A friendly debate has long raged between Beatles fans on the subject of which of the Fab Four was the better songwriter, John Lennon or Paul McCartney. I decided to try to find an objective answer this question by using quantitative techniques.
Background
The Beatles, of course, had four members, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. From 1963 to 1970 they released 210 songs, of which 185 were released on their 14 studio albums, with the balance (2010 – 185 = 25) released but not as part of an album.
Of the four members, Lennon and McCartney were the most prolific songwriters. The two agreed to officially share credit as “Lennon/McCartney” on all songs either of them authored as part of the Beatles, but through various secondary sources such as interviews we know that many of the songs were not collaborations and instead were written principally by one or the other. In fact, across the 210 songs in the Beatles discography, 72 were written principally by Lennon and 70 principally by McCartney. A further 18 songs attributed to Lennon/McCartney (e.g. “Wait”) were written in genuine collaboration and not principally by one or the other.
I obtained the above information on authorship of Beatles songs from fan Per Myrsten’s Beatles Discography.
Approach
I decided to cross-reference the song authors with a ranking of the Beatles’ songs. Rankings are available from the crowd-sourced ranking site ranker.com as well as from professional critics at Rolling Stone Magazine. Of the two I decided to use the ranker.com rankings.
To scrape the rankings from the webpage I wrote a Python script that uses a scraping library from Leonard Richardson called Beautiful Soup. Click here for the source code of my scraping code.
I then set up an Excel spreadsheet with the rankings and the author of the song on one tab, and the cumulative songs for each other and rank of the second. The formula for Column B is =COUNTIF($I:$I, "<="&$A3) and the formula for column D is =B3/SUM($B3:$C3) (at least on the first row).
Here are the first 20 rows:
|
Cumulative Songs |
Proportion of Cumulative Songs |
|||
|
Top X |
Lennon |
McCartney |
Lennon |
McCartney |
|
1 |
0 |
1 |
0% |
100% |
|
2 |
0 |
1 |
0% |
100% |
|
3 |
1 |
1 |
50% |
50% |
|
4 |
1 |
2 |
33% |
67% |
|
5 |
1 |
2 |
33% |
67% |
|
6 |
1 |
3 |
25% |
75% |
|
7 |
2 |
3 |
40% |
60% |
|
8 |
2 |
3 |
40% |
60% |
|
9 |
2 |
4 |
33% |
67% |
|
10 |
2 |
4 |
33% |
67% |
|
11 |
3 |
4 |
43% |
57% |
|
12 |
3 |
4 |
43% |
57% |
|
13 |
3 |
4 |
43% |
57% |
|
14 |
4 |
4 |
50% |
50% |
|
15 |
5 |
4 |
56% |
44% |
|
16 |
6 |
4 |
60% |
40% |
|
17 |
7 |
4 |
64% |
36% |
|
18 |
8 |
4 |
67% |
33% |
|
19 |
8 |
5 |
62% |
38% |
|
20 |
9 |
5 |
64% |
36% |
Then I charted columns D and E:
Conclusions
Notice that since McCartney wrote the top-ranked Lennon or McCartney song (Hey Jude) at the #1 rank he has 100% of the songs. The second-ranked song is Strawberry Fields Forever, by Lennon, so of the top 2 songs, so McCartney’s share has dropped to 50%.
McCartney actually has 67% of the top 10 McCartney / Lennon songs. But by the time we get to the top 20 songs, it is Lennon who is ahead, with 64% of the songs. Lennon appears to have authored more of the bottom-ranked songs, so McCartney did author a higher-than-50% share of the middle-ranked songs.
These figures leave the final answer of who was better undecided. It appears that both men were quite evenly matched. This seems to validate the conclusion of many fans that both men were very nearly equally talented.
It would be interesting to perform this same analysis using the Rolling Stone rankings. If anyone does this, please let me know in the comments.