5 star ratings

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 Logan wrote:

Regarding your earlier post, Steve, one should not dismiss the idea that people may have some common sense. If someone is reading a review of a folk album, and despises everything folk, even if someone says something like "Highly recommended to Prog fans" shame on him/her for buying the album as a fan of particular types of Prog and a loather of other types and being disappointed. I have come across people who seemed to genuinely insist that no true Prog fan will not like a particular piece of music (which is the no true Scotsman fallacy). I've argued that the ratings descriptions would be better if changed to something more precise. Instead of, say, "five stars: Essential: a masterpiece of progressive rock music", something more like" 5 Stars: a masterpiece, according to my tastes, of music of its ilk", perhaps even if its style is sh*t, and one likes the taste of it. But I am in all probability being too pedantic.

One can bring objective evaluation into a review, but appreciation is so subjective. I'd rather write reviews without having to rate it, or make the ratings explicitly subjective. 5 Stars = I Adore It.

I most like to read good and insightful descriptions of music, which includes describing the styles, mentioning other music/albums that relate to it, some historical nuggets based on one's research/ knowledge, and a bit of humour can be nice for enjoyabaility when it comes to reading such things. With an accurate description and reference points, I can often tell whether I will like an album, and I don't then need people to tell me that I should like it, or even if they like it.

Regarding TCat's comment about professional reviewers, I wonder how many who write reviews here have turned it into more than a hobby? For a while I was getting paid to write film reviews for a local newspaper, not that I did enough to make a living out of it, and I had some conflict due to my own arrogance. It as never a career, and I never ddid it enough or for long enough to have considered myself a professional film reviewer/ critic. At the first website I was a member of, I was hired as a web-writer due to my posts, didn't last that long and the production company was bought out. I haven't done anything much since that I thought might lead to work on-line. I would like to think some of the reviewers at this site were able to derive income from writing reviews and turn that hobby into a career (even if it was from creating their own websites which they would then derive income from).

If you have a passion for writing reviews of good-for-you and bad-for-you albums, and an income outside of it in a job that one is satisfied with, then perhaps one wouldn't care if one is, or ever becomes, a professional reviewer or not. Of course that depends on the individual. It does sometimes stagger me when it comes to the amount of work and time that people are willing to put into income generating sites with no remuneration.

I never enjoyed writing reviews much any more than I enjoyed writing essays, I used to like to write forms of creative writing, but the challenge as well as the results ultimately can be rewarding. Just the act of writing can help improve one's mind. I prefer discussion, although I find writing a rather clunky means of communication, so is oral communication, but generally I'm fine with good old-fashioned telepathy, though I'm more adept at more limited mind-reading. I know what you're thinking even if you don't, and if you think otherwise, you're wrong. ;)
I hear what you're saying. We're stuck with the parameters we've been dealt i.e. 5 stars = masterpiece instead of 5 stars = I adore it. But being stuck in this rut is not a good reason to ignore these parameters now as it does a disservice to past reviews that adhered to them. In other words bombarding reviews now with 5 stars does 2 things. 1) It's like the boy crying wolf. When the real masterwork appears it will be ignored as just another in the pile and 2) the oversaturation of 5 star reviews dilutes the worth of past 5 star masterworks, as if they too are just another of a longer line leading to the pile. There is no easy way to get around this, imo, overrating reviews is just wrong.