Gossip is the new pornography

perpetua:

This is an extraordinarily depressing essay by former Voice editor/professional contrarian Chuck Eddy. It’s like a guy who used to be principal of a high school getting really angry about the outcome of his old school’s student council election.

If 2009 was ”The Year of Too Much Consensus” because of its Pazz and Jop results, what was 2008? In 2008, there were 577 critics voting and TV on the Radio’s Dear Science beat Vampire Weekend by 669 points (and appeared on 49 more ballots). In 2009, Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion beat it’s next closest rival, Phoenix’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix by 331 points (and was on only fifteen more ballots, with 696 critics turning in ballots).