I happened to stumble across last year's Village Voice Pazz & Jop results, and thought I should compare them to last year's Meta File, just to get an idea how closely they correlate. It's worth noting that last year I looked at far fewer lists -- the winner count was 41 vs. 224 this year -- which may or may not mean anything. The following table shows the top 46 from the Meta file, everything that counted 13 or more. The right two columns are: where the record placed in P&J, and P&J rank divided by Meta file rank. In the latter column, anything less than 1.0 did better in P&J than it did in my Meta rankings. Anything more than 1.0 was overrated by my Meta method. Because I have more ties, the norm is actually a bit more than 1.0.

The top four are pretty much dead on. The biggest drops from my Meta list are: Gnarls Barkley (114/30: 3.800), Raconteurs (70/19: 3.684), Sigur Rós (54/18: 3.000), Beck (41/13: 2.929), Bug (108/37: 2.919), Al Green (46/19: 2.421), Conor Oberst (86/37: 2.324), Lykke Li (81/37: 2.189), MGMT (17/8: 2.125), Roots (39/19: 2.053). Aside from P&J prejudice against Scandinavians, I don't see much trend there. Gnarls Barkley won the song category, so that outlet probably explains the album vote drop.

The big gains here were: Erykah Badu (5/12: 0.417), Deerhunter (11/19: 0.579), My Morning Jacket (16/27: 0.593), Raphael Saadiq (19/30: 0.633), Nick Cave (9/13: 0.692), Randy Newman (12/16: 0.750). Badu broke late, and I can attest that Saadiq and Newman had records that kept gaining on you. But to get a better sense of what the Meta file missed, you need to look at the records that finished in the top 40 P&J that didn't make the above list. The first number below is the P&J finish rank, and the last number is the raw count from the Meta file. I don't have a good way of merging these in with the above, but note that 12 just missed the above list by one.

Kanye West broke real late, and was a record that initially disappointed most critics, many of whom then turned around and decided that it was pretty good after all. It's safe to say that there's no such record this year. Dylan was caught between the new/reissue division many lists impose, but he also always does better in P&J than elsewhere. Torche, Gaslight Anthem, and TI had significant jumps, but the others were within statistical range.

In any comparison like this, you'd expect that the correlation would be tighter at the top, and looser at the bottom as the samples get ever smaller, and that's pretty much what you get here. Other than the surprise gains by Badu and West I don't see much out of line. I don't see any comparable records this year, although I do expect the late-arriving Ghostface Killah to do a bit better than my Meta file suggests. Mary J Blige too, but she came in late even for the P&J deadline. Historically, P&J voters have tended to provide token support for a couple of select black albums each year, which gives the sort of pattern we see here -- Badu and West significantly up, Roots and Green down. Raekwon and Mos Def are the leaders this year (at 17 and 19), but I doubt that either has the crossover support to break top-10.

So I think this will go pretty much as expected. Which means, among other things, the surprises will be surprising.