It is one thing to have the biggest rock magazine in the world. Good for you, blah blah, blah. It is something else again to be entirely clueless about music.
Rolling Stone bewilder me. To call Taylor Swift’s Speak Now her best album and give it 4 stars is to tamper with the truth. I mean, it just isn’t so: there is opinion and then there is what simply is. Maybe Speak Now isn’t as bad as I claimed it was but it is certainly her worst album.
The question of taste will only get you so far. You can claim as often as you like that, say, Stephen King is a better writer than Charles Dickens was, but it will never be true. Or that Andrew Lloyd’s operas are better than Mozarts. But all you show is your ignorance.
Similarly, you can claim Speak Now is Swift’s best album but it definitely isn’t and you can claim National Ransom is a 3 1/2 star album when it is a self-evident dog with fleas.
RS make big money for their opinions about music but their opinions are worthless. They don’t have the slightest idea what they are writing about.