How the Straight Greats Scorecard Works

Straight Greats is the series for artists who put together runs of nearly perfect albums, one after another. Some make it to three. A few go further. The point isn’t whether every sane person on earth has to agree. The point is that a run holds up start to finish, album after album, with no dead weight and no charity required.

People have asked how I’m actually deciding these, so here’s the machinery.

Part of why I’m putting it in public is that I caught myself cheating. Not for a band I don’t like — for a band I love. I was working through a run, hit an album I’ve played a hundred times, and started building a case for it I’d never have built for somebody else’s favorite. Same flaws on a stranger’s record and I’d have been merciless. That’s the moment you need a scorecard. Not to be cold about it. To keep from being a hypocrite about it.

What I’m actually measuring

Not peaks. I’m measuring whether the thing carries you from start to finish and never makes you get up, even when all it’s doing is being extremely pleasant.

Most of Beggars Banquet isn’t going on my list of favorite songs. “Jigsaw Puzzle” isn’t a song I’d put on a best-of, and I’d fight you if you took it off that record — it’s perfect exactly where it sits, doing exactly what it’s doing, and the album would be worse without it. It’s a record full of very good songs, a couple of great ones, and not one mistake anywhere on it.

That’s the accomplishment. A record with three monsters and six duds is also great, in its own way, and I own a shelf of them — but that’s not what this series is counting. This is counting whether a record holds for its whole length, which is rarer than a peak and doesn’t get written about nearly as much.

The three badges

Every album I rule on gets exactly one.

CERTIFIED. Clears the line clean. No charity required.

ON THE EDGE. A great album with a real argument attached, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

NO FUCKING WAY. Not part of this run.

Three badges, no half-measures, no asterisks.

The Skip Test

Everything comes down to one question, and it isn’t “is this album good.” It’s: how many tracks do you actually skip?

Not rank lowest. Not admit are weaker. Skip. Thumb on the button, three minutes of your life you’d rather have back.

• Zero or one skip, and the skip isn’t load-bearing — CERTIFIED
• Two skips, or one skip that is load-bearing — ON THE EDGE
• Three or more, or a whole side that doesn’t hold — NO FUCKING WAY

Load-bearing means the track is holding up part of the building. Side closer. The long centerpiece. The title track. Two minutes of filler buried at track seven is survivable — you barely notice it’s gone. An eleven-minute jam you fast-forward is a different problem, because the record built its whole shape around it, and now there’s a hole where the shape was.

One catch: it has to be a skip on a real listen, front to back, like you meant it. Not the song you jump because you’ve heard it four thousand times and you’re sick of it. Being tired of a great song is your problem, not the album’s.

And a maybe isn’t a skip. A track you’re lukewarm on but sit through every time is doing its job. Records are allowed soft spots. What they’re not allowed is the reach for the button.

Those numbers assume a record of ordinary length — nine, ten, twelve songs. Two skips on eight tracks is a quarter of the album gone. Two skips across a sprawling double is barely a blemish, and pretending otherwise would disqualify half the records this series exists for. Unusually short albums, unusually long ones, and doubles get judged in proportion, and I’ll show the work in the post instead of hiding behind the number.

That also means the count is where I start, not where I’m stuck. Sometimes one skip is fatal because of what it is and where it sits. Sometimes a record absorbs three soft spots and never once loses you. When I go against the count, I’ll say so out loud and tell you why — because a rule I can quietly bend isn’t a rule, it’s a mood.

You can disagree with my count. You should. That’s most of why I’m publishing it.

Studio albums, original release, nothing else

Studio albums only. No live records, no compilations, no greatest-hits packages. No EPs either — an EP is a different animal and a shorter one, and half the arguments in this series come down to whether a band had enough for a full record.

And I rate the album as it shipped. Original tracklist, original running order.

No deluxe editions. No expanded remasters. No bonus tracks, no anniversary sets, no B-sides bolted onto the end thirty years later by somebody who wasn’t in the room. For the sixties British bands, the default is the UK release — the American labels routinely took those records apart and rebuilt them around whatever single was moving, and I’d rather judge the version the band sequenced. Where a record genuinely shipped in two configurations at once and there’s no obvious original, I’ll say which one I used and why.

Works both ways. A band doesn’t get rescued by a compiler four decades on, and a band doesn’t get punished because a label tacked four outtakes onto a perfect record to sell it again.

ON THE EDGE is not an insult

I need to be clear about this, because I don’t think the silver badge reads the way I mean it.

An On the Edge album is better than almost every record ever made. It’s usually a couple of tracks that split people, or one swing that didn’t land. It’s not a participation trophy and it isn’t me being generous. It’s me showing you where the argument is instead of hiding it.

Hand somebody an On the Edge record and call it a masterpiece and you won’t embarrass yourself. You just might not win.

Rate the album, not its neighbors

This is the rule I break the most, so it goes in writing.

An album gets measured against all albums, not against the two sitting next to it. A record that would anchor a different band’s entire career doesn’t lose a badge for the crime of following a masterpiece.

Goats Head Soup is my example. Played straight through on its own, it’s a real record — “Winter,” “Heartbreaker,” “Star Star,” “Angie,” and I’ll go to the mat for “Hide Your Love.” People have real objections to it and I’m not going to pretend they don’t, but most of the time when somebody calls it a comedown, what they mean is that it walked out behind four of the greatest albums ever made. Drop that same record into most discographies and it’s the high-water mark.

Without this rule, the better a band’s peak, the crueler I get about everything around it. That’s backwards, and it’s how you end up punishing bands for being great.

Red means it’s not in the run

NO FUCKING WAY is a ruling on the claim, not a ruling on the album.

It means no way that record is part of this streak. It doesn’t mean the album is garbage. Plenty of red albums are good records carrying too much weight, and when that’s the case I’ll say so — but the badge still goes up red, because the badge is answering a question about the streak.

The red badge is a wall marker. It tells you where the run stops.

The badge is the rating. The streak is a separate call.

This is the part that trips people up, so here it is plainly.

Every album I rule on gets a badge. Not every album with a badge is in the run. Those are two different questions, and I answer them in that order — ratings first, streak second.

The run itself has one hard requirement: at least three albums, all Certified except for one, and that one can be On the Edge. Two Edges inside a run kills it. That’s not me being precious. It’s the only thing keeping this from turning into a list of bands I like — if I’ll take two arguable albums, I’ll take three, and then the badge means nothing except that I was in a good mood that week.

Here’s what a scorecard looks like when the two numbers don’t match:

Four badges up. Three in the run. Nobody’s hiding the fourth.

It plays out three ways.

You suggest a band, I rate what you gave me. Somebody writes in and says these four are a run. All four get badges, and then I call it. Maybe it’s four. Maybe one takes a red and it’s three. Maybe it’s nothing. What I’m not going to do is quietly drop the album that didn’t make it and act like you only suggested three.

Both ends are arguable. Sometimes there’s a defensible album before the run and after it, and only one of them can be in — the one-Edge rule doesn’t bend. When that happens, I put both badges up in silver.

That’s not me ducking the call. I already made it, twice. Both albums cleared the line, both runs are the same length, and the scorecard gives me no honest reason to pick one over the other. So you take the one you like.

And if you’ve got a reason for going your direction, send it to me. An actual track, not a feeling. That’s the argument I want out of this whole thing.

It doesn’t qualify at all. Which turns out to be some of the best material there is.

What the scorecard finds besides a streak

A run is the rarest shape, not the only one worth writing about. Everything below uses the same badges and the same test.

Two great, then a wreck. Enormously common. The post is about the album that killed it.

One great album, standing alone. Graceland is the model. Paul Simon made it in the middle of a career full of records that don’t get talked about the same way. It can’t carry a run by itself, but it’s better than most of what I’ll ever certify, and there’s no good reason it should go unwritten just because it stood alone.

Nothing but Edges. Three in a row, all silver, no wreck in the bunch, and the run still dies — because two Edges break it. Sometimes that’s a band that could write but couldn’t edit. Sometimes it’s five great songs and a deadline, filling the other side because the other side had to get filled. The count’s the count either way. The post is about which one it was.

Old rulings stay up. The newest one is the standard.

I published rulings before I had any of this written down, and some of them were made on feel.

The old posts stay exactly as they are for now. That’s the ruling I made at the time, and I’m not going back to quietly sand it into agreement with something I figured out later. If you go read one and it doesn’t square with this page, you’re not confused — you’re looking at an older version of me.

Will I eventually go back and redo them? Maybe. Knowing myself, probably — some night at eleven o’clock I’ll get an itch about one particular album and I won’t be able to leave it alone. But I’m not promising it, and nothing’s waiting on it. If it happens, it’ll be obvious.

Where a new ruling contradicts an old one, the new one is the current standard. The archive is a record. This page is the rule.

See the scorecard in action

• Straight Greats No. 1: Radiohead
• Straight Greats No. 2: Aerosmith Had Six
• Straight Greats No. 3: R.E.M. and the Years I Was Lost
• Straight Greats No. 4: The Cult — Three Great Reincarnations Before They Fucked It Up

Tell me where I’m wrong

The count is the count, but I do the counting, and I’ve got the same ears and the same blind spots as anybody. If you think I skipped something I shouldn’t have, gave a band a pass I wouldn’t have given yours, or think there’s a run I need to hear, send it through the contact form. I read all of it.

Bring the track. That’s the argument I want — not “you’re wrong about that album,” but “you’re wrong about track four, and here’s why you’re skipping it.”