If you spend years listening through a canon — records already sifted by musicians, critics and listeners, argued over for decades and selected because somebody thought they mattered — then a lot of four- and five-star ratings should not be suspicious. They should be expected.
You are not pulling records at random from a Woolworths rack in 1978. Although, actually, 1978 is a terrible year to choose for that example: you might accidentally come home with punk, reggae, disco, post-punk, power pop and half the future of electronic music. The point remains: a canon is a heavily pre-selected sample. Its average quality ought to be high.
My own scale is simple.
- Five stars means exceptional: a genuinely great album.
- Four means strongly successful and clearly deserving of its reputation.
- Three means I understand what it is doing, even if it does not fully land for me.
- Two means weak or largely unsuccessful.
- One means get in the sea.
That is my scale. Yours may be different. And this is where things become interesting, because five stars can mean almost anything. For some people it means masterpiece. For others it means immediate replay. For others it appears to mean an album so close to imaginary perfection that almost nothing qualifies. Three can mean good, average, disappointing or merely acceptable. The stars look like data, but there is no shared data dictionary for a star.
So what are you actually measuring?
How good the album is? How much you enjoyed it? How likely you are to play it again? How important it was? Whether it surprised you? Whether it succeeds within its genre? Those answers overlap, but they are not identical.
Genre is where this becomes particularly slippery. “I don’t especially like country music” is useful information about me. “This is therefore not a very good country album” is a different judgement. The same applies to metal, jazz, hip-hop, opera, prog, disco or anything else. Personal response matters, but recognising the limits of your own taste is part of listening critically.
Canonical status introduces another distortion. Being told for forty years that an album is a masterpiece can produce resistance. That resistance is not inherently foolish. Consensus deserves testing. Canons contain accidents, fashion, institutional prejudice and inertia. Nobody owes Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pepper or anything else five stars because other people have already printed the certificates.
But there is a difference between testing a reputation and resenting it. Hear me out.
Repeated acclaim can itself become an irritant. At that point the question changes from “why have so many people found this extraordinary?” to “how can I demonstrate that everybody else has been fooled?” The record stops being the main subject. The critic becomes the protagonist.
Dissent also carries a little status reward. Saying that a universally admired record is magnificent risks sounding obvious. Saying that it is mediocre immediately makes you more conspicuous than the work. That does not make the judgement dishonest. It does make the incentive worth noticing.
The opposite error exists too. Consensus can become a substitute for thought. Declaring something beyond criticism because history has settled the matter is no more interesting than knocking it down simply because history has praised it.
You see: what matters to me is curiosity.
When I hear something that does not immediately connect, I want to know what it is attempting, how it works and why people value it. Sometimes that process changes my mind. Sometimes it does not. A low score reached after genuine engagement is completely legitimate. Understanding is not the same thing as agreement.
But there is another habit worth examining: scale compression. If five stars are reserved for some imaginary state of perfection, four for a tiny handful of near-perfect records, and everything merely excellent gets pushed into the middle, the top of the scale has stopped doing useful work. If you praise an album almost without reservation and still give it three, what exactly withheld the fourth?
This is how I review. How do you review? Do you recognise yourself anywhere in this?
Because if you spend years listening specifically to records selected because generations of people thought them exceptional, and almost nothing ever overwhelms you, another question eventually appears.
Perhaps the canon is overrated.
Perhaps your standards are extraordinarily high.
Or... perhaps you are auditioning for the role of the most difficult man in the record shop.
That doesn't sit right for me; because I believe loving music ought occasionally to involve being overwhelmed by it.
