Music cannot be reviewed properly

[SantoUno]

You must have read at least one album review in your life, and it is most likely about an album you hold dear in your collection. But I'm sure you disagreed with a lot of points as to whether an album is good or bad.

But in truth, NO ONE can review an album. Why not? Because music is always about personal tastes and preference. Someone might call an album terrible while others will praise it, and sometimes if someone considers an aspect of an album (low quality, repetition, unorganized) to be terrible and detrimental someone else might consider it as good. Not to mention that sometimes our views of certain albums and music might change over time. For example we might be unsatisfied with an album we bought recently but months later you might give it a second go and start enjoying it like never before.

Trying to be completely neutral and subjective is impossible as well. We will ALWAYS feel bias towards certan music, no matter what we say to try and deny it. Universal reviewers like AllMusic are BS because they have most likely given low ratings to albums that you consider to be great (In my case, they gave Sepultura - Morbid Visions 2 stars, while I think it deserves 4 stars).

In all serious I never ever want to try and review an album. I tried to once, but it is impossible. Exactly where do you start? What can you say about it? Song by song? Not so great as a whole. At least with video games we have been able to establish some agreed standards that dictate whether a game is good, but with music it is completely impossible. There will never be "the perfect album". No matter how many people like it there will always be at least one person who considers it to be average or awful because of certain qualities about it that they consider bad while others consider good.

 

[rokkolpo]

yes correct.
kinda obvious

 

[Julianking93]

Correct. That's true with everything.

Its just an opinion and everyone has them, so why does some dipshit at IGN get paid for it?

 

[teisjm]

True, though theres certain things a review can do, that makes some sense

Compare to other bands, not as in "this band is better than this otehr band" but, this CD sound a lit like "this other band" that way you know that you might wanna check it out.

Or they can compare to the bands prior releases, like Linkin Parks minutes to midnight is a lot quieter than their older albums.

As long as they try to stick to the more factual aspects, and not subjective stuff like, "this album is derived of all sense of emotion and art, cause i'm a stuck-up-my-own-arse-type-rewiever, who loves nothing but nazi marching tunes" This kinda makes the words better/worse unusable.

Theres just way to many music rewievers who are stuck too far up their rear end to realize that their personal taste in music isn't über compared to everyone else, and that most people don't give a fuck about whether they think the trakcs suck cause ethey remind said rewiever of the countless number of women and sheep who has turned him down durring his life.

 

[Zombie_Fish]

This is true of almost all reviewing, though. Regardless of what medium it is across, a review is simply an opinion of something. Even with gaming, whilst we can break it up into different aspects, these aspects still rely upon a person's opinion for reviewing the game, and in the right case whether or not you like a certain aspect will not affect your own liking/ disliking for a game or have very little effect. However, you may complain about reviewing each song at a time, but that is commonly done for music reviewing.

Art is an entirely subjective topic -- always has been and always will be. No medium of art is an exception to this.

 

[zehydra]

Except you can say that Music is some things and not others, right? So if someone claims something is Music, and it fails to qualify as music, could you consider it to be bad music?

I totally understand what you're saying btw, and I think you're right that music is very much a subjective thing. But it is not wholly subjective in my opinion, for instance very few people will be able to stand people banging cymbals together with a choir of kazoos playing random notes and babies screaming. Technically it could be called music, but most people would agree that it would be bad.

 

[Ciarang]

You must have read at least one album review in your life

Must I?

And yes... people like music based on their own tastes, what else is new?

 

[-Orgasmatron-]

You must have read at least one album review in your life, and it is most likely about an album you hold dear in your collection. But I'm sure you disagreed with a lot of points as to whether an album is good or bad.

But in truth, NO ONE can review an album. Why not? Because music is always about personal tastes and preference.

I stopped reading here because I really don't think three paragraphs needed to be written to explain this. It's common knowledge.

 

[MiracleOfSound]

Metal Hammer gave St Anger 10/10.

In otherwords, I agree with the OP.

 

[DannyBoy451]

You must have read at least one album review in your life, and it is most likely about an album you hold dear in your collection. But I'm sure you disagreed with a lot of points as to whether an album is good or bad.

But in truth, NO ONE can review an album. Why not? Because music is always about personal tastes and preference. Someone might call an album terrible while others will praise it, and sometimes if someone considers an aspect of an album (low quality, repetition, unorganized) to be terrible and detrimental someone else might consider it as good. Not to mention that sometimes our views of certain albums and music might change over time. For example we might be unsatisfied with an album we bought recently but months later you might give it a second go and start enjoying it like never before.

Trying to be completely neutral and subjective is impossible as well. We will ALWAYS feel bias towards certan music, no matter what we say to try and deny it. Universal reviewers like AllMusic are BS because they have most likely given low ratings to albums that you consider to be great (In my case, they gave Sepultura - Morbid Visions 2 stars, while I think it deserves 4 stars).

In all serious I never ever want to try and review an album. I tried to once, but it is impossible. Exactly where do you start? What can you say about it? Song by song? Not so great as a whole. At least with video games we have been able to establish some agreed standards that dictate whether a game is good, but with music it is completely impossible. There will never be "the perfect album". No matter how many people like it there will always be at least one person who considers it to be average or awful because of certain qualities about it that they consider bad while others consider good.

Thank you, Captian Obvious.

Also: I think you mean "Objective"

 

[BonsaiK]

You must have read at least one album review in your life, and it is most likely about an album you hold dear in your collection. But I'm sure you disagreed with a lot of points as to whether an album is good or bad.

But in truth, NO ONE can review an album. Why not? Because music is always about personal tastes and preference. Someone might call an album terrible while others will praise it, and sometimes if someone considers an aspect of an album (low quality, repetition, unorganized) to be terrible and detrimental someone else might consider it as good. Not to mention that sometimes our views of certain albums and music might change over time. For example we might be unsatisfied with an album we bought recently but months later you might give it a second go and start enjoying it like never before.

Trying to be completely neutral and subjective is impossible as well. We will ALWAYS feel bias towards certan music, no matter what we say to try and deny it. Universal reviewers like AllMusic are BS because they have most likely given low ratings to albums that you consider to be great (In my case, they gave Sepultura - Morbid Visions 2 stars, while I think it deserves 4 stars).

In all serious I never ever want to try and review an album. I tried to once, but it is impossible. Exactly where do you start? What can you say about it? Song by song? Not so great as a whole. At least with video games we have been able to establish some agreed standards that dictate whether a game is good, but with music it is completely impossible. There will never be "the perfect album". No matter how many people like it there will always be at least one person who considers it to be average or awful because of certain qualities about it that they consider bad while others consider good.

Music can be reviewed objectively, but it requires a certain amout of theoretical and technical knowledge both to write such a review and also to be able to read and understand it. Most people who read rock/pop/heavy metal/rap/[insert genre here] music publications don't have this type of knowledge, and nor do most people who write such reviews, so therefore most serious reviewing of music does not happen in the field of popular music media. Instead you get fairly fluffy reviews that talk about highly subjective stuff like what someone is wearing, how much drugs they took, and so forth. The best you can hope for is a lyrical analysis, but an actual musical analysis pretty much just doesn't happen, because analysing and breaking down the music in anything more than very vague terms would actually alienate a lot of readers, because they would be reading about things like parallel vs contrapuntal harmony, aural excitation frequencies, harmonic dissonance and resolution and other concepts that your average punter isn't that interested in and for the most part doesn't fully understand.

Reviewing music properly, understanding how and why it works (or doesn't work) also requires a great deal of time to do well and music publications figure no-one would care about the details anyway so won't invest that time - they figure the readership just wants to know if it's "any good" or not. Same applies to "space" issues in printed publications - someone publishing a magazine isn't going to want to fill the pages with a bunch of stuff only a slim minority of music fans even understand let alone care about. They could have sold that space to advertisers, or fit another article in there.

Obviously there are subjective elements to music taste, but music can still be discussed and analysed objectively, because it is an object. It isn't an object in the same sense that a chair is an object, what music really is, is a pattern of vibration of molecules, more of an "event object". Any pattern of vibration of molecules can be analysed and compared to any other.