best of summer results

Today on eMusic, we unveiled the results of our 50 Greatest Albums of Summer Poll. I’m happy to report that it’s a very strong list — lots of great albums, and a very strong consensus at the top of the chart. There are a few wrinkles, though, that I thought were worth highlighting.

1) In the world at large, summer = hip-hop. At eMusic, this is very much not the case. M.I.A.’s Arular placed at #6 (and its status as a hip-hop record is a bit hazy, with its electro/indie/world crossover), but the next highest hip-hop placement was Atmosphere at #135, below such obvious summer favorites as Low and the Pernice Brothers. How did Spank Rock’s YoYoYoYoYo, the closest we have to a contemporary summer hip-hop jam, fare? It came in at #345, with one first-place vote.

2) Yo La Tengo placed two albums in the top 50 — I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One at #22 and Summer Sun at #49 — but almost every single one of their records got sizeable votes. Fakebook at #60, I Am Not Afraid of You at #86, Painful at #91 and And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out at #113.

3) Electronic music also did not fare well. Stereloab’s ABC Music is the closest we get at #47. After that it’s Thievery Corporation’s The Cosmic Game at #67, the Gotan Project at #72 and Bedouin Soundclash at #136.

4) The oddest record that turned up fairly high on the list? My own beloved Beach House, who finished at #52 (I did not vote, btw). We ran a banner for them on eMusic last winter calling it “Perfect Winter Music,” but it works just as well for summer, too. Maybe just “Perfect Music” would be most apt?

5) Most pleasant surprise in the Top 50: Beulah’s lovely The Coast Is Never Clear, a great record that I had completely forgotten about.

6) Finally, three cheers to everyone for enduring the awful interface for the poll. The entry spaces had stringent character limits that prevented entire URLs from being entered (we recently changed our URL structure). So for artists like, say, Creedence Clearwater Revival — who received a ton of votes — it was impossible to tell exactly which record was being voted for. Not wanting to prejudice the poll, I simply isolated every CCR vote, and then checked to see what was in the comment area — sometimes people left comments about the records they were voting on, other times they re-pasted the link since our system would not accept it. I then came up with a ratio of mentions between albums, and applied it to the total points, thus we get Willy and the Poor Boys at #12 and Green River at #4.

7) PS: Best comment left in the entire thing? Bottlenekk on Green River: “There’s nothing more summery than chooglin’.” Amen to that.