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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3331 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 10, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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For completeness' sake, here are the criteria for the remaining ratings in the system:

****½ Records that would be 5-star albums but for one or two serious and unavoidable flaws. This category also includes records that have no major flaw but that either don’t gel when taken as a whole or that lack the kind of transcendent material necessary to achieve a 5-star rating.

**** An “average great album”. These records may have serious flaws that are outweighed by an abundance of good to excellent material and can be recommended without hesitation. These records don’t represent significant milestones in the history of rock music, but are solid albums that go beyond what could normally be considered routine.

***½ Records that have one or two great-to-excellent cuts but are dominated by material that isn’t quite up to standard, though often coming close. Can also be used for records that would receive a higher rating but contain material that is unforgivable. A routine album from a band that normally puts out great music, and a minor highlight from a band that normally puts out pedestrian music.

*** Above-average. These are essentially 3½-star albums that don’t contain any great-to excellent cuts. Sometimes the underlying approach is interesting enough but the songwriting just isn’t there. Other times the filler crowds out the more considered material. Overall these are worth hearing, as long as one keeps their expectations in check.

**½ Represents the Platonic ideal of an “average” record – one or two decent but not great tracks surrounded by mediocre filler. In practice these are often albums that have 3-star songwriting but without a 3-star approach. This is the point where casual fans of a group will usually get off the train.

** This is where mediocrity has come to not only dominate the record but to completely overwhelm it. The material is not exactly bad, per se, simply boring and uninspired.

*½ A distinction is in order here – mediocre means that while the material isn’t exactly good, it’s still at least listenable, the kind of thing that could play in the background without incident even if you’d never want to listen to it closely. Bad material is actually offensive to the ears, making you want to turn it off. These records are mediocre at best and bad at worst.

  •   Albums that should never have been released. Either unlistenable failed experiments that while bad aren’t entirely without interest, or records where the bad material starts to drown out the merely mediocre.

½ Albums that never should have been recorded. Unlistenable in their entirety, these albums nevertheless have some small silver lining that saves them from the lowest category.

0 Reserved for the very rare album that manages to offend from the opening cut to the last. It can’t be overstated how bad a record has to be to land here.

I included this description because I want to make it clear that just because I ranked an album toward the bottom of this list, or indeed, because I did not rank it near the top of this list, does not mean that the album is deficient in some way. Any record rates a half-star higher on a good day and a half-star lower on a bad day. As such, while to some extent these albums naturally seemed to fall into tiers, it isn’t always obvious that Record X is necessarily better than Record Y, and one’s opinion is always going to be dependent on his own subjective judgment. Furthermore, rating albums using the rubric established above is difficult enough, but it is relatively easy compared with sorting them sequentially based on quality. For an album to rate 5 stars it only has to be free of major flaws. To rate high on a list like this, though, there is an essential conflict between historical relevance and enjoyability—it’s one thing to recognize an album’s greatness in an abstract sense, another to actually want to listen to it regularly. This becomes problematic when one has to make the decision whether to rank a personal favorite higher than an established part of the canon. The point of all this is that compiling a list like this is a highly subjective process. Any album on it could get a ranking of forty places higher or lower depending on whether it’s a good day or a bad day. People are bound to complain that a dozen of their favorite recordings are omitted from the top ten. To that I have to say: Make your own list; I’d love to see it.

I'm not much of a music head, but I do watch and review a lot of movies and was struck at how neatly your 5 star rubric matches to mine for movies, like almost to a T. Even the 4.5/5 star distinction where a 4.5 star is basically perfect, but to get that last little mmph it needs to move me in some way, or change me. Transcendent, yes!

Do you have some examples of 0 stars? I would enjoy seeing those

I was going to include the zero star albums as a separate "Bonus Feature" one of these weeks, but since you asked:

The first broad category is experimental garbage by minor artists who seem to specialize in experimental garbage. Daniel Higgs manages two enteries in this category; Magic Alphabet is 42 minutes of him fooling around with a Jew's Harp, and Say God is a weird quasi-religious mess where he plays harmonium and does that sing-songy chanting that priests sometimes do. Also in this category are Eric Copeland's Strange Days, which sounds like a mashup of random snippets taped off the radio unartfully combined, and The Messy Jessy Fiesta by Blectum from Blechdom, an Indie Electronic duo who obviously don't have any musical training and have the musical sophistication of a 13 year-old fooling around with a cheap keyboard.

Moving into slightly more mainstream territory, Casiotone for the Painfully Alone's debut album Answering Machine Music is a bunch of generic emo songs set to a programmed Casio keyboard and other cheap instruments. The Moldy Peaches are best known for the annoying song that appears at the end of the movie Juno and their lone album (which contains the song) is similar crap that sounds like teenage poetry set to simple melodies and recorded in the cheapest way possible, on purpose. And of course there's Lou Reed's classic Metal Machine Music, the first entry we have by a mainstream musician, except that the four sides of guitar feedback were recorded as an intentional Fuck You to his record company so there's an asterisk here.

Moving on to albums by mainstream musicians that were intended to actually be good. First we have Rod Stewart's 1984 album Camouflage, which includes "Some Guys Have All the Luck", easily his worst single, and the rest of the album is even worse, just a gloss of bad '80s production over unmelodic crap. Jeff Beck's 1985 album Flash is something of a twin to this (Stewart sang on an awful cover of "People Get Ready" and Beck played guitar on some cuts from Camouflage) and is bad for all the same reasons. The Beach Boys 1992 album Summer in Paradise is nothing more than a Mike Love cash-in that sounds like it was recorded entirely with 1992-era Pro Tools presets. Finally, there's Queen's soundtrack to Flash Gordon which is incredibly kitschy and, to my recollection, is mostly dialogue from the movie. It should be mentioned that, apart from Flash Gordon, all of these mainstream records include terrible covers, proving that songwriting isn't the only problem here. In addition to the version of "People Get Ready" from Flash, Stewart's Camouflage contains a cover of "All Right Now", and Summer in Paradise has an awful cover of "Hot Fun in the Summertime". To put an exclamation point on this, Jeff Beck released a zero star single around the same time, a cover of "Wild Thing" that's worse than anything on either his or Stewart's record. It also gets bonus points for having the worst picture sleeve in the history of music, a photograph of what appears to be a clown from an S&M club.

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