I have to admit I’ve felt a little sick the past few days. You see, I still actually pay attention to reviews from major media, because I guess I have nothing else better to do with my day-to-day life.

I don’t know if this sickness had to do with the media’s reviews of Kanye West’s “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” but I’m starting to feel far too affected by it. Four major publications (Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, USA Today and The Independent) have awarded the record a perfect score, a mark it doesn’t entirely deserve.

The biggest trouble I’ve felt about my opinion on this record, though, has a lot to do with how media consumes rating scores. If you have indie hipster friends (or just friends wholly consumed with music), it’s probably not hard to get into a discussion about Pitchfork’s rating system, how ridiculous it is and so on.

But until the Kanye release, I saw the ratings more like guidelines. If the record looks likable despite a low score, I listen anyway. (The Brody Dalle-fronted hard rock project Spinnerette earned a low score and was still liked by me, for example.) If the record gets a high rating, it’s probably not as good as said, but still fun (Sleigh Bells, Vampire Weekend, et al.).

This all reads as ridiculous, I realize. Score ratings matter so little in the grand scheme of life and matter only to people I’ve never met who frequent message boards anonymously (like myself). And yet, this has been one of those bubbling under problems of music and media in general; namely, being unsatisfied with the opinions of others.

Gaming media suffers worse from this problem than others. I can hearken back to the days that Ubi Soft raked Dan Hsu of Electronic Gaming Monthly over the coals for not thinking “Assassin’s Creed” was a good game.

Still, I feel uncomfortable about my own opinions in comparison to those of a community that I found crazy for calling Kanye’s record a “modern classic.” Writers, like a great majority of people, do pay attention to the words of others. Criticisms can go either way, since dwelling on criticism makes for bad writing in my personal experience. However, they still listen to what someone thinks about things they enjoy.

If I really enjoy “Red Dead Redemption” or “Inception,” I am quicker to notice the opinion that mirrors my thoughts. We want to talk about movies, games and so on with a sense of the writers we enjoy telling us what we want to hear (with prettier diction).

Maybe I’ll just never be able to settle Kanye the rapper as a creator of classics. I don’t know what my thoughts on “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” even accomplish. Maybe it just makes me think about why I do this stuff.