For an interesting topic for today, I thought about how many bad tracks does it take for a record to be deemed as bad? As niche or unimportant this might seem, it’s interesting to try and guess what dictates whether an album is trash or not. Generally speaking, people associate a record with being bad with the track-list itself.

Obviously, some people will dictate any record from a specific artist bad if they disagree or have an issue with something the person did or said. Still, it’s valuable to look at the music from an artist who isn’t controversial or did nothing wrong as a way to see how many bad songs it takes for the album to be bad.

Everyone has a subjective take on this. Whether it’s someone saying no album is bad since it’s a work of art or on the other spectrum, someone claiming there isn’t a record that doesn’t have at least one bad song. From my perspective, there are certainly some records that are perfect and have no bad tracks. However, most albums I at least enjoy tend to have a couple of tracks that are mediocre.

From another point of view, records that are barely listenable or not necessarily listenable may have a majority of tracks that are bad. Does this dictate a record being awful or not? Some people might agree if an album has a few bad tracks that it’s not worth listening to, while others tend to feel more optimistic and take a closer look at the record overall.

Truthfully, if an album has a majority of bad tracks, then I tend to deem it as being a bad record. Whereas if only four out of ten tracks are bad, I’ll go to the step above and feel like it’s an okay record. Although all of this subjective, it had me thinking what the difference is between a record I think is okay or mediocre compared to one I feel is awful.