rating system

with almost 5,000 notes about music, movies, shows, etc., it helps to have some structures in place to prevent the glut of information from flattening itself into noise. and while i have tags and genre filters to help slice things up, i also employ the coarsest way of assigning priority to media: the rating system.

that said, i have no interest in posing as a critic, nor do i see anything to gain from doing so. i mostly just want to keep track of what i like, how much i like it, and how much i want to revisit it.

and on the flipside, i very rarely hate things, so i see no need to have a system that feels compelled to balance love against hate. on places like rym, that’s something of a necessity just for the sake of having a reasonably balanced ratings graph,¹ but this is my notebook and i can make the rules, and i ended up doing so by adapting elements from the controversial positive rating model employed by long-time Rate Your Music user ~SellMeAGod.

people on rym hated this model, and one look at his ratings distribution shows why: as per the logic of the site, it meant the vast majority of ratings would be a 1.5 out of 5 or worse. still, if you’re able to look past its implementation there, i think he makes some good points – namely, the idea of every star being earned. and in this case, maybe it’s best to think of each additional star as reflecting how closely it has managed to entrench itself into my life. and maybe that’s all it needs to be!

enter the star rating system: my attempt at ascribing value to the things that i love, limited to four stars because my emotions are so wobbly that i’d have a hard time delineating how i feel across a more fine-grained scale. plus, if In the Groove 2 (2005) uses four stars as the highest score one can get, then that’s good enough for me.

for songs:

• ★: i found something interesting in it
• ★★: i liked it!
• ★★★: really liked it / want to remember it
• ★★★★: important to me / soul-bonded

it’s almost a given that an album will have some single-star tracks, and it’s pretty common for one to have at least one two-star track. but for a track to break past that, it has to work its way into my life, usually over multiple listens.

the gap between three stars and four stars here is therefore pretty wide – wide enough that i keep a tag for albums that have these tracks.

for albums and other full works:

★ (top 15%): enjoyable throughout / i liked it!
⭐ (top 5%): great / want to return to again (and again?)
🌟 (top 2%): special to me / these are my friends!
🌠 (top 0.5%): a part of me / core to my identity

much like with the track ratings, two stars is about the highest that an album can go on first listen. for an album to rise higher than that requires multiple listens, time for the album to grow on me, and at least one song from it to have become special to me in the meantime.

attraction points

i’m a sucre addict. i like my music sugary and highly melodic. perhaps that makes my taste bad, but that’s ok because you don’t have to have my tongue.

i try not to let pedigree influence my taste. i want to say that i give the most lauded albums a fair shake, but at this point i’m kind of tired of trying to make myself like things just because i feel like i “should.”

• japan and ryuukyuu
  • shibuya-kei / akishibu-kei / picopop!
  • j-pop
  • okinawan music / shimauta / ryukyuan bushi
  • vgm and its derivatives
• zimbabwe: chimurenga / sungura
• shoegaze / dream pop / hazy sweetness
• flavors of ambient and new age music
• occasionally novelty, bakamedia and sometimes kusomedia
• lullabies

things that are harder, more violent, or less melodic don’t tend to have much of an impact on me, so they will likely not show up much in this archive.

Footnotes

1. maru has made multiple jokes at my expense about how my rym ratings graph’s most common rating is a 2.0, and whenever i’m in an especially critical mood she says i’m shifting into “2.0 watermoon” mode ↩