The Beatles Bible 2015 Canon Poll - Results & Discussion | Page 27 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Ok finally finding time to try to post this…my life has been, well, something else..quite unexpected, busy, and wonderful, over the past month 🙂

First, @meanmistermustard, do you happen to have the final version of the results sorted by album? If so, would you please send me a copy? If not, I’ll add the final results to the list you posted.

I think this should win as topic of the year 🙂 Of course it can’t compare traffic-wise to things like “In My Life ” and “Impossible to derail”, but as far as new topics this has definitely been the most fun imo! And as has been discussed the technology will make future such polls, such as the non-Canon poll, not just possible but fairly easy. One more time, thanks not only to the pollsters but also the participants 🙂

I know I talked a lot about analyzing my voting, distributing my votes equally throughout the 10 ratings, “objective” vs. “subjective” song quality, etc. There are almost as many approaches to voting as there were voters. I kind of figure that the method a person uses doesn’t matter; however paying close attention to whether we are rating the “best” Beatles songs (as we “objectively” think) or “our favorite” (purely aesthetically) Beatles songs is worthwhile as differences in this primary objective could make the poll not accurately reflect its purpose. Regardless of my personal opinion of whether we can be objective in terms of song quality (I think at least many of us can, to a point), they are different and distinct goals. Some of us may think our favorites are the “objective” best, and that’s ok – but I would rate them differently. Which leads me to my main point – in the end I did both – I started trying to be objective, but then made adjustments based on subjective factors.

I don’t think the poll resulted in something that we could present to a Beatles novice as their “best” work. While SFF is a great song, there are several better ones according to my set of “objective” criteria (which are probably not the same as yours ;). If I had to pick a single song, it would be ADITL – but others have good claims on being the “single best Beatles song”. Although Lucy isn’t a personal fave of mine, I have to respect Elton’s opinion that its the greatest rock-n-roll song ever written. And any attempt to win a novice over to Beatlemania should highlight the great variety of their music, from simple teeny-bopper love song pop hits to simple songs about deep subjects and bizarre songs about (essentially) no subject and everything in between. One of my favorite examples, Lovely Rita , is a great example of a simple song that bears up to a lot of analysis; I Saw Her Standing There is a fairly standard and simple early rock love song, yet it’s got a lot of what I consider great objective features; In My Life is one of the best descriptions of love in a song that I’m aware of; Here Comes The Sun is incredibly simple, yet the ostensible subject matter (return of spring) is something that is incredibly pleasing to humans on an instinctual/survival level – seeing that first nice day that means we’ve survived another winter has meant, since before simple mammals evolved into early humans, that the species made it through another winter. And the song holds up to more than one metaphorical analysis. The examples go on… I guess thinking about our top 10 it would be a fairly good “package” to present to someone – but there are some important songs missing (as those of us who gave more than 10 songs a “10” rating well know!).

I noticed that my personal top 10 was remarkably close to the poll results. I’ve summarized how my and the poll’s top 10 compare, and analyzed it (as I am want to do). My conclusion is that it’s actually probably common and the majority of us came pretty close (except you poor @Zig!). But I’m spoiling it because it makes the post even longer and some of you might not be interested at all in detailed speculative analysis…I know some just go on aesthetics and that’s all good too 🙂

trcanberra said

Wigwam said
That’s actually quite surprising but very interesting………Thanks I’ll have to get my head around this…..White Album below Help and MMT are the big surprises.

Thanks

It doesn’t really surprise me; the ‘White Album ‘ has such a variety of material on it – including some quite experimental tracks – while MMT is a cobbled-together concoction with all those hit singles on the 2nd ‘side’. The margin to Help is much closer, but a lot of the songs on the WA are polarising.

I used the “cobbled-up” version of MMT just so that those hits would be counted somewhere. Obviously, if they had been included on Sgt. Pepper ‘s (as some think they should have been), it would most likely have taken the #1 spot. But I personally like Sgt. Pepper ‘s the way it is – whether it’s just that I’m so used to the feel/flow, or that I really do like all those “lesser” songs quite a bit, I’m not sure – probably both. You can discount MMT’s qualifications to be in the rankings based on your point that its status (at least the track listing I used) as Canon might be questionable to purists, of which I’m generally one in this respect. When discussing the entire library, it’s usually easier to use only the UK track listings rather than muck things up by considering the (dirty & confusing marketing ploy of) relisting and renaming of some albums when they found their way to the states.

Using just the soundtrack songs, the average drops all the way to 119.3 (10th), which is probably more reflective of the general community attitude towards MMT. If they hadn’t been released on MMT, they surely would have deserved spots on Past Masters , which would have moved it to 103.9 (7th), a reasonable spot given that it’s a collection of singles. Perhaps that is more appropriate, having one album for singles rather than picking MMT to put a disproportionate number of the best singles onto. But all 4 Beatles weren’t involved with picking the track list, which raises questions in my mind as to whether the albums are really Canon (not that I want to dig up that topic here, and the individual songs are Canon in my book!). And even I’m not obsessive enough to do it properly, separating them into Past Masters 1 & 2 – which would have put them on an equal footing with the others as far as number of songs go. I’m thinking Past Masters 1 would have been significantly lower than 2, since the two were created in chronological order and the songs generally got better rankings the later they were produced – understandably.