<s>Parsing</s> Crunching The Pop: Glenn McDonald Determines Just How Unique Rock Critics Really Are

Jess Harvell | January 24, 2008 9:45 am
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Glenn McDonald, proprietor of the long-running War Against Silence site and mathematical madman, has done his annual critical number crunching, combing the results from the Idolator 2007 Pop Critics Poll and the Village Voice‘s 2007 Pazz And Jop poll to come up with “All-Idols 2007,” which includes a ranked determination of the most “centric” voters (i.e. the people that voted for the most high-placers in each poll) and the most “eccentric” voters (i.e. the people that voted for 10 records that nobody else mentioned) out of the 782 rock critics who voted in one or both polls. (Glenn’s statistical analysis only takes into account the album votes.) If any rock critic wants to know just how much of a singular snowflake they really are, here’s the cold hard data. So what did we learn this time out?

The most centric voter happens to be (fittingly enough) our own populist chart expert Chris “dennisobell” Molanphy, who voted for eight out of the Top 10 albums. Most eccentric voter is Stefan Shepard, who voted for 10 albums where I don’t even recognize a single artist’s name. (Maura’s at No. 398 and I’m at No. 402. So close!) Plus Glenn’s also upgraded his rock critic social networking software so that it’s easier than ever for voters to see which of their fellow dorks are their new best friends (i.e. who voted for the same albums). Well, unless you’re Maura, in which case your list of “similar voters” is mostly people you already know. As for me, well, clearly I’ve taken a wrong turn somewhere:

0.376 Michael Daddino 0.300 Adrien Begrand 0.284 Andy Gensler 0.282 Ryan Schreiber 0.238 Andrew Scott Earles 0.234 glenn mcdonald 0.232 Christopher Gray 0.215 Lyman Grover 0.215 Milena Dazed 0.213 Jordan Sargent

Thanks to Glenn once again for this selfless feat of nerdery.

All-Idols 2007 [Official Site]