Objectivity In Rating Music

Plus: Mariah Carey, Amy Winehouse, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Big Star, Boyz II Men, Lucinda Williams

Welcome to Jamwise! 

I’m listening to the greatest albums of today and all time in random order to expand my musical horizons and learn the wisdom of the musical ages. This week we’re listening to some more great stuff, thinking about the way we try to “objectively” rate music, and reimagining how I rate music in the future.

Here are this week’s randomly selected albums.

Also don’t forget to check out the Jamwise Tracker. Things are starting to take shape! I’ve started tracking my preferences in a few new ways - like what years am I listening to, and how does the age of the music affect my taste? And how much does previous exposure to music affect how much I enjoy it?

So far, the age of the music doesn’t show a clear trend, but we are early in the game. However the graph of my taste vs. my previous exposure is pretty telling - albums I’ve heard a lot before seem to be scoring higher, while those I haven’t are all over the place. I’m positive there’s something to this, and I’m going to keep a close eye on it going forward. Definitely an interesting insight if it keeps holding true in the long run.

You may also note, if you look closely, that I’m a HUMUNGOUS nerd.

Let us jam.

#1 Record - Big Star

Ahhh, yet another band from the 70’s I haven’t really heard of. Classic Millennial.

Big Star was a rock band, and #1 record was their… first record. I love an efficient title, nice job team. It had some issues on release because the record company could’t produce enough copies to keep up with the high demand. Critics loved the album from the beginning and it’s at #474 on the Rolling Stone list.

The album starts with the fantastic rock blues jam feel, no frills, just straight into the 70’s rock. The Ballad of El Goodo got me just on the title, and the song was like a ballady mix of the Beatles (who were one of Big Star’s big influences), the Band, and maybe a little reminiscent of Tom Petty, or maybe he’s just on my mind because he’s in the list today and I love Tom Petty. 

When In The Street came on I realized I did know some Big Star - it’s the theme song for That 70’s Show, although that was a cover version by Cheap Trick called “That 70’s Song.” I had no fricking idea. The original is solid, too.

This was fun - I love finding old school rock and roll I’ve never heard before. It gives me a pretty specific feeling knowing this song has been out there for decades and it’s just now found its way to me. I keep a playlist of all those kind of songs that might be common knowledge to millions of other people but are new to me. I find it’s a cool juxtaposition of “old to the world” and “new to me”. You could make the case that JamWise’s mission is pretty much driven by that exact feeling. A lot of Big Star songs are going into that playlist.

Objective Rating - 7.5

Jamwise Taste Rating - 8 (I kept imaging adding it to my nonexistent vinyl collection which must be a good sign)

Jamwise Descriptors - Under My Radar, Old But New To Me, Songwriting Sensei

New Jamwise Jams

• Thirteen

• Don’t Lie to Me

• My Life Is Right

• Watch The Sunrise

Damn The Torpedoes - Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers

This album is one reason I’m glad I’m not trying to make the an unbiased review blog. I fricking love Tom Petty, and I probably know more than 75% of the words on this entire album. This will be unashamedly biased, although as usual I will do my best to listen as if it’s a new album coming out and I’m a fan hearing it for the first time.

Refugee, the first of many bangers on this album, makes me thing back to Week 2 and my thoughts about the need for context in music. This song feels as if it needs political and cultural context to really understand - I don’t need that to enjoy it, unlike some genres that are new to me like Jazz, but it would add to the understanding for sure. 

Then the rest of the hits. Here Comes My Girl. Even the Losers. Don’t Do Me Like That. I was fangirling the entire time. I wonder if people knew how epic these songs would be in the all-time lists when this album came out. 

Tom Petty songs seem so deceptively simple, but there always so much tension between the vocals and the straightforward chords and the lyrics that forms it together into something more. Bigger. It’s intangible to me but there’s something there that’s a little bit magic. 

Objective Rating - 8.5

Jamwise Taste Rating - 9

Jamwise Descriptors - Songwriting Sensei, American Legend, On Repeat

Re-appreciated or new Jamwise Jams

• “There Goes My Girl”

• “Don’t Do Me Like That”

• “Louisiana Rain”

The Emancipation of Mimi - Mariah Carey

Considering this newsletter will be coming out right after Christmas, it seems super appropriate that I’m listening to one of the best Christmas song artists of all time. This album came out in 2005, and it was the tenth (!!!) album from Mariah Carey. It has an absolute all-star lineup of guest appearances, and it’s rated #379 on the Rolling Stone top 500 list. 

Honestly I didn’t really know many Mariah Carey songs before this album, despite having a healthy respect for her talent and her ability to bring the holiday season to life year after year. I can still remember one year singing “All I Want For Christmas Is You” with my buddy at our college bar. Except I can barely remember it, it was July, and we got booed offstage because we didn’t know the lyrics despite my buddy promising he knew every single one of them and all I had to do was fist pump along with him. 

Mariah Carey has an unimaginable level of talent. This album felt like what it was - an all-star game, where every track seemed tailored to feature her voice, her guest star’s voice, and the hyper-polished production. That being said, I didn’t really relate to the music. At a certain point, an album full of all-stars runs the risk of not having that “team” cohesion of others, and that was my impression of this album. And it makes perfect sense, honestly - after ten albums, you should be making albums like this, just tossing out single after single with your equally famous buddies. It was the opposite of raw, almost too polished, and I found that disconnecting me from the songs little by little as they went by.

However, this album did spark the idea for this week’s JamWisdom. This is the most distinct example of an album that I would give a super SUPER high rating objectively, but scores pretty low on my own personal taste meter. I know how talented and good and polished Mariah Carey is, and it’s easy for me to say it’s a 9 but not for me. But that really got me thinking about objective music ratings and how they relate to our personal enjoyment of an album or song - more on that later.

Objective Rating - 9

Jamwise Taste Rating - 2

Jamwise Descriptors - Mega Voice, Polished to a Shine, Talent Monster

II - Boyz II Men

Released in 1994, #495 on the Rolling Stone top 500 list.

Is it possible for a song to be too smooth? This is the impossible question I asked myself in the first half of this album, which is unusual in that most of the single hits are saved for the end. The beginning of the album is full of soulful runs and smooth beats that don’t really resolve into any kind of hook that… well, hooked me. But this might be because I knew what was coming for me in the latter half of this album.  

Because after the Interlude is a straight up love fest. “I’ll Make Love to You” serves as a massive hit and also as a great summary the attitude each of these songs give off. It’s not a request or an invitation - it’s a statement of fact.

This album is clearly a defining example of whatever genre you want to lump it into. Didn’t get me in the mood, personally, but I get it. 

Objective Rating - 6

Jamwise Taste Rating - 2

Jamwise Descriptors - Moist, Moist, Moist

New Jamwise Jams

• “Water Runs Dry” (lol the opposite of moist)

Back To Black - Amy Winehouse

After listening to this, I feel like even as great as the 2 big singles from this album are, they don’t fully capture all of Amy’s talent. Listening to the whole album reveals so much more about her voice and style than I’d been exposed to with the singles I’d heard before. She has this super cool bluesy timing that just adds to the magic.  

This album had so much going for it. Amy’s voice, especially the way she seems to come in and out of each line so fluently and effortlessly, were pure magic to me. The songs were also great, and the arrangements were only a little horn-heavy in certain places, as one might expect from a young Mark Ronson (one of the producers, together with Salaam Remi), but this album helped put Ronson on the map for good reason as well. 

I’m in awe of how good this was and will be returning to it many times in the future.

Objective Rating - 9

Jamwise Taste Rating - 8.6

Jamwise Descriptors - Mega Voice, No Bad Songs, Tip Top Talent

New Jamwise Jams

• You Know I’m no good

• Back to black

• Love is a losing game

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road - Lucinda Williams

She was known as a great song writer with lots of hits and was clearly authentic but at first, I didn’t understand the placement of this album in the top lists. This is where I wonder if critics sometimes can get into an echo chamber of their own. They listen to each other as much as to the music.

The songs improved after the midpoint, starting with Can’t Let Go. Did I like the songs more because I’d heard a familiar hit, or was it the songs themselves? It’s hard for me to say. The first part of the album sounded like it were written by an AI caricature of a country artist, while the rest had more character and variety of structure. 

Only once I got through all the songs did I realize this is an album by a songwriter first and foremost, and I should have approached it with that in mind. These songs are arranged like demo tracks in need of covering and high quality production before they’ll sound like a hit album. That kind of raw and simple production works for a lot of artists, and on reflection it works for Lucinda’s album, but I didn’t have proper grounding before listening. I think that led to the first songs hitting wrong - especially as the last things I listened to were Mariah Carey and Amy Winehouse. Again, context and transition influenced my perception. 

Overall it wasn’t the disaster I initially thought, and I get how Lucinda Williams could make such a stellar career as a songwriter. I also learned a lot about how to control my initial reactions - I’m glad I did, because I would have missed out on some good music if I’d let my knee-jerk reaction make my decision for me.

Objective Rating - 7.5

Jamwise Taste Rating - 1

Jamwise Descriptors - Songwriting Sensei, Rawness 

New Jams

• “Can’t Let Go” 

Jamwise Wisdom

This week got me really thinking about what it means to objectively rate music, and if it’s even possible. I came into this thinking the big rating lists were already doing something like this. Factoring in both the musical quality (however you define that), cultural significance, originality or impact on future generations of music, and others. But the more music reviews I read, the more I start to realize how much the opinion of the reviewer plays a major part in their conclusions. Some critics don’t even seem to be going for an objective review, even though that’s a big part of how they supposedly build trust with their readers.

So what is the real role of a music critic anyway? Are music critics even useful if they can’t provide an objective review that anybody can use to determine if they might like an album? 

As Zackary Kephart puts it in his blog The Musical Divide:

“In a sense, then, for me, those independent thinkers have always inspired me more than the “professionals,” because even in an age where it’s just as easy to gain a new find or recommendation from a streaming playlist or algorithm, I still value that human connection through a recommendation or review. “

It’s a great point. The professional critic has different motives than the independent writer. Professionals have to make statements that enhance their personal credibility, and therefore can’t act like “fans” or be too positive or negative about their subjects. An individual listener, however, who isn’t going for a truly objective review, doesn’t have to worry about reputation. Bloggers, for example, are often incentivized more to be genuine and to write in ways their audience enjoys rather than trying to put off a superior aura about music listening (this isn’t universal, but there’s definitely more audience connection with bloggers compared to the big-name critics). “Human connection” is becoming more important and less present in popular media.

So what to do with this information? Should we boycott the critics, the algorithm, and social media? I don’t think so. I only think we should understand what function each of them fills, and not trust blindly. And to support that, we should have our own ways of “objectively” rating music, for all the reasons I mentioned above.

I am rethinking what the Jamwise objective rating means, and what its goals are. My goal for my Taste rating is easy - to rank in terms of how much I enjoyed it and how much I want to listen again. But what’s the point of personally doing an objective rating when there are so many others out there more equipped to do that? And does anybody want an objective rating in the first place?

The Emancipation of Mimi was easy to objectively rate as great. It’s obvious even though I didn’t really get into the music on a personal level. But Car Wheels On A Gravel Road was much harder. At first, I found myself thinking it was not objectively good. But I don’t think that’s true - I think it’s a function of the way I listened to the album. Once I got into an open and objective mindset, I found that I liked the music. I identified objective things that were great about it, which enhanced my personal opinion.

I‘m curious about why it’s so hard to separate objectivity from opinion with music. What could lead to my inability to separate the two? Familiarity? Misunderstanding what I like for what is good, which seems like a pretty universal human thing? Context? These aren’t answers that will come in one post, but I intend to explore them going forward in this project.

I want to keep some form of objective rating. The drive to form an objective rating of the album is what forced me to keep listening to Lucinda Williams’ album, and led to me enjoying the latter half of it. If I’d followed my gut instinct i would have stopped, even though I now believe my dislike was not 100% due to my actual feelings about the music. So although my objective ratings might not be the most polished or professional, they are helping me as I search for music I love. 

I appreciate different things in different kinds of artists. Good songwriting makes me smile at the cleverness of the music or lyrics. Amazing talents make me say “holy shit” no matter what’s being sung or played. Some artists like Tom Petty make me love them for more intangible reasons - maybe it’s magic, and maybe it’s things more personal to me like familiarity bias. Some of these things can be rated objectively, at least in part, and some can’t. But a mixture of a pseudo-objective view of the music and pure feeling seems like a good way to do my ratings, since there are elements of both in my personal opinion.

There are objective things about music - i.e. more or less facts - that I value highly, and several that actually affect my instinctive rating. I’ve distilled it down to 4 reasons to keep my objective rating:

• Research shows that the more we hear songs the more we like them. I want to be aware of this fact, which is how many times have I heard a song or album, and I think I need a way to adjust for this somehow in my “objective” rating

• I want to distance myself from my previous preferences in order to expand the amount of good music I know. So knowing that a song is in a genre I don’t know anything about is useful information, and can influence my objective rating

• The history of an artist or song is fascinating, culturally relevant, and valuable. This will help me gain context in many ways, and should also b part of an objective rating system

• If I let my gut instinct determine what I listen to, I’ll never break out of my shell. Using an objective rating system will encourage me to listen to more things outside my comfort zone, with the goal of creating my objective rating

Maybe Objective Rating is the wrong term for what I’m going for here. Maybe what I need to separate is my “gut” reaction and my “brain” reaction to the music so I know which one is the real driver of my opinion. 

In conclusion, I’m revamping how I do my “objective” ratings. I’ll try to make them less about how much I like the song and more about how good I think certain aspects of it are. More details to come, but I think there will be some new terminology going forward, as well as some spreadsheet updates to support my new rating system.

And don’t worry, I have no plans to start acting like a music critic, no matter how much I might talk about objectivity. I’m a music fan first and foremost, and that will always be my motivation.