[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.

[coldtea]

>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.

The RS is just something read by aging boomers. It hasn't been relevant since the 70s. And even then, after an initial period, it was for the politics/culture/gossip content, not the music.

The circulation is not really relevant. If you follow the music world, press, interviews, behind the scenes, biographies, etc., RS has never been influencial for actual musicians/execs/fans/etc. The other magazines mentioned, have.

NME, Melody Maker were far more relevant in the 1980-1995 period (yeah, that's UK, but UK had an unproportionate influence in US music as well. Not just in punk, post punk, new wave, and electronic music, which it close to dominated, but back to the Beatles, Stones, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Who, and so on (all British).

As for something actually influential for post-2000, that would be something like Pitchfork.

RS doesn't even register for decades...

[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...

[geocanuck]

I wouldn't say that I agree. I don't think a delusion of any sort is produced. If something is beautiful (which is objective), saying "it is ugly" does not make you ignorant so much as it makes you simply incorrect. Calling beauty ugly is equivalent to saying "truth is false", which i would argue is a "problematic" view to hold.

[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?

[geocanuck]

Thanks for the kind response. I would say that variance in taste or popularity does not imply beauty at all. Something can be popular but not beautiful. Just because something is popular does not make it beautiful. People liking lots of different things does not imply that all these things are beautiful or that beauty is subjective, relative or meaningless.