Even if these two pieces should not align with your musical taste, you should be able to acknowledge objectively that these are both immaculate from a technical point of view and written in the best possible taste.
Well, you're right. I am willing to acknowledge that. Being perfectly honest, I think that, for me, a lot of this is basically just a byproduct brought about by this feeling of frequent dissatisfaction that follows me into all areas of my life, consumption of the arts/media included. At the end of the day, most things I experience don't tend to leave that much of an impression on me, or otherwise leave me especially susceptible to noticing their flaws. In other words, I'm just a very hard to please kind of guy and I can't help, but come away from most things with a middling impression of their quality, which otherwise clashes heavily with how hyped up and celebrated it is to most other people, whatever it might be. That's why negative reviews are more appealing to me, since they tend to validate the problems/issues I also may have experienced with something, which are otherwise entirely left out of positive reviews. It's also safe to say that jadedness, anhedonia and overall depression are each pretty much the main culprits behind a lot of this as well. What's more, when it comes to music or more classical forms of art, I honestly don't have much of an opinion, and my post was more geared towards an annoyance of this trend as it pertains to contemporary forms of entertainment, like video games, films, or TV shows.
I mean, taking something like Dark Souls as an example, it's an extremely popular franchise that many people have heaped their praises on for years, often to the utter dismissal or outright denial of its flaws. Personally speaking, I've played and finished Demon Souls, along with Dark Souls and its following sequels. I didn't hate them, nor did I particularly like them. They were essentially the epitome of an okay, middle of the road experience, with strengths/weaknesses aplenty. What's ultimately frustrating to me is, for a lack of a better term, the fanboyism that begins to generate around any such game, or what have you, that becomes popular enough that discussing its flaws is seen as an act of heresy. That's why I often turn to and seek out more negative reviews, since it's usually only through this that one can see a more balanced take on discussing these kinds of things. I mean, even though I love games like the original Deus Ex, or System Shock 2, I'm sure lots of people hate them, or would see them as outdated relics from a bygone era. Neither are perfect games, and although I enjoy their gameplay/combat/story a lot, one could argue that each of those categories are as equally terrible to someone else, as to how I find them to be good for me.
This notion of whether something is "objectively" good or not is usually brought up as a means to "prove" that something is unarguably great and amazing, but, at the end of the day, our subjective experience still dictates what we'll ultimately think about it, or how much pleasure/displeasure is brought to us by consuming it. People are very often blinded by the fact that just because they personally happened to enjoy whatever it is they liked that doesn't mean it's completely and objectively good, assuming such a thing ever can be. Using again the prior example, there are flaws to any combat system, whether it's Deus Ex or Dark Souls, and it really just comes down to how much those flaws bother us enough that we'd wish to see them improved. When people, at least in this instance, act like a game doesn't have
any flaws, or that the flaws are somehow intended features, well that's where I feel like all this goes off the rails and becomes very annoying/alienating.
But, like I said, I think the fact that I find myself mired in severe depression probably has something to do with all this as well, and how it's often difficult to enjoy things to the same extent in which others can. Overall though, I still feel like there's way more honesty present when someone comes at something from the negative instead of the positive, since they're not going to mince words or gloss over those aspects of it that aren't as great as they could be. But, once more, I'll make mention of the fact that, by and large, I'm kind of a grumpy old man who has very particular tastes, and very rarely do I experience something in which I truly enjoy it. I also feel that for pieces of media in which there is an abundance of positive reception, that leaves a fundamental absence of negative reception, which otherwise creates an incomplete picture of what it's all about. Speaking specifically of Steam, if a particular games has greater of 10,000 positive reviews and is seen as mostly positive, that's an immediate sign for me to check out the negative reviews to see what the real shakedown of things is.