Does scoring albums suck the fun out of listening to music or does it encourage healthy scrutiny when analyzing music?

Yeah, only people who just found out about Scaruffi think that. He likes straight-forward artists like Springsteen and the Ramones (not that there is anything wrong with that) and calls avant-garde shit by the likes of Coil pretentious. He realizes the superiority of innovative music (which is always avant-garde) but he knows some hacks can make some noise and call it experimental (not saying Coil is shit, that was just an example I used of an experimental band that he's not into).

These. I hardly always agree with the dude but usually if he regards it well it’s at least worth giving it a shot. Also I think the people who think his writing style is lacking forget that half the time his reviews are translated from Italian by outside sources

also that Korn album is very innovative for its time

I don't get why people complain about his writing style. I think his prose is beautiful even if I'm not really a follower of his (I'm a huge Bowie fan).

>I like it because it sounds good
there is literally nothing wrong with this.

>Charismatic and sometimes funny

Appetite For Destruction also got an 8/10

Whoever wrote this has only read Scaruffi's Beatles review.

No such thing as healthy scrutiny when it comes to music. Music isn't that kind.of art, it's all.just meaningless opinions and there's no good or bad music. Critics are greedy pointless bastards and you should never give them"views"

>I like a lot of the stuff he doesn’t care for but the stuff he gives 9s and 8s to are 99% of the time completely deserving of extremely high praise
This is an exaggeration, at least for the 8s, but generally I agree. Christgau isn't bad though either, if you can ignore his huge blindspots.

So do I just trying to explain why some might not. He’s really good at describing stuff imo in a way that isn’t buzzwordy

Analytics ruined music and just about everything else

Scaruffi's reviews are so biased, subjective, and short that no real conversation can be started from it. People just use his scores as evidence for why an album is good/bad.

To be a good reviewer, you have to be able to enjoy music that is trying to go for a certain sound and be objective. Christgau has a big problem with reviewing anything outside of rock.

Fantano's original mission was to give track by track reviews in a sense that made people discuss the music more, but literally just because gen z is retarded and he puts #/10 scores in his descriptions, people only use those as arguments and refuse to have discussion.

75% of Pitchfork staff do not know how to review music. Popular music that gets reviewed only gets good scores if they pay Pitchfork or if the music follows the left agenda. And the rest get thrown to the wolves with 4-6's. They skip through anything outside of that, anything obscure coming out today really, and give arbitrary, meaningless scores and reviews since the reviews themselves will get about 7 clicks total.

I would say Fantano easily has the worst impact as his fanbase skip the entire review, write dumb shit in his comments, and blindly follow his opinion and score without question because they can't think for themselves.