While flitting through metacritic.com, a website that collects and sorts reviews of varying mediums I noticed one thing: I never seem to agree with any of the reviewers. I don't mean the numbers - they don't mean anything anyway - I'm talking about their articles in general.
The website doesn't post the entire article, but they have the links to most of them. I couldn't help but notice that my favorite songs from Man Man's "Six Demon Bag" and Cake's "Pressure Chief" differed drastically from any of the journalists/bloggers.
Out of a handful of the reviews that cited specific songs, every single on of them had at least one song in common, if not two. The funniest thing is, neither of the two (or one, whatever) was my favorite song on the Album and in the case of Cake, I literally never listened to any of the ones mentioned.
This brings up a question of tastes. All the reviewers seem to have uniform opinons about the same tracks. I'm not going to claim that they had the same good taste, since that obviously would imply that I have bad taste (something I'm not entirely willing to admit). So I guess it comes down to this: why do all the reviewers on metacritic have the same thoughts?
That question segues nicely into a related topic about social cliques. I'm not referring to high-school groupings, but the little communes found in the so-called American intelligentsia. One of the best examples is the Oscars, or more fundamentally, movie critics. The movies that tend to win are almost always unanimously lauded with few exceptions. I find it disturbing that supposedly great works of film do not raise conflict. Generally speaking, some of the best works of art in any medium has a conflicted debut. There are those who adore it and there are also those who vilify it as the fall of culture. This does not appear true in the case of the Oscars.
To su it up, when I look up reviews I tend to expect a variety of ratings based on different basis and standards. What I seem to get is everyone lumping themselves together in a couple of distinct camps claiming they're right with little justification. I just find that unuseful - that's really all I can say. Modern critics (maybe older ones as well, I don't look up culture sections in news media archives) are just as helpful as the sales assistant that's ignoring you and trying damn hard not to make eye contact.
