So this week I did a new thing – I introduced grading songs and albums into my Album of the Week feature. This is going to be a new thing going forward. I’m using this post today to discuss the grading scale in detail. I will have this post around as a guide for people who happen across my album reviews. At the end of this I’ll also touch on stuff regarding the Album of the Week going forward.

I had a long period of indecision about how to do a scoring system. I was torn between the 5 point number system and a 10 point scale. The 5 point scale is nice and compact and very easy to understand scoring differences, a 2.5 is a world away from a 5 or even a 4.5. A 5 point scale with half steps is also a 10 step scale, or 11 if you count zero, but that’s beside the point.

I honestly thought about doing a 10 scale just to be “different.” A lot of people use the 5 point scale and I wanted to present things a bit differently. But I was having fits with stuff like a 6 or a 7, those kind of scores just look weird to me and seem like they’re just numbers hanging out somewhere. What the hell is a 7, really? The 10 point scale didn’t fit me.

Being bright as I am, it took me a really long time to hit on the letter grade system. Seriously, I deliberated on this for over a year and then finally messed around with letter grades just a few weeks back. I really liked the results and I feel like I can accurately express what I want with the grades so that’s what I’ll go with.

I will lay out the various letter grades and what they represent on my grading system below. And yes, I’m using plus and minus on all but the very bottom and top grades, so there are 14 possible grades for songs and albums. Most people understand the letter grade system but my top grade is somewhat unconventional in western society so I’ll lay it all out here.

F – the lowest end of the scale and a failing grade. It’s a song that sucks in irredeemable fashion. I don’t even know if I’ll use it all that much but I can think of a few total stinkers that would get the harshest of grades. No need for a plus or minus here, an F is an F.

D – really bad. Not failing, but not that far off. D on my grade scale is not a great thing. I’m not trying to keep a student from failing a class, this isn’t a pity grade. I’m judging final work here and a D is just not cutting the mustard. Anything on a D scale is a song I don’t really want to listen to again but I can find something about it that keeps if from earning the dreaded F.

C – this does generally denote average and is how I’ll use it. There are plenty of average songs out there and even great albums have some less than stellar tracks a lot of the time. There isn’t anything “wrong” with being average, though of course music fans are looking for something more. But I’m sure I’ll hand out plenty of stuff in the C range as I go along, there are a lot of ho-hum songs out there.

B – B is a very good, solid grade. Better than average, as would stand to reason. For a song it doesn’t represent a transcendent work but is still a very good song worth listening to. It is me saying that this is very much worth giving a spin to and is ideally the minimum grade for any music I listen to, but that obviously won’t happen.

A – the top of the Western grading scale, an A is usually as good as it gets. It won’t be the top rank on my scale but it will commonly be the best possible grade. This is a band or act getting the music really, really right. Every student wants an A and every band wants an A. But they’re not that easily earned.

S – S is a grade above A that is used in Japan and it has also seeped into Internet culture on tier lists and things like that. S-Tier stuff is the greatest stuff possible. An S song is a rare gem and is absolutely the best of the best. I used to run an S-tier songs series on here and that is the same concept here – any song that gets this grade is just truly magnificent. It won’t been seen a whole hell of a lot but those S-tier songs are out there. I won’t use plus or minus for S grades either – S is as good as it gets.

That sums up the letter grading scale. It will take me a bit of time to get used to doing it but early returns are pretty good so I’ll rock it out going forward. This feature will apply to the Album of the Week series, as well as any other albums I happen to write about. I won’t use it for the Song of the Week or other stuff like that. I may do brief album grades for more current releases in short review form as well.

If you came here to get an explanation for my grading scale, you’ve reached the end of relevant content. I’ll throw a YouTube clip in here and then discuss some stuff relevant to my Album of the Week series in April 2024 below, it won’t really pertain to the grading system outline. If you’re reading this on or about Friday April 12 and are a regular reader, you may (or may not) want to read the below passage.

So with this grading thing also comes a re-evaluation of the Album of the Week feature. I started it when I started the blog as a way to ensure I had something consistent to write about at least once a week. It has served that purpose well but like anything I have also evaluated it over time.

At one point last year I was actually thinking of pulling the plug on AOTW – I was getting a bit bored with it and felt it was a grind to finish off the post each Saturday before it went live. But doing the 1984 thing this year has reinvigorated me a bit and I feel fine with continuing AOTW going forward.

It will take me a little time to truly integrate the grading system into my posts. There may be one or two that pop up without it as I have a few things nearly ready to go – my inability to post a few times so far this year has left me with a bit of extra material.

As I go along I’ll be playing with the posts a little bit, small changes to formatting and such. I don’t have a grand direction here – I just want to play with a few things and see how they look, it’s not a huge deal.

One other hope as I introduce the grading system – I am reasonably confident that I can cut down the length of these album posts as I switch my focus more to the song’s grade. I’ve had a few of my posts this year really get away from me. I will be working on keeping things more compact in the near future.

Also – I’ve done nearly three years’ worth of album posts without grades. Over time I will likely drag a few back up again and hand out grades. I will make them separate posts and I’ll probably just do those on other days rather than doing a second AOTW post about those albums. Honestly I only have plans for one right now and that will come up in August on the album’s 30th anniversary, but I will recycle content a little bit to integrate this new grading scale.

And one small aside about the AOTW and the grading system – I by no means want to only review great albums. There is plenty of other music out there worth looking at that isn’t A material. But, as it would happen, the next few albums lined up in queue are, well, pretty damn amazing and so it’s gonna look like I’m the easy teacher handing out As like candy. That will be somewhat true as I keep doing the 1984 thing, but I think this will actually get me to dig into some less heralded albums as I go along. But there are a few ringers lined up here in the near future.

I think that about covers what I wanted to talk about. I will leave you to guess which 1984 classic album I’ll discuss on Monday, I’m sure it’s hard to figure out, lol. See you then.