Been sent the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album this morning.
Sure I'm excited. No less an authority than Q Magazine has given it 5 stars and the zingy epithet 'Spectacular'. (How do I know this? Because it's right there on the cover.) Wow. Five stars out of five. That means that not only it's the most perfect album ever made but that there was also a perfect conflagration of events happening while the critic was evaluating it. It will be flawless! It will be Blonde On Blonde (um, conventionally speaking). It will be a Daydream Nation (thank you, Pitchfork) for this year's generation who enjoy watching dorky girls wearing glittery tights bounce around, while making like Chrissie Hynde and rocking the good rock.
Five stars! Wow. I'm scared to even put it into my CD-player, in case my ability to appreciate music and the random collection of factors around me (wind chill factor, ants crawling into my computer keyboard, aesthetic qualities of envelopes balanced on top of printer) don't match up to Q Magazine's ideals. I mean, five! That's like Bo Derek in 10 (um, conventionally speaking). That's like my latest written assignment in KKP601. That's like 2+3=5. It's perfection, right?
How grand that 40 years of a proud and noble art-form can be boiled down to a sole signifier, a numerical value. The editors at Q Magazine (and Uncut and NME and Pitchfork and JMag) must be so proud of themselves, the way they can do away with all those unnecessary words and descriptions and allusions and boil criticism down to its essence: a number. And then they can get quoted on all those lovely advertising posters! Wow. Respect due.
They'll be able to start doing league tables next. Oh wait...they have.
They have.
1. So is it a 5/5? (yeah, stupid question I know). Although having said that Q did give 'Be Here Now' 5/5 and didn't they give Razorlight a 5/5 once?
ReplyDelete2. Am I the only one who predicts what score Pitchfork are going to give a review, can more often than not get it a few decimal places and then doesn't bother to read the actual review because reading Pitchfork reviews onscreen is just too painful?
3. Surely if you must score records most should get 2 1/2 stars for being ok/quite good/average (with some sort of bell distribution curve thing going on). A lot of reviews I read seem to be 3 1/2 or 4 stars (and I'm looking at you Time Off...) so the system is implying that we're living in some golden age when almost everything released is at least much better than average and a fair proportion of it is almost classic, when the reality is that they’re, for the most part, pretty average, 2 1/2 star albums.
ps lol at the automatically generated related links.
ReplyDeleteTotally agree with your distribution curve theory Ed. I, too, get pissed off at the 3-4 stars given to very ordinary records and the fairly cursory remarks offered in support of said rating.
ReplyDeleteOn another note, what is the origin of the star rating system? If memory serves me correctly, I first encountered them in old TV and movie guides....
I am waiting for someone to write a web widget which allows you to compare critics with artists and the star rating system (or with advertising placements). Should be to hard to code. We need a web geek to work on this. 'Rate your critic' - this critic gets 1 star because they always rate band X at 5 stars no matter what shite they serve up as a record etc...
When NME first introduced grading in the 80s, myself and Steven Wells would give the album either 10 or 0, no in-between. It took the sub-editors a surprising amount of time to tumble to us. (Or - it occurs to me now, typing this sentence - perhaps they were secretly sympathetic.)
ReplyDeleteThere was an interesting comment from 'Spawk' on the Drowned In Sound message-board (about Plan B Magazine) in relation to this, which I'd like to reprint here.
ReplyDeleteIn not rating reviews, Plan B missed a trick - its poetic rhapsodies would rarely feature on marketing material, indirectly promoting the magazine itself - and the policy-makers occasionally hinted that they disliked "list-making" and "ranking", which could be mistaken for masculine, and hence "patriarchal" tendencies. So far, so idealistic, but ratings supplement a review, rather than supplanting it, and numbers give an indication how close artists have come to being groundbreaking, moving, or simply tuneful... depending on the emphasis of the review. Even those of us who hate the commercial world want targets, right? As an artist... or as a listener who wants a challenge.
Also (and less often commented), the non-rating system meant you had to get a sense of the personalities of the Plan B writers, to understand what their oneiric, flippant, sometimes-visionary responses to music actually meant. To some extent, you found yourself following their stories, the way other people follow Hollyoaks... or The Archers.
http://drownedinsound.com/community/boards/music/4181998
The record itself is really good. I've listened to it for the first time this morning and I really enjoyed it.
ReplyDeleteAs for the rating systems, well, it's quite funny how reviewers sometimes are inconsistant. I mean, do you rate the music or the record itself? For instance, a "Best Of" with all the best songs from a band gets three stars out of five, tops, while the three-four albums that originally had these songs on got four or five stars. I can sure understand that it's being considered as a re-issue of something we've already heard, but hey, some people haven't yet!
About the scale, well, it's like school, sometimes you get a A+ (or 20/20, 10/10, 100%... depends on your country), but you're still not perfect. We live in a world that depends too much on numbers. We should give words for every records instead. Like Q did with the word "Spectacular", because to me, the last YYY record is more "Spectacular" than "5/5".
[...] just been reviewing the new Placebo album for JMag. Three and a half stars, if there are any Q Magazine readers out [...]
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