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Reviewing the Review: Part 3: The Score
The practice of giving a albums, movies and games a “Score” as part of the review is at times a hotly contested subject. Some reviewers believe that a review cannot be without a score, otherwise how would the reader be able to tell how much the reviewer liked the game. Other reviewers (including one of my personal favorites, “Yahtzee”) hate it, claiming that their opinions are best voiced through detailed criticism of the work, and that a scored encourages readers to glance over the text and assume that they know all they need to know by a set of numbers. Despite my desire to bow down and lick Yahtzee’s bootstraps, I like the score, and believe that it is a nice summary of the reviewer’s overall impression. I dislike the fact however, that many music reviews use just a single number or star rating for their reviews, and don’t take the time to break down that number into subcategories to give specific insights to each key aspect of the album. I like the score because it helps to clarify exactly how the reviewer feels about a segment of the work that he or she might have had mixed reactions to. For example, a Rolling Stone review of a Guns and Roses album might applaud Axl Rose’s vocal talents or a Slash guitar solo, while simultaneously complaining about the band’s ability to write appealing melodies. This written detail gives us a good sense of what exactly is good or bad in terms of musicianship on the album, but it gives no insight into just how the two criticisms come together to form the reviewer’s opinion on that aspect as a whole. For this reasons many video game sites (see IGN, Gamespot) and a few music review sites (see absolutepunk.net) have devised ways to summarize what they think are the strong points of a work either with a rubric or a set of awards (both positive and negative) to give to the aspects that they find most important to point out.
I have devised a similar system for my reviews, although It is a little more complicated and confusing that those on other sites. I chose 5 categories that I felt were the most important in determining an album’s quality, and then further divided those into 2 very specific sub categories. For each album I review, I give each sub category a score (From 1 to 10) and then total the scores and take the average to get my overall album score. I chose to go from 1 to 10 because I personally hate it when reviews are out of 5. Five tells you absolutely nothing about the album, because there is so little difference between each score. For instance, a classic album like “Who’s Next” might get a score of 5/5, while another very strong album, say “Tommy,” might get a 4/5, to show that it was good, but not as good as “Who’s Next.” The Problem here is that 4/5 is an 80%, a B- if were calling these grades, and Tommy, is not a B- student. Tommy is at least worthy of a B+ if not an A minus. Now we get to the real problem. What happens when we have a contemporary album that is good, but not as good as Tommy? The next highest score below 4 is a 3 (or I guess a 3.5, but if you’re using decimals, why not just use a 10 point system?), which is in High School, a Failing grade. Is The Killers’ “Sam’s Town” a failing album? No, absolutely not. Is it as good as Tommy? No. So then where does it fall on this list? Hard to say. Its for examples like this that I abhor the 5 star system and adhere to a 1-10 spread along with all of the tens place decimals (8.3, 6.1, 5.7) as possible scores as well. In the interest of simplicity, I only use the integers for sub category scores...
... Stay Tuned for an In depth description of each Category and Subcategory in Reviewing the Review Part 3: The Rubric!
Note: Originally, I intended on having on big post that consisted of the above section and followed by a summary of my Rubric, but due to the length of my explanations I will post each category (it ands two subcategories) separately
