The Book of Nine Balls Ch. 4: 2+2=5?

We now return you to our regularly scheduled bitching and moaning...

In the last chapter, our hero...you know what? If you forgot, just take a moment to reread it. Not that these chapters correlate or anything. Take your time; I'll wait... *gets up and goes to get a drink and some chips...munch, munch, munch* Now, onto chapter 4.

* While I am doing pretty well ripping apart the fabric of music reviews, I might as well stick with what I appear to have a natural talent for. Here is another quote from a review in Rolling Stone for Mary J. Blige's The Breakthrough:

"Blige's new disc...doesn't deliver everything its title suggests, but it'll do until a real breakthrough comes along..."

Keep that quote in mind...trust me, it'll be important later. Got it? Okay - now, the magazine uses the commonplace 5-star rating system. Of course, a rating of 5 stars is considered the pinnacle of musical genius and potency. A measly 1 star means that even your pets wouldn't take a steaming dump on it for fear that they will contract whatever grotesquely suck ass affliction the music and/or musicians suffer from to earn a single star. Yeah, yeah, the star may have a golden color, but it sucks, okay? I've, on rare occasions, taken dumps that color, but I'm not parading THAT around like I'm the king of the goddamn forest, now am I? So take your teeny tiny little golden colored star, the electroplated turd of acknowledgement that it is, and go back to whatever primordial pool of vomit your cells evolved and took shape from. At least, that's my interpretation of what a 1-star rating means; I fully understand if your perspective is different. "To each their own" works for me (note to music critics who stumble across this - see how using a quote or descriptive language can actually apply to what the writer is talking about? That's a freebie; I'm gonna charge you for the next one *winks mockingly while making the requisite camera shudder sound with his mouth*).

To be fair to the critics, they are only following the current trend. I don't believe many of them want to write that way about music. As someone who loves music deeply and passionately, I feel that writing that way about something that I love, as I am guessing the critics do (deep down I want to believe they still love music), distances me from it...almost like I am using bigger words and more adjectives to cover up how I really feel. It is the difference between saying "That dress is stunning; it really accentuates your curvateous figure" and "Nice dress; I so wanna bang you like a drum" (Shay, I can hear you laughing - that one was for you...nice shoes, by the way *wink*). I think the former is a much more articulate way of expressing the same sentiment as the latter, but that does not make it more effective for the audience. But I am not getting to the point of this bullet - I sometimes get hung up on the past. I like closure. Call me a bitch if you want, but I like conclusion.

Now, do you remember the quote about Mary's CD? No? What the hell do you mean, "No?" I asked you to remember a quote from a music review...not Bernoulli's fucking equation! Stop sitting there feeling as stupid as you're looking! Go reread it; I'll wait. *gulps down his drink, angrily banging the glass down and muttering to himself* Finished? *sighs, visibly annoyed* Finish then... Done now? Good - with a quote like that, what do you think the star rating would be? Me? I think the album would either be 2.5 or 3 stars. Yeah, obviously the album did better than 3 stars or else I wouldn't be writing this. It got 4. I'm not saying that the CD doesn't deserve the 4 stars it received, but I think that the review should reflect the overall rating. In reading many of these reviews, I get the impression that the person writing the review is not the same person looking to hand out gold colored stars. Please do not think that I am picking on Rolling Stone; I see similar inconsistencies with Entertainment Weekly, although I think they are less obvious. The miniature free version of Filter I read seems to have a good handle on being consistent between the details of the review and the overall impression of the rating (coincidentally, I think Filter's percentile system is horrible - there is such a thing as being too scientific). I have decided to use elements from various sources for my reviews: I like EW's letter grade system the most, but I am taking the concept of listing standout tracks from RS. I might just list my favorite track. The format is still volatile. I just think that if you are going to say a CD is a 4-star offering to the public, you should reinforce that notion with positive language. Or at least let the person writing the review give the final rating. You know...whichever one works for you.

Oh it ain't over yet...