Now that I’m semi-regularly writing reviews for the Okazu site, I thought I should be a little more systematic in the way I rate things. I happened to stumble across the rating systems Robert Christgau has used for his consumer guides to music — one for music prior to 1990 and a second for music since then — and thought they might be worth adapting my own purposes.
Below is my attempt to harmonize these two schemes and adapt them to a 10-point scale. As always, any score I give will be a personal opinion, but my goal is to score works such that someone of roughly similar background and tastes would adjust my score by no more than one point either way.