Am I reading this correctly?

I played in a jazz ensemble for years. I've been trained as a classical/jazz saxophone player for nearly 11 years. I've listened to more records of music than I can remember. I've studied, written about, pontificated about, explored, and played so many genres, styles, and movements that I can't believe how much of it I DO recall - American blues and folk from the 1920's. 1950's Gospel, 1960's Country, black metal, ambient, experimental rock, post-rock, fusion, post-punk, psychedelic, baroque, romantic, new age, world influence, trip hop, thrash, new wave, reggae - the list goes on and on and on and on...

Edited by Alitare - October 03 2012 at 19:56

dtguitarfan wrote: thellama73 wrote: dtguitarfan wrote: The T wrote: Mr Dtguitarfan: I haven't written any new PA review in about two years. But I am a prog reviewer. I became one after I had written about 30 or so, I would say. Check my reviews: I have reviewed all but the last DT album and the average rating should be well above 4 stars for those. Please stop whining about not becoming a reviewer because the powers that be don't share your musical taste.  Nope, they pretty much told me that I'm not reviewer status because I review too many Prog Metal albums.  If it were an automatic process whereby as soon as you reach 30 and someone has said "well, his reviews are not crap" you get the status, I'd be ok.  But as things are, I say people around here are pretentious.  Mind you, I'm a collab at MMA, and over there we've had a discussion about REMOVING the extra weighting for reviews and collabs (we've actually discussed keeping weighting for reviews, but lowing how much weighting they get).  We are VOLUNTARILY asking to give up our special weighting!  Not here.  They like the power here. I think the issue is probably a lack of diversity in your reviews, which I think is a reasonable criterion. It's not that you have to review albums the collaborators like, it's that you have to be more than a one-genre prog listener. Yup. 30% of my reviews are not my favorite genre. So I'm not allowed to have preferences?

I don't know why I keep getting involved in discussions with you. Fine, no, you're not allowed to have preferences. Happy?

thellama73 wrote: dtguitarfan wrote: The T wrote: Mr Dtguitarfan: I haven't written any new PA review in about two years. But I am a prog reviewer. I became one after I had written about 30 or so, I would say. Check my reviews: I have reviewed all but the last DT album and the average rating should be well above 4 stars for those. Please stop whining about not becoming a reviewer because the powers that be don't share your musical taste.  Nope, they pretty much told me that I'm not reviewer status because I review too many Prog Metal albums.  If it were an automatic process whereby as soon as you reach 30 and someone has said "well, his reviews are not crap" you get the status, I'd be ok.  But as things are, I say people around here are pretentious.  Mind you, I'm a collab at MMA, and over there we've had a discussion about REMOVING the extra weighting for reviews and collabs (we've actually discussed keeping weighting for reviews, but lowing how much weighting they get).  We are VOLUNTARILY asking to give up our special weighting!  Not here.  They like the power here. I think the issue is probably a lack of diversity in your reviews, which I think is a reasonable criterion. It's not that you have to review albums the collaborators like, it's that you have to be more than a one-genre prog listener.

Yup. 30% of my reviews are not my favorite genre. So I'm not allowed to have preferences?

^^ We're all individuals (cue more Monty Python) with different desires.  Some care more about such status and weighting than others.  I'd like to see those weighted ratings gone (or make it optional to see ratings with the weightings for those that find that somehow better).  True, I haven't reviewed much, but actually, I think I might review more if we didn't have those weighted ratings skewed towards collabs (not that that would be a good thing for the site since I'm a poor reviewer).

As for being  a reviewer, I don't think generally it should matter hugely if one focuses on one style of music -- especially if one avoids styles that one doesn't like/ is not familiar with.  I could see a problem if one reviewed/ rated certain categories much higher than others, and rated/ reviewed albums not by the standards of its category or musical idiom.  I think it rather better for a  reviewer to like a wide variety of music under the Prog umbrella and review a wide variety of music. 

People chosen to be collabs tend to be fairly balanced, are seen to have good behaviour, and if one is seen to be unbalanced or has a monomania, or is complaining, that can affect the decision.  It's also about how one presents oneself in the forum in many cases (though some prog reviewers don't post in the forum).

I'm not really balanced, as I tend not to like the more "melodic rock/ metal"/ arena rock/ metal / AORish styles of music.  I generally lean to the the more avant-garde oriented, jazzy and psychadelic styles in PA.

Then how do you explain my voluntary forfeiture of Prog Reviewer status? If that POWER, ALMIGHTY POWER is such an entrancing draw...

rushfan4 wrote: lmaorofllollmao wrote: rushfan4 wrote: Spoken like a true 13 year old who wasn't around when ELP came into existence.  . I dont understand, you're saying i can't voice my opinion on a band because i'm not from 1970? No I am saying that your opinion is similar to other children your age who haven't lived enough life to properly form an opinion and yet they feel like they should share their misguided opinions anyways because w**king on a thread is what they do.  And quite frankly it gets quite tiresome after awhile for us old farts.  And that is coming from a relatively young old fart.

Well, i might as well admit, i'm SO sorry i attemtped to say ANYTHING to a 42 year old person. I'm 13, I thought i disliked emerson lake and palmer, but i guess i have no opinion whatsoever, because a stranger told me so. I'm again, SO sorry for even saying anything, because as always, it ends in embarrassment with a bunch of people claiming to be very intelligent because of their age.

thellama73 wrote: Ok, first of all complaining about not being a prog reviewer is a little pathetic.

The reason I brought it up is to support the claim that this site favors the opinions of certain people.  If reviewer status were given to anyone who got to a certain number and had a fair enough quality of reviews, I wouldn't have a point.

thellama73 wrote: Second, you have fewer than forty reviews. That's not a ton to go on. I have more than eighty and I have never been asked to be a reviewer, nor do I really mind.

Wrong.  55.  Which is 25 more than the number they say you must have in order to become a reviewer.  And there would be more on here, if they didn't take so darn long to approve and put up new bands.  Note: MMA made the decision a while back that in order to keep the process going, if a vote took too long to process, an admin could step in and make a final decision.  They did this because they want to keep the process going and keep people coming to the site to look for what's new and current.  This site has ceased to care about such things and sometimes takes years to process a vote and put up a profile.

thellama73 wrote: Third, here's your review of Led Zeppelin IV (the only album you've reviewed that I've heard):

So what?  As you said, it's not terrible.  It's not my best, but it's better than plenty I've seen, and when I asked the admins here why I hadn't earned reviewer status, they never pointed out a single review that they had a problem with.  If they had, I would have rectified that issue and tried to rewrite the specific ones they had a problem with.  No, they actually said the quality of my reviews were fine.  So once again I say: in order to earn reviewer status and have your vote count more around here, you have to review the albums the powers that be like! 

I didn't know about the bigbigtrain album, that's hilarious because they are awful

I'll show you the review I'm most proud of (at least contained on this site):

If you really want to read my reviews, I have many that are not on PA. Check out my blog at http://thetintinnabularium.blogspot.com/ </shameless self-promotion>