1991 Pazz & Jop Ballot
Albums
(24) Guns N’ Roses, Use Your Illusions II
(17) Garth Brooks, Ropin’ the Wind
(13) Massive Attack, Blue Lines
(12) Guns N’ Roses, Use Your Illusions I
(9) Nirvana, Nevermind
(5) Bananarama, Pop Life
(5) Teenage Fanclub, Bandwagonesque
(5) KMD, Mr. Hood
(5) Various Artists, Five Heartbeats
(5) Bongwater, The Power of Pussy
Singles
Geto Boys, “My Mind’s Playing Tricks on Me”
Garth Brooks, “Shameless”
Natural Selection, “Do Anything”
Yo La Tengo and Daniel Johnston, “Speeding Motorcycle”
Crystal Waters, “Gypsy Woman”
Paula Abdul, “Blowing Kisses in the Wind”
Pirates of the Mississippi, “Feed Jake”
Rush, “Roll the Bones”
Peace Choir, “Give PC a Chance”
Rick Astley, “Cry for Help”
EPs
Dinosaur, Jr, Whatever’s Cool With Me
Digital Underground, This Is an EP Release
Yo La Tengo, There Goes My Baby
Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, Songs About Pets
Videos
Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”
Tesla, “Edison’s Medicine”
Van Halen, “Poundcake”
Warrant, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”
Aerosmith, “Sweet Emotion”
Notes on the Year
The rock crit story of the year was the continued failure of pop radio, the musical equivalent of Bill Clinton, jealously guarding a shrunken fan base and terrified of reaching out to the disenfranchised. Utterly oblivious to the emerging youth cultures, pop stations ignored Nirvana, Metallica, and most good rap, and watched their market shares predictably shrink as exhasperated teens and twentysomethings realized MTV was the only media outlet representing their tastes. Thanks in part to Billboard’s belated effort to reconcile their stats with reality, the pop album charts, and even much of the singles charts, have rarely been as exciting and eclectic as they were in ‘91. But now even America’s Top 40 is considering counting down cuts based only on Billboard’s radio charts, so pop stations don’t have to be tainted by the sound of big-selling singles like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Mind’s Playing Tricks.” What does having a Top Ten single mean if Casey Casem won’t admit it? It used to be that pop radio was where you could go to watch mass culture movements collide and shoot off sparks; now MTV’s the only place you can hear Paula Abdul and Nine Inch Nails back-to-back, the only place where fans of either are forced to listen to both and maybe make some connections. That’s why I’m really creeped by MTV’s plans to add channels and chop up their programming into more demographically packageable chunks; if Yo! MTV Raps hadn’t been on the same station that programmed Madonna, hip-hop would be in a very different state today.
But for all its cool heterogeneity, MTV was as gutless as pop radio in ignoring the best power balladeer in the nation, Garth Brooks. Granted, this isn’t as bad as the pre-Thriller lockout of R&B, but I can’t help believing that if pop fans, raised after all on Jon Bon’s oat operas, got a chance to learn that guys who really do wear cowboy hats didn’t have the cooties, the world would be a little nicer a place.
On the other hand, maybe it would just make people feel better about voting for that hardcore fan of the Nitty Ditty Nitty Gritty Great Bird, President Bush. Maybe subcultures need their protectionism, the hypocritical self-righteous anti-popism that bands like Nirvana spout in inverviews, to nurture something they can care about more deeply, that they can feel is more pure. Can anybody besides rock critics and record bizzers really care equally about hardcore rap, neotrad country, and pop metal? And when we say we do care equally, does that really just mean we don’t care all that much about anything, other than our images of ourselves as endlessly open-minded?
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