The two minutes and 18 seconds it will take you to peruse the Pazz & Jop results? Probably better you devote them instead to the several hours (days?) it will likely take you to fish through all the reading material compiled in Jason Gross’s annual Best Music Writing summary, hosted this year at Red Bull Academy. Nice to see this is still a thing.
Best Music Writing, 2013 (Jason Gross)
RockCritics.com 
Speaking of unexpected venues publishing awesome features, who’s picking up Dean’s List? Presumably Barnes and Noble? Maybe SPIN? I want to hear what Xgau had to say about Eminem and…really ARTPOP?
Not sure. It’s funny, though, I’ve seen Christgau mocked in a couple places for placing ArtPop in his Top 10, but a) is it an awful record? I’ve only heard the first single, which I thought was fine — nothing special, but an improvement at least over “Born This Way”; b) it just doesn’t strike me as a stretch that Christgau would still be investing time into Gaga past what i assume most people are saying is her sell-by date (are you, or other people, saying that? I’m inferring a lot here). He’s a stick-to-it critic if anyone is.
just two minutes and eighteen seconds i think its a joke but if its true it is great. i remember the words which my music teacher told me that people just judge the song or the music by its first paragraph.
What I mean to say, Ryan, is that this is likely the lamest Pazz & Jop ever, and that’s after a many-years-in-the-making slide into lameness already. Sentences like this (from the Beyonce essay) are indicative of the “quality” of Pazz & Jop circa 2013:
“But 10 months later, we were suddenly gifted with Beyoncé. And this changed things.”
“Gifted,” as a verb, I think — meaning her album was bestowed upon us like a gift? Which, hey, “changed things.”
Oh, I just meant that ARTPOP is terrible — nothing to do with sticking with Gaga, and in fact I think it is the “truest” Gaga alb, but that that is embarrassing. Which I dunno, maybe Xgau likes the shamelessness. (I kind of appreciated it conceptually but thought the actual songs were terrible.)
(And actually I just want to hear what he has to say about it)