Picks Index Page

1996 Pazz & Jop Ballot

Albums

  1. (25) Afghan Whigs, Black Love
  2. (25) Lotion, Nobody’s Cool
  3. (10) Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Michael Brook, Night Song
  4. (10) Ween, Twelve Golden Country Greats
  5. (5) Joan Obsorne, Relish
  6. (5) Oasis, What’s the Story Morning Glory
  7. (5) Nearly God, Heaven
  8. (5) Counting Crows, Recovering the Satellites
  9. (5) Sheryl Crow
  10. (5) Shania Twain, The Woman in Me

Singles

  1. Everclear, “Santa Monica”
  2. Los del Rio, “Macarena”
  3. Beck, “Where It’s At”
  4. Quad City DJs, “C’mon n’ Ride It (The Train)”
  5. Weird Al Yankovic, “Amish Paradise”
  6. Tori Amos, “Caught a Light Sneeze”
  7. Primitive Radio Gods, “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand”
  8. Jewel, “Who Will Save Your Soul?”
  9. Rage Against the Machine, “Bulls on Parade”
  10. Spacehog, “In the Meantime”

The year in jop

Well, any year with the Macarena in it can’t be too bad. Actually, I first heard the Macarena in the summer of 1994, when a fellow box viewer in my request-neighborhood demographic got good and obsessed with it. The problem was, something was fucked up with the video, so all we’d get was 15 seconds of the beginning of the cut, skipping over and over again. Impressively, that synth intro help up under repeated listenings, fortelling of greatness to come. The Macarena was the only pop music this year to become nearly as significant as, say, Independence Day - a mass culture touchstone. What I can’t decide is if that’s the moment when a text really begins to matter, or if that’s when it ceases to have any meaning altogether. Bob Dole and Jack Kemp both did the Macarena - does this signal a new era of bubblesalsa

The Smashing Pumpkins are the G’n’R of the mid-’90s - arrogant, self-pitying, and overambitious in a way only an true fan could love. So why are they so tiresome? James Iha and D’Arcy make just about as good foils for Billy Corgan as Slash and Duff did for Axl, and they’re certainly an `improvement in fashion sense. The problem is Corgan - his charisma just isn’t up to the challenge of being a rock god, and he doesn’t have anywhere near the singing chops to pull off either the snarling rockers or the gushy ballads. (He gets closer on the gushy ballads - at least then his whine isn’t on full pitch.) Only the atmospheric pieces like “1979” really work, which hardly seems worth the price of admission.