It’s an arbitrary thing, ratings…but occasionally their subjectivity collapses to the naked singularity of the completely laughable. What sort of baseline are pop critics working from when another less than stellar U2 record fetches a five star rating from Rolling Stone and four out of five stars in the recent issue of MOJO? Love, loathe it or be bathed in utter indifference, are consumers really supposed to buy into the notion that along with records like Revolver, Pet Sounds, and London Calling, room now needs to be made on that roster for No Line On The Horizon? Is there some sort of implied 21st century context that we’re all now subject to that obviates the benchmarks of the past?
Yeah…sorry Chauncey, it all smells of an editorial stance that trying very hard not to offend. I’m all about giving U2 props when stumble on a decent riff (“Vertigo”), but the thin “swagger” and faux Dylan-esque delivery of “Get On Your Boots” ?!? That’s one star gone already.
I’m much more up for seeing the scale stretched out to something more realistic and less constricting. What’s wrong the ol’ 1 to 10, with the brazen freedom to employ a decimal point when necessary? Or perhaps we could go the Rotten Tomatoes route and compile percentages based on a simple yay or nay? Either way, what passes now as record rating is far closer to useless than it’s ever been.
6 Responses to Stars Are Stars?
Yup. Yes. Oui. Ja. Uh-huh. Solid, Jackson. Sho-nuf. Right on.
Star ratings are an oozing carbuncle on the already unlovely face of music criticism.
As critics we should stick to saying what we think and feel about the music.
These ratings, we all know, are little more than yet another sop to the notion that readers have a sadly limited attention span. The assumption is that they’re probably not reading the review anyway so at least if they have a star rating they might go out and buy the product on that basis alone.
Why are we assuming that our readership(s) is (are) dumb and lazy? If we go on doing that we’ll end up getting the audience we’re creating. It’s a classic self-fulfilling prophecy.
And if we get an audience that dumb, I’d lay odds they won’t understand the adverts that pay for the magazines, so the admen will pull out their dollars and stick them where there’s an audience that can read.
Besides, five stars compared to what? Compared to all time or compared to everything else that came out this month? Or compared to what the average reader can remember? If it’s compared to all time, well, I’m just not prepared to believe that every month sees at least one more album that’s an all-time classic. If it’s compared to this month then surely that means the five stars are only as good as the month the album happens to have been released in.
I’ve really no idea why I’m arguing this point at all. Star ratings are nonsense. Nufsed.
The logical result of stars (whether out of five, 10, 20 or whatever) is grade inflation of the sort that bedevils the education system. As soon as you grant full marks, you’ve created a hostage to fortune that can’t be eradicated. Sometimes the evaluation holds (OK Computer got some very good marks on release) and sometimes it comes back to bite your arse (so did Be Here Now).
If we really need to offer a synthesis of the reviewer’s opinion, concise enough to fit on a cover sticker, why not a single word, usually but not necessarily an adjective, that conveys a qualitative opinion, but doesn’t demand a fixed place in a quantitative metric? Rather than “9/10″ or “**”, what about: “Outstanding”; “Interesting”; “Disappointing”; “Glum”; “Brave”; “Derivative”; “Perky”; “Piffle”; “Swaggering”; “Pointless”; “Steinmanesque”; “Farfisatastic”; “Beige”; “Tolerable”; “Hmmm”; “Ouch”; “Nah”? And let’s make it a rule that no magazine can apply a particular word to more than one product in a single calendar year.
That should stretch the vocabularies of a few hacks I could mention.
Sometimes the stars awarded don’t even relate to the opinion of the reviewer. The text can be a no-holds-barred slag-off, yet as if by magic at least three, and on occasion four stars appear.
But more than stars, it’s the capsule review I hate most. Where once the inkies would run reviews of at least 400 words, we now get these poxy minimalist write-ups that tell us nothing.
How true, Mark, and we’re back to the assumption that magazine readers are too stupid to understand or too lazy to read anything longer than 50 words.
I’ve seen review formats that specify a 70 word text which must, as well as the review, include a brief summation of the artist’s career and style, plus the titles of at least two songs. Looking at the new Costello CD, the average title length is about five words, so two titles is ten words. That leaves 60 for the remainder of the review. Let’s say another carefully crafted ten words go on ‘career and style’, so there’s fifty left.
Some of those words will be names of people in the band and the instruments they play, maybe there’s a guest artist or two that must be mentioned.
I’ve often felt like shoehorning in the critical element in a single meaningless sentence at the end along the lines of, “Oh, and the album’s quite good.”
To be fair though, we’ve all had albums – usually by non-songwriting minor ex-members of once famous bands now doing their obligatory solo opus before disappearing back into the woodwork – where fifty words felt decidedly over-generous.
The star system is particularly venal when it comes to sites like Amazon, which tend to not publish reviews with very low star ratings. It can be frustrating if you’ve written a review of a particularly awful book to have it deleted. The best way to get around it is to award the book half a star more than you would have, but to keep the review as tepid. It doesn’t get round the problem of really dire books, though.
No star ratings? You mean that we’d have to go back to reading all those reviews? Even now, reading the review is necessary when the almost meaningless 3 star rating is given…
What chance was there that Rolling Stone or Mojo were going to give less than 4 stars to a new U2 album? (not that I’m going to bother to read it even if it has a hundred stars). How often do editors adjust the ratings for major album releases? And what’s the deal with those ads that quote from reviews in the very same issue?