What is your main way for ranking albums???

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Poll: What is your main method for rating an album?
Artistic achievement
18%
 18%  [6]
Overall significance or importance or influence
0%
 0%  [0]
How often you listen to it
0%
 0%  [0]
How much you enjoy it
53%
 53%  [17]
How many awesome tracks it has on it
9%
 9%  [3]
Other
18%
 18%  [6]
Total Votes : 32

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Lowkey



Gender: Male
Age: 26
United States

  • #21
  • Posted: 04/01/2018 19:30
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How much I enjoy it

That’s it
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FelixC





  • #22
  • Posted: 04/01/2018 20:54
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rkm wrote:
My highest ranking albums are always those that are most personally significant to me, typically aligned with a significant life memory, issue or theme I was processing at the time. They have to be good, and have a significant number of good songs, and often have some kind of cohesion that make the whole greater than the sum of the parts, but I could care less if they are ground breaking or not, or if anyone likes them.


Right. Just about everything gets called groundbreaking nowadays. It's one of those words that gets thrown around so often that you wonder if people just use it as a way to pump up the value of what they like. As if to say "I'm not one of those people who just goes around liking the music everybody else likes, I only like things that are art." So little music is groundbreaking that if we only listened to music that is actually groundbreaking, we wouldn't have much to listen to.
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badseed



Gender: Male
Age: 35
Location: FL
United States

  • #23
  • Posted: 04/01/2018 22:55
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It's like a strange combination of all of the above and none of the above. Lots and lots of jazz albums in particular are so artistically brilliant that if I was basing my chart on greatness alone nearly every jazz album I've heard would be on there. It's the ones that move me more so than the ones I enjoy the most, although enjoyment comes into play as well. Much like the films of Lars von Trier, I don't particularly enjoy Joni Mitchell's Blue or Sufjan Stevens' Carrie and Lowell but I still love them dearly because of the impact they have on me personally. I really don't care much about artistic merit when it comes to most mainstream rock music; it's usually more about how much I enjoy the tracks. But when choosing jazz and soul it's about technique and emotion while most folk and singer-songwriter stuff is more about the lyrics and emotion. Rap is about technique, lyrics, emotion and production. That's just the basic genres, not counting subgenres and sub-subgenres that all have their different ways of connecting with me as well. So I can't really even compare most of the stuff on my chart because they're all being judged by different standards. So like the one guy said earlier, it's all a bunch of bullshit.
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bobbyb5



Gender: Male
Location: New York
United States

  • #24
  • Posted: 04/01/2018 23:09
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badseed wrote:
It's like a strange combination of all of the above and none of the above. Lots and lots of jazz albums in particular are so artistically brilliant that if I was basing my chart on greatness alone nearly every jazz album I've heard would be on there. It's the ones that move me more so than the ones I enjoy the most, although enjoyment comes into play as well. Much like the films of Lars von Trier, I don't particularly enjoy Joni Mitchell's Blue or Sufjan Stevens' Carrie and Lowell but I still love them dearly because of the impact they have on me personally. I really don't care much about artistic merit when it comes to most mainstream rock music; it's usually more about how much I enjoy the tracks. But when choosing jazz and soul it's about technique and emotion while most folk and singer-songwriter stuff is more about the lyrics and emotion. Rap is about technique, lyrics, emotion and production. That's just the basic genres, not counting subgenres and sub-subgenres that all have their different ways of connecting with me as well. So I can't really even compare most of the stuff on my chart because they're all being judged by different standards. So like the one guy said earlier, it's all a bunch of bullshit.


I would disagree a bit about singer-songwriter being all about lyrics and emotion. That may be the effect it has, but it was really about songcraft and composing. The good stuff anyway. What distinguishes great singer-songwriter records from lousy ones is how well-crafted the arrangements were and how good the melodies were. It's true it wasn't about technique or art, but craft.
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badseed



Gender: Male
Age: 35
Location: FL
United States

  • #25
  • Posted: 04/01/2018 23:26
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bobbyb5 wrote:
I would disagree a bit about singer-songwriter being all about lyrics and emotion. That may be the effect it has, but it was really about songcraft and composing. The good stuff anyway. What distinguishes great singer-songwriter records from lousy ones is how well-crafted the arrangements were and how good the melodies were. It's true it wasn't about technique or art, but craft.


Meh, the arrangements and melodies were good but rarely made the album. When I think singer-songwriter I think Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and the like and without the emotion provided by the lyrics and delivery I don't think the albums would have been nearly as good. Not to say the style doesn't play a part but if "It's Too Late" and "You've Got a Friend" kept the background music but changed the lyrics to less relatable content I don't think Tapestry would be nearly as good. Surely more modern singer-songwriters like Sufjan Stevens have outstanding arrangements but that's more the exception than the rule, at least for my taste and experience. One person front and center with a microphone, acoustic guitar/piano, and maybe a harmonica is my general description of the genre.
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bobbyb5



Gender: Male
Location: New York
United States

  • #26
  • Posted: 04/01/2018 23:47
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badseed wrote:
Meh, the arrangements and melodies were good but rarely made the album. When I think singer-songwriter I think Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and the like and without the emotion provided by the lyrics and delivery I don't think the albums would have been nearly as good. Not to say the style doesn't play a part but if "It's Too Late" and "You've Got a Friend" kept the background music but changed the lyrics to less relatable content I don't think Tapestry would be nearly as good. Surely more modern singer-songwriters like Sufjan Stevens have outstanding arrangements but that's more the exception than the rule, at least for my taste and experience. One person front and center with a microphone, acoustic guitar/piano, and maybe a harmonica is my general description of the genre.


But what makes the difference between a great Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Carole King record and a not great one? How well-crafted the songs were and how well-crafted the accompanying music was. And lyrics are really not much without good music to go along with it. You could listen to a great record over and over and over again, but would anyone ever read the lyrics printed on a piece of paper over and over and over again? Of course not. Does anyone take out the lyric sheet and read it every day in the same way that you take out a record and listen to it over and over?
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YoungPunk





  • #27
  • Posted: 04/02/2018 00:33
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@Bobby

I'm actually starting to appreciate the musicality of artists like Bob Dylan recently, as I'm getting older (27)
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RichardSauce





  • #28
  • Posted: 04/02/2018 00:50
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When it comes to clicking on those little stars, that's mostly just how I personally feel/how much I enjoy the song or album.

When it comes to making a list, there's definitely a confluence of all the listed options, and honestly applied pretty unevenly, sometimes the cultural/genre importance of the record will weigh more, or the technical/musical/lyrical achievements, or a sense of "This has THE defining songs of this artist/period, even if the overall album is a bit weaker."

My baseline for qualification, however, will always be whether or not I enjoyed it. I'm just not going to put an album on one of my lists that I don't like, I wouldn't be being honest if I did.
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RoundTheBend
I miss the comfort in being sad



Location: Ground Control
United States

  • #29
  • Posted: 04/02/2018 01:14
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Another way to put it, scores and therefore ranks greatly decrease for great albums but are littered with filler, mediocre experiments, etc.
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badseed



Gender: Male
Age: 35
Location: FL
United States

  • #30
  • Posted: 04/02/2018 02:28
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bobbyb5 wrote:
But what makes the difference between a great Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell or Carole King record and a not great one? How well-crafted the songs were and how well-crafted the accompanying music was. And lyrics are really not much without good music to go along with it. You could listen to a great record over and over and over again, but would anyone ever read the lyrics printed on a piece of paper over and over and over again? Of course not. Does anyone take out the lyric sheet and read it every day in the same way that you take out a record and listen to it over and over?


The difference is how the songs make me feel. Like I said it does have some to do with arrangements. But the best records for those artists all have numerous memorable lines. Blonde on Blonde isn't one of my favorite albums because of the catchiness. It's because of Dylan's rarely matched knack for making me smile with individual lines. Stuff like "he's sure got a lot of gall, to be so useless and all, muttering small talk at the wall while I'm in the hall" and "your dancing child in his Chinese suit, he spoke to me, I took his flute, no I wasn't very cute to him, was I" could have been spoken over the sound of screeching chalkboards and it would still be fantastic.
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