Who Really Picks the Best of the Year?
by Robert Mineo
Annual recaps litter the pop culture landscape as one calendar year fades into a new one. Top movies, top songs, top TV meltdowns, top wardrobe malfunctions—the Top 10 or Top 20 or Top 50 compilations can be endless and mind-numbing. But they are fun barometers of trends.
The most notable aspect of such lists is how the picks of critics vary—often wildly—from consumer choices. It would be a rare event if, for example, the top box office hits were the same movies that critics were praising. (See 2006, when Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, one of the biggest moneymakers of all time, barely registered a positive review.)
Rocket science is not needed to figure out that critics usually support the more "arty" or unique releases because they are overwhelmed with such a massive amount of trash among any year's new release schedule. And you tend to demand more from your entertainment choices when you pay more attention to the details.
Conversely, consumers consume entertainment for diversion and/or enrichment and only have time to invest in what grabs their attention. So, all the popular clichés that critics find boring over time tend to work well at luring in the general public who are caught up in other aspects of life. Who needs invention when you just want a respite from the 9-to-5 grind?
As in all areas of popular entertainment, this phenomenon is present within Christian music. For a long time this supposedly niche market has been mature and expansive enough to have its own selections of "popular" and "arty" offerings. Recently, Christian music periodical CCM magazine provided a window into this dichotomy.
Chart rankings, dollars spent and/or unit sales figures are the usual indicators of popular tastes. But an even more insightful means of tracking full artistic impact is voting through a poll system, which is done by CCM with its annual Reader's Choice Awards.
This year's results were featured in its January 2007 issue, while critic picks were featured in the previous issue. The critics only selected Top 10 albums, while readers selected, among others, Best Artist, Best Vocalists and Best Recordings. But the familiar chasm was there.
The critical darling within Christian music for 2006 overwhelmingly was Good Monsters by Jars of Clay. This disc resonated with industry gatekeepers so immediately that CCM selected it as its Album of the Year with a cover story in September! There is no arguing this was a great choice, especially coming from a veteran band that many thought reached a pinnacle with its debut over a dozen years ago.
Yet, even though Good Monsters charted decently and has been embraced by Christian radio and longtime fans, the band, the album and its singles are not even featured as runners-up for the readers' poll. Not even a mention for best album cover for the fuzzy monster suits the band members wore for the photo shoot.
Critics also supported the melodic worship rock of the Michael W. Smith-discovered band, Leeland, and the art-pop return to form of Cindy Morgan on Postcards. Leeland's disc, Sound of Melodies, was the CCM debut of the year and Morgan earned unexpected shout-outs on three of the five critics list. But—you guessed it—neither was anywhere to be found among readers' selections.
The artist that did grab readers' fancy was Backstreet Boy Brian Littrell, based on his solo debut, Welcome Home. The record was included on one critic's list, but readers named him Best Artist and Best Vocalist and tagged Welcome Home as Best Album. Littrell also scored under Best Live Performance, Best Song ("Welcome Home [You]"), Best Video (same song), Best Album Cover and as Artist You'd Like to See on the Cover for the First Time (which was fulfilled with the January issue cover). Littrell's straightforward, vanity-free pop offering proved how much of a splash a (relatively) big mainstream fish can make in this pond when done right.
Others fan kudos went to Best New Artist Aaron Shust (a slow-building worship artist who shares the cover with Littrell), Best Musicians Skillet (each member separately scored for his/her particular instrument) and Best Worship Artist and Best Songwriter Chris Tomlin (who gained attention from Time magazine in late 2006). Best Band went to Casting Crowns, still riding a strong sophomore release, Best Group to hip-hip duo Grits, Best Male Vocalist to Jeremy Camp, and for the seventh consecutive year Best Female Vocalist went to Rebecca St. James. And—you guessed it—no critical inclusion, except for a couple of nods to Tomlin.
So what defines real success, an artistic masterpiece or a best-selling opus? In reality they are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and both opinions may just drive each side to (re)consider what pleased the other.
My Yahoo Music subscription is now pulling up "Littrell, Brian" and "Morgan, Cindy."
