Everybody’s A Wenner: The “Rolling Stone” Review-Section Revue

Brian Raftery | October 12, 2006 12:36 pm

Welcome back to another edition of “Everybody’s A Wenner,” in which we look at Rolling Stone‘s Knoplfer-lovin’ record-reviews section, and try to prove the theory that every album earns a three-star rating–no matter how bad. For a slightly more convoluted explanation, check out our first installment.

As many of you have pointed out, your Idolators are terrible at math, and our “let’s average every grade out” approach may not be the most statistically sound way of proving that three stars is the most commonly assigned grade. So from now on, we’re going to calculate the percentage of how many reviews in each issue earn three stars, and then tally them up every few issues, and then carry the X or something. Lord, we have no idea what we’re doing.

So, issue No. 1011, a.k.a. “The issue in which that Kids Incorporated trollop dresses up like a Vivid Video vixen”: Quite a few four-star reviews in here (Beck, Lupe Fiasco, Los Lobos), and a handful of actual negative reviews (including a two-star mark for Janet’s 20 Years Old and a one-and-a-half mark for Chingy). Overall, it was not our best week to prove that RS is simply in the business of slapping three stars on everything. Maybe the editors are finally wise to us–or maybe they were too busy singing the praises of Tila Tequila to be bothered with assigning more reviews this week.

Issue #: 1011 Total number of reviews (excluding reissues): 18 Total number of three-star reviews: 5 Total percentage of reviews that are three-star reviews: 28 percent Total number of Idolator editors who know how to calculate percentages in their head: 0