On Review Scores

Hi Everyone! I'll be posting a lot of reviews here, and I've decided not to provide a numeric score at the end of each review, so I wanted to discuss my reasoning. Back in March, I wrote a review of the newest Tropical F*ck Storm album for my school's magazine, in which we have to assign each album a score. I had mixed feelings about the album. It felt poorly structured and messy, retreading old ground for the band without major improvements. However, TFS is one of my favorite bands, and I earnestly enjoyed nearly every song on the album, whether they reinvented the wheel or not. So, what do I do? Do I say it's a 4 by TFS standards? Or do I say it's a 7 relative to all music I hear? I went with the latter, but it felt unsatisfying. It felt like my thoughts on it didn't match my score, but I doubt I would've felt right giving an album I really enjoyed listening to a poor score.

Scores also accentuate a compulsion that many reviewer's feel to inject some "objectivity" into their work, whatever that entails. How do you rate something you enjoyed watching, but didn't think was well-crafted? How do you score guilty pleasures? And conversely, how do you score something, a literary classic or cinematic touchstone, that you "know" is great, but didn't personally get much out of? (This last question invites a larger discussion on how we approach art that is deeply lauded or culturally significant, one I'll likely write about at a later time. I would recommend reading the fantastic New York Times article "Eating Your Cultural Vegetables" by Dan Kois for more on the subject). By omitting scores entirely you can avoid whittling these complex questions down into simple, insufficient answers. These questions should remain unresolved, free to spark discussion.

So, scores tend to raise more questions than they answer, which you certainly don't want for a summative tool, or provide simple answers to complex questions, which narrows discussion. As a result I'd always take a concluding paragraph over a concluding number. After all, it is your job as a reviewer to convey both specific thoughts and overall attitude through your words. If your readers need a number to understand how you felt about the album, you haven't done your job.

Giving scores also affects how readers engage with your review. Let's take a prime example: one of my favorite YouTubers, YourMovieSucks. YouTube recently introduced a feature where you can see the most viewed sections of a video if you hover your mouse over the progress bar. On many of YMS's reviews, viewers slowly trickle down as the video progresses, until a huge spike of engagement near the end of the video when he provides his score. This means that a large number of his viewers either skipped ahead, or just clicked there immediately instead of watching the review. As a result, these viewers refused to engage with real analysis of art. Let's say a viewer heavily disagrees with the score YMS gave a movie. Which situation will this viewer gain more from? Watching the video in full to understand his thoughts, identify where they differ, and see the movie from a new persepctive, or skipping to the end, seeing a number you disagree with, and clicking off? If you forego a number, you avoid this second scenario, and viewers are forced to engage in a real discussion about how a piece of art made them feel. That's the goal! A number may help boost engagement, but it cheapens discussion that deserves complexity. It misses that WHY you felt a certain way is far more interesting than WHAT you felt alone.