Critics' choices

Examine the year-end critics polls of major music publications, and you’ll probably conclude that Courtney Barnett’s Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit (Mom + Pop) and the rapper Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly (Aftermath) were the best albums of 2015.

Listen to those albums, and you might also conclude that herd instinct can trump better judgment when music critics move in packs.

To be fair, Courtney Barnett is worth thinking about. Between her conversational prolixity and her band’s relaxed way with pinky riffs, she can be funny or at least fun—attributes not always in abundant supply where confessional, singer-songwriting lesbians are concerned.

In other words, except for the song in which she calls Jesus a “she,” Barnett is no more off-puttingly exhibitionistic or transgressive than Joan Jett or Chrissie Hynde.

True, sometimes her much-celebrated eye for detail results in little more than piles of verbal bric-a-brac or forced climaxes such as the underwhelming “I wanna go out, but I wanna stay home” refrain that ends “Nobody Really Cares If You Don’t Go to the Party.”

But sometimes her sensitivity to language is compensation enough. Just one syllable short of haiku, “Give me all your money and I’ll make some origami, honey” (“Pedestrian at Best”) is a pretty efficient way to proclaim that one can’t be bought.

Of course, in that Barnett doesn’t give her music away or grant her live audiences free admission, she not only can be bought but is being bought. And she must keep being bought if she’s to continue to avoid having to fund her music-making activities with a day job.

So far, she hasn’t burrowed far enough into this contradiction to discover whether there’s a paradox at its heart or merely a cul-de-sac. But she apparently has the musical and attitudinal means at her disposal to do so should she be so inclined.

The same cannot be said of Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, the verbal component of which comprises a dim self-awareness held together with innumerable “N-words,” “F-bombs,” and other expressions indicative of an intelligence far too limited to be taken seriously.

So whether he’s promising a race war the next time cops shoot a black man or confusing a chrysalis with a cocoon while invoking his album title’s lepidopterous imagery, Lamar sounds like a clown.

So why do critics love him? The easiest answer is that, being mostly liberal, they consider nobly savage inarticulateness to be a sign of authentic “blackness,” not realizing that in so doing they’re perpetuating a negative stereotype at odds with their putative racial egalitarianism.

Or maybe, like their fellow doublethinkers in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, they realize what they’re doing but simply prefer dealing with cognitive dissonance to going down a road less traveled by.

A third hit?

The most surprising album to show up repeatedly in year-end critics polls was E-MO-TION (Silent/Giant Little Man) by Carly Rae Jepsen, the Canadian singer whose 2011 smash “Call Me Maybe” became so popular that it left her audience wanting less and threatened to make her a one-hit wonder.

She avoided that fate when “Good Time,” her duet with Owl City, reached the Top 10 in 2012. But her next three singles peaked at 86, 90, and zero respectively. And E-MO-TION’s singles haven’t fared much better.

In short, neither Jepsen’s unassuming persona nor her uncontroversially effervescent pop is the kind of thing to which critics usually respond. That they have (this year anyway) is a pleasant—and an inexplicable—surprise. —A.O.