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    Ed Mintz, Who Gave Audiences the Chance to Grade Films, Dies at 83

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    With CinemaScore, he broke new ground by building a business based on the opinions of moviegoers rather than critics.Ed Mintz, a mathematician who created an exit polling system for films called CinemaScore, which asks people leaving theaters on opening nights to grade the movies they have just seen — a precursor of the website Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates and scores critics’ opinions — died on Feb. 6 in Las Vegas. He was 83.His son Harold said the cause of death, in a memory care facility, was vascular dementia.Mr. Mintz, a film buff, was a partner in a computerized billing service for dentists in 1978 when he and his wife, Rona, went to see “The Cheap Detective,” a comedy written by Neil Simon and starring Peter Falk, at a theater in the Westwood section of Los Angeles. They both disliked it, and they felt let down by the critics whose praise had encouraged them to see it.Their disappointment was echoed by at least one other departing moviegoer.“And all of a sudden, some guy said, ‘Is anybody here wondering why they can’t get the opinions of actual moviegoers and publish that? We keep getting critics,’” Mr. Mintz recalled in an interview with The Las Vegas Review-Journal in 2016. “I looked at him and thought, ‘Wow, that’s a great idea.’”That thought percolated until later that year. While attending Yom Kippur services at a synagogue in Los Angeles, he gazed at a donation pledge card. Rather than write with a pen or pencil, which Jews are prohibited from doing on Yom Kippur and the Sabbath, worshipers designated what to give by bending a perforated tab.“I almost jumped out of the chair,” he said. “I thought: ‘Simple. How simple.’”He quickly conceived the CinemaScore ballot card, which he tested by sending employees of his dental business to a few theaters. When the testing phase ended, polling began in 1979, and Mr. Mintz started reporting the results in a syndicated newspaper column.The card and the polling process have changed little since the beginning and create a crowdsourcing alternative to critics’ opinions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      How a Show Forced Britain’s Devastating Post Office Scandal Into the Light

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      After years of delays, victims of one of the U.K.’s worst miscarriages of justice are finally being exonerated — thanks to a TV drama.More than 700 people convicted of a crime they didn’t commit. At least four suicides. A woman sent to jail while pregnant. Bankruptcies. Marriages broken, lives ruined.The shocking details of one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history have been reported for years yet somehow stayed below the radar for most of the public, despite intense efforts by campaigners and investigative journalists.Until last week. A gripping ITV drama series, “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office,” which began airing on Jan. 1, achieved something that eluded politicians for a decade, cutting through a morass of bureaucratic and legal delays and forcing government action.The show dramatizes the fate of hundreds of people who ran branches of the Post Office across Britain, and who were wrongly accused of theft after a faulty IT system called Horizon created false shortfalls in their accounting.Between 1999 and 2015, they were pursued relentlessly in the courts by the Post Office for financial losses that never occurred. Some were jailed, most were driven into financial hardship, many suffered mental health issues and some took their lives.Under pressure, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Wednesday promised a new law to exonerate and compensate all known victims, a sweeping intervention that aims to finally bring justice after years of glacial progress.And the police suddenly said last week that they would investigate whether Post Office officials — who refused for years to admit that the IT they forced managers to use was at fault — should face charges. Meanwhile one of its former bosses, Paula Vennells, has handed back an honor bestowed by the queen in 2019, after more than a million people signed a petition demanding she be stripped of it.All this has left an intriguing question: how has a TV show achieved in one week more than investigative journalists and politicians in more than a decade?“However brilliant the journalism is, it maybe appeals to your intellect, to your head,” said Gwyneth Hughes, the writer of “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office.” “Whereas drama is designed to appeal to your heart — that’s what it has been doing for thousands of years.”Paula Vennells, the former chief executive of the Post Office, in 2012. She said she would hand back an honor bestowed by the queen in 2019 after a public outcry this week.Anthony Devlin/PA Images, via Getty ImagesMattias Frey, a media professor at City, University of London, argued that the drama shows the continuing power of terrestrial TV to change public perceptions and generate “one of those old fashioned water cooler moments” that fuels broader public debate.Even the show’s executive producer, Patrick Spence, was surprised by the scale of the reaction. Before the show was broadcast, he told his team that they shouldn’t be downhearted if ratings were modest, given the competition for eyeballs.The day after the series began he was informed by a colleague that more than 3.5 million people had watched the first episode. “I thought I had misheard her,” Mr. Spence said. Nine million people have now seen the series, according to ITV.He believes the show has inadvertently become a state-of-the-nation drama, articulating “a bigger truth, which is that we don’t feel heard, and we don’t trust the people who are supposed to have our backs.”The case is all the more shocking because the Post Office is an institution woven into the fabric of British life, more used to being portrayed in a benign role as in the popular TV show for children, “Postman Pat.”An official inquiry into the scandal was established in 2020, and more than £148 million, or more than $188 million, has already been distributed to victims from compensation programs. In 2019, 555 branch managers successfully challenged the Post Office in the High Court.Despite that, of the 700 criminal convictions, only 93 have so far been overturned, a sluggish pace that fueled campaigners’ anger.Former post office branch managers celebrating outside the Royal Courts of Justice in London in 2021, after a court ruling cleared them of theft and false accounting.Tolga Akmen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSince ITV’s drama aired, more victims have come forward, but dozens of other people died before they could receive compensation. When Horizon declared branch accounts were in deficit, managers were contractually obliged to make up shortfalls.Some paid from their own savings to avoid prosecution, even though they were sure they had done nothing wrong. Others pleaded guilty to lesser crimes to avoid jail although they were innocent.One victim, Lee Castleton, whose plight was featured in the drama, told the BBC that his Horizon account would swing abruptly from profit to loss and that more than 90 calls to a help line proved useless. The Post Office, he said, was “absolutely hellbent” on not assisting him.As news of his supposed wrongdoing filtered into the community, Mr. Castleton and his family were accused of theft in the street, his daughter was bullied at school and she developed an eating disorder. Forced to travel far afield to seek work, he slept in his car.Such stories provide the beating heart of “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office,” which is the result of three years of work. The truth of what happened was “unbelievable,” said Ms. Hughes, the show’s writer. “If I wrote those things fictionally, nobody would believe me, people would switch off.”The heroic Mr. Bates, played by Toby Jones, is portrayed as an even tempered and indefatigable character who — like other victims — was told by the Post Office that he was the only person to report problems with Horizon.The actor Toby Jones in character as Alan Bates, a man who is “a terrier; he’s wise, he’s clever, he’s very good at forward planning,” said Gwyneth Hughes, the writer of “Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office.”ITVHe found others, formed a group of victims, and pursued their cases with meager resources, battling a succession of setbacks to achieve an extraordinary victory in the courts.“Everyone likes an underdog, and we had underdogs in spades,” said Ms. Hughes, adding that Mr. Bates might look like a mild-mannered bearded fan of real ale but is also “a terrier; he’s wise, he’s clever, he’s very good at forward planning.”“He is, in a way, a gift as a character, he has a complexity: cometh the hour, cometh the man,” she said. “He’s led this long march of the misunderstood and unheard, and kept his sense of humor.”A few politicians were allies in the victims’ cause, notably James Arbuthnot, a Conservative lawmaker (now in the House of Lords) who fought on behalf of a constituent wrongly accused of stealing £36,000.There is also a cameo role for another Conservative lawmaker, Nadhim Zahawi, who played himself in the drama, questioning Ms. Vennells, the former Post Office boss, during a parliamentary committee hearing.To viewers Ms. Vennells emerges as the obdurate face of the Post Office, someone determined to defend its reputation rather than engage with its victims, a stance all the more surprising because she is an ordained Anglican priest (although she stepped back from any major role in the church in 2021).Fujitsu, the Japanese company that developed the Horizon system, is also under increasing pressure, with politicians hoping to recover some of the costs of compensating victims from the firm, which still has billions of pounds’ worth of contracts with the British government.Professor Frey worries viewers may have seen a “simple David and Goliath story” whereas lawyers and politicians must grapple with something more complicated. He sees a risk that “the pressure that should be brought to bear on politicians in order to clean this mess up maybe comes in a way that is undifferentiated.”Ms. Hughes has concerns about that too. “I hope they do right by all our lovely sub postmasters, but I also hope they find a way to do so that isn’t going to cause further problems down the line,” she said. “Thank God that’s not my job.” More

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      in Music

      What Is Russia Thinking? A ‘Documentary Opera’ Tries to Answer.

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      “Russia: Today,” a piece by the composer Eugene Birman, is based on hundreds of interviews with hundreds of Russians, in which they share their private feelings about the country.Many things have been said about Russia since the country launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine a year ago. But getting a sense of what Russian citizens privately feel about their nation is hard: State news outlets are more strident than ever and independent ones have been closed down. Western reporters still working there are treated with suspicion or fear.Unlikely as it might seem, a new “documentary opera” is attempting to cut through the noise to find something approaching the truth. Called “Russia: Today” — the title is a wry nod to the propaganda-spouting, Kremlin-funded media company, now known as RT — the piece, by the Russian-born, Hong Kong-based composer Eugene Birman, is assembled from hundreds of interviews with Russian citizens, people of Russian heritage and people who live in neighboring countries, conducted over the last few years. On Thursday, the piece receives a rare performance at Kings Place, a London concert hall, after an aborted attempt to premiere it in Moscow and a controversial first outing in Estonia, near the border with Russia.A collage of recorded testimony, new music and chant inspired by Orthodox liturgical practice, “Russia: Today” tries to open a window into Russia’s psyche — exactly when many people outside are wondering what’s on its mind.“I thought it would be a useful thing to give voice to people who are not typically in the Russian press, or aren’t reachable by Western journalists,” Birman said. “The idea is to let people’s words speak for themselves.”Topical though “Russia: Today” seems, it dates from before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year. Yet the themes it explores — post-Soviet nostalgia, uncertainty about Russia’s place in the world, anxiety about escalating conflict — seem eerily prescient. At one point, we hear a woman describing Russia as “a huge broken freezer: ripe bananas and rotten tomatoes.” Someone else brusquely compares the country to a “fat kid at a birthday party who everyone makes fun of‌” — until “he explodes.”Birman, second from right, in rehearsal with the singers from Exaudi, the group who will perform “Russia: Today” at Kings Place, in London, on Thursday.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesYet there are notes of optimism too: Another voice suggests that, while Russia is “a mess” right now, there is “hope for change.”The State of the WarRussia’s Heavy Losses: Weeks of failed attacks on the Ukrainian stronghold of Vuhledar have left two Russian brigades in tatters, renewing doubts about Moscow’s ability to maintain its offensive.Bakhmut: With Russian forces closing in, Ukraine is barring aid workers and civilians from entering the besieged city, in what could be a prelude to a Ukrainian withdrawal.Arms Supply: Ukraine and its Western allies are trying to solve a fundamental weakness in its war effort: Kyiv’s forces are firing artillery shells much faster than they are being produced.Prisoners of War: Poorly trained Russian soldiers captured by Ukraine describe being used as cannon fodder by commanders throwing waves of bodies into an assault.In 2017, when the dust was still settling on Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Birman was invited on a European Union-funded program to encourage cultural dialogue between artists from Eastern and Western Europe. For that project, he staged a series of workshops in Riga, Latvia — a city with a large ethnic Russian population. Birman set up a sound booth inside an arts center there and invited anyone who stepped inside to anonymously record their thoughts on Russia’s past, present and future.“There was a queue out the door,” Birman said. “One person spoke for, like, 30 minutes.”To capture a wider range of perspectives, the production team also set up recording booths in Helsinki, Finland, and Vladivostok, Russia, in 2018 and 2019, collecting hundreds more pieces of testimony. These were transcribed and pieced together into a libretto by the writer Scott Diel, with whom Birman has collaborated on other verbatim projects. (Those include the 2013 cantata “Nostra Culpa,” which was based on a Twitter tussle between the Times Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman and Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the then-president of Estonia.)Despite being billed as an opera, “Russia: Today” has no apparent plot; instead, the material is framed as an hourlong Orthodox memorial service, moving from opening prayers through lamentation to a kind of peace.“There are many different layers to the piece, just as there are many different layers to Russia,” said Sergej Morozov, the director of “Russia: Today,” by phone. “From outside, we see this political, aggressive layer, but there are different layers hidden underneath.”Birman himself left Russia with his family when he was six, in 1994, and grew up in San Francisco, before studying in Britain. As much as anything else, “Russia: Today” was an attempt to understand a country he often feels estranged from, he said. “I wanted to find what Russia is, because I didn’t have the answer myself.”In the version that will be performed in London, five singers are clustered around microphones beneath a screen that shows stark images of the Russian landscape shot by the filmmaker Alexandra Karelina. Snow-swathed railroad tracks and apartment blocks blur into glowering fir forests; vivid green tundra gives way to gray frozen lakes.We see no people, but we hear voices continually. Sometimes the interview recordings are played straight, or woven into cacophonous layers; other times, the words are declaimed verbatim by the performers, in Russian and English. At moments, Birman molds them into eerie, angular vocal lines. Coloring the score are the sounds of bells, whistling, birdlike cries and the growl of a low bass voice.Birman’s original idea was to present stagings of the work in Moscow and London. Plans were well advanced until summer 2021, when the singers of a Russian vocal ensemble that had agreed to premiere the piece, took a closer look at the text and pulled out.“The conductor just called me and said, ‘I’m so sorry, the singers don’t feel comfortable,’” said Tonya Wechsler, the show’s producer. “She said, ‘Look, one of them told me, ‘Do you not realize that it could be our last performance?’”Birman guessed that it was the religious element of “Russia: Today,” as much as its political overtones, that spooked the Moscow singers, given President Vladimir V. Putin’s alignment with the Russian Orthodox Church. “I think it was the appropriation of sacred music,” he said. “They feared that this would be problematic for their careers and their safety.”“Russia: Today” was premiered in Sept. 21 in Narva, Estonia, a city with a large ethnic Russian population.Anastasia VolkovaWhen another ensemble gave the first performance in September 2021 — in Narva, Estonia — some Russian-speaking audience members also made their displeasure felt.“We had a post-show discussion and some of the people there said, ‘Oh, it’s all lies, we cannot believe people actually said this,’” Wechsler said.Further attempts to get a live performance in Russia came to nothing. When a recording was screened in a Vladivostok movie theater a few weeks later, the venue requested that it be shown without subtitles, in case photos of the text found their way onto social media.Given everything that’s happened since, could Birman see “Russia: Today” being performed in the country of his birth any time soon? He laughed. “Nobody’s going to touch this for as long as the current government is in,” he said.Even if he could visit Russia without risking the military draft, it would be impossible to repeat the fieldwork he did just a few years ago, Birman added. “Who’s going to be willing to talk about Russia in this way at this point? Who’s going to say anything honest?” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’: A Guide

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      Here’s everything you need to know about the film that a poll of critics crowned the greatest ever made, including why it’s important and where you can watch.Sight and Sound’s once-a-decade poll of critics has crowned “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1975), directed by Chantal Akerman, as the greatest film ever made. Here’s everything you need to know about the film and the poll.What is the film about? It’s nominally the story of three days in the life of a Brussels widow (Delphine Seyrig) as she goes about routine, even monotonous household chores and has sex with precisely one client each afternoon, which is how she supports her teenage son. Read Vincent Canby’s review.What is it really about? The quotidian lives that women lead become the stuff of drama and even suspense here. The Times co-chief critic Manohla Dargis described it as “a 201-minute leisurely dive into one woman’s inner and outer spaces.” Read our critic’s appreciation of the film.Why is the film important? Probably the best known example of slow cinema, it was embraced by academics, critics and feminists when it was first released partly because of its radical politics, in Dargis’s words, and partly because of its technique, which has proved highly influential.With “static, head-on compositions and unblinking blocks of real time,” the writer Dennis Lim once explained, the film’s “observational strategies, long takes and scrupulous framing” can be seen in the work of everyone from Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant to Michael Haneke and Jia Zhangke. Read an interview with Akerman.Who was Chantal Akerman? The Belgian director, who died in 2015 at the age of 65, was considered a pioneer in feminist and experimental filmmaking. She was only 25 when she made “Jeanne Dielman,” her second narrative feature, and she would go on to make more than 40 all told.For the director, a daughter of Holocaust survivors from Poland, “the generational trauma of the Holocaust was a continuing theme, though below the surface,” the Times obituary said. “In recent decades she explored her own Jewish identity.” Read the obituary and an essay on the filmmaker.What is the Sight and Sound poll? It’s a survey that the British magazine Sight and Sound conducts every 10 years and is greatly respected in the film world, though as you can imagine any subjective list of the best films ever is bound to be controversial. In 2012, the poll made news when “Vertigo,” by Alfred Hitchcock, took over No. 1 from “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles), which had held the spot for 50 years.For the 2022 survey, Sight and Sound invited more than 1,600 critics, academics, distributors, writers, curators and others from around the world to submit their top 10 films of all time.What did Sight and Sound say about the poll results? “Streaming and digital communication have created opportunities to amplify voices and films that were less seen before,” Mike Williams, the editor of Sight and Sound, said in an interview with The Times. “I think our list is becoming more reflective of the wider world of filmmaking, enjoyment, criticism and conversation.” Read an article on the poll.Where can you watch it? It’s streaming on HBO Max and the Criterion Channel. You can also rent it on Amazon, Vudu or Apple TV+. More

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      in Television

      Lights, Camera, Run! Behind the Videos of Mayor Candidates

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      What did it take to record videos of eight Democrats who are vying to lead New York City? Collaboration, hustle and a willingness to talk to ambulance drivers, for starters.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.On June 22, New Yorkers will go to the polls to choose the Democratic candidate who will very likely be the city’s next mayor. After a chaotic year, many voters are, understandably, just tuning in now.As a politics producer on The New York Times’s Video desk, I spend most of my time thinking about how we can use original visual reporting to bring additional depth to key races and issues. For this project on the mayoral race, our goal was to help readers get to know a big group of contenders in a way that was clear, informative and fun.Last month, we digitally published our final product, an interactive set of videos featuring interviews with the top eight Democratic candidates. The interviews, conducted by the Metro reporters Emma Fitzsimmons and Katie Glueck, along with photography done on set, inform a print version of the project that appears in Sunday’s newspaper.When we started planning, we knew that the race had a number of distinct qualities we needed to take into consideration. First, many of the candidates were not well known to those who didn’t closely follow city politics. This was also the first year New York City would be using ranked-choice voting — in this race that means voters can rank up to five candidates on the ballot. (A full explanation of how this voting will work can be found here.)Our team included Metro editors and reporters, designers, graphics editors and video journalists. The initial idea for the piece was based on past Times projects that focused on Democratic presidential candidates in advance of the 2020 primaries. (here and here). The core idea was simple: Bring in the candidates, ask them all the same questions and publish their answers in an interactive format that allowed readers to “choose their own adventure” and navigate through topics of interest.We wanted to give these interviews and the project a New York City feel, so we selected two different spaces in The New York Times Building where we could use the city as a backdrop.Emma Fitzsimmons, The Times’s City Hall bureau chief, on set for an interview with Eric Adams, the Brooklyn borough president.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesOur interviews were set primarily in natural light, which can pose certain challenges. Ideally, an overcast sky or a clear sunny day is best, because you want light to hit your subject evenly. A cloud that moves in front of the sun and casts a shadow on your subject’s face can ruin a shot. This meant closely tracking the weather and cloud movements with Noah Throop, our cinematographer, in advance of every shoot. On bad weather days, we filmed in the Times Center auditorium, which was less susceptible to light change.We also had to navigate the challenges of filming during a pandemic, meaning we needed to find large open spaces and set up testing regimens and safety protocols for both staff members and guests.Shaun Donovan, a mayoral candidate, on set. When filming in natural light, either an overcast sky or a clear sunny day is best.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesBehind the scenes, we coordinated with the campaigns in an effort to catch each candidate arriving, which at times meant running through the Times Square subway station, trying to scout for their vehicles in traffic and looking to confirm whether Andrew Yang and his team were in fact having lunch at Schnipper’s (a burger joint in the Times building) before his interview. The cameras were rolling from the moment we met up with candidates outside until the moment they left the building.The author looks out for Mr. Throop in the Times Square Subway station.Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesWe decided to make one video per candidate, instead of organizing videos by topic, to give viewers an opportunity to sit and listen to a particular individual if they desired. The interviews ranged in length from 40 minutes to more than an hour based on the candidate’s speaking style and brevity.The videos on Kathryn Garcia and the other top seven Democratic candidates were organized so that viewers could sit and listen to a candidate at length. Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesMy role during an interview as a producer is to focus on how everything will look and sound on video. This means that the array of things I do includes listening for good sound bites, monitoring what questions might need an additional take, fixing people’s hair and running outside to ask ambulance drivers on a break to turn off their flashing lights (which I had to do numerous times during these shoots).In editing down the interviews, we tried to highlight what made a candidate unique and pull out key differences among members of the group — along with some moments of levity. But ultimately what we wanted to provide was a resource where voters could hear from each person, relatively unfiltered, to help them make up their minds.Who Wants to Be Mayor of New York City?The race for the next mayor of New York City may be one of the most consequential elections in a generation. Here are some of the leading candidates vying to run the nation’s largest city. More

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      in Music

      What Are the Greatest 2,020 Songs Ever? Philadelphia Is Deciding

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookWhat Are the Greatest 2,020 Songs Ever? Philadelphia Is DecidingThe Philly radio station WXPN polled its listeners and is revealing their choices in a marathon show. “I treasure the folly of it,” our critic writes.Edith Piaf, from left, the Notorious B.I.G. and Paul McCartney are among the artists with music on the WXPN list of the 2,020 greatest songs.Credit…From left: Hulton Archive/Getty Images; Raymond Boyd/Getty Images; Wood/Evening Standard, Hulton Arcvhie, via Getty ImagesDec. 14, 2020Updated 7:34 p.m. ETAre you busy right now? And if not, are you up for another year-end list? Are you up for another list that’s also basically another election? You see, since Thursday, WXPN, a public radio station in Philadelphia, has been unfurling what its listeners chose as the 2,020 greatest-ever songs, based on a preferential balloting system that permitted voters to choose as many as 10 songs and as few as one, of any kind from any century. Late Sunday afternoon, the countdown passed the halfway point. I like the collective act of building a list. I like the story it tells about the art form and the people who claim to love it. I love the aggregation of sensibilities and generations and blocs. I might more than love it.The unfurling lasts 24 hours a day until a summit is reached, which means that catching the songs you voted for (or would have) might entail some sleeplessness. On the first overnight, I missed the best song ever written about anybody named Leah (Donnie Iris’s “Ah! Leah!,” No. 1,826) and one of my Top 3 favorite Donna Summer songs (“State of Independence,” No. 1,797).Why do this to myself? Why do it for what’s essentially just another canon? Enough with those! They’re exclusionary, history-warping, gate-kept; perpetuators of the same-old same-olds — the Beatles and the Stones and Dylan. These hierarchies of worth are rarely about passion for art; they’re papacy. And didn’t I mention that this is a Philadelphia station and the list was likely determined by Philadelphia-area radio listeners? That means hours and hours of rock ’n’ roll — old rock ’n’ roll. Tons of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Jackson Browne and Warren Zevon. An onslaught of Led Zeppelin. Basic rock, as a friend put it when I told him what I was up to. Bad Bunny just had the No. 1 album in the country. Anything like him on this list? As of Monday afternoon: not so far.My best answers for “why do it?” include the aforementioned accounting for taste (I, at least, like knowing what other people like) and something more particular to our having to retreat indoors yet again. It’s been a terrible year for experiences — pleasant, frivolous, collective ones, anyway. This countdown is an oasis amid the sands of monotony and worse. I’ve done no dancing at any bar or club (or illegal house party) since mid-February. But there I was in my kitchen Friday night presented with a block of nourishment, wagging my fanny against the cabinet doors as Janelle Monáe’s “Tightrope” led to Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend” then the Trammps’ “Disco Inferno” (traditionally, a song that keeps me seated) and “Boogie On Reggae Woman,” the most physically addictive song Stevie Wonder has written, followed by “Highway to Hell,” essential AC/DC that my body treated as if DJ Kool had produced it.Frank Ocean has at least three songs on the list, including “Pyramids” at No. 1,891.Credit…Visionhaus#GP/Corbis, via Getty ImagesSo far, the usual suspects (see “old rock,” above) find themselves overrepresented. (It’s a mark of a kind of progress that, at some point, Radiohead had as many songs as Steely Dan and the Who. The station’s site is keeping track.) There’s also been much too much Van Morrison and Moody Blues yet no or not nearly enough Nina Simone, Carly Simon, Alice Coltrane, Patti Smith, Reba McEntire, Madonna, Björk, Tracy Chapman, PJ Harvey, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, Shakira, Beyoncé and Erykah Badu. Joni Mitchell currently leads the song count among women. And an event featuring more than 1,300 titles so far has turned up less than 20 by rappers; that number includes De La Soul’s appearance on Gorillaz’s “Feel Good Inc.” I’m looking on the bright side. There’s plenty of time.Either way, that is not WXPN’s problem. Loosely, the station’s format is listener-supported rock, down at 88.5 on the proverbial radio dial. Rock was foundational to its programming the way flour and water are to dough. I would describe it as “modern-rock singer-songwriter,” somehow without also being too “coffee shop” or “college radio.” XPN introduced my adolescent, late-1980s, early-1990s Philadelphia self to Joan Armatrading, Iris DeMent, Lyle Lovett, Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, Ben Folds Five and Olu Dara (a.k.a. Nas’s dad). It led me to Keb’ Mo’, Jonatha Brooke, Matthew Sweet, the Jayhawks, Jeff Buckley, post-“La Bamba” Los Lobos and Don Dixon, whose “Praying Mantis” is the “Boogie On Reggae Woman” of skintight, smarty-pants pop-rock. When John Prine died over the spring, years of WXPN are the reason I knew to shed tears.The city had other stations. WDAS for what I’d call grown-and-sexy R&B. Power 99 was rowdier and eventually more rappy. Q102 was pop. WMMR had become classic rock. WYSP seemed like rock before it was classic. One station had an alternative Friday night that played Nine Inch Nails and Meat Beat Manifesto. I was into all of it. XPN, though, was mine.The station still airs a show devoted to the ecstasies of lesbian musicianship (“Amazon Country”) and retains a Peabody-winning hour for kids. Today, its programming seems even more broad. In a given hour you could hear Solange Knowles, Sudan Archives, Chicano Batman and the late Sharon Jones, as well as Courtney Barnett, Josh Ritter, Kathleen Edwards, Fontaines D.C., Spoon, TV on the Radio and the War on Drugs. It’s still not a place where much current hip-hop meaningfully happens.This is a station in a city with a local music scene that it has remained part of. (The University of Pennsylvania provides its broadcast license but that’s really all.) The buoyant, affable on-air talent are audio veterans, not Penn students, and some of them sound like they couldn’t have grown up more than a mile from the West Philadelphia studio.Lady Gaga popped onto the list at No. 1,382 with “Born This Way.”Credit…Darron Cummings/Associated PressThis is a long way of saying that my personal excitement around this station daring to mount a greatest-songs-of-all-time chart arises from a tension between its inherent format and the music toward the other end of the dial. How much will the final list reflect WXPN’s values and broad, devoted audience and how much will it also ultimately reflect a station like WMMR’s?On Sunday, while the countdown was unveiling Beck’s “Loser” and Dion’s “The Wanderer,” I asked Bruce Warren, XPN’s program director, if he worried whether the results were going to tell him something about his station that he didn’t want to know. He laughed and reminded me that the program includes some kind of annual countdown and that, in his 30 years at XPN, eclecticism has always been the station’s raison d’être. Indeed, over the first five days, anyone listening even a little might have heard Metallica; Kurtis Blow; John Coltrane; Tash Sultana’s atmospheric dazzle; the Vienna Philharmonic playing Mozart; Lady Gaga; Frank Ocean; and a lot of Genesis.Warren has no official way of knowing how many of the 2,400 ballots cast were from the Philly area, but his hunch is most of them. “Today, we played a song by the Meters,” he said of the New Orleans funk band’s “It Ain’t No Use,” which came in at 1,063. “We’ve played them on XPN for years. They’re probably a band that, in that genre of music, we play a lot of. That speaks to the core listeners of XPN. They know the Meters because they know we play their music.” The same is true for the surfeit of Wilco entries, the high-ish positioning of Indigo Girls, and the decent showings of Loreena McKennitt and Bruce Cockburn, two very different Canadians and former XPN staples.But Warren is no fool. All of that Genesis testifies to some of the station’s older listeners “who grew up listening to them on WMMR.” He says that the final 200 songs will represent something of a consensus among those ballots, and that “No. 1 is No. 1 by a lot.” I wouldn’t let him spoil what kind of consensus, but I do wonder. Would it be what my friends who are also following along wearily predict? “Stairway to Heaven”? “Born to Run”? Would Aretha Franklin serve her usual canonical function of hauling both Black America and womankind to the top of the pile? Did no one write the words “Sinead” and “O’Connor” on their ballot?One compelling aspect of this countdown business is philosophical. At 2,000-plus songs, some percentage was probably always going to hew to XPN’s taste. Local acts like the Hooters, Amos Lee and Low Cut Connie are very much here. And believe it or not, “local” extends to Bruce Springsteen and Billy Joel, who, as of midday Monday, had almost 30 entries between them. But how would a countdown of the 2,020 greatest songs proceed over at, say, WDAS, where the format is now old-school R&B and “The Steve Harvey Morning Show” anchors the a.m. block? Power 99 used to have a nightly countdown show that one song — Shirley Murdock’s “As We Lay” or Keith Sweat’s “Make It Last Forever” or Prince’s “Adore”— would dominate for what felt like weeks. What would a more epochal undertaking look like? Would WMMR find a way to make inroads there, too?And what would the same countdown reveal at a similar station in Anchorage or Montgomery or Chicago or the Bay Area? Does it matter that a few corporate behemoths have flattened pop’s palette? Can a chart still quantify local taste? Would an accurate answer prove as vexing as precise electoral polling data, because, in part, we now live on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube? Is this entire process just too random and subjective to be worth continuing?I vote no; it’s not. I treasure the folly of it, the surprises, the mind-bending idea that a ranking process could place the number 1,995 next to something as celestial as Franklin’s “Amazing Grace” and go on to play another song after Ella Fitzgerald turns “Mack the Knife” into thrilling mass murder. I think “Brilliant Disguise” is a better Springsteen song than the certain finalist “Born to Run,” but no chart will ever reflect that, because it’s a blasphemous position. But I like the drama of the blasphemy and the certitude of what a chart tells you: Modernization is hard work. XPN’s is a kaleidoscope nonetheless.It’s true that you could build your own massive, perfectly tailored playlist. But you’d miss the astonishment of Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” kicking off the 767-to-764 block and A Tribe Called Quest’s “Scenario” ending it in smithereens. There’d be no shock at all in hearing, say, Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” (1,093) follow the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Juicy” (1,094), which had chased Paul McCartney and Wings’ “Band on the Run” (1,095). There’s no happening upon Dan Fogelberg’s 40-year-old “Same Auld Lang Syne” and swearing it’s the lonely ghost lurking on Taylor Swift’s two quarantine albums. Ditto — if you’re up late enough — for hearing XPN’s newbie host Rahman Wortman go a little bonkers exclaiming that Outkast’s “B. O. B (Bombs Over Baghdad)” did indeed make the cut.And you certainly couldn’t cringe at Olivia Newton-John’s “Xanadu” and the Richard Harris travesty known as “MacArthur Park.” I suspect that the people who voted for those two know that they’re trolls. But it doesn’t matter. Even songs as baffling (fine, as horrendous) as those have culminated in days and days of something we’ve grown increasingly estranged from: word-of-mouth radio.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More