[samdjstephens]

Is there such a thing as an objective album ranking? Especially when you consider the shifting landscape of music over time. Actually forget the shifting landscape of music, consider the shifting landscape of people - theres been significant generational change since 2003, doesn't it make sense that albums move up and down the ranking as their relevance increases or decreases? It doesn't surprise me at all that Marvin Gaye would have gone up the ranking.

edit: I think it's also worth asking the question of what role race played in the degree to which an artist or group was heralded "at the time".

[coldtea]

>Is there such a thing as an objective album ranking?

No, but there's such thing as a "somewhat objective album ranking".

>Actually forget the shifting landscape of music, consider the shifting landscape of people - theres been significant generational change since 2003, doesn't it make sense that albums move up and down the ranking as their relevance increases or decreases?

Not when it hasn't change that much for 3 decades prior...

>It doesn't surprise me at all that Marvin Gaye would have gone up the ranking.

As if Marvin Gaye represents some new taste/genre? It's as old or older as a lot of the stuff it went above in ranking.

And it's not like 2020 sensibilities are somehow closer to Joni Mitchel's Blue suddenly over, say, Velvet Underground (which, iirc, got dropped in ranking).

[CydeWeys]

> No, but there's such thing as a "somewhat objective album ranking".

Is there? Can you expand on the methodology? All the somewhat objective ranking methodologies I can think of rely on data sources such as top-sellers lists, which would result in not a ranking of best albums but rather of highest selling ones. "Best" is inherently subjective in my estimation. About the best you can do for that is figure out which albums the largest number of people would consider best (but now you have absolutely massive familiarity and sampling biases to contend with).

[coldtea]

>Is there? Can you expand on the methodology?

I'm ok with the regular "cricic makes an assesment" methodology for that. Just needs critics that know their stuff (e.g. not just marketers and shallow dabblers) and who don't just pander to some fashion du jour when making a list in spite of their actual prefereneces thinking that this will make their list more sellable/controversial (and thus generating views)/etc.

Which I think was lacking here. I don't believe those are the actual tastes of those critics, them just wanting to appear like that...

[CydeWeys]

You're making a subjective judgment here on the quality of these critics though. I mean it's Rolling Stone, the biggest music magazine of all time. These lists come out roughly once a decade, so a lot of consideration is going into them.

Just because you disagree with the ranking doesn't mean that they don't know their stuff or weren't rigorous about it. If you really don't like this list, show me a better one, and I'll show you a list whose editors just happen to agree with your tastes more than the editors of the Rolling Stone list does.

[coldtea]

>I mean it's Rolling Stone, the biggest music magazine of all time.

Huh? Rolling Stone hasn't been relevant since the mid-70s...

We in Europe had NME, Melody Maker, MOJO, and lots of other higher quality music magazines...

[CydeWeys]

Rolling Stone has significantly larger worldwide circulation than all of those magazines (in some cases by an order of magnitude or more). In addition, some of the magazines you listed no longer exist, whereas Rolling Stone still does. E.g. NME ended its print publication in 2018 and Melody Maker ceased entirely in 2000.

You got any other examples of magazines you think are bigger/more relevant than Rolling Stone? Because none of these fit the bill.

[geocanuck]

beauty has levels of objectivity. there is partial subjectivity in aesthetic judgement.

hence "somewhat objective"

[CuriouslyC]

If you are saying beauty has some degree of objectivity because we share some common genetics that predisposes us to develop similarly, I understand what you're getting at, but it's still completely subjective.

[geocanuck]

Not quite what I'm saying. Beauty and goodness (being fundamentally identical) are attributes of objective reality. Subjectivity is the confusion of our limitations for the eternal truths of the universe. I hope this makes my position more clear.

[CuriouslyC]

That view seems likely to produce the delusion that anyone who doesn't agree with you is ignorant, which is problematic...

[CydeWeys]

> beauty has levels of objectivity.

Can you make this more concrete for me? What are the concrete levels of objectivity as applied to the judgment of quality of musical albums? The thing about objectivity is you can define what you're talking about very precisely, i.e. "This angle on this triangle is 72 degrees" is an objective statement (subject only to measurement error). I'd love to see some similar statements about how we can make objective statements on the beauty or quality of music.

[geocanuck]

Sure. I replied to another comment with a longer explanation of the definition of beauty, i suggest you check it out and give me your thoughts.

to be brief, beauty is a transcendental. thus, it exists independently of the individual, and further, exists independently of the material universe. thus, a claim like "this angle is 72 degrees" does not have an analog in metaphysical space because the object does not exist in an empirically measurable space. think of it this way: can you measure beauty, truth, or goodness with calipers? the notion is ridiculous because these ideas exist in metaphysical space, not in a material space. the definition of beauty converges on the conditions of integrity, harmony, and clarity. Does the music have integrity? Is it complete and whole? Or is it incomplete? Is the harmonious (think about this in terms past musical theory...)? Is it proportional? Does it exhibit symmetry (imo this is not limiting)? Or does it sew discord and disharmony? Is it asymmetric and poorly proportioned? Is it clear? Is processing fluency (ease to which information is processed) high?

A more interesting question to ask is: is this music in accordance with natural/divine law?

So, you can get an objective statement on beauty by understanding beauty as true, good, and virtuous. It is objectively complete, harmonious, and clear. It is the ideal to which art strives. Therefore, when something is in accordance with the nature of beauty, we can say objectively it is beautiful. We can make an antithetical statement to this if something (say the music) is in discord with the nature of beauty.

[cmendel]

This is an interesting point of view that I hadn't considered before. Thank you for making this argument. How do you square your ideas with musical genres like dubstep, likely not the best example but the one that springs to mind, that lack some or all of these features and are still beloved by a subset of the population?

Would the variance in taste not imply that beauty itself is subjective?

[samdjstephens]

> No, but there's such thing as a "somewhat objective album ranking".

I wouldn't disagree with that, I'm sure all of the various versions of this list by RS are "somewhat objective"

> Not when it hasn't change that much for 3 decades prior...

That's an interesting point - but look at the last decade: western society has been going through some turmoil, change is happening faster in some areas

> As if Marvin Gaye represents some new taste/genre? It's as old or older as a lot of the stuff it went above in ranking. > > And it's not like 2020 sensibilities are somehow closer to Joni Mitchel's Blue suddenly over, say, Velvet Underground (which, iirc, got dropped in ranking).

I think Marvin Gaye is more relevant to modern tastes (and therefore universal tastes) than the Beatles, for example. But yes, that doesn't explain all, or even most, of the shift in the rankings.

[SECProto]

>No, but there's such thing as a "somewhat objective album ranking".

What objective criteria do you think should be used to do the ranking? Number of chord progressions used? Variety of instruments on the album? Lingual diversity? Or maybe the inverse of one of these criteria would be better? Point being, even choosing an evaluation criteria is subjective.

The only semi-objective criteria I can think of would be the number of other albums/musicians it influenced - but this is basically a meta-ranking.

Aside, for the record, I wouldn't have Sgt Pepper anywhere near my top ten "greatest albums", but What's Goin On and Pet Sounds can stay.

[coldtea]

See my answer above.

A good critic does a subjective assessment, but also understands things like the place of a work within the larger history of the medium, it's relative importance, how influential it has been, several skills involved (not necessarily technical "playing" skill - skills in e.g. emotional resonanse or expression or production, etc are good to judge too), and so on.

And whetever the fashion of 2010-2020, they wouldn't put "Let's Get In On" as the #1 in a 500 Greatest Albums of all time list.

This looks more like a too-little-too-late "let's have RS show some hypocritical allegiance with the black movement and the whole hoopla in 2020" calculated ranking, than actual consideration of the relative merits of the work.

[geocanuck]

the objective criteria is beauty/ugliness. there is partial subjectivity in determination of "rank" past this distinction. hence "semi-objective"

[CydeWeys]

Beauty is the canonical example of a subjective criterion. There's even a well-known phrase about this you've probably heard: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", a phrase so old and time-tested that it predates Christianity by several centuries.

It's hard to even make sense of what you're saying because you're using words in exactly the opposite manner that everyone else uses them and thus only offering up contradictions, which are by definition already false.

[geocanuck]

I disagree. Beauty is a transcendental attribute of being. As such, it is not contingent upon cultural diversity, religious doctrine, or personal ideology, but is an objective property of all that exists.

[SECProto]

> the objective criteria is beauty/ugliness

So Sgt Pepper is beautiful? What makes it so?

[coldtea]

>So Sgt Pepper is beautiful? What makes it so?

For one thing, it captured a place/era almost perfectly (as agreed by tons of people in that place/era - including fellow musicians).

Second, it has the height of maturity of what was considered the most important band of all time (and close to such as seen by both the critics and commercial success).

Third, it unarguably has considerable skill in several areas (melody, harmony, orchestration, playing, etc).

Fourth, it was largely influencial.

Fifth, most experts (critics, rock musicians, etc) agreed so for half a century.

Those things are enough to call it beautiful in mind book.

Just because we can't measure something (e.g. beauty here) with some technical instrument doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or people can't agree on it.

[geocanuck]

i was going for an explanation of how art and aesthetics are not purely subjective. and how one could arrive at the statement "semi-objective ranking". so im not arguing "Sgt. Pepper is beautiful" im arguing "there is objectivity in art therefore some art is better than other art" thus implying some form of objective "ranking". nonetheless, ill try to answer what makes something (in this case music) beautiful. there are many different explanations that converge on similar concepts/ideas.

in many traditions, ranging from Chinese philosophy to the ancient Greeks, beauty is associated with goodness, virtue, and truth. particularly of the Greeks, there was an emphasis on its relation to mathematics, namely proportion and symmetry. aesthetic considerations like symmetry/asymmetry, simplicity/complexity are utilized in mathematics, physics and cosmology to define truth (or lack thereof).

the Thomistic view is that: A) beauty is a transcendental (a Platonic view) and B)that there are 3 conditions: 1. integritas (wholeness, integrity, perfection) 2. consonatia (harmony and proportion) 3. claritas (radiance/clarity that makes apparent the form to the mind, analogous to processing fluency)

The definition of beauty thus converges on the idea that: something is beautiful when it is harmonious, complete, and clear. something beautiful is virtuous, good and true. you could also argue this as "in accordance with natural order" as the natural order is complete, clear, and harmonious (and thus beautiful). you could go further with this idea and argue that beauty is "of God" or "in accordance with God" or "in accordance with the Logos". but that is a different argument for a different time.

art is the field of human interest whose ideal is beauty. therefore, it follows that beautiful art is complete (has integrity, wholeness), is harmonious (perhaps in accordance with natural world i.e. proportions such as golden ratio, etc. this is not limiting), and is clear (the form is readily made apparent to the mind, i.e. high processing fluency, the information is easily processed)

Does Sgt. Pepper fit this criteria? Is it beautiful?