To supplement this year's Pazz & Jop launch, Sound of the City asked a few critics to expand on the reasonings behind their voting. We'll start off the series with Seth Colter Walls of New York City, who has a constant itch to do the deep dive and find the single-voter albums out there. Find his ballot here.

​Damn do I ever love voting in, and then reading, Pazz and Jop. All these serious music-listening people, expressing opinions, mostly with a high degree of sincerity: admit it, it's a nice break from the social media-enabled review cycle, in which a lot of people apparently feel obliged to sound off on topics about which they may only kinda sorta have an aesthetic stake. (Read: The Internet.)

Consumers (and/or voters) often look to the number ones, to talk about the consensus where it exists—me, I liked but did not love Merrill Garbus's poll-winning record, outside of the stunning tracks "Powa" and "Bizness"; I suspect her masterpiece as a composer may yet be written for forces larger than her multi-tracked self—but in times where a 10-vote album ballot feels ever more confining and statistically unrepresentative of broader listening habits, I'm always fascinated to look at the sheer number of lonely minority reports on this side of the poll.

Critics cited 1,734 different full-lengths this year; way more than half of those titles had only a single champion. Multiple votes for albums only start to occur with real consistency around poll position #341 (Gang of Four's Content). If you're a true Pazz freak you're gonna do the deep dive, and try to find something new in that glut of passions rebuffed (or ignored) by the hivemind. As in: wow, East River Pipe put out a record this year? I didn't know that. Same-ish thing goes for Brooklyn Rider and their disc of Philip Glass string quartets.

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​Back in 2007, All Tomorrow's Parties and the Pitchfork Music Festival decided that getting GZA, the Wu-Tang Clan's resident rhyme scholar, to reenact his crime rhyme masterpiece Liquid Swords in full was a good idea. And it probably was—once, maybe twice. But the third time removed the charm. Yet since then, the notion of rappers being booked to perform albums in full has bloomed into an infernal trend.

The idea of having a classic hip-hop album be recreated in full in a live setting looks cool on a flyer and the show announcements will get people in comments sections talking, but the practice is problematic—in large part because most heralded records are guaranteed to have at least one bum note. If you witness Public Enemy storm through It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, do you really want the Beasties-lite of "Party For Your Right To Fight" to be the last noise you hear before leaving the venue? Or have Eric B & Rakim's ham-fisted limp scratch botch "Chinese Arithmetic" sullying "Eric B. Is President"? Does anyone not skip past the annoyingly upbeat "Let's Get Crazy" when running through The Great Adventures of Slick Rick? And good luck with any De La Soul project: De La Soul Is Dead is my favorite rap album on most days, but "Who Do You Worship?", "Kicked Out The House," "Johnny's Dead AKA Vincent Mason"—those are all better subtitled "Skip." (Although the idea of De La and cohorts performing the skits in a school hall is a ticklish one.)

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Demi Lovato, not pleased with her advance copy of our thoughts on her new record.

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In the span of months, Disney star Demi Lovato, only 19, has gone from ugly tabloid stories—many probably false, but still—about cocaine, eating disorders and regrettable parties to releasing her third solo album, Unbroken, after receiving towering (ahem) acclaim for redemptive lead single "Skyscraper." This is 2011, of course, so her tours include fewer covers of goth metal and more of Lil Wayne, and her album features fewer guitars and more appearances by the likes of Dev, Jason Derulo and Iyaz. Popdust's Katherine St. Asaph and Sound of the City's Nick Murray discuss, via the miracle of GChat, Demi's new record, growing up in public, and the difficult transition from Radio Disney to Z100.

Katherine St. Asaph: The whole Demi Lovato album campaign's come seemingly out of nowhere, going from 0 to "Skyscraper" and then to Unbroken, the new album.

Nick Murray: Yeah, out of nowhere Demi Lovato starts getting critical buzz, while Joe Jonas plays a VIP-only show when Santos Party House takes over Saks Fifth Avenue for Fashion Week. How did we get to this point?

Katherine: Everybody likes redemption. Especially considering how (really, really, really) uncomfortable all the tabloid stories about Demi had gotten.

Nick: I imagine that much of the good press this record has gotten relates to how easy it is to find those stories (or the fallout from them) in the songs. But beyond the lyrical content, those tabloid stories have really determined the direction of the album and at this point, her career. Whereas most artists seem to attempt the transition out of teenpop by showing how edgy they've become (e.g. Miley Cyrus becoming a bird who can't be tamed in the video for "Can't Be Tamed," or Joe Jonas using drunk driving as a metaphor for a night in the club—or is it the other way around?—in "Fast Life"), for Lovato, that wasn't really an option.

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Yes, Ke$ha's involved in this.

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In general conversation, the guilty pleasure is a simple enough concept: it describes something you might like but, well, feel guilty about liking, presumably because it isn't otherwise up to your standards of taste. Over the past ten or so years, with pop critics taking traditional guilty-pleasure strongholds like teenpop and Southern rap more seriously, the concept itself was put to closer scrutiny. To summarize a decade of articles, blog posts and message board debates, the term "guilty pleasure" was revealed to conceal biases running along the lines of class, race, gender and age. Why should someone enjoy [choose your personal white/male/middle class fave] as a "serious" work of art, but listen to, say, the new Rick Ross or Britney Spears record only after using guilt to create some distance? And if pop music exists to bring you pleasure, why feel guilty about taking it?

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Timothy Saccenti

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This week's Voice takes a look at how Pitbull rode a bullish multimedia campaign to a level of chart success and celebrity that far exceeds what he accomplished during reggaeton's heyday. It's every bit as heartening as it is surprising. When you consider the other acts who have fashioned a similar career arc—a brief but substantial peak, a productive but highly ignored valley and improbable rebirth in an admittedly cratered economy—I welcome Pitbull's rebirth more than that of Kid Rock, Train or Cake.

Which is not to overstate the idea that Pitbull went totally incognito in the period between reggaeton's height and the present day—singles with the Ying Yang Twins and Pharrell did fairly decently, while his Spanish-language records anchored him and earned him a slew of Latino Billboard awards. But in the post-reggaeton moment of 2006, he might have been best known in some circles for this very publication's claim that he was better than Nas. Granted, this took place during the lead-up to Hip Hop Is Dead, so that sort of accolade could've just as easily been granted to the likes of Annuals or Brightblack Morning Light and still have had a high degree of accuracy. It's also worth noting that Nas isn't mentioned in that piece anywhere after the title, so he could've been replaced by the likes of Pearl Jam or Red Hot Chili Peppers or any other '90s titan who was making a dreadfully dull album in 2006 merely by being themselves.

Both kept relatively busy in the years since then, and they've been on about equal footing: Pitbull may have been the one making the records entirely in Spanish, but they were much easier to comprehend than Nas' indefensible Untitled. And now, both are in a position where their Q ratings are at a peak—Shakira's shaking her ass in Pitbull's new video, and Nas has heads thinking he could at least recapture the glory of It Was Written—so if only for giggles and shits, it's worth asking the same question again, right?

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NB: This is not how bloggers generally dress.

​Yesterday, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Duplass brothers—the siblings behind last year's cutesy indie Cyrus—were shopping a script for a thriller in which the mother of a recently deceased indie rocker seeks vengeance on a blogger who had snarked in her kid's general direction. The brothers are hoping to get Susan Sarandon for the mom role and Cyrus Jonah Hill to play the blogger, but the really important name is the one of the site where the mean mau-mauing appeared: Pitchfork. Since the brothers have already stolen my idea, I might as well show you some of the "indie thriller" treatments I'd been working on:

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As the Weeknd says, "XO till we overdose.."

​Two days ago, r&b changed again. On Sunday night, a Canadian collective called the Weeknd released their nine-song mixtape, House of Balloons, on their web site. Though they were quick to deny the direct involvement of Drake's sonic architect, Noah "40" Shebib, the apparitions in The Weeknd--no official members have yet come forward--have been heavily co-signed by the Toronto star. Why? Because they are Canadian countrymen? Because the Weeknd's spacious, moody r&b deconstruction further cements Drake and 40's reinvention of the genre? Is it just pure aesthetic appreciation? They're all probably true. What is irrefutable is the calculation that has thus far gone into this project.

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​Recently our hackles were raised after a concerned Park Slope resident (or, as reports increasingly indicate, a gifted troll) sent out a petition hoping to keep a new club from playing the hip-hop music (gasp!) in yuppietacular Brooklyn. We could not imagine the anarchy if rap music ever hit Park Slope: Think upended strollers and innumerable adorable pug dogs scattering toward Grand Army Plaza, causing winter-squash raviolis to rattle off forks at Al Di La. Uh, you're all conveniently forgetting that the Rub throws a great weekly party on Fifth Avenue, and KRS-One was born in Park Slope, right?

Anyway, our favorite line in this ridiculous petition is the decidedly anachronistic description "another Yo MTV Raps 'bling-bling' vip club," which moronically links a hit 1988 TV show with a hit 1999 song. Which got us thinking: Do today's rock critics know more about the seminal Yo! MTV Raps than your average panic-stricken Brooklynite? And so we asked 15 music writers:

Who were the hosts of Yo! MTV Raps?

Should be super easy, right? It's essentially the show that brought hip-hop to the suburbs in 1988, changing pop culture, fashion, and music forever. It brought radical politics to our living rooms and taught a generation of white kids to shave lines into their hair (sorry, mom). Was our panel of critics actually watching this landmark moment unfold? Or were they too busy waiting for Dave Kendall to play the new Mighty Lemon Drops? Our posse in effect consists of 15 professional and semi-professional rock writers, all given the usual rules:

1. I will not identify you AT ALL, so it is OK to be wrong. [We will say that our esteemed panel edits magazines, websites, and alt-weeklies. They have written for pretty much every outlet you've ever heard of, from Rolling Stone to Spin to Billboard.]

2. You can't use Google.

The correct answer and some dropped science below:

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So maybe you heard that Radiohead put out a new album, The King of Limbs, on Friday, one day earlier than planned, a gift that triggered a "live-Tweeting my first listen" torrent of unprecedented volume and ferocity, a glut of Internet-borne insta-opinions that seemed at odds with the band's reputation for making Very Serious Music that demands to be very slowly and carefully considered. Has Limbs been cheapened by the speed at which everyone formed their opinion about it? Do Radiohead deserve any special dispensation, any critical grace period? Are Radiohead even a band worth talking about anymore? Here, SOTC's Rob Harvilla and Zach Baron hash it out. It only gets slightly personal.

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This picture is from Arcade Fire's Tumblr, where it's captioned "Win jumping up and down, thanking the world." Because why wouldn't it be?

​Radiohead may have already surpassed last night's Grammys as the au currant news of an indie-rock world that is all of a sudden drowning in good tidings, but--despite already having written an epic liveblog and a near-instantaneous 46-word think piece--we're not quite ready to let last night's bizarre spectacle go. Because, you know, ARCADE FIRE. Also, other things (like, say, Gang Starr's Guru, inexplicably omitted from last night's "In Memoriam" montage in favor of a bunch of entertainment lawyers). And so, below, Zach Baron and Rob Harvilla go one more round on the whole What It All Means, or Should We Even Be Asking That Question? question.

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