Turn Me On, Dead Man

Recently Rolling Stone magazine released another "Collector's Edition" of song rankings--this one ranks the top 100 songs by the Beatles. Like the recent update to their picks for the 500 greatest songs of all time, The Beatles: 100 Greatest Songs is a fun read, but fortunately this one skips much of the self-importance evident in Rolling Stone's all-time greatest songs list. No "blue-ribbon panel" necessary for this one, just the editors of Rolling Stone. At the top of their list is "A Day in the Life," and the rest of the Top 10 Beatles Songs is on their website.

I was interested to see if Rolling Stone's list favored John more than the other Beatles. That has been the case with cover photos, as John holds the record for most appearances on the cover of Rolling Stone with 29 (including the premier issue of the magazine in 1967). The Beatles have been featured on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine 13 times, and John and Paul have appeared as a duo on the cover of Rolling Stone three times, and John has appeared alone (or with Yoko) 13 times. Paul has appeared on the cover without any other Beatles 10 times, so his total is 26, not far behind John but considering that John died almost 30 years ago after a reclusive five-year period, and that Paul has been active through the entire time that Rolling Stone has been in publication, it is striking that John leads Paul on this score. In case you're curious, George has been on the cover four times outside of the band for a total of 17 appearances, and Ringo has only been on one cover without the Beatles for a total of 14 appearances.

A "by the numbers" analysis is given on the last page of The Beatles: 100 Greatest Songs, and it does, in fact, show that John is the favorite Beatle among the editors of Rolling Stone magazine. The list includes 40 songs written by John alone and 17 written in collaboration with Paul, while the list contains only 35 written by Paul alone. The list also includes eight songs written by George. John is disproportionately represented on this list, but by how much depends, of course, on how you attribute authorship to each of the Beatles' songs, not to mention how you count the songs (is "Revolution 1" the same as "Revolution"? Is the "Abbey Road Medley" one song, as it is counted in The Beatles: 100 Greatest Songs, or is it eight songs?) William J. Dowlding developed rather detailed authorship estimates in his book Beatlesongs, and I used a simplified version of Dowlding's conclusions that is consistent with the "main writer" attributions used in The Beatles: 100 Greatest Songs. I came up with the following:

This accounts for the Beatles output from 1962 to 1970, removes duplicates and cover versions, and counts the "Abbey Road Medley" as one song. Assuming equal contributions from each author in collaborative efforts, this means that John was responsible for 44.1% of the Beatles' output, Paul accounts for 41.8%, George 12.7% and Ringo 1.4%. John and Paul, then, are both disproportionately represented on the Rolling Stone list at the expense of George and Ringo. John accounts for 48.5 songs on the Rolling Stone list (40 individual compositions and 17 collaborations with Paul), while Paul accounts for 43.5 songs (35 individual compositions and 17 collaborations with John). George only has eight songs on the list and Ringo, well.... Then I wanted to see if John's songs were ranked higher than Paul's on average. Using a simple method of giving the author 100 points for the #1 ranked song, 99 points for the #2 song, 98 points for the #3 song, and so on (and dividing the points evenly for contributions), John has a total of 2524 points, Paul has 2137 points and George has 389. That is, John's point total is almost 50% of the possible number of points, while Paul has 42.3% and George has only 7.7% of the points. In other words, John's songs tend to be ranked higher than Paul's and George's. To sum up:

One last thing, I wanted to see if the list included songs from all eras equally, or if the editors of Rolling Stone were more partial to early- or late-period Beatles music. It turns out that the editors of Rolling Stone love Revolver (understandably) above all. About half of the Beatles output from most years made the Rolling Stone top 100 list, but almost all of the tracks the Beatles released in 1966 made the list. Both sides of the "Paperback Writer/Rain" single as well as all of the songs on Revolver with the exception of "Love You To," "Doctor Robert," and "I Want to Tell You" were included in the Rolling Stone top 100.

My biases are similar to Rolling Stone's.  My top 10 Beatles songs would be:
1. Strawberry Fields Forever
2. Rain
3. Tomorrow Never Knows
4. Dear Prudence
5. A Day in the Life
6. Two of Us
7. Ticket to Ride
8. Let It Be
9. Blackbird
10. It's All Too Much

Though my favorites are almost all late-period tracks, I am partial to John's songs and my favoriate album is Revolver.

Recently Rolling Stone magazine updated their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The current list makes only minor alterations to the original version of this list, which was published in 2004. For the original list "Rolling Stone asked a blue-ribbon panel of 162 artists, producers, industry executives and journalists to pick the greatest songs of all time." Here is a graph showing the count of songs by year of release, the gray bars represent the 2004 list and the black bars represent the 2010 list. The "Special Collectors Edition" included a similar, but less detailed figure, showing only counts by decade. Breaking it out by year is revealing, though, with a peak in 1956 capturing the impact of Elvis and the artists at Sun Records, followed by the breakout of the Beatles and Bob Dylan in the middle of the 1960s. The two peak years being 1965 and 1967, the year Rolling Stone began publication.

The criticisms of this sort of list are obvious: the great majority of artists featured in this list are either from the United States or the United Kingdom, with only one song is not sung in English ("La Bamba" by Ritchie Valens). I don't want to criticize the list for what it is not, because a list like this can never please anyone. The list is what it is: a retrospective of popular music filtered through Rolling Stone, an undeniably influential publication. I'm not taking issue with any particular song included in the list. Wait, I take that back--"Rock Lobster" is the 147th best song of all-time? Is this some kind of in-joke? If you're going to include novelty songs with animals in the title, why stop there? How about "Disco Duck" or "Who Let the Dogs Out"? or reach back to "How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?" But, then again, looking at the appendix entitled "How We Made the List" (which has no information about how they actually made the list) reveals that Kate Pierson and Fred Schneider of the B-52s were both on Rolling Stone's "blue ribbon panel".

But I digress. As I said, I don't want to criticize the list for what it is not, but instead to look at the list on its own terms. I have two main criticisms. My first criticism is that this "update" seems pretty pointless to me--even more pointless than the whole idea of assembling a "blue ribbon panel" to validate what was probably a mostly predetermined list of songs to begin with, that is. According to the appendix, in 2009 Rolling Stone assembled "a similar group of 100 experts" to pick the best songs released since 2000, which ended up bringing the total number of songs released in the last decade to 27. The order of the original list was altered very little for the updated version. Instead, the more recent entries bumped older songs that have somehow lost their luster in the last six years. Like most everything else with this list, however, the deletions were arbitrary. How is it that "Da Doo Ron Ron" went from being the 114th best song of all time on the 2004 list--better even than "Rock Lobster"!--to being thrown off the list altogether? Despite the minimal changes to the 2004 list, the 2010 edition features an intro written by Jay-Z, so I guess that makes it more "current".

My other, and more general criticism is that it strikes me as odd that it portrays the last four decades, the period of time that Rolling Stone has been in publication, as a period of relentless decline. Really? All downhill musically since the Summer of Love? Haven't there been a few innovations in music in the last 43 years? Even if you don't like the genres that have developed in the last 43 years, haven't a number of excellent songwriters and bands risen during this period? Writing in the late-1990s, Jann Wenner pointed out,

Rolling Stone was quick to recognize punk rock (which traded heroes for anti-heroes), but slower and more ambivalent about 1970s funk, heavy metal, dance music and hip-hop, which have turned out to be significant influences on the 1990’s. Lately, as rock’s center has collapsed, the magazine is still sorting out which subgenres and subcultures to certify.

The way I interpret this is that as the music market has splintered it's gotten harder to find good music, so if you're Rolling Stone magazine, why bother? Or maybe it's that Rolling Stone has never seen the need to challenge the somewhat narrow musical aesthetic it's had since it began publication.

Oh sure, it's fun to read lists like this, but I could do without the self-importance of it all. Is it really necessary to call it "The ultimate playlist, created by the editors of Rolling Stone and a panel of experts"? As I said in an earlier post, I highly recommend This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession by Daniel J. Levitin. Levitin notes that are brains are hard-wired for music and asserts that,

In what is a recurring theme of your brain on music, even those of us who lack explicit training in musical theory and performance have musical brains, and are expert listeners.

So go ahead make your own list of the 500 (or any other arbitrary number) greatest songs of all time. I'd love to read anyone's list. Where would you rank "Rock Lobster"?