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Jackin’ The Pop
January 9th, 2007The beast has been unleashed: Idolator’s Jackin’ Pop Critics Poll makes its maiden voyage. I’m thrilled to have been a part of it, though as you can tell by my ballot comments, perhaps sometimes I’m not so happy to be a part of _this_. Resolution for 2007? Bring Back The Love!
In addition to Idolator’s parsing of the poll, Glenn McDonald brought forth the statistical beast from within and has given us two fantastic analyses: the first is a ranking of whose ballot was most in alignment with the winners (I’m pretty much in the middle there, not surprisingly), the second is a breakdown of album clusters. The second is more fascinating to me, largely because it reads like one of those “Recommended If You Like” stickers (sometimes), but also manages to highlight some pretty obvious patterns in lists. There’s neat little breakdowns, like if someone picked Cat Power’s _The Greatest_, there was an approximately 25% chance they’d pick a record by TV On The Radio, Neko Case, The Hold Steady and J Dilla. Of course, that’s an easy stat. I think. Here’s some interesting observations from Glenn:
• The closest anybody comes to losing their own poll is DJ Drama and Lil Wayne. Of the 24 voters who voted for Dedication 2, 21 of them also voted for Clipse’s Hell Hath No Fury. In no other case is this ratio much lower than 2:1.
• The only artists whose subset polls don’t have Ghostface Killah in the top 10 are Band of Horses, Midlake, the Dixie Chicks and Bruce Springsteen.
• In the top 10 according to the 29 people who voted for Mastodon, Converge comes in tied for 7th. Converge only got 8 votes total, but 6 of those people also voted for Mastodon. Converge shares 7th with Clipse, who got 99 votes total, but only 6 from Mastodon voters. There are only three or four other albums with fewer than 10 total votes that would make the top 10 according to the voters for any album with 20+ votes, and those are all from smaller samples (3 or 4 votes).
• The Dixie Chicks, despite receiving only 26 votes total, came in 3rd among Springsteen voters, 7th among Bob Dylan voters, and 9th among Jenny Lewis voters.
• DJ Drama and Lil Wayne, despite receiving only 24 votes total, came in 4th among Scritti Politti voters, 5th among Justin Timberlake and TI and Clipse voters, 7th among My Chemical Romance voters, and 8th among J Dilla voters.
• The biggest jump into 2nd place is Grizzly Bear, who come in 2nd among Midlake voters. Midlake, however, doesn’t even make the top 10 according to Grizzly Bear voters. Presumably this means war.
Also, the Delta 5 reissue made it to number 16 on that poll. How cool!
January 9th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
I totally voted for the Delta 5 reissue, but alas, my ballot was lost in the glitch that claimed who knows how many ballots. Damn shame too, cuz I wonder what turnout would’ve looked like had all the hanging chads of the inaugural Jackin’ Pop poll been investigated [or if there were time/money for such things.]
January 9th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
Yeah, that was kind of a bummer, seeing how many ballots were eaten. However, it’s not the fault of Matos, Maura or Brian — Gawker’s commenting system is awfully glitchy. It winds up eating half of the things I try posting. I doubt it would have rocked the boat too much, just looking at the numbers.