Rolling Stone does it. Time magazine does it. And we at The Bruin do it too.
I’m talking about rating music and other art with numbers. Rolling Stone gives an album between one and five stars, and we, in our collegiate way, rate on a scale of paws: “USC” is the worst we can say about an album, and five paws is the best.
This idea is hardly a revolutionary one ““ numbers and grading scales are used all around us to measure achievement, value and skill.
Like the grades we’ve all grown up with, ascribing numbers to things seems a valid way of understanding the relationships between those things.
USC to five is a constant scale, and since all musical releases have to fall somewhere on that scale, numbers can give someone a pretty reasonable idea about how albums compare with each other. And when we’re predicating about albums, those kinds of relative comments are important to be able to make.
But there is a difference between using a scale for a given album and, say, using a scale for the slope of the ground in some particular area.
When you say that some street has a 15-degree incline, it is clear what the units are: degrees. In every judgment about the incline of a street, those units will be used, so all comparisons are completely straightforward.
When you use numbers to compare albums though, it’s unclear what exactly the units of the scale are.
Thinking about how we assign numbers to music, I can only imagine some vague notion of “goodness points” out of a possible hundred, with artists receiving numbers that fit their achievements.
But if we don’t know what these points are, it’s hard to figure out how many each album is supposed to receive.
The point is that you need to know a goal or a total so you can start comparing things based on how close they come to achieving that total.
So while we know that the total for degrees of an incline is 180 and the highest score possible for an album is five paws, I can show someone what a degree of incline definitively is but I can’t show someone the musical correlation to a paw.
To think about something qualitative in terms of numbers is to think in reverse.
Five paws is the goal, the top, but it’s a goal based on units that don’t correspond to anything specific.
Of course, that is to be expected with the subjectivity of art, but that’s what the review is for in the first place.
All the writing, all those words: They convey a subjective thing that is simply better said in words than in numbers. Why use a scale awkwardly when we can just use words for what they do well?
I feel like an example is probably in order: Compare Radiohead’s “In Rainbows,” which we recently gave five paws, with Black Lips’ “Good Bad Not Evil,” which figured into The Bruin recently (I would give it four paws.).
Now, the Black Lips has to get a lower rating than Radiohead, since while the Black Lips’ jangly garage rock is one of the best things I’ve heard this year and something I think everyone should listen to, it simply doesn’t have the completeness, depth or greatness of “In Rainbows.”
But to rate both of these albums on the same numerical scale doesn’t make any sense; Black Lips and Radiohead are doing different things and accomplishing different goals.
Comparing Black Lips to Radiohead in terms of unmeasurable amounts of goodness doesn’t result in anything productive and only gives the false impression that the lower-rated album is somehow worse.
It’s not worse ““ it’s just not great in the same sense, and it has its own goals, roles, times and places.
And this is where the writing comes in. Each album needs to be explained in its own context to be fully appreciated. The best questions to ask are: What is the band doing? Is it intriguing?
As qualitative things, albums need to be explained, described and felt ““ not measured.
I doubt that we’ll get rid of the rating system anytime soon, or that the other guys will ““ after all, America is obsessed with ratings right now. Just bear in mind what a rating really is: It’s a pseudo-measurement, a shorthand abbreviation that speaks loosely, an oversimplification.
Scales are a convenient way to think, but when you get down to it, the numbers don’t really say much at all. For that you need words.
To rate LaRue’s column, e-mail him at alarue@media.ucla.edu.