The Third Eye Method

or, how to be a pretentious snot in your spare time

"It was Plato who first put words to the Theory of Forms... for example, there exists in the world of ideas a perfect chair. This is the ideal chair, the chair of which all chairs in our world are dilutions, imperfect variants, and lesser shades of. This is the chair which embodies absolute chairness; it is the reference chair." -- Simon Parkin

"The Blues are beautiful because it’s simpler and because it’s real. It’s not perverted or thought about: It’s not a concept, it is a chair; not a design for a chair but the first chair. The chair is for sitting on, not for looking at or being appreciated. You sit on that music." -- John Lennon


As I posted previously, there is such a thing as good taste in music. It can be proven. But having beaten that particular dark horse to death, I'm going to put my lack of money where my mouthpiece is and give you my very own system for rating music. It's one I've been developing for a while, and the good news is that anyone can do it, professional or not -- but the success you have at rating music is, I have to warn you, proportional to just how much music you've heard.

So what do we look for in a musical piece -- a song or an album? Ratings systems are usually pretty haphazard; they're either unnecessarily complicated or shockingly arbitrary. I've come up with something called The Third Eye Method, which works as a nice metaphor for being able to see things more deeply than others, but is really just a mnemonic that reminds you we're talking about three qualities that begin with the letter I. Diamonds, for example, are judged by four Cs: Cut, Clarity, Carat, and Color. But songs take a lot less time to form than diamonds, so I'm doing it in three: Impact, Invention, Integrity. 


1. Impact.


Any teenager knows impact. In fact, it's most young people's introduction to music: that club beat or guitar riff or crazy vocal that hits you dead in the face, and maybe changes your life. The record industry, ever-mindful of that coveted 18-34 age group, wants you to rock out or get crunk or whatever. It's what drives the money. They know your hormones are caught up in such things like a cow stuck in a fence. It's why rock and roll came along in the first place. Same goes for soul, disco, metal, punk, and hip-hop. Loud, fast, hard, clean.

At the same time, there is such a thing as emotional impact, and this is where pop music rules -- the achingly tender ballad, the sweet love song, the catchy hook that earworms you at work all day. It's the crack, this impact, the drug that makes you come back. It has to move something: your head, your ass, your heart. And it must do so simply and, above all, efficiently. Boredom equals death.

Artists that score high on Impact: AC/DC. Ramones. The Mars Volta. The Sonics. Public Enemy. NWA. Andrew WK. Most hardcore punk and real metal. But Elliott Smith and Bright Eyes hold down the sensitive end.
Artists that don't: Coldplay, Bon Jovi, boy bands, any Kidz Bop song. Anything lame. You'd be surprised what a general consensus the "cool kids" always have on lameness.


2. Invention.

This one's also easy for most casual music listeners. Have you heard something that sounds like this before? If no one has, congratulations, you just scored high on I number two. This is the aspect of popular music that eventually drives the industry, but the changes happen much more slowly. More of a geological movement, really. But slow moving tectonic plates can cause earthquakes. 

Remember that band you heard when they first came out, and for years you went around telling all your friends about them, but no one cared? And then one day, they were all over the radio, or a band that sounded like them was all over the radio? That's the eventual power of invention: the new sound. It's the kind of thing that only real musicians can do, because they have to stitch seemingly disparate ideas together in their heads and make them work somehow. And that takes time. The good news is, if you invent it, you can suck on that tit forever. You are master of your domain.

Artists that score high on Invention: Velvet Underground. Zappa (no pun). Pere Ubu. Hendrix. Coltrane. Radiohead. Mindless Self-Indulgence. Outkast. TV on the Radio. Anything Mike Patton does.
Artists that don't: The bands that kind of sound like these bands, but not as good. The ones that showed up after they paved the way, and got on the radio. The copycats.


3. Integrity.   

This I is the hard one, the one that usually separates the pros from the bros. It has nothing to do with a moral interpretation of music: this is integrity the way it's used in structural engineering, the sturdiness of an object, the strength of it. What is the song trying to be? Does anyone do this kind of thing better? Is the song conveying a sentiment, or expressing it, rather than merely indicating it? Is the epic truly epic? Does the artist's grasp match his reach -- that is, can he/she/they pull off everything they're attempting? Is she making those tricky jumps or falling on her ass? Can he play the damn thing the way it needs to be played? Is this going somewhere? Is there a point? Is it for real? 

You usually have to log a lot of hours to answer these questions. The good news is that there's already a music critic/fan canon full of immortals who cannot be denied, who sink the shot just about every damn time. You don't have to try anything fancy or new, necessarily, but whatever you attempt, you must pull off.

Artists that score high on Integrity: The gods that walk as men. The Beatles. Led Zeppelin. Hank Sr. Metallica. Jay-Z. Beck. Prince. Pink Floyd. The Wu-Tang Clan.
Artists that don't: Pretty much anyone on American Idol. Black Eyed Peas. Any sellouts. Any posers. Michael fucking Bolton. Justin fucking Bieber.      


So you can see that any work of art serves a practical use, just as any work of commerce: it should create an immediate and intense connection with the ordinary man, it should do so in a way that has not been done before, and it should be able to maintain that connection through craftsmanship. In other words,  the chair must be comfortable, new, and sturdy.   


Now the rest is simple, at least the way I do it: Grade each of the Is on a scale of 1 to 100 (no sense in not being as exact as possible), then average the three scores out. Each 20 points is roughly equivalent to a star in a five-star rating system: 50 is 2 1/2 stars, 80 is a four-star album, anything above 90 can generally be considered an instant five-star classic. 

It's not easy, taking such a mercurial construct as music and attaching cold hard numbers to it, and there's no guarantee something which is technically excellent will push your buttons. But it's important to be able to articulate anything that has so much control over our emotions, hell, even our bodies.. Writing about music is not, as the saying goes, like dancing about architecture: architecture is rigid yet stylish, like writing. It's more like the other way around. So what you can do is take your knowledge of architecture -- and terpsichore -- and build a museum devoted to dancing. And there's no reason to let clumsy people determine what goes in there.