The Definition of Goodness

Scott Hardie | July 5, 2016
Howard Hawks defined a good movie as "three good scenes, no bad ones."

Can the same standard be applied to an album of music -- at least three good songs, and no bad songs?

If this standard was applied to every album, are there any outcomes that would surprise you -- the albums that you thought were good that weren't, and vice versa?

Scott Hardie | August 6, 2016
The new Chili Peppers album was on my mind as i pondered the above. It has a half dozen pretty good songs, the best being a collaboration with Elton John. But it also has a few mediocre songs and one quite bad song that drag the album down.

Plenty of great classic albums have already been widely praised and don't need my validation. If I picked from my favorites among lesser-known titles, the go-to when I think of a perfect album is Aimee Mann's The Forgotten Arm, a concept album about a failed boxer and the woman who loves him. It has several great songs, like "She Really Wants You" (the interplay between guitar and organ in the bridge still gives me goosebumps) and "Little Bombs," and the album ends with an emotional punch in "Beautiful." Most of the tracks are really very good; it's tough not to link to all of them as evidence of the album's quality. And yet... The album opens with a bit of a clunker, easily the weakest track, necessarily coming first because it sets up the story. It's not bad exactly, but it lacks the spark of vitality in the rest of the album, coming alive only in a guitar solo. Does an album fail the Howard Hawks test for having just one mediocre track? Is an album still good if it's not all good?