Apparently.
(Taken from The Guardian, 18 February 2010)
In December the US website Metacritic embarked on a campaign to find the "best music of the decade". The site, which aggregates all the reviews it can find of as many albums as possible, collated 10 years' worth of album reviews – around 7,000 – to find out which artists had been the most critically admired over the previous decade. Near the top of its chart were many of the names you might expect: Radiohead, the White Stripes, Tom Waits, Sigur Ros and Elbow. Bob Dylan nestles at a respectable No 15. But top of the list – the best reviewed group of the 2000s – were a little band from Austin, Texas, who take their name from a Can song, and have been going for 17 years.
Metacritic's announcement that Spoon's four-album run from 2001's "stellar" Girls Can't Tell to 2007's "well, stellar" Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga received the highest "accolades from music press and music fans for their impeccable songwriting and addictive songs" took everyone by surprise. Everyone, that is, except Spoon's singer-songwriter, 38-year-old Britt Daniel.
Read more here...
I don't understand the role of the meta-critic. Am I supposed to like it incrementally more with each positive review? And at the end of the day, does this kind of rating aggregation even prove anything? Lil Wayne has simultaneously the 7th worst rated album on Metacritic and the 5th highest selling single on the Billboard 200. (Number 1, in case you were wondering, is Sade's new single, proving that resurrection is not just for Jesus and John Romero)
ReplyDeleteOh come on Everett, Spoon are great. The Shins though....
ReplyDeleteI didn't say they weren't, Darragh.
ReplyDelete(from Facebook)
ReplyDeleteDeniz Martinez
Um, no.
03 March at 15:39 ·
Deniz Martinez
...but speaking to the larger point, I couldn't offer up an alternative answer, because I couldn't possibly name just a single "best" band from the past decade (even if you're just asking for a personal favourite)...even asking me to narrow it down to a dozen would be painful, and then I certainly couldn't sequentially rank them all with any finality from there!! Part of that is just loving way too much music LOL...but part of that is also not being able to play that game of trying to statistically analyze and rank works of art. I love maths (truly, I was a maths nerd in school LOL), but not everything can be quantified in such ways...and not everything that can be should be...
(Of course, having said all that, I HAVE done many a best-of list or countdown thing for friends as an exercise in amusement...but they're always done with the caveat that the rankings are not written in stone and really shouldn't be taken all that seriously...they're more a snapshot of my mood of the moment rather than some definitive Final Word...)
03 March at 15:50 ·
Ali Bromwich
Fuck that...just listen.
03 March at 17:01 ·
(from Facebook)
ReplyDeleteCraig Spann
No.
03 March at 22:31 ·
Everett True
Um. Indeed. Makes you wonder at the purpose of meta-critic
03 March at 22:33 ·
Craig Spann
Slap me down and call me a cynic, but do you think there could be a financial motivation in there somewhere?
03 March at 22:35 ·
Everett True
heh heh heh
03 March at 22:35 ·
Craig Spann
I shall investigate this troubling development further.
03 March at 22:42 ·
Craig Spann
Actually, it all sounds like one of Jude's Power Ranger moments. "Meta-Critic...POWER UP!"
03 March at 22:46 ·
Grant Cogswell
Matter -and links - rush into a vacuum.
Thurs at 13:41 ·