pitchfork is dumb (#34985859340293849494 in a series.)

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

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.