Critical Mass

Today, kids, I'll be talking about a site called metacritic. You probably already know about it, basically what it does is this: it combines the critics' scores for a whole bunch of stuff: music, movies, TV shows, video games etc... and figures out an average. It also offers links to and snippets from the reviews themselves. I love it. To demonstrate how it works, but also as an example of the music criticism available on teh interwebs, we'll be looking at metacritic's coverage of the Raconteurs' (that's the Saboteurs for us Aussies) debut album.

Ok, so, for starters, we can see that it's recieved an average score of 72 so far. Not bad, not bad... I rate it a little higher than that, but you're always gonna have some reviewers who'll bash it because it involves Jack White, and he's all popular and stuff now. Do you rate it higher than 72? Then rate the album yourself and contribute towards the average user's vote... currently standing at 8.2 out of 10, with just 34 votes registered.

So, who are these esteemed critics whose opinions have been canvassed? Well, we've got our traditional print mononliths... the arthritic collosuses straddling the world of music criticism: Rolling Stone, Mojo, The Guardian, the New York Times, you know the drill. (For magazines that don't do ratings out of 100 or ratings that can be converted into 100, metacritic's score goes off the general 'feel' of the review. Or something.)

But ranked alongside their newsstand brethren are a pack of upstart web-sites... not blogs, as far as I can tell, because then they'd have roughly 1,000,000 reviews to compile. And most of them would just say something like, "I brushed my teeth today. Oh, and yeah, the Raconteurs are cool. I dunno. I wonder if I've got any pizza left over?"
I kid, I kid.

So, among the more interesting reads on the new media front, we've got DotMusic, Playlouder, Drowned In Sound, musicOMH, The Onion's A.V. Club, Pitchfork, PopMatters, Cokemachineglow and Tiny Mix Tapes. And, because there's one in every crowd, Tiny Mix Tapes are the ones to assert that if Jack White wasn't in The Raconteurs, "the press/blogosphere would slam it."

I've gotta side with the positive reviews on this one... it just sounds like some fairly talented "indie" pop musicians getting together and having fun, and keeping it catchy enough for the listener to have fun too.

So, there's a blog entry relevant to the "rock criticism" topic. The next entry promises to be random.