Best Albums of 2003, Scientifically

thdexter writes "Two guys statistically analyzed the best albums of 2003, from some thirty top-10 lists, giving value to how often an album was mentioned by editors and recording its mean place. White Stripes came out on top, with Outkast below. Full results are available on the site."

Comments

Re:I think

[fastidious edward]

Looking at their 'scientific' analysis and method, perhaps "most critically acclaimed albums of 2003" would be a better.

Critical acclamation may be a proxy for what the critics think is best, but beauty, including musical beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.

A better way

[domodude]

Metacritic.com compiles up to 30 reviews for a particular video game / movie / CD and averages the review score. Here are to true top albums of 2003 as rated by nearly everybody: http://metacritic.com/music/bests/2003.shtml

Note that the list does change as more reviews come in. This list actually has good music like The Shins or The Notwist.

Re:A better way

[Captain Beefheart]

I've found metacritic to be a better barometer than gamerankings.com, because metacritic is far more selective with its sources. In fact, as far as I can tell, gamerankings takes every score it can get its hands on, from the mom-and-pop indie shop to the major sites and magazines. No offense to the indie shops, but you can get some very uninformed and often gushing evaluations that skew the overall rating several points.

Metacritics has Knights of the Old Republic for the PC an 89, while gamerankings has it at 92.5. Note that the reader score at gamerankings is an 89. The PC version of Prince of Persia gets a 92 at gamerankings while metacritic gives it an 88. The gameranking reader score is an 86.

Both times the difference is about half a review point (on a ten point scale) which is pretty significant. And both times the high metascore goes to gamerankings. And both times the reader score is closer to Metacritic's metascore.

Re:Latest music

[poptones]

...if you think about it, the latest music they play on the radio isn't necessarily good anyways. Fate will decide that.

Methinks you are another of those aging denim rockers who has confused popularity with quality. Listen to a "classic top 40" station and you'll hear plenty of old Michael Jackson; listen to a "classic rock" station and you'll get plenty of Foreigner and Journey and Kansas and Styx and Boston... all formulaic bands that sucked twenty years ago when I was a kid, and still suck today. The fact they hgave stuck in the throat of our culture like a chronic post-nasal drip doesn't make them "great." This is the very same lesson even PBS refuses to get - as exemplified by their incessant rerunning of such ancient pablum as "The Lawrence Welk Show" and "Are You Being Served?"

If you listen to classic rock and oldies, you are guaranteed the best music from that era.

I cannot recall the last time I heard Cowboys International, Wire, Martha and the Muffins, or Joy Division, or even Bampff or Carolyne Mas on a "Classic rock" station. In fact, I'm pretty sure that's true simply because it just ain't gonna happen. "Classic" in our vernacular means "popular" and none of those acts I mentioned were "popular" outside the demographic that shunned the mainstream culture of the seventies and eighties. No amount of popularity is ever going to make Bosteigner Kanjourtyx "the best music" of that era to anyone except the zombified stoners who have now become the undead-heads of the middle aged.

For the sake of argument let's refocus a bit and just consider "popular" acts of the time. If they play alice Cooper, what do they play? Elected? Billion Dollar babies? Maybe. More likely they play some later stuff from his first attempted comeback when he was doing soundtrack work and horror movie appearances. Most likely of all is they'll just play some of his new crap simply because the corporations need to move it from the record club shelves and Vinnie gets to keep too much of the money when they move his old stuff. Ever hear "Black Juju" or "Steven" on the radio?

One of the most thrilling parts of the many Heart shows I went to were when Nancy would play her extended acoustic solo intro to "Crazy on You." This later became a studio track called "Silver Wheels" on their "Bebe LeStrange" album - ever heard it on the radio? I never did in spite of the fact "Crazy on You" remains a staple of "Classic radio" to this day.

Ever see "Almost Famous?" Listen to the music Nancy Wilson wrote for that movie and tell me it doesn't sound exactly like other popular hits of the era.

"It's only me, Arthur Pee, welcoming you to WRIF - the Motor City home of the most profitable corporate rock ever recorded! And now here's Fever Dogs by that little band from Troy..."

More "scientific" than you think ...

[gradji]

While I think the original post makes a good point, it should be noted that other traditionally "scientific" studies also use fairly arbitrary measures.

Take the case of (new) drug-testing: the statistical tests used are often arbitrary, both in the chosen significance level and the statistic itself. The former is well discussed (why is 5% or 1% necessarily the proper cut-off point for rejecting a null hypothesis) but the latter receives much less attention. Many of these statistics have known distributional properties only under assumptions that are either unverfiable or, worse, not bothered to be verfied by the researcher. I have seen statistics conducted on results from experiments where the underlying phenomena can only take positive values yet the researcher assumes it is governed by a Normal distribution (whose support is the entire real line)

Lastly, I think the researchers on the top 2004 recordings should be commended for following the spirit of science. They clearly explain their objective, the data they used, and their chosen method of analysis. Their work can be replicated from what they publish on their website. This is something that cannot be said of many experiments conducted in the finest university/industry labs by Ph.D. researchers! Truly in the spirit of scientific discovery, if one has problems with their "arbitrary choice" ... all the tools are there to adopt different choices and see how the results change.

[ That said, I wish the researchers had spent a bit more time explaining the motivation underlying some of their "arbitrary" choices. ]