When I started this exercise (as a Bluesky thread) I already knew that Ranking the Beatles’ songs was not a very realistic thing to attempt. In several places in the original thread, and here on the blog site, I have explained some of the issues and why I still carried it out, but in essence:
Ranking songs or any kind of art is not just difficult, it’s crazy. The whole point is to make something unique and original. To rank them is to miss that point.
Still it’s useful to deal with things one at a time and the ordering creates a bit of mystery and tension. (Bluesky thread, November 2024)
So I decided to rank the songs – it will be more interesting than a random sequence. But as I know, deep down, that any ranking is inherently flawed, I have not attempted to optimize the scheme for accuracy; it’s just a preliminary practical step to sorting the songs so that they can be considered one at a time.
I am a bit nerdy and for various reasons (for example, choosing songs to cover or learn for an open mic) I’d already set up a spreadsheet with all the Beatles’ songs and various ratings in it. It was a pretty crude way to identify what I liked about different songs, and includes things like “lyrics”, “melody”, “performance” and optional bonus points for things like “bass” and “harmonies”. I later added in some old MP3 “star” ratings I’d used to help choose songs for playlists. Then I came up with a very crude way to combine the points into an overall score.
The results do give some kind of rough ordering, but don’t even reflect my own taste very accurately, never mind representing an objective evaluation of the merit of each song.
Here are some other pages where I talk about ranking if you are still interested: