Easy Come Easy Gaughin

A friend of mine expressed amusement that Jack Bruce could be listed above Led Zeppelin in the overall achievement list that I posted last week. It’s a math thing that I could not resist explaining.

Remember, the idea is to assess the ratings listed in The Virgin Encyclopedia of 70’s Music.

In the “Best 5″ rating, the artists are tied; they each have a classic 5-star disc (gotta get me that Songs For a Tailor), and then they each have 4 4-star discs, so they are tied in that regard with 21 total stars.

So we move over to the “Overall above average” rating. Here’s one way to understand how this comparison works. We will remove one album from each artist with matching ratings, then assess what’s left over at the end. Here’s how those match up.

Now the trick is to look at what’s left. Every Led Zeppelin disc is accounted for, but Jack Bruce has 5 discs left. They are these;

Now the deal is, we have effectively “subtracted” Led Zeppelin’s critical ratings from Jack Bruce’s, leaving Bruce with 5 discs and 14 total stars. This gives an average of 2.8. But this average is higher than the overall average for all of the albums in the book, which is about 2.76. Since Jack Bruce is above average even after the equivalent of Led Zeppelin’s discography is extracted from his, Jack Bruce squeaks out a “win”. If his remaining discs had average under 2.76; ie, if he had 5 remaining discs and only 13 total stars, Led Zeppelin would have “won”.

Here’s the quicker version of that “logic”, though it’s not as dramatic. Led Zeppelin has a total of 11 albums in its discography. The average artist with 11 albums would have a total of 11*2.76 = 30.36 total stars; Led Zeppelin has 39, so they are 8.64 stars above the average artist.

Jack Bruce has a total of 16 albums. The average artist with 16 stars would have a total of 16*2.76 = 44.16 total stars; Jack Bruce has 53, so he is 8.84 stars above the average artist.

Jack Bruce by a hair!

I turned 50 recently (I am having my end of life crisis) and I received 7 books derived from the “Virgin Encyclopedia” of music. There is a large and expensive book called The Virgin Encyclopedia of Music that contains thousands of entries from multiple music genres. My local library has a copy of that, and I have coveted it for a long time. It’s in reference, so I can’t check it out of the library and, say, marry it. As it turns out, it’s hard to find a copy for much less than one HUNDRED dollars. And hey man, I’m a teacher. One hundred dollars will buy a lot of bologna, and the kids have got to eat.

For me, obsessive number jockey, the most important thing for each entry was the discography at the end of each mostly well-written and entertaining entry. These discographies are very thorough (at least up to the publication date of 2002), and utilize a 1 through 5 star rating system. For a guy obsessed with ranking systems, that’s like vanilla extract to a wino.

Fortunately, the Virgin Books company must have recognized that they weren’t going to sell too many copies of a book that costs more than most families’ weekly grocery bill, so they broke the book into 5 smaller books by decade, 50’s, 60’s, 70s, 80s, and 90s.

The artists are placed by some method I don’t fully understand having to do with the decade in which they first came to “prominence”. It makes sense that the editors did not want to spread someone like Neil Young across four different volumes of the book, but there are occasional glitches in their system. Take The Kinks, for example. In my mind, they were first prominent in the 60’s, but they show up in the 70’s book.

Despite these sorts of strange incongruities, I love the books, and as I read the entries (yes, they are encyclopedias, and yes, I am reading them cover to cover) all of those numbers at the end of entries keep glowing, calling out to me, must be DEALT WITH.

So here’s the deal. I kept track of all of the ratings for all of the albums listed in the book. I am virtually certain to have made a mistake or two, so these numbers are not exact, but by my count there are 11334 albums in the book which receive a total of 31364 stars for an average of 2.76725 stars per album. Let’s call it 2.8 just to make it easier to talk about.

To assess an artist, I look at their rated discography on an album by album basis. For each album, the artist either gets an award or a deduction according to how far the album in question is above or below the mean for all albums in the book. A three-star album awards the artist .2 points, since that album is .2 points above the mean. For a four-star album, the artist receives 1.2 points, for a 2-star album the artist has .8 points deducted from their score, and so on.

So each artist gets a score that represents their TOTAL points above average.

Another score is awarded to each artist according to their best 5 albums. Alice Cooper, for example, did so many horrible albums throughout the 80’s and 90’s that his overall “above average” score is abysmal. This isn’t a criticism, by the way, the man’s a legend, and he was carving out a living. I can’t imagine many people with the opportunity to stay in the music business quitting, God bless him. And he should/must be recognized for the quality of his Love it to Death/Killer/School’s Out/Billion Dollar Babies run. So each artist gets a score that is equal to the total number of stars from their five best albums.

Then the ranking begins. The artists are ranked, first according to their “above-average” score, with their “best-5″ score serving as a tiebreaker. Occasionally ties still remain, but they are exclusively in the nether regions of the overall list, so I literally break them randomly. Sue me. This ranked list is tagged with a number giving the artist’s place on the list. In this listing, Frank Zappa is number one (sorry, Tom), followed by Keith Jarrett, BB King, Barbra Streisand, and King Tubby.

Then the process is reversed. Artists are ranked first by their “best-5″ score, with the “above-average” score as the tie-breaker. Under this scheme Neil Young is first, followed by Bob Marley, David Bowie, Keith Jarrett and Joni Mitchell.

At this point each artist has two ranks. David Bowie is 90th in “over average” and 3rd in “best 5″. Barbra Streisand is 4 and 23, King Tubby is 5 and 24, Joni Mitchell is 10 and 5, and so on.

I then give the artist the benefit of the doubt, allowing them to retain the rank that most benefits them. So Bowie gets a 3, Streisand a 4, King Tubby a 5, Joni Mitchell a 5, and so on. It is THIS number that determines the final overall ranking. Like in golf, lower numbers are good. I use the overall “above-average” rating as the tiebreaker here. Frankly, I enjoy following an artist as they develop over a long career, and I think making great music for decades trumps popping out a handful of good albums.

Now I will stress that there is NONE of my personal opinion in the following listing. This is strictly an amateur statistical analysis of the information contained in this book. I created a ranking scheme, and it might or might not produce interesting results, but it has nothing to do with my personal tastes, which are scary and deserve your contempt.

Here’s the artist list.