Eclectic Company: “The Votes Are In”

Last column I wrote before the New Year started with me bemoaning running behind in my critical obligations, having already missed the deadline for one of the “bests of” music ballots I was supposed to fill in for early January print. Turns out, I was not the only one of the critics solicited for their opinion who was confused. A few days later came an email notice that balloting had been reopened to satisfy the rest of the perplexed and unready. So I got crack at it number two, and you can check out my actual votes in three of this year’s polls.

When I wrote regularly for The Village Voice, I agonized over votes for their annual Pazz & Jop poll because my then-husband was for many years the assistant Poobah (a mocking title coined from a character in Gilbert & Sullivan’s operetta The Mikado to indicate someone in an exalted position) to Bob Christgau, editor of the Voice’s music section, and the Grand High Everything of serious music criticism, known affectionately as the “Dean” of America’s rock critics. Tom, ex-#1, and Bob, would spend hours calculating the scores that hundreds of balloteers had allotted to this band or that record, until they were able to make definitive pronouncements about who and what was the best of the previous year’s popular musical output.

The madness had some method to it, and these days, other ballots I sometimes indulge in are graded similarly. Bob had figured out that it was not enough to put Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die in the number one slot on your list, because it might happen that Traffic would be in different positions on other critics’ lists; how to add up the apples and oranges? Weight the ballots! Assign point values to each vote, then add all the points assigned by each critic to each artist, no matter what position the artist might hold on different ballots. At the Voice I got 100 points to divide among the ten best albums. I could give up to 30 points to one act, but no fewer than five points to any act on my list. The mathematically lazy, like me, could vote their list in descending order – 15 points for the top slot, 14 for the second slot, 13, for the third, etc. But for those even lazier, the Poobahs would assign 10 points to each act if you hadn’t point-graded your list.

So now, with the mechanics out of the way, all I had to do was choose my bests from the prior year. Well, no, not exactly the prior year, because we were voting before the year was over, and albums released near the end of the year might have been overlooked entirely. The Voice’s Pazz & Jop Awards and The Nashville Scene’s Country Music Critics’ Poll, and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences’ GRAMMY Awards all calculate the eligibility period for any year’s awards differently. Some say the record must not have been released before or after certain dates, and no two use the same dates. Others say the record’s “year of impact” on the public must have been during the eligibility period, even if the record was released more than 12 months before the voting year during which the impact was felt.

The GRAMMYs are a horse of a different stripe altogether. For each award, the voters are given choices that have either been selected from two previous rounds of nominating ballots submitted by as many NARAS voting members as wish to, or that have been nominated by a committee specializing in a particular craft category such as “Notes,” “Package,” or “Production” where the general voter would have little or no familiarity with those works deserving nominations. There are no write-in votes, so if you object to the choices you’ve got on the final ballot, you have to vote with your feet to show disapproval. Of course, the awards committee might not get your point, and simply think you were too lazy, too stoned, or too busy to respond in time.

Like many other NARAS members with musical tastes and businesses outside the mainstreams of pop and rock, I was of a mind to complain about this year’s abrupt and numerous changes to the awards. One big difference is the loss of many award categories, caused both by combining a few arguably redundant awards, and by simply dropping others. When there were more award categories, more artists had a shot at winning a GRAMMY (among the casualties was the short-lived Cajun and Zydeco award that Terence and Cynthia Simien led a long hard fight for), especially in a relatively esoteric area (there were separate categories for Hawaiian Music and Native American Music and Polka Music, but now all those styles compete with each other plus Cajun, Zydeco and whatnot for a single Regional Roots award). I suspect from the grumbling I’ve been hearing there might be calls to Occupy the GRAMMYs next month.

One change I thought I’d hate turned out to be better than the old way we’ve been voting on the GRAMMYs since long before I joined up in 1994. Your vote used to be limited to eight categories of music and crafts out of about 28 such designations. You could vote for all awards within a category group — Best Country Vocalist, Best Country Song, Best Country Album, etc. — but some categories might have only one award, for example, Best New Age Album, so your overall options were limited. This time, post changes, I got to cast 20 total votes for individual awards no matter what stylistic or craft category group they were in. And I discovered that while I cared about Best Rock Album, I really didn’t care about the Best Hard Rock Album award, so I gave it a miss, and used my vote in another musical genre which I hadn’t had the luxury of voting for under the old system. Tune in to my website and check to see how much or little I’m in sync with the rest of the Academy when the awards are telecast February 12th.