The Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop poll is out for music year 2008. Predictably, voters named TV on the Radio's very fine Dear Science the victor.
To declare a winner, the Voice's music desk tabulates ballots from hundreds of name-brand critics, no-name editors and writers, card-carrying bloggers, small-press holdovers, MP3 addicts and various hangers-on. Among the collateral results of all the sharing of opinions is a kind of music-geek social networking. The fun of submitting a ballot comes a couple of months after the December cramming, when you find out who else shares your zeal for a particular song or album (or, in the case of Pitch music editor Jason Harper and me, who swapped CDs all year) by clicking to see everyone who voted for it.
That's how I ran across Oliver Hall and his eccentric (a Doors live album? Really?) ballot:
That name is also attached to a comment in one of the think-piece parts of the poll:
Beyoncé's "Single Ladies" is very fine musically--I'm a sucker for
the vocal harmonies--but who the fuck wants to dance to a song about
one's duty to get married? What is this, ancient Greece? Especially,
the passage of California's Proposition 8 (enthusiastically sponsored
by Pastor Rick "New Bronze Age" Warren) deprived me of any fun I might
have had hearing it in gay clubs.
Oliver Hall
Lawrence, KS
The city is what caught my eye. In Lawrence, Oliver Hall is a University of Kansas dorm.
So is there really a dude named Oliver Hall in Lawrence, or has someone Ollie-rolled the venerable Voice poll? Fess up, "Oliver," or we'll make you get married and invite Beyoncé to watch.
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