Release Polls: Rank & Tier your Favorite Artists!

^ This (my post, not yours) is very, very badly expressed, and could be a lot more sensible. I don't like the terms for one thing, although that shouldn't matter if it's clear what it means/ represents. The exercise does not resonate with me. A simple number would be preferable, like 1 to 20. But maybe because I don't have the "soul" (so to speak) of a mathematician or statistician, or whatever, the numbers don't sing to me. I like to list more than rate. I'd keep the question marks, personally, but then I like Doctor Who.

They are almost all great to me (or one might say awesome for them), that's a problem, and what is supreme amongst them often depends on what I am listening to at the time. The terminology does not work well with my personality either. Honestly, I don't like the terms, maybe they are a little too informal and young for me (I'm pretty old school), lacking nuance, too much like synonyms... "Da shizz" I like for some reason, and "Yowza" and "Wha' tha?" so, hmm. Don't know, my weird sense of fun and humour, I guess. I don't like the ratings descriptions at PA either.

While I rank and rate things, it's not something I'm very comfortable doing. I would rather try to review if I was better at it. I'd like to present lists that show music I am into and hopefully connect with others who share the tastes.

I actually do find charts useful, so I am hardly against rating and ranking albums. But I'm more like I love lots in their own way. Or I find it mediocre, or bad for my tastes. But I usually listen to and like to talk about that which I love.

And on a sidenote, I most like lists when they are interactive, people commenting on each others lists and sharing what they like and don't like from each other's likes... I do like looking at the combined results from your polls, like with albums of the year and being a contributor to that. I value your site for making lists and seeing others lists and seeing combined rankings...

Different strokes for different folks. Lots I do like to use at your site. I feel like a rating and ranking and such descriptions just does not do justice to how an album affects me commonly. The numbers and descriptions don't represent the beauty enough to me, or how it resonates emotionally, or I should say I feel it's lacking in its descriptiveness of beauty to me as it is a subjective evaluation. Sadly, no review or rating can truly share how music or other art and things make me truly feel. Empathy, vocabulary, and signs and signifiers can give some insight.

Rating is not something I tend to enjoy, or assigning levels of status to something with descriptions like awesome or masterpiece. Ranking is already a less than desirable task for me despite finding utility in ratings and rankings. Maybe I'm being selfish... When I was in my 20s I wrote film reviews and I hated the expectation of rating the album and was less comfortable with others rating art. I've become more okay with it because I realise that that can help me to discover things that I will love, but to also be wary of ratings still. What is super-duper stupendously great to me might be super-duper bad to the ears of another of course. But I digress and kind of lost my way as I was dealing with a call.

One thing I often don't like to say or even imply is that one album is better than another. Others are much more comfortable with declarations of quality than I am and will bandy about terms such as good, great and bad much more, and more stridently and definitively than I would like. Even if one is not speaking in objective terms, but explicitly subjectively, very often I don't think of an album as being better than an other for me as I value each on its own merits and in its own way. And as said, often the one I like best is what I am listening to at the time. It doesn't mean I don't have preferences, of course I do, but ranking and rating can feel like a very shallow and even disingenuous exercise to me. I can say with, say, quite a few of those Swans and Stevens albums that I ultimately value them both equally and differently in their own ways. I can also say that some of theirs I do not value as much as others. I like to focus the most on those that I appreciate very much.

EDIT: In terms of tiers descriptions, I do quite like something of this sort in part (off the top of my head, and rather hyperbolic):

- Friggin' Adore!!
- Love!
- Really Like
- Like
- So-so (meh)
- Dislike (as a negative experience))
- Really dislike (yuck)
- Hate (this album should die!)
- Abhor with a hatred that burns intensely (this album and, well I won't go there)
- Detest with a rage so strong that you would rather see the world burn than contemplate a world in which this album exists
- Detest with a rage and hatred so strong that you would rather see the universe burn than contemplate a universe where such a horrendously horrible and infinitely hateful album could ever exist or have existed in all of space-time. Even just the idea of it would make a universe that could conceive of such a thing utterly deplorable and worthy of absolute annihilation

Edited by Logan - 5 hours 10 minutes ago at 17:45