The pre­dictably yawn-​inducing results (by which I mean I pre­dicted the top six in my sleep—check my dream jour­nal if you don’t believe me—& the reason I was asleep is that I had been lis­ten­ing to the top six) are in for the 37th (or, I insist, 38th) Vil­lage Voice Pazz & Jop music poll. Here’s my ballot:

And some of my com­ments here (note that I pro­vide the tag line). As usual, this list doesn’t reflect my cur­rent think­ing about

Brad Paisley’s ter­rific new record, Amer­i­can Sat­ur­day Night, arrives freighted with con­tra­dic­tions. So does all good pop music. But they’re rarely announced as starkly as they are on “Welcome to the Future,” a song seem­ingly designed to illus­trate the prim­i­tiv­ity of the tra­di­tional model of licens­ing pop­u­lar songs for use in adver­tis­ing described by Greil Marcus in Lip­stick Traces:

At first, [Michael Jackson's] will­ing­ness to imme­di­ately trans­form ["Billie Jean"] into an adver­tis­ing jingle seemed like a slap in the face to every­one who loved it. But months later, when the con­stant air­play bought for the com­mer­cial allowed it not just to replace but almost to erase the orig­i­nal, one could hear “You’re a Whole New Generation” [the Pepsi anthem that reworked "Billie Jean"] as a new piece of music…. When he sang the line, “That choice is up to you,” dra­ma­tiz­ing the consumer’s option of Pepsi versus Coke, he made it sound like a moral choice.

“Welcome to the Future” ren­ders this entire process super­flu­ous. The song arrives already trans­formed into an adver­tis­ing jingle,