Copyright 1997 Adam Barnhart. All Rights Reserved. Fair use of this document.

If you take any coursework in Critical Thinking or Logic (or, schooling be damned, just think that way), you quickly realize that the majority of generalizations that we make about the world are of the hasty variety. This concept, of course, sounds terrible when you first stumble upon it. Most of us are brought up thinking that a hasty generalization is among the worst intellectual sins one can commit, but it's a simple matter of mortality -- it would be nice if we all had an infinite amount of time to evaluate everything in painstaking detail, but, as people remind us all the time, we're only human. A phrase which means two very important things: that we're fallible and that we'll eventually kick the bucket. These hasty generalizations allow us to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in our lives, freeing up time to go out and actually live.

And what does all of this have to do with a collection of music reviews sitting on a middingly well-travelled web site? The numeric ratings I use here are, simply, a distortion. A distillation of innumerable attributes -- the quality of the songwriting, the level of musicianship, the philosophy behind the lyrical content, the quality of the recording, and a million others -- into something which is probably best identified as "How Enjoyable Adam Thinks the Record is."

Which may not be worth a damn to you. I've found that most reviews tell you more about the reviewer than what's being reviewed. When Michael Azerrad (am I picking on him again?) says that one band or another is "self-indulgent," I know I'm likely to enjoy its music. You'll surely have similar reactions to biases of mine.

There is another important difference between what I have to say about music and what Bill Holdship says. I'm not, by profession, a music critic. I'm, rather, a fan of music...and one with fairly omnivorous tastes, at that. When I first pop a CD in, I'm hoping that I'll like it, expecting that it will offer something new and interesting that I haven't yet heard. After all, what I'm listening to is the artistic expression of some person or group of people. Whether we're speaking of someone's life work or some little ditty that they've whipped up during the couple of hours a week they spend in front of a piano, we're speaking of a phenomenon that's intensely personal. Some people miss this point -- even if the musician in question is trying to achieve commerical success, we're listening to something which is extremely personal and important to its progenitor. People often speak of their songs as they would of their children. I have some amount of faith in humanity, I suppose, and expect that, for the most part, the best someone can possibly do would make for interesting listening at worst. There is music out there I don't like, but there's a great deal more out there that I derive pleasure from listening to. I'm not going to feign "coolness" by arbitrarily panning a certain percentage of everything I listen to.

So, like most classes at the university, this area is certainly going to reflect some grade inflation. I'm using a 10 point scale, and most of the things I review are going to congregate between 7 and 10. There's a little bit of a ceiling effect going on here and, while I'd like to provide all of you with more information by changing up the scales, there's something of an understood meaning already hung on all these numbers, so, rather than reinventing the wheel, I'll defer to the existing system and explain myself a little...

I'll use a 10 from time to time. Basically, it's where the Rush albums go, along with another work of genius here and there. It doesn't mean "perfect," but it does mean something awfully damn close to that. Heavy Weather is a 10, as is Zeppelin IV. On average, there's about one of these a year.

A 9 is still an awfully strong album. I haven't really laid all this out yet, but I'd assume that anything from here north would land in my top 10 for the year. To continue talking about Weather Report and Led Zeppelin, I'd say that I Sing the Body Electric and Led Zeppelin II are in the 9 (or 9-plus) neighborhood.

I imagine I'll use a fair number of 8's. This still is clearly well in the black -- I'm still talking about something I like quite a lot and will end up making repeated journeys to my CD player. I guess I'm comfortable with "very good" here. And, for all you cynical folk, I think there's an awful lot of "very good" music out there. Which is why I'm probably pretty damn useless as a critic.

A 7 is the back end, I'd say, of something I'll listen to a fair amount. If I give it a 7, I still like it. Of course, if I give it a 5 or 6, I'm still saying it's worth listening to, but a 7 is worth buying new. If I give something a 5 or 6, I'm speaking of something that might be worth looking for in the used bins for a while.

Anything lower is not good news. I've never purchased anything that isn't, I'd say, at least a 5.5 or so, and, unless someone dumps a Slaughter album on me (sorry Mark), you probably won't see the lower ratings here. I'll save those for bands that I don't much care for and, hence, wouldn't spend a lot of time (or money) on.

Well, enough of that. I'm quite a generous guy where these ratings are concerned, it seems. As I said, I'm not really in a frame of mind to apologize for being a fan of most music. I'm guessing that, like I do with every other critic in the would, you'll read one or two of these, see if you agree or disagree with me, and act accordingly.