Accentuate the positive?

Uh oh, I’m channeling Johnny Mercer.

I ran across some blog entries awhile back about non-P4P reviews.  And specifically that for some forms of entertainment, there is a wide range of both positive and negative reviews, while for other forms of entertainment, reviews tend to be almost uniformly positive.

The observation about almost uniformly positive reviews is one that some (including me) have made at times about P4P.  There certainly are a few negative reviews, even alerts.  The vast majority of P4P reviews, though, are positive.  In fact, many of the reviews might be best described as glowing; almost worshiping about how wonderful the lady is.  Some interpret that as reviewers just being afraid to be honest about the ladies they see.  But after reading some of the following observations about non-P4P reviews . . . maybe the explanation is subtly different.  And maybe the phenomenon is not that unreasonable.

First, an essay in the NYT Book Review about — no surprise here — book reviews.  The author (of the essay) had an observation:

Authors are always complaining [about various errors in the reviews of their books]. 

What makes this bellyaching so unseemly is that the vast majority of book reviews are favorable, even though the vast majority of books deserve little praise. Authors know that even if one reviewer hates a book, the next 10 will roll over like pooches and insist it’s not only incandescent but luminous, too. Reviewers tend to err on the side of caution, fearing reprisals down the road. Also, because they generally receive but a pittance for their efforts, they tend to view these assignments as a chore and write reviews that read like term papers or reworded press releases churned out by auxiliary sales reps.

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The next blog entry, In praise of negative reviews, carried the discussion over to the context of popular music reviews, for which reviews are almost uniformly positive, and contrasted that with another type of entertainment, where there is a much wider range of critical opinion:

I think the critical medium that suffers most is pop music criticism, which skews toward generally positive reviews of most everything, no matter how bland or terrible. Scan the sidebar of Metacritic’s music page. Nearly all of the review averages are positive or very positive, and almost none of them are straightforward pans. In fact, right now I don’t see a single album with a review average that gets a score categorized “generally negative reviews.” Contrast this with the movies page, which contains more than a dozen films with low averages. Even the limited release indies — the “artsy” films — are often given low marks.

Why is that?

Is contemporary pop music really that much better than contemporary mainstream filmmaking? I think not. Instead, it’s just that the music reviewing culture has developed in such a way that most everything scores a “pretty good” or a “not bad.” . . . The tendency in movie criticism, on the other hand, is to prize strong, brassy opinions. I don’t know exactly why this is. Perhaps the historical influences? Pauline Kael, of course, as well Siskel and Ebert and others, all set the tone for bold critical judgments. Or maybe it’s just that movie critics are a more cantankerous bunch.

On the other hand, if you look at the movie ads in the paper very often, it’s also evident that there are some critics who — perhaps just so they’ll be the ones quoted — always seem to have outlandishly positive evaluations of some truly horrible movies.

The blogger went on to describe both pluses and minuses to the approach toward movie reviews.

There’s a downside to this, of course — a love it/hate it mentality that gives everything a thumbs up or thumbs down without any nuance — but on the whole, I think a non-trivial number of negative reviews is a good thing for any critical sphere, and I much prefer criticism that’s prone to overstatement rather than middling, mushy non-judgments, and critics who, rather than blandly praising everything that comes their way as “just fine,” seem to genuinely believe that their chosen medium is one that has the potential to be wonderful, wretched, and everything in between.

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Finally, a blog entry about The bias toward positive reviews.  Why do they happen?

Suderman has no real explanations for the surfeit of positive reviews. I had some theories back when I was writing more music reviews and was trying figure out why anyone bothered. Unlike films, many many records get released, and just noticing one and running a review of it already marks it as significant. The substance of the review itself is almost beside the point. Acknowledging its existence is already an admission that it’s “pretty good,” so it would be strange for the review to suggest otherwise.

And

 But it wasn’t hard to figure out the logic for this way of doing things. When people read CD reviews, they want to find out about something they should go listen to. They don’t want this: “Hey, here’s something you never heard of. Take a few minutes to read about why you were far better off that way.”

It might amuse some readers to see well-established artists attacked, but who wants to read negative reviews of stuff they haven’t heard of? There’s no point, and the reviewer just comes across as mean. I certainly felt this way about myself when I was writing the negative reviews. It seemed dumb for me to be discouraging these performers, who had no chance of making it, really, no matter what I wrote about them. It’s no fun pissing on people’s dreams. In fact, it made more sense to try to champion all bands, so I could potentially claim some of the glory for helping one of them make it. (I was too cynical to think that actual musical talent had anything to do with future success; success in popular culture has mostly to do with promotion and relentless networking.)

There’s also the whole question of taste, preference, and lack of an objective standard:

Readers often want hype, not evaluation, because it gives pop culture a sure-fire context, whereas a review that traces musical influences and parses lyrics only helps a select few readers. Besides, there are no established criteria for what’s good beyond popularity or fidelity to genre expectations. Maybe Suderman thinks it’s possible that music reviews could be objective evaluations of quality, as defined by some unimpeachable universal standards, but I don’t believe these exist for pop music (or for much of anything in culture—aesthetic criteria are political creations). The pop music people consume is typically a tribal thing or a means to participate in the zeitgeist, and it’s hard as a reviewer to shape the zeitgeist from the margins. But that doesn’t stop many of them from trying.

The idea that I would simply write up a fair evaluation of a record was of course out of the question. My taste is pretty eclectic and idiosyncratic. That was by design. I took pride in the idiosyncrasy because I used to think it made me special, unclassifiable. So my opinion was of no use as a guide for people with more “average” tastes, and I sometimes went out of my way to be contrarian. Most reviewers are similarly in it for the self-definition, seeking to prove to themselves that their tastes are unique or trying to secure tangible proof of their influence on the world. The parasitic positive review is as much a will to power as the nihilistic negative one. And I think pop-music reviewers generally have a disproportionate amount of respect for musicians and want to mystify what musicians do, turn it into magic. This justifies the amount of time they spend under the musicians’ thrall, thinking about the musician’s efforts instead of making efforts of their own.

That makes sense.  I also found interesting his discussion of how difficult it can be to write meaningful reviews of music:

In general, it’s hard coming up with compelling descriptions of music, and with readily accessible sound files, reviewers are competing with the songs themselves, which are easier to sample for oneself than ever. Many review editors try to compensate for this by urging writers to craft tightly wound prose explosions with lots of active verbs and implausible metaphors. The poetic quality of the review has to make up for its inability to beat the music, which basically speaks for itself. Generally, explaining whether the record is good or not is secondary to the writer’s making the reader laugh or think, Wow, that was cleverly phrased. And if all else fails, reviewers can work a variation on the formula of “sounds like artist A plus artist B doing some crazy thing”: e.g., “sounds like Bob Dylan making a pass at Joan Armatrading while landing a helicopter in a minefield.” (Here’s a good example from Klosterman’s review of Chinese Democracy: “It’s like if Jeff Lynne tried to make Out Of The Blue sound more like Fun House, except with jazz drumming and a girl singer from Motown.”) These descriptive conglomerates typically come across as positive but don’t really help readers, unless they have a clairvoyant capacity to get on the reviewer’s wavelength.

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Well, some definite parallels, which changed (at least somewhat) my perspective on P4P reviews:

• Just as with music reviews, versus movie reviews, there is a culture toward overwhelmingly positive reviews — at least on some boards.  Reviewers do it in part because that’s what they see other people do.  And because we don’t usually want to be “cantakerous” toward ladies with whom we have been and may be again intimate.  Just doesn’t match well.
• Maybe reviews tend to be very positive because those are the sessions a client is most likely to review; less motivation to review a session that was OK but not spectacular?
• Not all ladies get reviewed all that often.  Maybe what’s important is not so much how positive a review is, as how many positive reviews she gets. 
• There might be objective standards about what menu items were included, or the price, but it’s questionable how objective any standards about the quality of the time together would be.  From above: “My taste is pretty eclectic and idiosyncratic. “  Or, as we sometimes shorten that observation, WALDT.  My reaction to Lady X may not mean much to another reader, who doesn’t share my perspective.
• It’s hard to write a meaningful review that will provide much help to most readers, beyond the essentials: no upsell/bait&switch/scam; amount; menu items; yes/no recommendation.  That’s not to say that it’s impossible, but it’s definitely not easy.  A glowing positive review may just be the easiest way out, because it takes the least thought/effort.
• It’s also interesting that book reviews, as opposed to movie reviews, are more open to obvious reprisals for negative opinions.  A book reviewer usually is herself an author.  A move review is rarely a director.  P4P is not exactly the same, of course, but there is an opportunity for, and fear of, reprisals.
• Along the lines of “who wants to read negative reviews of stuff they haven’t heard of,” in P4P — for most clients — a lack of positive reviews serves virtually the same function as a negative review.  Many of us don’t want to “take one for the team”; we wait to see a lady until there are positive reviews, rather than deciding to see a lady unless there are negative reviews. 
• And, yes, the limitations of the form do wind up motivating some P4P reviewers to get rather, umm, “creative” in how they describe the encounter.

Certainly informative, useful reviews would be better.  But maybe that’s an unattainable “Holy Grail,” and even if not, it’s probably very difficult to achieve.  If it’s difficult in the context of music and books, think about how much harder it is when an objective review would mean keeping separate the intertwined business and (very) personal aspects of P4P. 

Maybe we should be more understanding about what we actually wind up with.  And maybe all of this also helps explain why I have a diminishing belief in the informative value of reviews (although, of course, reviews may be helpful in ways other than presenting information).

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When I look back on past reviews that I wrote, I might have to plead guilty myself.  Some of them, indeed, may sound overwhelmingly positive and exaggerated.  I may be one of the reviewers that others complain about.  Some reviews – while still positive — have been somewhat more restrained praise, but many of the “OK but not mind-blowing” sessions were never reviewed at all.