Bad Music and Bad Philosophy
Skimming literature on the sociology of knowledge, I came across Alfred Sohn-Rethel's "Soziologische Theorie der Erkenntnis", which begins with the following definition of "society" (sorry, no translation, as I have no idea what it means):
"Gesellschaft" ist, im Sinne dieser Untersuchung, ein Zusammenhang der Menschen in bezug auf ihr Dasein, und zwar in der Ebene, in der ein Stück Brot, das einer iÃt, den anderen nicht satt macht.
Which reminds me that a few years ago, I heard on BBC (Radio 3 if I recall correctly) a listener complaining about some modern classical music they had played. He suggested the following test for good music: If people listening to the piece for the first time don't notice that there's something wrong if random notes have been added or altered in the composition, it's bad music and shouldn't be broadcast.
Now this doesn't quite capture my judgments about music. (I once had a visitor who was surprised to find out that the sounds we had been listening to for the past 40 minutes come from my CD player -- playing Christian Zanesi -- and not from a nearby construction site.) But I think it's a pretty good test for bad philosophy: If intelligent first readers don't notice that there's something wrong if random negations have been added and adjectives randomly swapped in the text, then it's bad philosophy.