Best Ever Albums

Re: Is it fair to rank albums?

TheAstralPlane — Sun, 4 Mar 2012 21:24:24 GMT

Author: TheAstralPlane

Posted: 03/05/2012 02:24

I don't take it very seriously, but I do look at lists to find new music.

Re: Is it fair to rank albums?

cartoken — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 04:02:01 GMT

Author: cartoken

Posted: 02/18/2012 09:02

Yeah we have 2 points in common (average score + overall feeling). But in mine there's the number of songs, for me an album with 15 very good songs is better than an album with 10 very good songs, even if the average score here is the same.
I also give a score to my overall feeling about the album from 0 to 100 (counts around15% of the total score the album).

Re: Is it fair to rank albums?

19loveless91 — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 17:56:13 GMT

Author: 19loveless91

Posted: 02/17/2012 22:56

cartoken wrote:

swedenman wrote:

cartoken wrote:

This is why I use a mathematical formula to rank albums and not just by my overall feeling for an album. And i'm quite satisfied with the result even if it can never be perfect.

Just out of curiosity, what is your mathematical formula? I've been trying to come up with one for myself but have yet to come up with a good one.

I'm taking 3 things in consideration in my formula:
1. The overall score of the album (an addition of points of all songs) around 35% of the final score. Here of course the more tracks there is the greater the score will be.

2. The average rating of the album, about 50% of the final score. Here the number of tracks is not important

3. My overall impression of the album , around 15% of the final score. This is the purely subjective score, of how I feel about the album.

About the songs, to keep it simple, I have a 4 scale rating system:
- 0: will never listen to it again (0 pts)
- 1: Nice (1pt)
- 2:good (2 pts)
- 3:excellent (4pts).

So this is in a nutshell the overall idea, to get to the final score there's a simple calculation to do. Hope it's a clear :P

hehe, here's mine:

I also try to rate songs and then do the calculation for the entire album. My ratings aren't the usual 0-100 ratings that I use for albums, but are in a way a bit similar to yours.
Except my scale is bigger and goes from -1(.25 for especially horrible songs) to +1 (.25 for my very favourite songs). At first I only tried to give 0 points for the average ones and 1 point to the great ones + half a point for when I couldn't decide (and less where the songs were bad). Tried to keep it simple... It didn't really work so now I use quarters of points too (-0.25, 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, ...).

I get the album rating by dividing the sum of all songs' points with the number of songs on the album. Basically if all songs get a 0 from me, then the average score on my scale is a "0", which means the album is neither bad, neither good. I decided that this is equivalent of the 60/100 rating. If it gets less than a 0, then it's most likely getting less than 60 (doesn't happen often with me).

If every song is great and gets 1 point, then it's somewhere between the rating of 95 and 100. If an album is mostly consisted of such songs and has at least 2-3 really fantastic songs, then it's gonna get a 100. I gave that rating to 9 (LP) albums so far, one of them has a overall score lower than "1" (YFIIP), but it has IMO enough of those really fantastic songs + works really well as an album.
Anyway, if the "average" (the quotient) is around a 0.5, then I'll rate the album with 80/100, if it's around 0.25 it's a 70, and if the score is around 0.75 it's a 90. Other than that the lines between ratings aren't that defined, it always depends on my overall feel.

The reason I don't just rate songs with 0-100 and calculate the average is that I would have to rate at least half of the songs a 100 to even have a chance of a high enough average to also give the album a 100. IMO, even an album filled with great, if not exactly "perfect" tracks (i.e. the ones I give a 1.25 and a 100 on this site), can be given a perfect rating.
And I guess I find it simpler like that. It's also easier when there are songs where one is a lot longer or shorter than the others. In that case I usually rate the songs in "pairs" (basically: if one song is 6 minutes long, and the other one 2 - whereas most of other songs on the album are between that - then I give them a score out of 2, the longer track obviously being more important for the score).

The biggest problem with this way of rating stuff is that it excludes other things about the album, the overall feeling, concept, etc. So this kind of scoring really is only a guide of sorts to help me with an approx. rating and rank of the album. There are cases where my genral feel about it was very different to the score, e.g. where I feel one half of the album is significantly better than the other. In that case I go more with what I feel about the album than the formula. Example - Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix would be a lot higher on my chart, but I know the score is so high because of the fantastic first half, while I don't have such strong feelings for the second one. It's a bit unfair that I put it among those albums which are consistently good and as such less reliant on individual great tracks.

Shit's definitely not perfect, but it's a good help with ranking stuff in the long term as it assures that what I hadn't listened to in a while doesn't fall dramatically in the rank just because I forgot about it...
It probably sounds complicated as shit, but don't worry I didn't really give it that much thought as it might seem 🤣

edit: fuck me and my inability to express myself in shorter posts

Re: Is it fair to rank albums?

cartoken — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 16:11:19 GMT

Author: cartoken

Posted: 02/17/2012 21:11

swedenman wrote:

cartoken wrote:

This is why I use a mathematical formula to rank albums and not just by my overall feeling for an album. And i'm quite satisfied with the result even if it can never be perfect.

Just out of curiosity, what is your mathematical formula? I've been trying to come up with one for myself but have yet to come up with a good one.

Re: Is it fair to rank albums?

Romanelli — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 08:07:00 GMT

Author: Romanelli

Posted: 02/17/2012 13:07

gussteivi wrote:

Eggman/Walrus/Taxman wrote:

Is ranking albums fair? Maybe not, but it sure is fun. That said, I do sometimes have a problem with the rankings. Lately, I've gotten to thinking of my chart not as a ranking, but a list of 100 great(est) albums. And it keeps changing. For example, Thriller used to be in my top 5 on my chart. Well, whaddaya know, it isn't even on my chart anymore. And a long time ago, I might've thought that people were crazy to think that any album which wasn't Revolver could be THE greatest album ever. Now that title belongs to Highway 61 Revisited. I also used to think that Trout Mask Replica was the best Magic Band record. Now Doc At The Radar Station is my fave (by a tiny margin, though).

I think it's really cool that you do that, Eggman.

Too many people have a "fix" top 10 or 20 that they refuse to compromise with. It's like they're afraid it might disturb the "holy balance" of their chart to introduce/replace a single album in the top.
Not to mention they might have written some comment on it they're really happy with.

I'm as guilty as anyone perhaps, but I did introduce an artist to my top ten that a month ago I barely had heard about, let alone heard.

But no one's touching Romanelli on this. He's changing his chart every day! 😮

Ha! Didn't think anyone noticed that!!!!

Re: Is it fair to rank albums?

gussteivi — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 06:01:27 GMT

Author: gussteivi

Posted: 02/17/2012 11:01

Eggman/Walrus/Taxman wrote:

Re: Is it fair to rank albums?

Facetious — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 04:45:44 GMT

Author: Facetious

Posted: 02/17/2012 09:45

Is ranking albums fair? Maybe not, but it sure is fun. That said, I do sometimes have a problem with the rankings. Lately, I've gotten to thinking of my chart not as a ranking, but a list of 100 great(est) albums. And it keeps changing. For example, Thriller used to be in my top 5 on my chart. Well, whaddaya know, it isn't even on my chart anymore. And a long time ago, I might've thought that people were crazy to think that any album which wasn't Revolver could be THE greatest album ever. Now that title belongs to Highway 61 Revisited. I also used to think that Trout Mask Replica was the best Magic Band record. Now Doc At The Radar Station is my fave (by a tiny margin, though).

Re: Is it fair to rank albums?

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 23:27:42 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 02/17/2012 04:27

cartoken wrote:

This is why I use a mathematical formula to rank albums and not just by my overall feeling for an album. And i'm quite satisfied with the result even if it can never be perfect.

Just out of curiosity, what is your mathematical formula? I've been trying to come up with one for myself but have yet to come up with a good one.

Re: Is it fair to rank albums?

cartoken — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:41:07 GMT

Author: cartoken

Posted: 02/16/2012 22:41

This is why I use a mathematical formula to rank albums and not just by my overall feeling for an album. And i'm quite satisfied with the result even if it can never be perfect.

Re: Is it fair to rank albums?

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 17:06:12 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 02/16/2012 22:06

Romanelli wrote:

What if The Godfather is simply too long and boring for your tastes, and you decide (using your own individual mind) that it is, to you, NOT a classic film? What if I see Superunknown at #2 on your chart and wonder what in the world you may be thinking for having that on your chart at all because I hate it? My point is that if you asked 100 people if they would consider those three films as among the greatest of all time, I can pretty much guarantee that at least one person would disagree...just as you would never get a 100% consensus on just your top TWO albums...much less be able to say what your #3 should be.

Someone is going to stand up and say that Weekend At Bernies 2 is among the greatest films of all time...or that Justin Beiber's latest is a true classic of recorded music. It's easy to say, "Let's just consider all of the classics as one great body of cinematic excellence"...but who gets to decide what those films (or albums) are for the rest of us?

If it were easy to determine that, all music would sound the same, and there would be only one movie. And none of this would be any fun at all.

Well no, I'm not trying to say that those 3 movies are the best of all time and they just can't be ordered. I'm saying that to someone who considers them all fundamentally perfect movies, is it fair to rank them when they all excel in such different regards, or should we just acknowledge that they are all incredible and they each contribute to an extraordinary overall cinematic experience?

Re: Is it fair to rank albums?

Robert Anton Wilson — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:40:42 GMT

Author: Robert Anton Wilson

Posted: 02/16/2012 20:40

There is ultimate rank and then there is rank order. You seem to have a tie at number 3 for your albums but it seems clear to you that it is one of those album which fills your number 3 spot. I think it happens often. Maybe one day something will happen that will make you be sure and maybe not. I know for me I have had my top 3 favorite movies set in stone for years but all tied because whichever is top is a question of timing. My top 3 movies are Apocalypse Now, 2001 & The Godfather. When I feel science fiction this usually push 2001 to the top, when the Doors released their 40th anniversary boxset that pushed Apocalypse to number 1 because of the role the Doors music plays in this movie. While my actual order cannot be set, my rank-order is, these are my top 3 movies.

Like you say, there are so many different styles and so many different reasons for putting music on that the idea of one album being the ultimate answer every time is ludicrous. That is why on my list you have such diverse artists as Radiohead, Miles Davis, Philip Glass and INXS ... sure INXS aren't as "objectively" talented as Miles but when the crowd comes in they seem to be more appropriate to put in.

Re: Is it fair to rank albums?

Romanelli — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 14:36:14 GMT

Author: Romanelli

Posted: 02/16/2012 19:36

swedenman wrote:

So I'm somewhat of a movie buff, as well. I'm not quite as devoted to collecting movies as I am to collecting music, but I still really appreciate the art form and have even taken it upon myself to rank my 10 favorite movies (going much beyond that is a little too much work). However, I've always found that ranking movies, much like ranking music, is really difficult for me. Take my chart, for example. I have A Night at the Opera and Superunknown at the #1 and #2 positions, respectively, and I doubt they'll be moving any time soon. However, I have a handful of albums (namely Nevermind, Abbey Road, Toxicity, and Rated R) that have been cycled through the #3 position a handful of times, and to be perfectly honest I doubt I'll ever make up my mind for sure. So why is this?

Well, I was talking to a friend of mine who also considers himself a movie buff, and he presented an interesting thought: It's true that some movies deserve to be considered true masterpieces while others definitely do not, but instead of ranking the masterpieces on how good they are, shouldn't we look at it more as a grand feast of cinema in which every movie has its own distinct flavor and contributes to the overall experience in its own way? I mean, is it really possible to compare such classics as Godfather, Terminator, Silence of the Lambs, etc., when they're all so accomplished in such different ways? And the same can be said for music. I can't decide which album belongs in the #3 position on my chart because Nevermind, Abbey Road, Toxicity, and Rated R are all outstanding albums and my collection would be equally incomplete if any of them were to be removed from it.

Of course, I do still try to rank them because I like the thought of an ordered top 100, but I still find the idea interesting. Thoughts?

Is it fair to rank albums?

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 12:58:14 GMT

Author: Anonymous

Posted: 02/16/2012 17:58

So I'm somewhat of a movie buff, as well. I'm not quite as devoted to collecting movies as I am to collecting music, but I still really appreciate the art form and have even taken it upon myself to rank my 10 favorite movies (going much beyond that is a little too much work). However, I've always found that ranking movies, much like ranking music, is really difficult for me. Take my chart, for example. I have A Night at the Opera and Superunknown at the #1 and #2 positions, respectively, and I doubt they'll be moving any time soon. However, I have a handful of albums (namely Nevermind, Abbey Road, Toxicity, and Rated R) that have been cycled through the #3 position a handful of times, and to be perfectly honest I doubt I'll ever make up my mind for sure. So why is this?

Well, I was talking to a friend of mine who also considers himself a movie buff, and he presented an interesting thought: It's true that some movies deserve to be considered true masterpieces while others definitely do not, but instead of ranking the masterpieces on how good they are, shouldn't we look at it more as a grand feast of cinema in which every movie has its own distinct flavor and contributes to the overall experience in its own way? I mean, is it really possible to compare such classics as Godfather, Terminator, Silence of the Lambs, etc., when they're all so accomplished in such different ways? And the same can be said for music. I can't decide which album belongs in the #3 position on my chart because Nevermind, Abbey Road, Toxicity, and Rated R are all outstanding albums and my collection would be equally incomplete if any of them were to be removed from it.

Of course, I do still try to rank them because I like the thought of an ordered top 100, but I still find the idea interesting. Thoughts?