Talk:Sour (album)/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: David Fuchs (talk · contribs) 22:36, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

{{doing}} Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 22:36, 26 October 2022 (UTC) Overall, this is a solid start to a GA article, and there's been a lot of great work put into it; however, I think there's some significant areas for improvement remaining.

• General:
• Lead:
  • Originally planned as an EP, Sour was expanded into a full-length album following the viral success of her debut single, "Drivers License".—This first paragraph is a little weird and stubby to me, and I think it's mostly down to this line. The first paragraph details the what, who, and where, but then it switches to the development of the album, before the second paragraph goes back to a broad overview. I would combine the first and second paragraphs, and move the mention of the expanded album to where "Drivers License" is mentioned second, in the third paragraph.
• Prose:
  • In general, there's a lot of wordiness throughout the article that occasionally feels like it fluffs the prose rather than being a sober and neutral retelling; it doesn't have to be featured article brilliant but it should be a little cleaner. It also means that sometimes the prose strays a bit dangerously to close paraphrasing rather than an original summary (c.f. the description of the album art, which has very similar phrasing and construction to the Teen Vogue article it is sourced from.)
    • From the first section: American songwriter and producer Daniel Nigro was suggested by a friend to listen to Rodrigo's songs on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series: The Soundtrack (2020). Nigro was "just completely blown away" and reached out to Rodrigo via Instagram, offering to work with her.—weird passive voice, and it buries the important parts of the sentences—that Nigro heard Rodrigo's work and reached out (the friend is irrelevant.)
    • to unprecedented commercial and critical success—what does this mean? If the only support is Billboard's declaration in the following paragraph, then this really needs to be toned down.
    • Rodrigo began teasing a follow-up single by archiving her past Instagram posts and posting cryptic teasers of it—what is it? Presumably the single, but the construction of the sentence makes "it" seem like it's her past IG posts.
  • The use of quotes I think is generally too much, since especially when fragmented, they make the text hard to read, e.g. According to Rodrigo, the word "sour" has many different meanings and she tried to write a song titled "Sour" for a long time but was unsuccessful in doing so, making her realize that it is an "all-encompassing" trope that covered the sour portion of her life.[19] She tried to balance out the "sour" songs of the album with some love songs, in order to avoid being pigeonholed as "the heartbreak girl"; however, she eventually dropped the idea, to preserve her authenticity as a songwriter.
    • I'm a little uncomfortable with how lots of quotes are used because it either obscures whose opinions are whose, and sometimes suggests something authoritative when instead it's just a critical inference, e.g. It speaks about "on the examination of glaring red flags that only appear in their true colors through the lens of hindsight" or passive voice constructions like "Jealousy, Jealousy", has been described as "jazzy",. In other cases, it just feels like undue weight or duplicative, like how you have a block quote starting out the conception section and then immediately go back to repeating the same information (trying to blend genres) in the next bit of prose, just now in Wikipedia's voice. The same thing happens in the second paragraph of the section, where the prose explains she wanted to highlight negative emotions young women are giving grief for, and ends with a quote.... Saying the exact same thing. The same thing is also found int he Background section, where you mention how Nigro found Rodrigo twice (it's also different in both tellings.)
  • Some information is repeated throughout the article, for example constantly mentioning "Drivers License"'s release as a single.
  • Nigro was "blown away" after watching an Instagram video of Rodrigo playing her song "Happier" I don't see why Nigro keeps getting blown away, or why this is important.
  • We get descriptions of the album's genres in conception, and then again in music and lyrics. I would defer to critics, especially over the artists own puff quotes.
  • The seventh track, "Enough For You", —um, so we just skipped the fifth and sixth tracks? Nothing worth saying about them, even in a sentence?
  • Another Rodrigo pull quote here in Songs that is totally unnecessary and duplicates content previously established.
  • "Traitor" impacted US contemporary hit radio formats on August 10, 2021, as the fourth single from Sour—"impacted"? Why are we saying that and talking about radio formats versus just saying it was released on August 10? We don't do the airplay for the singles before it. And the only time we do it afterwards is before it impacted Italian contemporary hit radio formats through Universal Music Italy on September 3, 2021, as the fifth single from the album. which likewise doesn't seem all that relevant.
  • The energetic song provided listeners the taste of a different side of Sour, departing from the slower and melancholic emotion of the preceding singles "Drivers License" and "Deja Vu" Why is this particularly here versus the description of the album?
  • Before becoming a single, the song arrived at number 12 on the Hot 100, and landed atop the Billboard Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart. unsourced
  • She has expressed excitement for a potential upcoming tour in support of the album after the COVID-19 pandemic ends. Tense wrong, and out of date information.
  • On February 17, 2022, Rodrigo announced a documentary about Sour, titled Driving Home 2 U (A Sour Film), releasing to Disney+ on March 25, 2022. Ditto. Also, can we get better sources than quoting a press release for its contents?
  • Why is Robert Christgau included in the year-end lists? He appears the only individual journalist versus publication, and I think it makes sense to defer to the latter.
    • On the same note, only the NYT breaks out the critics ratings, but other publications also have different standings depending on the critic (Variety as a whole didn't give the album #7, just one critic did.) This needs to get harmonized—to me my first thought would be that this makes much more sense as prose than a list.
  • Following the debuts of "Drivers License" and "Good 4 U" at the number one spot of the US Billboard Hot 100, Sour became the first debut album in history to have two songs debut atop the chart, and overall the fourth album to do so.[135] Isn't this repeating what we learned in the singles section earlier?
  • "Good 4 U" debuted atop the Hot 100, garnering Rodrigo her second number-one song in the US and the second from Sour Given that Sour is literally her first album, mentioning it was the second number-one song for Rodrigo and from the album is redundant.
  • Sour charted at number two in its second week If it's already on the charts, it doesn't really "chart" a second time.
  • The second instance in its seventh charting week, when Sour moved 88,000 units This is not a complete sentence.
  • which generated 133,000 units Did these LPs spontaneously burst forth? Why are they "generated"?
  • As of October 2021, Sour amassed 2.35 million units in the US — a) this is a year out of date, feels like there should be more current numbers, and b) amassed what? Just say sold.
  • The reception section needs a lot of work. It's a collection of quotes with no connection or organization, just quotes after quotes, critic after critic. WP:RECEPTION might suggest some specific pointers, but the main thing is there needs to be some organization—talking about specific tracks, overall, aspects like production, lyrics, instrumentation, something—and the quotes should really be better considered. You want to summarize critical opinion, not regurgitate it.
• Coverage:
  • The article has sections on all conception, recording, release, and reception; I think it's appropriately broad for GA criteria.
  • The fact that Rodrigo credited different singers for interpolation is tucked away in the credits; given that it discusses one of the interpolations in the descriptions of the tracks earlier, and the fact that that Paramore accusation of plagiarism was made and widely covered in reliable sources, it seems weird to me that these are not mentioned earlier (especially since currently the line about St. Vincent and Swift getting nominated is unclear because the details about why they are credited is buried after it in the article.)

• References:
  • What makes POPSUGAR, MusicBrainz, PopBuzz, reliable sources?
  • Spot-checked current refs 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 14, 18, 20, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 35, 37, 41, 45, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54, 58, 62, 71, 74, 85, 88, 89, 91, 92, 101, 109, 110, 111, 131, 140, 154, 177, 192, 230, 231, 244
  • Mirroring the prose issues themselves, I went hunting through some of the references and I think that there are times the prose in Wikipedia distorts what's actually being said to the point that it's a verifiability problem.
    • One case, the Wikipedia text: Craig Jenkins of Vulture categorized Sour as a "post-genre" record, one which materializes Rodrigo's aim to transcend boundaries of music genres and coalesce them. The actual quote of "post genre" does exist in Jenkins' piece, but everything about Rodrigo's aim and the supposed "boundary transcending" is very much overreaching the text—especially when the Vulture review is on the whole somewhat lukewarm on the record's success overall.
    • Ref 1 (and other paywalled video content) really needs a quote or at least a timecode. A feature-length film is not precise enough a source.
    • Ref 5 doesn't cite the 2020 date for signing with Geffen. Ref 5 and 12 are also identical URLs.
    • Ref 20 only mentions "Good 4 U" in the context of a danceable track, not "Brutal".
    • Ref 29 does not support The songs of Sour represent different perspectives to a single storyline of failed romance.
    • Ref 37 is used to cite Rodrigo revealed that she wrote the hook of the song from a text message, going on to say that she "thought it would be a cool way to describe this toxic, sort of manipulative relationship". But the source itself is clearer that she got the title of the song from a text message sent to her, and I think this should be clarified because "wrote the hook of the song from a text message" doesn't really clearly convey what happened.
    • Ref 51 is a self-published source; if no secondary sources noted Grant Spanier photographed the cover, it's probably not important enough to mention.
    • Ref 54 is used to cite Sour was supported by five singles, four of which charted in the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 but the source seems too early to cover the additional singles (it mentions only two.)
    • Ref 58 is used to support The song debuted atop the US Billboard Hot 100 and made Rodrigo the youngest artist ever to debut atop the chart but the source itself says that Eilish is the youngest.
    • Ref 80 is a private video and cannot be used as a source for verification.
    • Ref 91 and 92 do not support the assertion Rodrigo covered "Complicated" at every one of her show dates.
    • Ref 192 and presumably other of the chart links just links to the current charts, not the ones that have the relevant information
    • Ref 231 is to a Dropbox link, not an official site (it also doesn't list exact sales.)
• Media:
  • I don't see how File:Sour Prom (promotional photo).png passes NFCC, even if it had a beefier fair use rationale. This article isn't chiefly focused on the concert, there's no critical commentary discussing the appearance of her, and it's not crucial to understanding the subject.
  • Along those lines, I think the fair use rationales for the media samples need a lot of beefing up as well. Based on what's in the article, File:Brutal by Olivia Rodrigo (music sample).ogg probably has a better argument for staying as there's more specifically about it; at present I don't think the same can be said for File:Enough For You by Olivia Rodrigo.ogg.
  • Other media appropriately licensed.

Article to my eyes passes criterion 4, 5, nearly passes 6 and 3. I think the major issues are 1 and 2; I think the prose needs a significant overhaul and the references need to get double-checked back to the statements attributed to them. On balance, I think this is substantive edits that go beyond the scope of a review so I'm failing the nom at present. --Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 19:58, 9 November 2022 (UTC)