you can probably sell more albums and concert tickets by making girls hug their guys than by making guys pump their fists and snarl.

But here's my point: I think I could have enjoyed that concert just as much had none of those people been there. They weren't an important part of my aesthetic experience. And I'm wondering whether I'm alone on this one, whether the feeling of being surrounded by fellow Tom Petty fans enhances the experience for other people in some major way. And I'm trying to figure out when I started feeling this way, because it wasn't always the case. I used to like mingling with crowds, especially when that meant getting into a sweaty moshpit. Now I'm old(er), and my legs hurt if I stand up for two hours at a show, so I'm much more likely to go to something big enough (in an arena, say) that there's a seat there for me to flop back down into when things get boring (and every show gets boring at some point). A thing like the Summer Slaughter Tour, which features eleven or twelve death metal bands in a row, many of which I like a lot, but is held in a tiny sweatbox of a club with no seats and starts at three in the afternoon? You can forget about that bullshit.

Still, pure physical discomfort isn't what makes me so unconcerned with being part of a crowd. It's something larger, something I can't put my finger on yet, and/but it's something that's making me re-evaluate rock music as a whole. Because for a lot of people, the idea of rock (and pop) as communal experience carries a lot of weight. Someone whose preference is for solitary listening seems to be in some way "doing it wrong," or having an "incomplete" understanding/experience of the music. I'm not convinced. In fact, I think rock music may be best experienced in focused solitude. Because it's not part of a total package—it's not just the sonic component of an evening that depends on beer, lust and air thick with sweat to be complete. The music is enough all on its own, for me anyway.

THE WELL-DRESSED HEADBANGER

I'm pretty excited about the Summer Slaughter Tour, which hits NYC on August 1; ten of the most listener-abusive deathcore and technical death metal bands around, crushing it one after the other. I mean, seriously: Decapitated, The Faceless, All Shall Perish, The Red Chord, Veil of Maya, Cephalic Carnage, Decrepit Birth, Carnifex, Animals as Leaders and Vital Remains all on one bill? Sold!

The one thing that bums me out about the show is that as much as I like the majority of these bands (the only ones I'm not particularly looking forward to seeing are All Shall Perish, The Red Chord and Cephalic Carnage), I know I'm not gonna come home with even one new T-shirt.

Metal shirts, like metal itself, have gotten more and more "extreme" in recent years, with logos getting uglier and spikier, slogans getting more obscene/offensive, and imagery heading into territory that, frankly, I don't want on my chest where strangers can see. There was an awesomeness to metal graphic design in the '80s and even, to a degree, in the '90s that young bands don't care to match. To this day, old-school bands like Judas Priest, Metallica and Slayer offer good-looking shirts that a man in his late 30s can wear with relative dignity.

Iron Maiden used to be the gold standard for this. Their shirts, which almost always depicted mascot Eddie (I have one of the few that doesn't, a shirt from the 2004 Dance of Death Tour with a band photo on the front), were witty and cool-looking; you could wear them on the street and get unexpected nods of appreciation from strangers. I was hoping to buy a new shirt on Monday night. But everything on offer was ugly, and I left the gig empty-handed.

One option a few bands have exercised in recent years, which has pleased me greatly, has been the simple black-and-white logo shirt. I have one from Atheist, one from Entombed, and one that's not quite a straight logo shot, but features a logo and a simple white graphic, from the L.A.-based Native American crust/grind band Resistant Culture. And, of course, Motörhead has been doing that for decades—the classic "Motörhead/England" shirt, with their pig-demon mascot's head in the center, adorns hundreds of thousands of torsos worldwide, so many that Lemmy once told me, "I wish everyone who's got the T-shirt had the albums."

I feel like a lot of young bands are going out of their way to alienate older fans. There are a lot of metalheads in their late 30s who like new bands, but don't want to be walking around in a T-shirt that's been designed to piss off parents and high school principals. I think shirts designed for grown-ups would be a great marketing tool, and a way to bridge what I see as a growing generation gap in metal.

Of course, I could just be old and out of touch. That's not outside the realm of possibility. All I know for sure is that when I go to Summer Slaughter, I'll be wearing this classy, simple garment:

THIS WEEK IN CLEVELAND

Steady Eddie
Iron Maiden's iconic mascot comes clean

Iron Maiden's music is beloved by generations of headbangers. In 2010, don't be surprised if you find yourself sitting between a 17-year-old kid and a 47-year-old vet at one of their shows. But if you ask fans how they first came to the band, chances are pretty good that most of them will tell you something about spotting an awesome album cover in the racks and thinking I've gotta hear what that band sounds like!

Without a doubt, Iron Maiden have one of the best-looking discographies in music history, all centered on their snarling, demonic mascot Eddie. From the band's 1980 debut through the upcoming The Final Frontier, Eddie has been on every single Iron Maiden album cover, single sleeve, and T-shirt, sporting dozens of different costumes and guises. He's been an Egyptian pharaoh (1984's Powerslave), a military-tank commander (2006's A Matter of Life and Death), and an alien warrior butchering helpless astronauts (The Final Frontier). But he's always been distinctly himself too. The band's relentless touring schedule this summer prevented any members from sitting down for an interview, but Eddie was more than happy to be engaged.

A lot of metal bands have had mascots, but very few have achieved your kind of longevity. How did you first come to be associated with Iron Maiden?
It's surprising, really. That Motörhead dog/pig thing's been around forever, I'll give 'em that. They keep it in a cage backstage. And you want to keep your hands and feet away from the bars, let me tell you. You think coming between Lemmy and his Jack Daniel's is risky? Try approaching that beast. And Megadeth has that skull-faced fella. We met a time or two. Didn't get on. He's got Mustaine's personality, that one. I don't know what happened to the robot animals Judas Priest used to have, the eagle and that lion/tank thing. I miss those guys. But I really am sort of the king of the ring. To answer your question, I was in London, trying to make it as a male model, but it wasn't really working out. The whole "heroin chic" thing was years away, so a bloke with my physique was destined for a life of doors slammed in the face, you know? Even the punks and goths didn't want nothing to do with me. But then these guys spotted me on the street and said, "We're desperate for an image, and you're perfect! Be on our album cover!" So I said yeah, figuring it'd be like a steppingstone to something bigger, you know? Well, 30 years later, here I am.

What's your favorite of all the costumes they've put you in?
Well, I suppose I should say I like the new one — that's what an artist is always supposed to say, don't you know? But honestly, I think my favorite was Powerslave. The idea of being worshipped really appeals to me. That one, and Live After Death, where I'm bursting out of the grave. They really buried me, you know! And I might not look it, but I've got fears and insecurities like anyone else, and being buried alive, well, that's bloody high on the list, innit? So my positive memories of that one are mostly down to just getting out from under the bloody dirt! I tell you, we had some discussions after that, the band members and me.

And speaking of the band members, has there ever been any tension between them and you, given how much more recognizable you are than most of them?
Yeah, they know who the face of the band is. I mean, if you see a picture of them and I'm not somewhere in it, you'd wonder "Who the hell are these guys?" They're just five middle-aged Englishmen, straight out of any pub.

Six, actually. You're forgetting guitarist Janick Gers. He's been in the band since 1990.
Oh yeah, that fella. You know, I don't even think his guitar's plugged in. Always bounding about the stage, twirling in circles. The first couple of tours with him onboard, I thought he was some kind of hired acrobat, frankly. Well, to answer your question — no, no, we get along great. I really missed Bruce and Adrian when they were gone and was glad when they came back.

Do you have a favorite Maiden song?
Oh mate, I don't pay attention to the music. I just hang out in the backstage waiting for my cue. I tried listening a few times, but bloody hell, some of those songs are long. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" — Christ, I could put that on, go out on a date, and get home just in time for the final chorus! No, no, I do my bit and earn my check just like the rest of the crew. I'm no different than the guys who load the amps in and out, I'm just more recognizable is all.

[From the Cleveland Scene.]

RECIDIVISM

Cosmo Lee at Invisible Oranges is asking his readers which band or bands they've seen the most often. For me, the leaders are Iron Maiden, Einstürzende Neubauten and Cecil Taylor in a three-way tie. I've seen each four times, with my fifth Maiden concert coming up on 7/12.

Right behind them are the groups or artists I've seen three times each: Amon Amarth, Arch Enemy, Borbetomagus, Clutch, Fishbone, the Flying Luttenbachers, High On Fire, Isis, Machine Head, Motörhead, the Rollins Band, Slayer, Slipknot and Social Distortion.

Then there are those I've (only) seen twice: AC/DC, Black Sabbath (once with Ozzy, once with Dio), Butthole Surfers, Ornette Coleman, Dio (as a solo act), Exodus, Ice-T, Jane's Addiction, Judas Priest, Megadeth, Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Orthrelm, Pantera, Iggy Pop (once solo, once with the Stooges), Radiohead, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Sword, and Rob Zombie.

I'm probably forgetting some, too—bands I saw open for several different headliners, or other unmemorable circumstances. If you're reading this, are you a recidivist? Do you see the same bands over and over? Are you always happy you went?

BANDS ARE NOT JUKEBOXES

Today at my MSN metal blog, I condemn the practice of bands (e.g. Slayer, Megadeth, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Nine Inch Nails, Eyehategod, Unsane) playing entire albums live. It's fucking boring, and it's demeaning to the bands (who are reduced to being living jukeboxes) and the audience (who are rewarded for mindless nostalgia). Putting together a great set is an art form unto itself—balancing old and new, setting a pace that starts strong, offers a slight slowdown in the middle so the audience can relax/catch its breath, then bringing the energy level back up for a thunderous conclusion and a kick-ass, explosive encore. It might seem similar, but that's really a totally different thing from sequencing an album (or a CD), especially an album from 20 years ago, when albums actually had sides that demanded mini-sequencing of their own. Frankly, I'd be more impressed by seeing The Rock-afire Explosion playing a whole album by a band. Anyway, there's more if you want more.

IRON MODERN

Iron Maiden launched their latest U.S. tour in Dallas, Texas last night, and since it's 2010, the set list and some video were already out before the night was even over. Here's a clip of the opening number:


And here's the set list:

01. The Wicker Man (from Brave New World)
02. The Ghost of the Navigator (from Brave New World)
03. Brighter Than a Thousand Suns (from A Matter of Life and Death)
04. El Dorado (new song, from The Final Frontier)
05. Paschendale (from Dance of Death)
06. The Reincarnation of Benjamin Breeg (from A Matter of Life and Death)
07. These Colours Don’t Run (from A Matter of Life and Death)
08. Blood Brothers (from Brave New World)
09. Wildest Dreams (from Dance of Death)
10. No More Lies (from Dance of Death)
11. Brave New World (from Brave New World)
12. Fear of the Dark (from Fear of the Dark)
13. Iron Maiden (from Iron Maiden)
Encore:
14. The Number of the Beast (from The Number of the Beast)
15. Hallowed Be Thy Name (from The Number of the Beast)
16. Running Free (from Iron Maiden)

Eleven of the sixteen songs they'll be performing every night are from the last ten years. As someone who thinks their last three albums have been really, really good, and is absolutely looking forward to the new one, I'm very excited by this.

Others don't share my enthusiasm. But you know what? Maybe the MetalSucks guys haven't seen Iron Maiden play their classic songs ("The Trooper," "Aces High," "2 Minutes to Midnight," "Flight of Icarus," "Powerslave," etc., etc.) enough times yet. I can understand that. The thing is, I have. I've seen Maiden four times in the last eight years—at Madison Square Garden in July 2003, doing a greatest hits set; at Hammerstein Ballroom in January 2004, celebrating the release of Dance of Death; at Ozzfest in 2005, playing only songs from their first four albums; and in June 2008 at Madison Square Garden again, on the "Somewhere Back in Time" tour, which focused on material from Powerslave, Somewhere in Time and Seventh Son of a Seventh Son. So yeah, I've had my fill of the old songs. And I think it's great that they're celebrating their last decade. I guarantee you, Bruce Dickinson—already one of the greatest frontmen in rock history—is gonna sell the living fuck out of this material.

When I saw this set list, I wasn't instantly sure it would work. So I put together an iPod playlist of the studio versions. And you know what? It's an hour forty of some of the best metal of the 2000s. Seriously, this show's gonna kick ass. (Assuming you get there late enough to miss Dream Theater, of course.)

RONNIE JAMES DIO 1942-2010

Legendary metal singer Ronnie James Dio passed away early Sunday morning, May 16, from the stomach cancer he'd been battling since November 2009. The 67-year-old Dio had one of the greatest and most recognizable voices in metal history. His career began in the 1950s, fronting various rockabilly and R&B groups (Ronnie and the Red Caps, Ronnie and the Prophets) in upstate New York. "When you start, you do cover material, and whatever happened to be around, we did it," he told me in an interview last August. "We did a lot of blues, a lot of R&B material very popular back East—people like Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, the Isley Brothers, James Brown, those kinds of people. You did what was put in front of you."

Dio really found his niche in the early '70s, though, first with the boogie/Southern-rock-style band Elf and then alongside former Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore in Rainbow. With his theatrical outfits and dramatic, sweeping gestures, not to mention his astonishingly powerful voice, he established a persona far larger than his relatively small physical stature, stalking the stage and commanding the audience's attention at all times.

After leaving Rainbow in 1978, he moved on to front Black Sabbath, and in so doing reshaped that legendary band in his own image. "When we did 'Children of the Sea,' I think that was the first one we wrote together, and that showed that I was more than capable of doing it," Dio recalled about taking over as Sabbath's lyricist. "And Geezer [Butler, bassist and primary lyricist during the Ozzy years] really didn't want to write. When I came in, he said, 'You're gonna write the lyrics, aren't you?' and I said, 'Well, I certainly hope so,' and he said, 'Oh, thank God, that's one job I never wanted.'"

Where the band had been focused on doomy rock and relatively down-to-earth lyrical concerns with Ozzy Osbourne up front and Butler doing most of the writing, when Dio joined, he brought his own interest in heroism and myth to bear on the albums Heaven And Hell, Mob Rules, and Dehumanizer. Last year, that lineup of Black Sabbath, now renamed Heaven And Hell, released one of 2009's best albums, The Devil You Know—a stunningly heavy, operatic meditation on mortality and doom, by four guys who helped invent a genre and got back together to show the youngsters how it's done.

But no matter how heavy the music was, Dio's fundamental optimism always shone through. "None of the songs end with 'OK, and now we're going to die,'" he told me in that conversation. "My manner is always to let people know that someone out there feels the same, and luckily I've got a stage to speak for them."

Of course, Dio also achieved solo stardom in the '80s, with albums like The Last In Line, Holy Diver, and Sacred Heart, and classic metal anthems like "Rainbow In The Dark," "The Last In Line" and "We Rock." I was lucky enough to see him live three times—first on his Sacred Heart tour in 1986, then as the middle act on the bill (between Motörhead and headliners Iron Maiden) in 2003, and finally in 2008, fronting Heaven and Hell on the Metal Masters Tour with Judas Priest, Motörhead and Testament. The latter show was my then-eight-year-old nephew's first concert, and I'm really glad he was able to see a true legend perform. The world of metal has suffered a great loss; we'll never see another performer like Ronnie James Dio.