'Josh Kortbein, your votes have been recorded.

Your Pazz & Jop albums ballot was submitted as follows:
1. Junior Boys - Last Exit - Kin/Domino (30 points)
2. Sonic Youth - Sonic Nurse - DGC (15 points)
3. Madvillain - Madvillainy - Stones Throw (15 points)
4. De La Soul - The Grind Date - Sanctuary (10 points)
5. Mouse on Mars - Radical Connector - Thrill Jockey (5 points)
6. Pan Sonic - Kesto (234.48:4) - Blast First/Mute (5 points)
7. - Kompakt 100 - Kompakt (5 points)
8. Ex - Turn - Touch and Go (5 points)
9. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - Shake the Sheets - Lookout (5 points)
10. Ghostface - The Pretty Toney Album - Def Jam (5 points)

Your Pazz & Jop singles ballot has been recorded as follows:
1. Xzibit - "Hey Now (Mean Muggin)" - Sony
2. Fabolous - "Breathe" - Desert Storm/Atlantic
3. R. Kelly - "Happy People" - Jive
4. Usher feat. Lil Jon and Ludacris - "Yeah!" - Arista
5. Petey Pablo - "Freek-A-Leek" - Jive
6. Alicia Keys - "If I Ain't Got You" - J-records
7. Memphis Bleek feat. Freeway - "Just Blaze, Bleek & Free" - Roc-a-Fella
8. Jay-Z - "99 Problems" - Roc-a-Fella
9. Houston feat. Chingy, I-20, and Nate Dogg - "I Like That" - Capitol
10. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - "Me and Mia" - Lookout'

Best with cartoon wads of meat, of course.

I will never tire of gags premised on arbitrary people spontaneously saying 'my anaconda don't want none'. Better with cartoon people, too. Of course.

One way I know now that Sonic Youth might actually be one of my actual real-live favorite bands is that when say I go by their records on the shelf or my computer and think, oh, hey, I wanna listen to Sonic Youth, I'm then paralyzed with the indecision caused by not wanting to pass anything up. I don't think I would feel quite that way if I didn't also derive distinctly different (not much different) experiences of pleasure from each of their records - if the records felt at all interchangeable. I realize this is a dubious-sounding thing to say about Sonic Youth. And still I feel it more intensely than most of the judgments I care to voice about music.

I'm not saying I'm about to go out looking for a fight or anything, but, you know.

I've just spent hours downloading the songs mentioned in Donald Larsson's companion to Weisenburger's companion to Gravity's Rainbow and yet I (1) still have a big list of things I couldn't find (some annoyingly so, like 'Lady of Spain' which you would think would pop up even if obscure British musichall numbers don't), and (2) have found little in the way of what I really sat down to look for, a list of songs that serve as the models for Pynchon's own songs. Sigh.

The sounds on Call Me are surprisingly metallic for such an intimate-sounding record. Maybe that's why it doesn't always seem to stand being turned up that well. The balance comes undone.

Clive on the Junior Boys.

I'm still trying to figure out if there's something I'm missing that would redeem 'The Makings of a Perfect Bitch' - or is it really just as unreflectedly conflicted about the virtues of women as it sounds?

(Hey Maya Angelou and Angela Davis, you're really great and admirable, here, hold on, just gotta finish this suture. There, now I've stitched together a slutty obedient intellectual black woman that I can be happy with forever. What the fuck?)

Hearing 'American Way' off of Street's Disciple feels a little weird because 'Atomic Dog' has already been so memorably reappropriated, but I wonder if it might not just be that; it seems like a sensation echoed by some of the other beats on the album, and just more loudly by this one: that by now some beats, some sounds, want to have more than one MC over them. I don't just mean more than one rapper with a verse, or with someone else on the chorus or the hook, but any sort of small sign that there are other people around. At times on this record Nas sounds unnaturally alone, like someone didn't show up for work that day and he had to run the store by himself; or maybe more like: he sent them all home early because he insisted on running it himself. I don't think it need have reflected poorly on his quest to be peerless, just to let the inevitable presence of the other people around him show up a bit more on the record.

(The fact that Kelis shows up on the chorus to 'American Way' only emphasizes this; since we know who she is and think of her as another person, another individual, instead of a chorus-voice, she reminds us that there are other individuals, and not just out there somewhere, but other individuals in Nas' life. There are obviously some exceptions, but even when there are other people things feel kind of lonely.)