Collected Animals

I don't like any objective system, whether it's numbers, letter grades, stars etc. Part of it is because I think that music is pretty personal/subjective, but more importantly I don't like putting music on a simple linear scale like that. Anytime you make a distinction between one piece of music being "good" and another one being "bad" there are countless assumptions built into that distinction. We group music styles into genres based on the most obvious of these assumptions (e.g. pop music should feature vocals, dance music should have a beat, etc), but the more specific these assumptions get the less obvious they are. What if dance music really doesn't have to feature a beat? when should it and should it not? obviously these are stupid questions to ask literally, but what I mean is that in order to find out the answer you have to just listen to the music and decide for yourself. there are no rules. every time I think I find one, I find an exception

of course I understand that every review isn't meant to be 100% objective, or a comprehensive treatise on aesthetics. and if people enjoy reading reviews then I see no problem with that, I've enjoyed reading some that gave me some new insight into the music. But I still think it's stifling to judge music based on a linear objective scale when there are any number of criteria that make music either good or bad depending on the time, place, person, genre, context, the list goes on. Drew from Matmos has a great piece on the Quietus about why lists in music suck (which i also agree with) and he gets into the problem with objective scoring in music, I highly recommend reading this bit here: http://thequietus.com/articles/16052-dr ... ay?page=14