Great piece, Franz, stylish and smart like all your stuff. Back in the day, I was sometimes editorially compelled to assign a rating to a review, which was frustrating but at least collaborative. Worse was when Metacritic assigned ratings, always ineptly. I think for Christgau the grade system allowed him to subdue judgement (or at least delete adjectives) and was a boon to his concision project, though I think its satiric element was lost pretty early on while its gadfly element lingered. I want to say Down Beat helped pioneer or at least popularize the star system in its record-review section and Blindfold Test. I still read the mag and find that younger Blindfold Participants are almost always collegial and self-censoring whereas in the past players would sometimes punch hard. I feel more and more estranged from ranking and list-making, though I used to carry around the second RS guide like a vade mecum. I'm not sure if I still believe this, but I used to think record collectors and baseball statisticians overlapped to some degree; at least for me, the hunger for numerical evaluation and order was probably some kind of anxiety response.
Great piece, Franz, stylish and smart like all your stuff. Back in the day, I was sometimes editorially compelled to assign a rating to a review, which was frustrating but at least collaborative. Worse was when Metacritic assigned ratings, always ineptly. I think for Christgau the grade system allowed him to subdue judgement (or at least delete adjectives) and was a boon to his concision project, though I think its satiric element was lost pretty early on while its gadfly element lingered. I want to say Down Beat helped pioneer or at least popularize the star system in its record-review section and Blindfold Test. I still read the mag and find that younger Blindfold Participants are almost always collegial and self-censoring whereas in the past players would sometimes punch hard. I feel more and more estranged from ranking and list-making, though I used to carry around the second RS guide like a vade mecum. I'm not sure if I still believe this, but I used to think record collectors and baseball statisticians overlapped to some degree; at least for me, the hunger for numerical evaluation and order was probably some kind of anxiety response.
I agree as usual—though from a distance it sometimes seems that the one who forgot Christgau’s bit was a schtick was perhaps him…
Yes, I think that's true.