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1) Music listen-through

A count of how many times I hear a foundational element of PPP. I call these "clicks" since I use a click-counter to do this.

2) Lyric read-through

After listening to each song, I then read through its lyrics looking for PPP themes. Each lyrical element is counted as one click, discounting repeats.

Song POSIThe base formula for rating individual songs is:(Music clicks + Lyric clicks) ÷ total seconds in song= POSIFor songs less than three minutes long, I add a weight or time penalty proportionate to its length—this is to offset shorter songs naturally getting higher ratings. I'll also make an adjustment for songs with particularly long intros or outros and also don't factor interlude tracks into an album's rating.Generally, anything around 9.5 is average; a rating above 14 can be considered exceptional.

Album POSIAn album's POSI rating is simply the average of the POSI rating of its eligible tracks; covers, instrumentals, or interludes are generally not factored in.

Band POSIAverage POSI rating of a band's albums.

Like restaurant or film critique, music reviews serve to entertain as much as they do inform. In this way, they often tell you more about the reviewer's taste than the music itself—rare is the review that flatly describes the contents of an album without editorialization, like how a nutrition label informs a health-conscious eater looking to fill specific dietary needs.Review rating systems are usually based on amorphous and murky criteria. Does a 3.5/5 measure production quality, composition, originality, adherence to (or bucking of) current trends, or is it more a reflection of the reviewer's tastes du jour? Does it account for their biases in any way? Is it in part a reflection of how they rated the artist's previous work? And if they listened to the album again in one year, would they rate it the same? What about in five years?Mood, setting, cultural context, and even what we were listening to prior all influence our opinions of new music. We can all think of a song we weren't immediately grabbed by, but on the third (or thirtieth) listen, something clicked—maybe it was due to who we were with, the technology we heard it on, or any other number of little details that make up a particular season of our lives.This occurs not only on the individual level, but also across the wider musical milieu. A perfect example is Weezer's album "Pinkerton".Upon release, Rolling Stone gave the band's sophomore release a 3/5 and readers voted it as the third-worst album of 1996.Eight years later, the magazine's readership voted it as the 16th greatest album of all-time. Two years after that, the album was upgraded to a 5/5 and added to the magazine's Hall of Fame.This—obviously—is ridiculous.Musically, nothing about the album changed. It was the same composition, production, and lyrics it was in 1996 as it was in 2004, and is now. The only thing that had changed were steadily increasing sales numbers, a growing cult status, and a number of newly popular bands that cited it as influential.Lead singer and songwriter Rivers Cuomo's feelings about his own album didn't seem to be immune to this shifting perception. "'Pinkerton' isn't worth a shit," he bemoaned a year after its release, declaring himself a "shitty songwriter". By 2001, his stance hadn't softened, saying to Entertainment Weekly, "It's a hideous record. It was such a hugely painful mistake that happened in front of hundreds of thousands of people and continues to happen on a grander and grander scale and just won't go away."You can probably guess where this is going. After receiving the aforementioned accolades that followed, Cuomo soon had a change of heart. In 2008, to Pitchfork: "'Pinkerton''s great. It's super-deep, brave, and authentic. Listening to it, I can tell that I was really going for it when I wrote and recorded a lot of those songs."Whether the newfound public appreciation brought on this change of feelings, or it was merely an artist getting over the (understandable) embarrassment of having a vulnerable piece of work panned, even Cuomo might not know. But from the point of view of critics and fans, the only changing variables here were a) time and b) what other people thought about it.So what if we created a rating system that eliminated those two variables as much as possible?Critics, fans, and artists can obviously change their minds about a work as they please—reconsidering or growing into a previously despised work is only natural. But given that the perception of all three of these groups can shift so quickly, why do we insist on using the standard and mostly unforgiving 1-5 or 1-10 rating systems?So what if, instead of reducing a work's subjective value to a number, a music rating instead could quantify its objective contents? In other words, what if instead of focusing on the best (whatever that means), we shifted our attention to the most?That's exactly what PPP aims to do: mitigate the more-dynamic effects of the traditional music review (like reviewer mood and public perception) and instead focus on the true constants: the content and composition of the music itself.

Although my inspiration from sports analytics might be obvious, PPP and Y!LS aren't intended to be some sort of righteous debate-settler. Instead, I wanted to make something that was fun to explore and get lost in.When I was in high school, I spent countless hours wading through the original Ishkur's Guide to Electronic music (RIP Flash). Thanks to its library of samples, quippy (and unabashedly biased) blurbs, and insane level of detail, I ended up learning more about electronic music genres than any early 00's suburb kid probably had any business knowing.I probably spent an equal amount of time on Newgrounds playing a game called Punk-O-Matic (RIP Flash again). Perhaps even more than composing riotous punk bangers, I loved how the game broke down the genre's musical elements into proverbial LEGO bricks you could listen to in isolation as you created your three-chord opus.While a spreadsheet obviously isn't an "immersive" experience like a Flash guide or game is, I figure anyone that stumbles across Y!LS and enjoys when over-thought out deep dives intersect with their personal interests will enjoy poking around and seeing how their favorite albums and songs stack up, or have fun going through the live "time machine" I've assembled.For both non- and former fans, I hope Y!LS can at the very least highlight that pop punk existed both before and now long after its commercial heyday, and serve as an introductory (or re-introductory) guide to the genre. Even if pop punk ends up not being someone's can of PBR, why not give them a fair starting point to make their judgment on that isn't just the same 25 low-hanging singles on every "POP PUNK THROWBACK" playlist. By offering a better understanding of what the genre "is", I hope to help further legitimize it and put its name in the mouths of those that might otherwise just label it as emo or worse, "rock".For everyone else, I hope the project can be a jumping-off point to gaining an even deeper appreciation for the genre and discovering new bands and albums, a way to virtually crate dig that recommends music on its relation to a given genre—as opposed to a machine-driven algorithm that recommends music based on your and other users' listening activity.

If the genre does up and die out someday, I hope the project can serve as a touchstone for a kind of nu-American folk music, perhaps something akin to Harry Smith's "Anthology," or just a dumb nostalgia trip for Millenials to stumble upon when we're old and helping our kids dress up for Early-00s Day at school.In the book "From the Basement: A History of Emo Music and How It Changed Society" by Taylor Markarian, there's a quote from WashedUpEmo founder Tom Mullen about emo, but that also describes how I feel about my own niche subgenre shrine:"There's a duty in my life to make sure emo is preserved and saved for future generations. Just because the photo or the song is on your phone doesn't make it last forever. We have to save what's happening now, save what this genre is and be able to document and archive properly. That will be my last dying breath. 'Hey, don't forget to save that flyer, the band may want to share that later…' CROAK."
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Ultimately, Yeah! Last Summer is just an excuse to dive extremely deep into my favorite music, create some overly-curated playlists, write some sappy essays about something that brings me unparalleled joy, and hopefully share that joy with at least one other PP head out there.In the end, I guess you could just say I'm here to...defend pop punk.