The Village Voice Pazz & Jop Ripoff Poll: Q&A with Glenn Boothe

The spirit and methodology if not the copyright of Pazz & Jop currently carries forward in the cheekily named Village Voice Pazz & Jop Ripoff Poll, a Facebook group with close to 2,000 members, at least several hundred of whom will cast Top 10 Album ballots in the 2023 edition. PJRP is moderated by Glenn Boothe, who started the poll, and Keith Artin, who, according to Glenn, does the “heavy lifting” of the numbers. I don’t know if it’s because I’m looking at Facebook this December more than I was last December or the December before that, but it seems like the poll has grown enormously this year—every time I login there are several new ballots to peruse, a fair number of which also contain comments and/or linked playlists. What I didn’t know, and only got a hint of after reading the bits of background provided on the group page, was that PJRP has a history that long predates its existence on Facebook. In fact, for many years PJRP existed in concurrence with the Voice poll—in Boothe’s original formulation it was an adjunct to P&J—a non-critics critics poll, if you will—not a replacement, though when the Voice version went kaput PJRP was conveniently in place to extend the tradition. (No scare quotes around “conveniently”; I’m not suggesting any sort of conspiracy at play…)

I recently contacted Glenn Boothe to help fill in some details about the history and the workings of the poll, including how to cast a ballot if you’re sane enough to not be on Facebook.

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I was surprised to learn that the Village Voice Pazz & Jop Ripoff Poll has been around as long as it has—I figured it was something you started in the last two or three years. Talk about the origins of the poll and its general trajectory.
In the early 1990s, I lived in NYC and because the Village Voice was a great resource for which bands were playing that week, I picked it up religiously. I then became aware of their year-end critics’ poll of favorite albums. One of the things that struck me immediately about their poll is that they compiled it differently than others; instead of just listing ten records and automatically assigning a point value to each position in the Top 10, the Voice allowed participants to weigh their contributions using 100 points, where you could assign a point total that reflected your love of a particular album. One of the things that is great about that system is that it helps weigh how much you like any one album in relation to others on your list as the more points you assign one album, the fewer points you have for the other nine on your list.

Anyway, their poll was reserved specifically for critics with the presumed logic that critics listened to more music than other people and thus were better arbiters of which albums deserved more attention. But the longer I lived in NYC, the more people I knew who participated, and to a certain degree, maybe I was jealous I could not participate (since I was not a critic). In the early ’90s, I worked for record companies primarily doing radio promotion, so I too was consuming a lot more music than the average reader.

So I thought about creating my version for at least one-two years before I actually did it, but the thing is, this was the early ’90s when “email” primarily consisted of writing on America Online (AOL). And although I did have a computer, my knowledge of spreadsheets was nascent, so as much as I loved the idea, I just wasn’t sure how easy it would be to execute (not to mention, if anyone else would find it interesting.)

Finally, in 1995, with a better grasp of spreadsheets and using our internal email service at Caroline Records, I decided to do this poll specifically with the Caroline staff. I can’t remember how many people participated but my thought is somewhere around 20. But it was a good test run to see if maybe others would be as into the idea as I was.

Fast forward to 1996, and now with a full-fledged email account (courtesy of Earthlink) and likely influenced by the fact that I had been laid off by Caroline earlier in the month (so maybe this was a way to keep in contact with people), I launched an expanded version of the poll that was primarily just to my friends in the music industry that I had email addresses for. I also can’t remember how many people participated in that second poll but it was significantly more than the year before (maybe like 60 people). And then moving forward it just continued to grow as people shared the invite with others (and eventually included a fair share of people who didn’t necessarily work in the music industry).

I should have all of this backed up but it’s all in different places (including zip discs that I can no longer access) but my memory was that within a few years, we were over 100 participants… And that kept going ’til the early 2000s. Then sometime in the mid-aughts, I had a computer crash and I lost a lot of info (including my email list of participants.) So, in all honesty, I kinda gave up for a couple of years ‘cos it just seemed like too much work to build it all up again.

Then when Facebook came along, I realized I could easily reach people through their platform and decided to start it back up again. Looking back, it was 2010 when I first used Facebook. Back then, I would create a Facebook event and have people post their Top 10s in the FB event. It hit me after doing that for many years that I was having to go through a lot of the same motions each year, so in 2019, I decided to create a FB Group (primarily so I didn’t have to go through the process of inviting everyone individually, as once they joined the group, they were in).

But just coincidentally, that same year is the year that the Village Voice ceased to do their poll, so the combination of that happening and this newly created FB Group, it appeared that this FB group had been created to replace the VV version. In turn, a lot of participants from the real poll ended up joining my Rip-Off Poll (including former Voice editor Chuck Eddy, which likely served as an endorsement of sorts).

So to be clear, who can participate in the poll? I assume you have to be on Facebook (correct me if I’m wrong), but beyond that, can anyone cast a ballot?
Anyone can participate. As I say, anyone who is willing to rank their 10 favorite albums for the year and then assign 100 points to that list qualifies as a big enough music fan to participate as that process suggests a certain level of music fandom. As I mentioned earlier, year-end album rankings were often left to magazines with the correct presumption that the writers consumed more music than their readers.

But as someone who worked for a record company, I also knew there were a lot of non-journalists involved in record companies who also listened to a lot of music (‘cos we likely got a decent amount for free). But then others got involved who worked at record stores or radio stations, so they also likely had access to more music than the average music fan (though there was never criteria that would prevent someone from participating). And now with the advent of streaming, there are no barriers to access (and I know people who do not work in music who consume more music than I do, and my listening habits are well above average!).

The poll is not limited to members of Facebook—I will include anyone’s submission who gets it to me and have even created an email (pazzandjop@gmaildotcom) specifically for people who either are not on FB or don’t want their list to be publicized. Sadly, some people participated every year via email, but we lost their contacts with the shift to Facebook.

Are you able to say anything about the electorate itself? Is it a combination now of music industry people and rock critics?
I’ll be honest, so many people that I don’t know now participate so it’s hard to say. There are a decent number of people I know that do work in the music industry, as well as some former music industry friends that I would have met back in the ’90s. And when we formed the Facebook group (which coincided with the end of the official Pazz & Jop Poll), there was also an influx of music journalists. I’ve been involved in live music in the Chapel Hill-Durham, NC area over the past 20 years now, so there are also likely more participants who live in this area than any other market.

What is your process for tallying the results?
The process is manually entering the data individually into a Google spreadsheet. It’s definitely time-consuming. This is where Keith Artin plays a big role. Most people associate me with the poll but really, Keith is the one that does all the heavy lifting of tabulating the results. Keith got involved in the past ten years when it was becoming too much work for me to handle (and it took me longer to post the results). And this was before the number of participants increased by 400% (when the FB group was created) and there are seemingly more acts with multiple releases in a year. It wasn’t that long ago, all you had to do was name the artist in your submission ‘cos most likely they only had one release for the year (but now we have to keep track of artist and album, which is just more data to be entered!).

Perusing some of the earlier editions on Facebook, I see you incorporated some interesting additional stats in your poll—rankings by artist, for instance, even some data about the voters. Can you talk about any of those and do you plan to continue down that path for the latest edition?
Yeah, I still do year-end awards for both artists and participants. I love crunching numbers so this is just fun for me to take a look at. I’m not exactly sure when I started doing the year-end “awards” but that likely dates back to year two (as I recall some of the Awards were originally named after people who seemed to consistently win them!).

If you go way back, I used to also write a recap of the year somewhat in the vein of what Robert Christgau would do for the real poll. I don’t think I’ve done that since it’s been part of FB.

I know some voters have wished aloud that there was a poll for songs/singles as well as albums. I also understand that adding that would be an enormous amount of additional work for what is essentially (from what I gather) a two-person organization. But any thoughts on that? Is this something theoretically you’ve thought about incorporating at some point?
In all honesty, I never considered that initially as I’m personally not that interested. The reason is that there are, say, 12 times as many songs as there are albums so there is less likely to be a real consensus at the top. We kinda see that with albums now given how much music people can consume in the streaming era as more individual albums get votes and a smaller percentage of albums get multiple votes.

But I would have no problem making that part of the poll if someone else wanted to do the computation side of it. My thought is a singles poll would take even more time to compile than the album poll given the number of individual entries. And so far, no one has volunteered to take that on.

When do you expect to post the results for this year’s poll?
The deadline is New Year’s Day* and we can generally turn the results around a day or two after. Keith is already entering the information so he’s normally able to have it ready not long after the deadline. I then go in and double-check things and organize the info for posting and run the numbers for the awards.

You mentioned Chuck Eddy, who I know has advocated for the poll, but to your knowledge, has Robert Christgau himself been made aware of this, or commented on its existence?
Ha, yes, it’s funny that Christgau did mention this poll in his own recap last year calling it “the freewheeling Pazz & Jop Rip-Off Poll that staked its ornery claim a few years ago on Facebook.” Per usual, it gets overshadowed that this poll dates back to before Facebook.

Any additional thoughts you’d like to add here, Glenn? Thanks to you and Keith for persevering with the poll and responding to my questions.
Thanks for your interest! And yeah, I’m just happy that so many people are willing to participate and others get as much joy out of seeing the results as I do. I know some participants get annoyed that others choose to give all ten albums 10 points each (vs actually ranking them) but my view is, that there are over one thousand people in that Facebook group who don’t participate so I’d rather have people submit something than nothing.

In the end, I feel like every year I discover something I like that I had no idea about before the poll. I still recall in that second year hearing about Belle & Sebastian for the first time… And they are now one of my favorite bands of all time! That alone is quite motivating.

*Since extended to noon, Jan. 2.