Yahoo Article

["Bryce R. Nelson" <nelsonbr@mail.plu.edu>]

People,

Enjoy this article I found!  In an earlier post I sent the address, but I
figured I may as well copy the whole article and send it to you all.  I'm
not saying I agree with this, or even understand it really, but it is
interesting nonetheless.  Especially since not a week ago I was going off
about how no one could prove who the greatest band was!

Unfortunately he doesn't mention the who to provide some more cannon
fodder for this whole discussion.

Bryce


   Monday October 6 2:07 PM EDT
 
Philosophy Professor Rules Stones Best Rock Band Ever
 
HARRISBURG, Pa. (Reuter) - A philosophy professor known in academic
   circles as a pioneer in quantitative aesthetic theory has developed his
   own mathematical forumla for judging rock bands and their music.
 
   And according to the calculations of Crispin Sartwell of Penn State
   University, the Rolling Stones are a better rock band than the Beatles.
 
   The basic reason, says the 39-year-old professor, is that the Beatles
   departed from rock 'n' roll's African-American blues traditions in
   order to become avant-garde artists. The very symbol of their downfall,
   he says,is the seminal "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," an
   album Sartwell describes as "truly bad."
 
   "It has a very European tonality. It is Umpah-band stuff," the 
   professor says.
 
   By contrast, the Rolling Stones rarely presented themselves as anything
   but a straight blues band, Sartwell explains.
 
   "Mick Jagger never mistook himself for Pavarotti or T.S. Eliot. Keith
   Richards never tried to do anything but make great little riffs."
 
   However irksome this may be to aging Beatle fans around the world,
   Sartwell says his conclusions are no simple matter of opinion. Rather
   they are distilled from an empirical analysis that turns on a pair of
   principles appropriately named, Sartwell's Laws.
 
   Sartwell's First Law dictates that the quality of a rock band is
   inversely proportional to its pretentiousness, with pretentiousness
   expressed as a ratio of artistic ambition to artistic accomlishment.
   The higher the rating, the professor says, the worse the band.
 
   In this manner, the Ramones, with a ratio of 1:8, come out better than
   The Talking Heads, with a 7:7 ratio. Nirvana, at 3:9, is exactly as
   good as Pearl Jam is bad, at 9:3.
 
   Sartwell also offers a specific warning about the quality of early U2
   and early Bruce Springsteen, saying both were in the habit of taking
   simple ditties and mounting them with "an elaborateness usually
   reserved for Wagnerian opera".
 
   But where the Beatles fell short was under Sartwell's Second Law. To
   wit, the quaty of a Rock song varies inversely as the square of its
   distance from the blues.
 
   White pop music performers from Benny Goodman and Elvis Presley to the
   Stones and the Beatles have succeeded by taking African-American music
   and repackaging it for mass audiences, Sartwell says. And the closer
   they have remained to the real thing, the better their music has been.
 
   "'Twist and Shout' and other early Beatles songs sound like they were
   recorded yesterday. But 'For the Benefit of Mr. Kite!' sounds like the
   relic of an extinct, incomprehensible culture," he says.
 
   The Rolling Stones do as well as the Ramones on the Sartwell system
   with a ratio of 1:8. "That's about as good as it gets," the professor
   says.
 
   On the other hand, the Beatles of the Sgt. Pepper era wind up with a
   rating of 8:2.
 
   "In '64 or '65, the Beatles were one of the best R&B bands ever to
   play.  The stuff was wonderful and I'd put it in the same category as
   the Stones.
    
   "It was with "Rubber Soul" that they really started to slip," he said.