f22 Critics Poll 2011
We asked, they voted, we counted. You won’t find a more exhaustively researched and authoritative run down of the best folk, roots and world music albums of the year than that nominated by the fRoots mega-panel!
I
t’s a funny old business. Having been doing this Critics’ Poll for 26 years, we’re no better at second guessing what our panel of over 300 experts (in one way or another) will pick as the Album Of The Year than we were when we started back in 1986. And then usually, when it’s all over, the top handful seem glaringly and deservedly obvious… And so it was again this year.
Not so long ago it was a foregone con- clusion that a West African artist would walk away with the top prize by a wide margin, as happened for nine straight years from 1999 to 2007. But things have changed a bit since Jim Moray caused widespread apoplexy amongst world music diehards by pipping Toumani Dia- bate and Rokia Traore to the post in 2008. Bellowhead repeated the same feat last year, and this time round the teaming of June Tabor & Oysterband for a second album caught the maximum imagination, narrowly winning out over a superb debut by Fatoumata Diawara. You heard both on our fRoots 36 compilation back in August.
So is there a trend? Well, although we’ve made very few changes in the com- position of our panel, there has either been a steady increase in favour of (largely English) folk or a slow decline in interest in world music – or more likely a combination of the two. The fuss that Moray’s 2008 win generated – albeit mostly from an internet message board that’s no longer very
active – seems quite extraordinary with hindsight. None of us has the stamina or anorak to go and produce hard and fast statistics, but gut feeling says that world music releases in general have decreased in quantity – whether you believe the same is reflected in quality can only be down to personal tastes. And then maybe changing fashion has a role to play: are they not there or just square?
But certainly the less canny parts of the world music record ‘industry’ shot themselves in the feet in the immediate post-Buena Vista days by deciding to ape and ally themselves more with the main- stream record industry, just as, unfortu- nately, the latter was about to drive off a cliff. You don’t have to be a Sherlock among fRoots readers to notice that already decreasing world music record advertising dried up almost entirely in our pages after the recession hit in 2008, whereas English folk, with its greater grasp of grass roots work and community, has fared a lot better. But it’s an impossible conundrum to figure. Does less promotion mean less records are being released, or just that they are no longer being brought to people’s attention, disappearing off the proverbial radar? Your starter for ten…
What has always been true is still the case though: to top the Critics’ Poll any year you have to draw support from across the genre taste barriers in order to get those crucial extra votes, and the top pair this year did just that. Well done to both.
So to remind you of the mechanics of
it… We have an unfeasibly large interna- tional panel of people who, in the course of things – usually their work – are likely to have heard and be interested in a wider range of releases than the person in the street. We ask them to nominate six new single artist albums, four re-issues or com- pilations and three albums that they con- sider to be the best packaged of the year. They don’t have to place them – every nomination gets one vote. We give guid- ance as to what’s eligible – basically, any music that falls into fRoots’ remit of “any- thing from anywhere with roots in a tradi- tion” that has been released since Novem- ber the previous year. Then we have to do an awfully big job of number crunching…
Occasionally people get a bit confused as to what section to put certain new albums in: for example this year’s Cecil Sharp Project clearly falls into the same category as Buena Vista Social Club or the first Imagined Village – a project where the same pool of ‘various artists’ work across all the tracks – so we treat it as a new artist album, and where people got it wrong we shifted the votes to accumulate them in one place.
But apart from that it’s good old fash- ioned democracy, which produces a short- list of “nominees” we announced in mid- November. Now here in detail are the placed results – the nearest thing to a definitive guide to the best folk, roots and world music releases of 2011 that there is.
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