www.rateyourmusic.com C/D?

i mean, specifically concerning lj's liveblog, it was like he was hearing it through the pitchfork score instead of listening to the record or having any real engagement with the artist or what she's been trying to do. fair to hear it and feel unaffected or even annoyed by it but it trips into reactionary when you make it all about this self-satisfied striking against the dominant narrative

also you'll all find this unsurprising but i agree that our value judgments about art are never entirely subjective!

the fiona record is an instance of an artist fully pushing her music into a universe only hinted at on her previous record(s), these are the usual conditions that foster critical acclaim for an already-critically-beloved artist, before pitchfork's branding even enters it

Lol I played with this band, unless it's a different one (there seem to be several)

― varèse désserts (Matt #2)

the one with the mellotron

i think professional criticism has strong positive value. when i was younger i had this sort of zappa-style sneering distrust of "professional critics" as being, you know, this elite cabal of gatekeepers whose tyrannical hegemony we needed to overthrow.

that point of view was, i believe, bullshit. the criticism zappa got was fair and just and zappa wasn't able to take it, and his fans weren't able to take it, but their inability to _learn_ from that criticism does not make the critics the bad guys here.

i would say this that is a sort of thing as "critical hegemony", not in an intentional or absolute sense, but music is a social art form, and so, necessarily, is music criticism. i would say that amateur criticism is of a certain limited value but mostly serves to reinforce alternative hegemonical structures, which insofar as it contains the possibility to promote fascism is not something i'm particularly keen on. my experience of amateur criticism has been of value to me because it has taught me how to write better criticism and, in addition, some small knowledge of how to differentiate good criticism from bad criticism, which is a skill most people don't have much of, to our collective detriment.

mostly i'm wary of this "democratic" notion that anybody is as good at anything as anybody else. even considering there is no true empirical basis for criticism, i do consider brad, for instance, to be a better critic, for their critical writing to be generally of more value, than most of the collected reviews of rym. in a better world the low quality of that writing would be recognized and would lead to a greater appreciation of writing of the sort brad does, but that seems not to be a widespread viewpoint.

Sometimes a dismissive knee-jerk trashing is a reaction to that dismal sense of alienation you can get when your nominal peers are (yet again) unanimously creaming over something you find simply godawful. Well, maybe not entirely "simply" but is it worth digging for the complication if you're not getting paid to dig? I do now and then happily break new aesthetic ground in what I can appreciate but also it's silly to pretend that you can't (at some point) quite reliably know when a thing isn't worth bothering with, or indeed that preferences won from experience aren't, you know, a valid guide to goodness and fulfilment.

is it worth digging for the complication if you're not getting paid to dig?

imo yes! i mean, i feel like it's one of the on-going projects of this board and why this place is more than just people shitposting opinions at each other (some of the time)

if you don't want to dig deeper, that's fine, but why post a knee-jerk trashing like that to the internet? like, where is the benefit in dave marshing all over a record in public?

it's true that the worst thing about rateyourmusic is rating your music

that dismal sense of alienation you can get

My reaction to “hype” is mainly — “I wish the music I love received even half this rapturous praise!” I do try to separate the hype from the material, when I’m listening to the album; but it’s hard to keep your reception entirely uncolored by it (a 10.0 on Pitchfork feels like almost a challenge to find weak points).

Well that is something I find depressing about dismissive one star one line RYM 'reviews' but "sheer upright bass pablum" is good value for money IMO.

xxp

(xp I guess some of the music I love does indeed actually receive half, or more, as much praise... so what am I complaining about, lol)

LOL. Quantitative evaluation has a use after all.

it made me search "upright bass pablum" on youtube because i wanted to hear what such a thing could possibly sound like

the results were disappointing, tedx talks by upright bass players - i mean, good job parsing that search google but i don't actually want to watch a fucking tedx talk - and somebody building an upright bass out of garbage, which i would want to watch but isn't really a "music" video.

really though the best way to find "upright bass pablum" is to just search for "upright bass". i mean, fuck this bullshit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HAGjU9Ldx4

hard to get anything more out of that besides "youtube 'influencers' are trash" though!

Naysaying isn’t necessarily a form of edgelording. There is solace to be derived from the knowledge that other dissenters feel as you do.

xps

that Black Magick SS album is below a 3 now, lol

obviously a good thing to get the Nazi shit off the charts but it does remind me of something annoying about RYM, how sometimes a really good new album in an esoteric style will come out and the fans will jump all over it, then when it makes the charts it winds up getting downvoted by hundreds of people who never would've listened to it anyway. its a fate that's befallen a lot of my favorite albums of the last few years but it doesn't happen to Metal or VGM soundtracks because the general RYM userbase won't go there.

it happens with metal too. it just happened 2 or 3 weeks ago with Sweven who were topping that chart, only to be downvoted by the furious army of fans of the record that was second place by then

"it didn't matter if you liked them both, you had to pick one. you had to fight. in the great Oranssi/Ulcerate War of April 2020, you had to know which side you were on"

n.b. hoping fans of both those bands are much cooler than that obv

any time rym is mentioned on ilx is a dud

otm

any time rym is mentioned on ilx is a dud

fixed.

well then i'm a dud i guess! maybe i should stop going there. maybe i should stop going to youtube too. i haven't quit going to either site and i probably am not going to quit talking about either.

I haven't been there much recently but I have mostly good feelings about it. Didn't realize Pitchfork scores and downvoting was such a big deal.

But I am disappointed to know that people downvote stuff.

i mean i do think the site management are doing a pretty decent job with what they have to work with (constant influx of 4chan people, etc), navigating the social dynamics of brigade-driven culture is i think a valuable skill to learn

3.7 aggregate score

I think with some better algorithms/analysis RYM could gradually strip out all these artificial voting campaigns (both positive and negative), sock votes and troll votes so they don't have an effect anymore. Detect when an account gives hundreds of rap or metal or country releases a half star vote, just flag those accounts silently and don't include any of their votes in the ratings. Detect if a certain album receives a sudden mass influx of low votes, flag & exclude all those accounts too. I believe IMDB already does this, in this day and age of machine learning a site should be able to detect these patterns.

Harder to ban people for handing out 5 stars tbh but I'm all for targeting deliberate downrating. I'm sure it can be tricky to prove though

That's why I don't think bans or warnings are the way to go, you'll only get endless bad faith discussions about proof and evidence as if it's IRL - if the internet has proven anything, never ever engage seriously with trolls online. Just silently exclude all votes from these accounts. If joining a mass troll campaign against Fiona Apple also invalidates your 'serious' ratings, it'll stop quickly. Nobody likes spending time voting/rating into the void.

Nobody likes spending time voting/rating into the void.

you should see ilxor.com

All my terrible opinions from 19 years ago are still there for all to read, some void...

I think with some better algorithms/analysis RYM could gradually strip out all these artificial voting campaigns (both positive and negative), sock votes and troll votes so they don't have an effect anymore. Detect when an account gives hundreds of rap or metal or country releases a half star vote, just flag those accounts silently and don't include any of their votes in the ratings. Detect if a certain album receives a sudden mass influx of low votes, flag & exclude all those accounts too. I believe IMDB already does this, in this day and age of machine learning a site should be able to detect these patterns.

― Siegbran

my understanding is that rym does, in fact, do some variation on this (and may possibly have been doing this before imdb), but it's tricker to implement successfully than you're suggesting (see: the actual imdb rankings)

Oh absolutely I'm sure it isn't easy (esp not as it is happening) but the bigger the ratings dataset gets and the cheaper/standardized these ML tools get, it will get easier in time to clean up the db in retrospect. If there's a desire to do so at all - I mean RYM can also just let all this ratings gaming run wild and not care.

IMDB seems to get a bit better at cleaning up all the miraculous 10/10 ratings and glowing reviews for garbage low-budget/direct-to-streaming films.

Oh absolutely I'm sure it isn't easy (esp not as it is happening) but the bigger the ratings dataset gets and the cheaper/standardized these ML tools get, it will get easier in time to clean up the db in retrospect. If there's a desire to do so at all - I mean RYM can also just let all this ratings gaming run wild and not care.

― Siegbran, Monday, April 20, 2020 6:10 AM (nineteen minutes ago)

oh, sure they could, but they also do have a fairly heavy influx of users from 4chan.

shit gets _ugly_ there. there is a _lot_ of misogyny. some major releases, like norman fucking rockwell, have their shoutboxes deleted because people would go in and post some pretty disgusting misogynist shit and on a popular release like that it's very difficult to keep it moderated. personally i'm not a big fan of "shoutboxes" at all, too much like youtube comments sections. not sure why they were created, but possibly it was some sort of trade-off to try and reduce the number of shitpost/meme reviews - which they have been going through and doing. a lot of my older shitposty reviews have been "unpublished", which overall i think is a good thing in terms of the site direction.

the black magick ss thing is being pretty hotly debated among the mods and admins right now. honestly i'm pretty disappointed that anybody in that crew would be so naive as to argue that they're _not_ nazis, but as far as i can tell it's just one admin who keeps pushing the argument against the better judgement of pretty much everybody else there. we'll see how it turns out; these sort of arguments tend not to have compromise-based solutions.

i think there are a lot of good people on that site, a lot of good people running that site, but obviously they are facing certain challenges.

the fiona apple shoutbox has been tabula rasa'd - let's see if its second chance pays off

the fiona apple shoutbox has been tabula rasa'd - let's see if its second chance pays off

― when I come out, can you introduce me as Jagger (imago)

unfortunately there's not particularly a strong precedent for that sort of thing happening there :(

fwiw I think my experience of RYM is mostly positive b/c I don't really follow 'new music', as in stuff within the Pitchfork/Fantano/RYM chart sphere. I'm one of the guys who votes 25 albums in the year-end polls here and is astonished to see one of them make #68. the 'critically acclaimed' stuff I like with a ton of reviews/ratings tend to be older albums. so I think I'm shielded by the uglier side of the site. that said I do post on the forums every now and then and I definitely get the sense there are a lot of very active users in the 16-21 age range

lol the forums are a nightmare

btw can't hate on a site which produced this masterpiece

https://rateyourmusic.com/list/ELVISPRESLEYAEROSMITHFAN/led_zeppelins_physical_grafitti___40th_anniversary___1975_to_2015/

forums in general are nightmares

this is my favorite web board but it's just a bunch of us middle aged people who have known each other for probably decades now talking about stuff without being interrupted by 16 year old dudes who just discovered radiohead for the first time

i wish there was such a thing as long-term sustainable social spaces on the internet, i'm sad about all the friends i've lost to community collapse, but i guess there aren't long-term sustainable social spaces anywhere else either

Yeah the idea that you can build a large, stable, self-govering/moderating global social space is a dream that already died in the Usenet age.

xpost

The shoutboxes are a terrible idea. I never look a the forums, I can only imagine how bad they are.

Nazi content and pornographic cover art is already flagged and it makes sense for an archival-type site like RYM to extend the (up to now "experimental")

Descriptors

Granular controls to fine-tune your content filters for a new, more sensitive world.

JIMMY PAGE - WELL WE NEED OUR OWN TIMELESS MASTERPIECE

JOHN PAUL JONES - WHAT ? ? ! ! ? ? ! ! WE HAVE ALREADY MADE FIVE CLASSIC MASTERPIECE STUDIO ALBUMS ! ! ! ! !

ROBERT PLANT - LAUGHS HA HA THAT IS SO TRUE

JIMMY PAGE - TRUST ME THIS ALBUM IS GOING TO BE AMAZING

frogbs that is great !

That’s awesome, ha ha

ROBERT PLANT - LAUGHS HA HA HELL YES THE WOMEN LOVE ME WHEN IAM ON STAGE SINGING TO THEM WHOLE LOTTA LOVE

JIMMY PAGE - LAUGHS HA HA YES ROBERT HAS THE VOCALS AND THE CHARM TO SEND THE WOMEN INTO ORGASMIC PLEASURE IN CONCERT

JOHN PAUL JONES - WELL ENOUGH WITH THIS SEXY ROCK GOD TALK WE HAVE A LOT OF WORK TO TOMMORRY AND THE NEXT SEVERAL WEEKS

JIMMY PAGE - I AGREE WITH YOU JOHN THIS ALBUM IS GOING TO BE A HUGE CLASSIC I BELIVE SOMEDAY SOME GUY WILL BE MAKING A 40TH ANNIVERSARY LIST OF PHYSICAL GRAFITTI

imo this is the one guy who's allowed to have 95% of his ratings be 5s

Why did Fiona Apple suddenly end up on 4Chan's radar? I didn't realize she was still doing well.

Is it just 4Chan people doing this downvoting stuff? Has Vox Day became a singer and decided that he's more popular than Fiona Apple?

a girl got a 10 from Pitchfork, that's all you need to know

You never know with them. I don't understand why there's a ton of un-ironic Brie Larson worship on 4Chan.