 | Between the Buried and Me The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues
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Album Rating: 4.0
Damn man. Getting deep on the rating system.
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philalethes you're thinking too hard bro, relax hahaha.
| | | Album Rating: 2.0
There have been a number of people, including Melvin’s review, that have been making unwarranted objective statements
My review makes no objective statements whatsoever. The reason I don't say in the review that it's all my opinion, is because every review is entirely opinion.
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users like Philalethes make me hate music in general.
| | | Album Rating: 3.0
never heard this band before, this impressed me :]
and wow Philalethes might be the most pretentious person, like, ever
| | | Album Rating: 4.0
lol Philalethes
| | | Album Rating: 4.5
Going to see them saturday can't wait, wtf they did not play White Walls on that set list chambers.
| | | Album Rating: 2.0
Otherwise you basically have showed that you don’t like this style of music, and went out of your way to creatively put down a band that at least had the courage to try and create music that pushes boundaries of musical structure and understanding.
This is so irritating. Ten years of listening to this band, and more than ten listening to technical, chaotic metal doesn't provide enough experience to judge an album? What boundaries are these guys pushing here? I mean, it's certainly camp for this style of music, bordering on musical theatre, but apart from that it's entirely standard.
| | | Album Rating: 4.0
Seeing them in about ten days. Hoping for White Walls but I think I'm getting Selkies.
| | | Album Rating: 3.0
Going to see them saturday can't wait, wtf they did not play White Walls on that set list chambers.
They closed with White Walls for us. It depends how much time they have.
| | | Album Rating: 4.5 | Sound Off
I do apologize for coming off sounding so pretentious. I certainly don't mean to sound like I am some musical czar or anything, or that my ideas are superior to anyone else. Just looking for conversation on music and ideas like everyone else.
This site seems pretty cool, in that it gives everyone a chance to share opinions and discuss ideas about pretty much anything. I was just trying discuss the idea of subjectivity versus objectivity in judging music, which I thought might be extremely pertinent to what goes on in this site.
All these arguments a while back, seemed to keep coming back to wether how we critique and rate music is completely subjective or not. I kept getting that rating music is just opinion in response to any of my posts. I don't think that rating music is completely subjective. If it is, we should just get rid of a number rating system all together. Placing a numerical value on something is, in its very nature, trying to create order, or a hierarchy. The charts on the site and end of year lists, are all also implying a scale with which to judge the years best output against each other. If it is all just opinion, we should just say our opinions, and never disagree with one another, because, they are after all just opinions, and everyone's valid. And yet, we do disagree with each other, and we do assign numbers to reviews. I think these all point to the objective elements that we base our likes/dislikes and our reviews on.
| | | Album Rating: 2.0
I don't think that rating music is completely subjective. If it is, we should just get rid of a number rating system all together. Placing a numerical value on something is, in its very nature, trying to create order, or a hierarchy.
The only heirarchy created by the rating system is one of popularity. The higher the rating, the more popular (and by that, I mean the colloquial use of the term, as in the most liked) the album is amongst those who have heard it. It doesn't attempt to create order, it just reflects the opinion of the userbase. As a human being, you are a subject, to the language you speak, the ideologies into which you've been interpolated and the unconscious elements of your own mind. Everything you think and do is subjective. You've built an ideology around something as trivial as 'rating' an element of human entertainment, and can't even imagine another method. Music theory isn't based on any universal law, it's just made up. Your choice to use it in judging music is precisely that: your choice. If a group of people make up a set of rules that suggest that all metal is satanic, and it doesn't contradict its own internal logic, then should we all follow and believe that system? Is there a god of music telling us that the currect brand of music theory is the right one?
| | | Album Rating: 4.5 | Sound Off
"The only heirarchy created by the rating system is one of popularity. The higher the rating, the more popular the
album."
Right, I thought about this too, but if it were as simple as that, then why not just have a rating system as simple as I
like this or I don't (the Siskel and Ebert method). We could just as easily create a system that shows how many people
like a particular album, thus showing how popular it is in comparison to other albums. A lot of review sites, including
this one, use a numeric system which implies something more than popularity. It points to a level of goodness or
badness, of which you can't arrive at without some sort of objective basis.
| | | Album Rating: 2.0
Goodness and badness are just made up, sometimes-agreed upon positions. The Beatles being a classic band is not a fact in the way that the law of entropy is. Lots of people love The Beatles and call them classic. That's it.
| | | Album Rating: 4.5 | Sound Off
"Music theory isn't based on any universal law, it's just made up."
Also true to the same extent that nothing in our reality or science is ultimate truth. They are all just theories after all. However, music theory is like any other theory of science, in that it is really just an inference to the best explanation as to why something happens. There is hundreds of years of evidence and study built in to describing music theory. Music theory is definitely not the only thing to base a rating of music off of. But consciously or not, our brains do hear and react to these patterns in music, and therefore play in to our judging of music.
| | | Album Rating: 3.0
Philalethes just stfu already.
| | | Album Rating: 2.0
Music theory offers a framework to work by, and some explanation as to why music has the effect it does, for example the effect of rhythm on human emotion. But music theory isn't a science, because it can't empirically prove anything. It's a set of rules that you can follow, play with, bend or break, but it is just a set of rules made up by us. Any music judged by it is going on the internal logic of that system. Science, on the other hand, tests hypotheses in the aim of describing what exists and what is possible.
No matter what objective rules you attempt to apply, the fact is that people react to music with gut instinct, with emotion and, whether conscious or not, whether positive or not, prejudice. It's surely fair to say that the vast majority of humanity would find all aggressive, chaotic metal to be bad. Do you think the musicians making the music care? Do you think they want to be accepted by everyone, or indeed anyone, because they follow some centuries old set of rules? The fact that you think you're in some elite echelon does nothing but massage your ego.
| | | Album Rating: 4.5 | Sound Off
"The Beatles being a classic band is not a fact in the way that the law of entropy is. Lots of people love The Beatles
and call them classic. That's it."
I also agree that a subjective statement such as The Beatles being a classic band is not the same as the law of
entropy. However, there is a reason why so many people do like The Beatles. We actually studied their music back in
college, right along side of many classical masters. This is because their music was riddled with objective musical
elements and structures, that were also found in classical music. These definable elements are the ones that our
brains react to on such a basic level, that we don't even always realize it. This is one of the big reasons that they are
able to appeal to so many people. I think you would be hard pressed to find a band that can go against conventions
of music theory, and would still appeal to so many people.
But theory and objectivity is only half of the battle. There is so much more that subjectively goes in to liking a band
like The Beatles. There are social elements, political views, and emotional attachments that speak differently to
everyone. I don't think that we can get away from either subjectivity or objectivity in critiquing music. They are both
a part of how we experience music and the world around us.
| | | Album Rating: 2.0
Objectivity is something we should and do strive towards, but also something that we can never reach. We are all products of our environments, and different conditions would have meant we liked different music.
I don't understand what issue you have with people saying that bands are bad/shit/awful or whatever. Do you not think the world would be slightly nightmarish if we could only say 'I don't like this, but it meets the criteria of good music so therefore it is.' Personally, when I hear something as crap as Defeater, or Skrewdriver, I like saying that they are a huge pile of rancid shit, perhaps even adding that their fans are sexual deviants with shrivelled gonads. Just like when I hear The Mountain Goats I love saying that they're the most awesome fucking thing since chocolate covered boobs. Politeness is about the worst thing humanity has ever produced, because it's all so false.
| | | Album Rating: 3.0
This thread is now loaded with so many unnecessary long comments.
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