pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

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

He’s waiting to hear the true original Trout Mask (the one we all know was docked 0.5 for being a Replica).

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

― mh, Wednesday, August 9, 2023 10:50 AM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcSXbvzW91U

release the Trout Mask Snyder cut

The only place I write for that demands numerical ratings (stars) is DownBeat, and I rate everything I review for them either 4 or 4 1/2 out of five, because who gives a shit. If you're reading DownBeat, you're gonna read the review, not just scan the star rating.

lol that portlandia clip is even funnier to me cuz there's a local band here called catbath

xp People not wanting to rate 1 or (the largest number) is a known problem with this type of rating, though.

music should be rated logarithmic scale, like the richter. a 7.0 is pretty good. an 8.0 is exactly ten times as good as a 7.0, while you could listen to the music of a 9.0 album one time, and it would equal the pleasure and goodness of listening to a 7.0 album 100 times

I've long suspected that's actually what Scaruffi is doing

what if you took 1000 great moments from 1000 different 6.0 records and edited them into one record? Would it be a Frankenst9?

also, black mirror idea: all human food and leisure time is curated by platform recommendations. everyone gets 100 "points" to spend per day, spread out among things like listening to music, eating, reading, etc, with the higher quality recommendations costing more points. so, you can have a decent meal which costs a lot of points and leaves you with only a handful (bachman turner overdrive), or you can listen to dark side but it's leftover lentils for you

(nothing against lentils, i had them last night and will enjoy the leftovers soon as i listen to dark side)

Be careful. The Leftovers has an 8.3 rating on IMDB.

under the one world socialist government vegans will have extra points left over to spend on state approved luxuries thereby eventually becoming the new ruling class

I never know how to rate a thing - how do I rate something that seems flawless but doesn't move me much versus something I love that has very obvious flaws?

I don't like the aggregators since they pull from a such a limited pool (professional critics on the one hand, internet nerds who watch that youtube guy on the other) and their biases when aggregated turn into a very boring and oppressive consensus

which is self reinforcing since everyone takes them seriously for some reason

under the one world socialist government vegans will have extra points left over to spend on state approved luxuries thereby eventually becoming the new ruling class

― your original display name is still visible (Left), Wednesday, August 9, 2023 12:13 PM bookmarkflaglink

wow that you managed to work this even into a thread about music reviews

don't you know that everything is political

https://media.pitchfork.com/photos/5e0e0f17b7c76f0009ccb48a/2:1/w_1600,c_limit/Moby.jpg

onethread

the only time i rate things is movies on letterboxd. i don’t think about it too much and just go with my gut. i tend to rate everything pretty highly and give stuff 5 stars all the time (often to the shock and dismay of my gf who is far stingier)

I rate but eventually calm down

I don't like the aggregators since they pull from a such a limited pool (professional critics on the one hand, internet nerds who watch that youtube guy on the other) and their biases when aggregated turn into a very boring and oppressive consensus

― your original display name is still visible (Left), Wednesday, August 9, 2023 11:19 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

there's a lotta truth to this but I think if you compare the RYM charts from 10 years ago to the charts now, they're definitely getting more diverse and esoteric

I think in both cases the main issue is these people have to score the album very quickly. when I wrote for The Quietus I'd have to turn in reviews sometimes before the album even came out. there's a lot of hyped up RYM stuff that'll have 3000 ratings within a year but 2500 of them will come within the first 2 weeks. idk I don't think that's enough time to really evaluate music, so many of my favorite albums were things I was lukewarm on at first, while I can think of a number of albums I was really excited about on release that I've cooled on since. I kinda miss those old review sites like Mark Prindle and George Starostin where they're like "I've been listening to these guys for 15 years", because even if you disagree with everything they write you at least know they've been thinking about it for a while.

A rating is always more a time capsule of how you feel about a particular work on a particular day but then, so is a review.

I really enjoy it when I rewatch a film and decide to change my rating on letterboxd, gives me the illusion that I am still capable of growth and change. I don't use RYM but you could do that too.

Left tbf there's a very easy way to access an aggregate that doesn't have the limited pool you mention - it's the charts.

having to choose between the received prejudices of a cultural elite and the heartless whims of the market, the story of my life

I like that concept of a review but it isn't how our grading and canonisation obsessed culture tends to receive them and the aggregators iron any of that out anyway

I still use them because I need some sort of filter but there's a lot you have to correct for and I wish they were treated less respectfully in general

If we're going to start bringing RYM and Scaruffi and Prindle into ILX conversations, you might as well just go full 4chan and post some pics of your "goon cave"

I'll defer to your expertise on the matter.

I come to ilx to avoid discussions of Scaruffi and Prindle!

(Not from 4chan but from musicbook, group chats, places where these people apparently matter)

You folks are intrepid; I've never found good music discussion anywhere online but here.

well quite

Rating things is lame. Zero stars.

if it’s an album I love it gets 5 stars

I can’t really parse much meaningful/interesting difference between 3 and 4 stars, let alone 100 different gradations of rating

Once every couple of years I remember Prindle exists and go look at an artist there. It’s sort of a time capsule of a more innocent Internet. The most recent one I looked up was PJ Harvey and he hated her, that was a shock - the first and third albums are almost universally praised AFAICT.

Did Buddyhead do reviews? Feel like I got them confused with Pitchfork in the early days.

Prindle was a hugely helpful resource for me when I was getting into The Fall (20+ years back). Don’t think I explored his thoughts on other artists too much… funny guy though

that guy really hated women

A year or so ago I was instructed - not asked - by a friend in a gc to stop hating on Prindle. It understandably wasn't long before the chat died, its cosiness slowly evaporated. But it makes me hate Prindle even more.

i was going to say that disliking PJ Harvey doesn't make you a woman-hater (at least for my sake i hope not, although i do have my gf's support on this) but i went to his review page and scanned through it for pages dedicated to female artists and on first pass found Joni Mitchell and Pink, both of whom he dislikes as well, so uh, does kinda seem that way, annoyingly, cos i enjoy quite a few of his reviews

on the flipside he actually really loves a whole bunch of PJ Harvey's music, and Madonna's singles, even if he expresses himself rather um unfortunately when he doesn't. dearie me

some of my best friends are PJ Harvey albums

xxxpost - milo my memory is that buddyhead has reviews for a while at least, but they were pretty short capsule punk zine style