pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

i don’t buy the argument that an album not making you want to actively stop listening at any point is sufficient for 10/10 status. often indicates an album that sounds the same all the way through (a favored buzzword, cohesiveness) which is fine but not a virtue in and of itself. nor is an album with one or more tracks you don’t need or want to hear more than once necessarily worse than one that has no such tracks (an entry level example being the white album, an obvious 10/10 to me with multiple songs i skip 90% of the time)

ya white album is a good example. also goldberg variations

don’t buy the argument that an album not making you want to actively stop listening at any point is sufficient for 10/10 status

Just to be clear, I don’t think this either!

don’t buy the argument that an album not making you want to actively stop listening at any point is sufficient for 10/10 status

that's...not what I said?

GNR's audacity and volatility is worth way more than 9 "good" songs. nevermind that the "filler" tracks on Appetite are actually the best ones. there are lots of ways to be great.

a 10/10 album doesn't need to have any good songs on it at all, come on.
https://i.discogs.com/7THU1G9tzeE3wkSjMV7ToO2MmeNqPt3C2qCNFNeAt3E/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:536/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9SLTU0MzY1/NzUtMTM5MzMyMDg0/Ni0yMjE4LmpwZWc.jpeg

it doesn't even have to totally succeed on its own terms

please give ratings out like candy because who the fuck cares, i mean the minute a 10.0 rating is indicative of some lofty "status" and has to be deliberated and meet "criteria" it's just a thing to throw stones at anyway.

Yeah I do think (and have probably said this already somewhere on this massive thread) that Pfork's 100-point scale does a disservice to the albums/artists, b/c with that degree of granularity it seems harder to "justify" awarding an album a perfect 10, without even a decimal point or two docked.

I grew up w/RS's five stars (incl. half stars), and still think in those terms; though I think at one point they didn't even use half stars (think the red RS Record Guide may be like this). Honestly that may be the best way to go...

(...in terms of making the highest rating both achievable and not like some indicator of godlike status)

like if that were the case almost all of my collection would be 10s.

I meant that an album being allowed to retain a 10.0 status despite having one or more skippable tracks is dubious to me, and that skippable tracks doesn't necessarily map to a band's ambition. If a song makes me want to skip it every time I hear the album (as opposed to just instances when I'm not in the mood for it), it's usually because it's not interesting, dull, or actively irritating to me.

my point with the last paragraph was that adventurous music is a slow burn that usually takes many listens to reward, and people who listen to that stuff don't usually demand to be instantly rewarded. so if people are tapping out after only a few listens to the track, it's often not because the track is 'out there' and thus polarizing to the audience, it's that they failed at what they were doing.

xxxposts

what are the filler songs on Appetite for Destruction supposed to be? there are non to me.

Without looking up the review, I would guess "You're Crazy," "Anything Goes" and "Think About You"...

yeah - the only one that I am utterly nauseated hearing any more is "Sweet Child O' Mine" and that's more due to overplay than actually it not being a solid song.

"My Michelle", "Nightrain", "Out to Get Me", "It's So Easy", the album goes fuckin' hard.

Wow, unperson hit the nail on the head.

"My Michelle", "Nightrain", "Out to Get Me", "It's So Easy", the album goes fuckin' hard.

The entire first side through "My Michelle" is unstoppable. Then they kinda run out of tricks and repeat themselves a little, but "Rocket Queen" brings it home huge.

Think About You is one of the best! great chorus

they are all good

And if they suffer in comparison to some of the greatest hard rock songs ever recorded, they'd all be highlights in the catalog of their contempories

i've heard people say all the songs but the 3 hit singles are filler!!! the hits are the ones i skip lol

people = more than one person lol

AFD is all killer, no filler. The B side is great and nasty rock.

Probably five stars/10.0/a+ etc should be handed out with much much more regularity. As it is, it's still only handed out to special legacy artists. As if those without any kind of iconic status haven't met the right people yet. But really, ultimately all of those grades and all are as meaningless as a music hall of fame.

RS did give AFD five stars on release, so they knew what’s up…

this grade thing seems like a good way to ruin music listening to me

what if the best thing in the world was more like an exam?

I don't like AFD one bit but I agree it's at least as good as "goddess in the doorway"

Being graded on exams was not fun but the power fantasy of the tables being turned is pretty fun - I'm the grader now teach.

but you're not. pitchfork is the grader

RS' Goddess in the Doorway was the American cousin of Q's All About Chemistry

esp if the Q review was also a favour to a former(?) fuck buddy

none of mick's lawyers post here right

everyone's a grader imago, why shod pitchfork not be allowed the same fun I'm having?

xps well it was (along with Discovery) their first 5 in three or four years so one might speculate how it happened

this grade thing seems like a good way to ruin music listening to me

― your original display name is still visible (Left), Wednesday, August 9, 2023 3:25 AM (four hours ago)

yeah who listens to records and thinks "this one is 4 and a half stars, that one is only 3" idgi

For whatever reason I can't give a rating to any piece of music I listen to, tried several times and it just feels uncomfortable

that's...not what I said?

― linoleum gallagher (Neanderthal), Tuesday, August 8, 2023 7:45 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

sorry wasn’t responding directly to you, just thinking out loud

i am responding more to an idea that i’ve seen proliferate among the tiktok generation of armchair critics where the first criteria for a “10/10” is “no skips”

idk I think ratings are useful, I mean sure they're dumb for reasons that have been hashed out over and over in this thread but there's like 400 hours worth of new music released every day, gotta be some way to tell what's good and what ain't

people grouch about RYM a lot but I find them pretty 'accurate', in that if I'm interested in an artist and check out the Top 3 albums there I'm generally getting the best ones. when you got 1000+ sets of ears on something I think that generally covers your bases. yeah I'll often wind up disagreeing with what the best albums are but its at least pretty easy to understand why things score the way they do.

xpost I mostly agree upthread that I don't think of music in terms of numbers because enjoyment of music fluctuates, like if all I was interested in was listening to the 'most perfect possible music' all of the time, I'd be replaying the same ten albums over again. there's fun in listening to flawed albums (like 7s out of 10) but if you get too Pitchfork-ized you start thinking to yourself "why should I listen to this 7 when I can listen to a 10".

not to mention quantifying the amount of like is difficult, and of course the writers don't come up with the rating themselves, so sometimes the P4 review doesn't match up neatly with the rating.

RYM being a collective rating system is more helpful in that you can see what lots of people who are fans of the scene are reacting to

Yeah I do think (and have probably said this already somewhere on this massive thread) that Pfork's 100-point scale does a disservice to the albums/artists, b/c with that degree of granularity it seems harder to "justify" awarding an album a perfect 10, without even a decimal point or two docked.

I grew up w/RS's five stars (incl. half stars), and still think in those terms; though I think at one point they didn't even use half stars (think the red RS Record Guide may be like this). Honestly that may be the best way to go...

― Nonhuman biologics enthusiast (morrisp), Tuesday, August 8, 2023 7:58 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

yea I totally agree, there's something very wrong about that kind of rating system, it's like grading a math test. when I see someone give an album 4.5 stars I think "okay they really like it but are maybe hung up on some detail or just find it merely good and not transcendent, which is a feeling I can understand, whereas when I see 9.3/10 I think well why not 9.4? are the clocks too loud? did a verb get conjugated incorrectly? I mean even if you're uncomfortable with rating I still bet there's a loose 1-5 star system in your head, some albums are your favorites, some are "very good", some are decent, some suck pretty bad

personally my main issue with ratings is they're so context dependant. virtually everyone rating stuff on RYM is doing so in the context of them listening to this stuff by themselves, inside their own heads. it totally causes them to underrate anything that's good in a crowd. I'm not like a huge Pitbull fan but all his stuff on RYM is at like a 1.5 and that ain't fair. his stuff sounds good at parties and if you turned it off to put on OK Computer or some bullshit you'd probably get chucked out. or take for example the collected works of Tatsuya Yoshida, which *when you're in the mood for it* sounds like the most incredible and impossibly technical shit you've ever heard, but when you ain't it's the most irritating music possible, like listening to every episode of Tom & Jerry being played at once. by that measure I guess the greatest album of all time is probably Sports by Huey Lewis and the News?? I mean that one sounds great in literally every context. You could even use it in a serial killer movie.

well, Patrick Bateman did use Fore!.

the problem with the RYM ratings, at least back in the day, was that metalheads would give poor ratings to albums that Pitchfork championed in order to knock them down in the rankings.

yea they added a bunch of secret sauce to the algorithm to stop that from happening, my understanding is now if you're one of those people who give say every U2 album a 1.0 then your ratings effectively don't count

yeah who listens to records and thinks "this one is 4 and a half stars, that one is only 3"

Don’t tempt me to post my personal star ratings for each Lana Del Rey album… no one here wants to see that!

now if you're one of those people who give say every U2 album a 1.0 then your ratings effectively don't count

― frogbs, Wednesday, August 9, 2023 10:33 AM bookmarkflaglink

not fair they should count extra in that case

people are super fucking weird about numerical ratings, and probably always have been, but it's worse in the internet age

I don't think anyone in the music biz is as bad as video games, though. There are publishers that linked whether game developers would get a bonus payout to their metacritic score which is batshit crazy

the guy who really irritates me is Piero Scaruffi. dude grades everything out of 10 but has never actually given out a 10 before!! his highest ever rating is the 9.5 he gave to Trout Mask Replica.

lol Scaruffi

he's just waiting until the best album ever comes out

imo that's valid, albums should asymptotically approach 10 on a 10/10 scale. if you hear a 10/10 album you can die. life's over, you heard the perfect album