Buy Or Don’t Buy

It was a nice surprise that this week turned out to be the week of Beatlestravaganza, when everyone took a break from talking about things we disagree on (mostly health care with fantasy football a close second) to talk about one thing we all agree on (The Beatles.)

But luckily, even with the canonical Best Band In The World there are still things to fight about. Best fifth Beatle? (Stu Sutcliffe.) Best Beatles era? (Mid-Beatles.) Best Beatles facial hair? (John Lennon’s Chester A. Arthur sideburns.)

And you can’t get any more argumentative than attempting to rank all 185 recorded Beatles songs from worst to best. That’s the ambitious mission of Playing The Beatles Backwards, a series that cropped up earlier this year but is loads of fun to revisit this week.

The Beatles catalog is such a large and foreboding piece of work that’s it’s almost impossible to imagine someone having an opinion on every part of it. But anonymous Internet hero JBev did, and he was kind enough to share it with all of us.

What’s the worst Beatles song? Apparently that would be “Revolution Number 9.” No quibbles here. What’s the worst Beatles album? Probably The White Album, with four tracks in the bottom 10. Worst single? “Day Tripper,” at #147. What what what? Sometimes you can even use statistics to come to some fun conclusions; did you know that “I’m A Loser” is the median-quality Beatles song?

(SPOILER: “A Day In The Life” is the top song and, noncoincidentally, Sgt. Pepper’s is the top album. JBev, besides liking the Minnesota Vikings, appears to be a Paul fan.)

If I had a graphing calculator still, I’d like to try and figure out the most solid album (highest average list position), the least solid album (lowest average list position) and most and least consistant (standard deviation, friends!) But I don’t, so for me (and I imagine for many people my age,) the project’s main benefit will remain archaelogical. I consider myself a pretty ‘with-it’ person, but I’d estimate that I’d never heard roughly one-quarter of the songs on the list. Already it’s turned me on to two tunes that are in solid contention for Favorite Beatles Song status (“It’s All Too Much” and “Baby You’re A Rich Man.” The others are “Lovely Rita,” “Paperback Writer,” “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey” and “Good Morning, Good Morning.”)

Fellow BoDB bloggers and our imaginary ghost readers, take a look. (It helps if you’re unemployed and have a lot of time, as I was when I first stumbled upon it.) What’s ranked too high? What’s ranked too low? What’s ranked just right?