The Village Voice's 2009 Critics Poll is out. A week ago I compared the 2008 results to my metafile projection, so I should do the same for 2009 now. The big difference between my metafile this year and last year's is that I sampled many more year-end lists this year. One measure of this is that the winner count this year is 224, vs. 41 last year. The correlation was actually better last year. The probable reason is that most of the extra counts come from bloggers who most likely deviate from critics in certain uniform ways: I'm guessing they're younger and play fewer records; what I'm sure of is that they're more narrowly into alt-rock. Even, I should say, since Chuck Eddy observes that the poll critics themselves are more like that than ever before.

Let's start off with a table of the top 50 records from my metafile, listed in metafile rank order. The two numbers on the right are the P&J poll rank and the ratio of the two ranks: anything less than 1.0 did better on P&J, anything greater did worse.

Animal Collective beating out Phoenix wasn't unexpected. I didn't do any weighting, but had I done so Animal Collective would have easily finished on top: of the lists that I did keep rank info on, Animal Collective won 15 vs. 3 for Phoenix. More on this later, but first let's track the major movements.

The biggest drops from my Meta list are: Arctic Monkeys (207/37: 5.595), Wild Beasts (147/34: 4.324), The Antlers (51/13: 3.923), Passion Pit (36/11: 3.273), La Roux (146/46: 3.174), Florence and the Machine (68/22: 3.091), Andrew Bird (81/27: 3.000), Metric (52/22: 2.364), The Horrors (65/29: 2.241), Neon Indian (112/50: 2.240), Regina Spektor (89/43: 2.070), Sunset Rubdown (77/36: 2.139), Japandroids (33/16: 2.062), Kid Cudi (101/49: 2.061).

I picked up a lot of UK lists, but P&J polls relatively few UK critics. Inevitably, some UK albums didn't make much of a splash here, with Arctic Monkeys the prime example. La Roux and Florence were others. In general, a whole cluster of arty indie-rock albums following Animal Collective and Phoenix slipped, starting with Grizzly Bear (6/3: 2.000) and including Antlers, Passion Pit, Horrors, Sunset Rubdown, and Neon Indian.

To get a better sense of the gains, we need to look further down the Pazz & Jop poll results. The following table lists everything from the top 100 that didn't make the metafile top 50.

The big gains were: Oumou Sangare (64/314: 0.204), Levon Helm (46/221: 0.208), The-Dream (16/71: 0.225), Loudon Wainwright III (73/314: 0.232), Maxwell (14/60: 0.233), Kylesa (71/272: 0.261), DJ Sprinkles (82/314: 0.261), Leonard Cohen (53/194: 0.273), Nellie McKay (94/314: 0.299), Bruce Springsteen (57/181: 0.315), Amadou & Mariam (55/158: 0.348), Black Eyed Peas (98/272: 0.360), Baroness (19/50: 0.380), Sunny Day in Glasgow (97/249: 0.390), Black Crowes (72/181: 0.398), Green Day (37/91: 0.407), Rosanne Cash (45/110: 0.409), Big Star (66/158: 0.418), Neko Case (3/7: 0.429), Brad Paisley (34/75: 0.453), Miranda Lambert (25/55: 0.455), Raekwon (8/17: 0.471), Lady Gaga (31/65: 0.477), Converge (24/50: 0.480), Pissed Jeans (54/110: 0.491), DJ Quik & Kurupt (62/126: 0.492), K'Naan (35/71: 0.493), Drake (78/158: 0.494), Animal Collective (1/2: 0.500), Glasvegas (100/194: 0.515), Bob Dylan (41/75: 0.547), Dâm-Funk (47/86: 0.547), Tune-Yards (70/126: 0.556), Tinariwen (59/103: 0.573), Mos Def (11/19: 0.579), Lily Allen (22/37: 0.595), Raveonettes (84/136: 0.618), Paramore (74/117: 0.632), Antony and the Johnsons (26/41: 0.634), Sonic Youth (20/31: 0.645), Ida Maria (61/91: 0.670), Avett Brothers (15/22: 0.682), Buddy and Julie Miller (87/126: 0.690), Flaming Lips (9/13: 0.692), Mastodon (18/26: 0.692), U2 (32/46: 0.696), Broadcast & the Focus Group (88/126: 0.698), Clientele (95/136: 0.699), Built to Spill (90/126: 0.714), Allen Toussaint (43/60: 0717), Vijay Iyer (49/66: 0.742), Very Best (63/84: 0.750).

Only a few of these belong to the dominant alt-rock aesthetic. Nearly every hip-hop record improved -- Kid Cudi was the exception, although you might also count Brother Ali. Maxwell and The-Dream did even better. Country/Americana made gains, as did African pop, veteran rockers (which seem to include Green Day as well as Dylan and Springsteen), and Lady Gaga. A couple of top jazz records also improved, despite my focusing on jazz lists -- this didn't hold up lower down the list. You can chalk these shifts up to an older, more professional electorate. By "professional" I'm not making a value judgment -- just recognizing that newspaper and generic pub critics have to cover a wider range of popular music than bloggers, and that necessarily means some hip-hop, soul, Americana, and whoever's selling -- this year, Lady Gaga.

The value judgment I'm inclined to make is that the Pazz & Jop critics promoted better records than my metafile found. Three of my ballot picks found no other supporters, but everything else I voted for gained ground. One possibility is the uniform use of a top ten standard in P&J, whereas my metafile occasionally picked up 100-deep lists. Another possibility is that my metafile undervalued Robert Christgau's real (though certainly limited) influence: those seven records were all very favorably featured in his Consumer Guide (as well as one of my three solo picks -- the other two were jazz records; I did find a few non-jazz A-list albums that haven't appeared in Christgau's CG, but none finished high enough to make my top ten ballot -- Mika's The Boy Who Knew Too Much came closest; Syran M'Benza, Fuck Buttons, Ersatzmusika, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Khaled, and Van Morrison had others; a similar number of records appeared in CG much lower than I had them -- Maria Muldaur tops that list).

One thing I did with the results was to pick out all of the ballots by people who voted for my picks. Adding them up, and dropping out my picks (which swept the top six spots), I'm left with (my grades in brackets; many of these are based on Rhapsody):

1. Brad Paisley: American Saturday Night (Arista Nashville) [*]
2. Yeah Yeah Yeahs: It's Blitz! (DGC/Interscope) [A-]
3. Neko Case: Middle Cyclone (Anti) [B]
4. Phoenix: Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (Glassnote) [*]
5. Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion (Domino) [*]
6. Maxwell: BLACKsummers'night (Columbia) [*]
7. Nellie McKay: Normal As Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day (Verve) [A-]
8. The XX: XX (Young Turks) [***]
9. The-Dream: Love vs. Money (Def Jam/Radio Killa) [*]
10. Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca (Domino) [C+]
11. Grizzly Bear: Veckatimest (Warp) [B-]
12. Black Eyed Peas: The E.N.D. (Interscope) [A-]
13. The Avett Brothers: I and Love and You (American/Columbia) [B]
14. Miranda Lambert: Revolution (Sony/Columbia Nashville) [A-]
15. Allen Toussaint: The Bright Mississippi (Nonesuch) [A-]
16. Amadou & Mariam: Welcome to Mali (Nonesuch) [A-]
17. Girls: Album (True Panther) [A-]
18. Sonic Youth: The Eternal (Matador) [A-]
19. Lady Gaga: The Fame/The Fame Monster (Streamline/Interscope) [*]
20. Tinariwen: Imidiwan: Companions (World Village) [A-]
21. Bob Dylan: Together Through Life (Columbia) [A-]
22. Wilco: Wilco (The Album) (Nonesuch) [**]
23. Rokia Traoré: Tchamantché (Nonesuch) [**]
24. Mos Def: The Ecstatic (Downtown) [A-]
25. Khaled: Liberté (Wrasse) [A-]
26. Wussy: Wussy (Shake It) [***]
27. Darcy James Argue's Secret Society: Infernal Machines (New Amsterdam) [***]
28. Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara: Tell No Lies (Real World) [**]
29. Levon Helm: Electric Dirt (Welk) [*]
30. Rihanna: Rated R (Def Jam) [*]

Of these, Paisley, McKay, perhaps Black Eyed Peas, and certainly Wussy can be chalked up to Christgau's promotion. Some records from the alt-rock consensus leaked in, although the reordering of nos. 2-5 is significant (although I liked Case the least). For what it's worth, the critics I intersected with more than once (and therefore counted more than once) are: Leslie Berman (2), Max Berry (2), Larry Birnbaum (2), Robert Christgau (4), Banning Eyre (3), Steve Knopper (2), Frank Kogan (2), Todd Kristel (2), Tom Lane (2), Milo Miles (4), Derk Richardson (2), Ellis Widner (3), K Leander Williams (2).

Glenn McDonald's voter similarity stats gives this order: Christgau (0.569), Miles (0.566), Widner, Eyre, Williams, Kristel, Richardson, Berman, Berry, Kogan, Knopper, Lane (0.366). Conversely, I came off as the voter most similar to Christgau, followed by Ted Cox, Miles, Berman, Alfred Soto, Dan Weiss, J Anthony Ware, Chris Herrington, Williams, and Ken Tucker. My "centricity" figure -- a measure of overlap with the winners -- was 0.12, tied for 506 of 696 critics. (Five voters tied with 0.00, meaning they filled their ballots with records no one else picked. Christgau came in at 470, with 0.146.) McDonald has been doing his centricity analysis for some time now, and my placement there has been pretty consistent.

McDonald also has an interesting chart on album similarity, which I should return to later.