For years, I've internally categorized things using a seven-point scale that I find enormously valuable. The system is weighted mostly towards things that I either like or love: very little consideration is paid to things that I don't care for, because I don't think it's worth getting finicky over that stuff. What interests me is how we differentiate the things we enjoy, the things that excite us, and the things that genuinely mean something.

This scale has seven points for a number of reasons, most of which I will not disclose to you (for reasons I will further not disclose). One reason, however, is purely numerical: a scale of seven points can be reduced down to three hazy groups of three numbers apiece, when you want to loosely rank a thing without being too persnickety about it. In this case, the seven-point scale reduces down to this handle little three point scale:

The slight overlap between groupings is nice, I think! Sometimes there are edge cases, and it's nice to know that, if something falls between two ratings, then you're allowed to decide that either one applies.

The goal of the full seven-point system, however, is to allow for precision: to give few enough options that one of them will fit perfectly and unequivocally. In my experience, four or five is far too little—which is why review sites that use stars will invariably allow for half-stars—whereas ten is entirely too much. Do we really need to differentiate between a 3/10 and a 4/10? In my opinion, no, which is why the ten-point rating scale gets a definitive 2 out of 7 for me.

But let's get into my rating scale, and I'll do my best to tease out why these are the points I decided my system needed.

This is the one and only point on the rating system reserved for things that you care about disliking. This is the sort of thing you would stake your identity on disliking. It says something meaningful about you, in your opinion, that you do not like this.

There's not a lot we need to say about this one. The interesting part, I think, comes with exactly where we leap to next.

We jump straight to apathy. This, to me, is a particularly important category, because it represents things you don't want to focus on. We live in a world that encourages you to form and share opinions about absolutely everything, which in turn encourages you to entrench your opinions, and to argue with people who disagree with you, or to try and persuade them as they're trying to persuade you, until suddenly you've decided that a major part of your identity revolves around whether you use an iPhone or an Android phone.

And most things just... don't matter that much! For instance, I think that a handful of Metric songs are sick. I learned very quickly, though, that I get bored and vaguely irritated if I try to listen to a full-length Metric album. So Metric is a 2 for me! (But some Metric songs are a 3, because rating songs and albums differently is allowed.)

Meanwhile, Hozier actively annoys me—enough so that it's become a running joke with friends. I don't like listening to Hozier. If you put on Hozier, I may politely ask you to play something else. Hozier is... also a 2! Because, again, a 2 boils down to: "I don't find this particularly appealing." And it's not that important exactly how annoying something is. A 2 means, don't try and sell me on it, don't try and convert me, don't expect an argument. It's just not my thing. And that's absolutely okay.

I fucking love Beast in Black. Sweet True Lies? Killer single. From Hell With Love, the album that single was from, is all wheat and no chaff. Dark Connection, their followup album, is sick in a different way. Their quality control is just, mwah!

Am I ever gonna write an essay about Beast in Black? Absolutely not. If you ask me why I like Beast in Black, my answer will be something along the lines of: "It's mostly because I have ears." I'm not sure I could say any more about it: you either get it or you don't.

That's a 3 on my scale: things that you really, really enjoy. That's just about it. No justification needed. 3 is one of the two "ambiguous" numbers on the smaller three-point version of this scale, and that's intentional: sometimes you feel "ehhh" about stuff when you're looking for something a bit meatier or meaningful or more intriguing, then come back to it and realize it's great as it is. Sometimes you think something's just incredible, then come back to it and decide it's just really fun. Fun is great! Good times are great. This is the place on the scale for good, good times.

This is for stuff worth chewing on. There's something there, if you will. It compels you, to paraphrase Knives Out (4) by Rian Johnson (also 4). If you'd have a conversation in a coffee shop with a friend about a thing, it probably warrants at least a 4. Unless it's a 1, of course.

As with many other points along this scale, your exact feelings about a 4 can vary widely. I didn't particularly enjoy Edward Yang's critically acclaimed film Yi Yi when I saw it a few years ago; nonetheless, it was absolutely a 4, because I've thought more about that movie than I've thought about films I've had an absolute blast with. RRR is three hours of nonstop cathartic blissful insanity; RRR is a 4. In Yi Yi's case, that rating means something like: I may not have clicked with it, but there's something there; with RRR, it means something like: There's something genuinely fascinating and skillful going on here. 

The leap from a 3 to a 4 is qualitative: I punningly think of this point as a point of interest. Somebody else's 3 might be something I'm fine not engaging with; maybe I'm in the mood, maybe I'm not. Somebody else's 4 is something that I'd love to hear more about, whether or not it's my cup of tea.

"This couldn't be better."

Ages ago, long before I knew who they were, I heard Ween described as "one of the only correct favorite bands to have" by someone I looked up to a lot. Years later, I completely understand what they meant. A close friend likes to say that Ween seems to understand what music should be on a deeper level than most bands ever reach; yes, they're very silly and fun and yes, they've got a terrific range and terrific imagination, but more than that, their albums flow in such an exquisite, endlessly compelling, hard-to-predict way. And their even-harder-to-predict live shows are just as good as their studio material is.

Ween is not my favorite band, but Ween is a 5. And a 5 is serious business. If your favorite anything is a 5, I will look upon you with respect, and trust your taste in other things slightly more. 

5 is the point on the scale that straddles "liked" and "LOVED." 5 inspires genuine passion—maybe even awe. 5 is desert island material. In a genuinely, impossibly perfect world, everything 5 would remain unchanged.

At the same time, there's a reason this isn't the top of the scale. (It's more like the bottom of the top.) The scale is defined like this specifically to make space for other kinds of things. It's to identify that other kinds of things exist, and to establish those other things as important.

You may remember the exact moment you first encountered this. You may remember specific details of what your first time was like. I remember the exact order of the first three Sparks songs I ever heard; I remember the room that I was lying in; I remember exactly what was in that room and where I was lying; I even remember the quality of light. I knew, almost immediately, that I had stumbled upon something that was going to change something for me, and I knew it because I could barely make sense of what I was hearing.)

A 6 is, in some way, transformative, no matter how direct or indirect your encounter with it is. I am not by any means well-versed in Miles Davis, by the standards of Miles Davis listeners; Miles Davis is a 6. My favorite philosophers, by their nature, tend to be 6s. (Richard Rorty immediately comes to mind—Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is such an easygoing, mild-mannered book, and it also fundamentally shaped how I view the world.) Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves, which I loved as a teenager and love for its adolescence as a thirtysomething man, is a 6 by sheer dint of how profoundly it shaped my understanding of how you can play with mediums that seem unplaywithable. "He's no Nabokov," a former friend of mine once sneered about Danielewski; that's absolutely true, because Nabokov is a 6 and Danielewski isn't, but House of Leaves is a 6 just the same.

These ratings are all relative, of course; they change as you change, and that's okay. Once upon a time, System of a Down would have been a 6 to me; then Decemberists would have replaced them, and Mike Oldfield and Joanna Newsom would have replaced them, and now neither of those quite reach the mark. I wouldn't judge someone for their idea of a 6, but their 6s will absolutely tell me something meaningful about them, just like my naming Davis and Rorty and Nabokov and Sparks says something meaningful about me.

A friend of mine says that her life revolves around Bob Dylan. When she met the man who's now her husband, she told me that she knew he'd be the one, because his life revolved around Dylan too. Bob Dylan meant so much to her that he pointed her to her spouse.

I've spent countless hours listening to Dylan. Sometimes, on long strange nights, I catch glimpses of what my friend hears in him. I own Dylan's The Philosophy of Modern Song, and it is astonishing. I don't think that any of the acclaim around Dylan is hyperbole. But Bob Dylan will never be the 7 to me that he is to my friend. Bob Dylan, to her, isn't church: he is religion. If my friend believes in God—I forget if it ever came up—then she sees God in Dylan, and finds God through Dylan too.

Religions are—and I say this non-pithily—often a 7 to somebody. The Tao Te Ching, and Taoism more broadly, is a 7 to me. (I grew up as Jewish and I identify as Jewish; Judaism is a 6, which if you ask me is not bad.) Sometimes physical locations are a 7; for a long time, one was to me, and I miss having that connection with that place.

I have mine. At some point I knew I had exactly seven, which felt numerologically significant in an atypically superstitious kind of way; now I have slightly more than seven, which is kind of a relief. I've written about most, but not all of them: David Lynch, Christopher Alexander, Cardiacs, Moonriders, Daniel Handler. Still untouched, at least in this space, are the game Pathologic, Diana Wynne Jones, and Philippe Gaulier. Step through them in the right ways, it sometimes feels, travel through the right corridors within them, and you'll find your way to me.


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Why do a thing like this? Why create a bespoke rating system?

For me, the answer boils down to: Because I find these seven kinds of things significant.

It's not about "better" or "worse." It's about being able to explain, succinctly, what different things mean to me. It's about being able to say: this is what I think this particular thing is. This is why I think it matters, and how much I think it matters.

I don't really care whether people like what I like, or dislike what I dislike. I get really annoyed when people go on about Bo Burnham (2), and for some reason I get kind of frustrated when people overhype Donald Glover (5), but who cares, you know? On the other hand, when someone pithily dismisses something that I think is interesting, I get genuinely bothered—just like it bothers me when someone sees my personal lack of enthusiasm for something as some kind of challenge. If someone's legitimately interested in something, I genuinely do want their perspective on it; I'd just rather dwell on their interest than on some misguided attempt to convert me. Similarly, if something I find deeply meaningful isn't of interest to somebody else, that's completely fine—so long as they take my relationship with it seriously.

I talk about media and art because they're easier, but I find this system is useful when it comes to thinking about ideas and theorists too. If you find a particular writer or thinker compelling, I want to know whether it's just because you enjoy them or because they make you go "huh!" or because they've defined how you see the world around you. Did you find this person's work legitimately life-changing? Are they "merely" part of your personal canon? Have they introduced ideas that you think are worth chewing on? Or do you just reach to them when you feel like stewing on a subject, because they write a decent sentence or have a pleasant voice?

I have not fully fleshed out how this rating system would apply to bars, but I think it is important that we aspire to make it work for bars too. Far too few 5s and 6s and 7s exist in the world of sitting somewhere with a drink and talking to a stranger, and it's up to us to either find the ones that exist or create the ones that don't.

Anyway, use it or don't. And tell me how you rate it five years from now, if you wouldn't mind.