u/Omni1222 skipped due to the 24-hour time limit. I'm up with an unchanged pool, I guess.

My cut this week is a good one, I think you'll really like it.

It is this/this is it/is this it?/this it is...

#90 - We Can Work It Out

Mr. Kite is just damn cool. Great lyrics, queezy-wheezy organ, psychedelic waltz section.

Octopus' Garden. Contrary to popular belief, I am not a Ringo hater.

Rain has got such a great sound, as Jonathan Ross might say.

8 Days A Week is such a joyous distillation of power pop that it seems sinful to get rid of.

Here Comes The Sun. No.

She's Leaving Home has some of the best harmonies that they ever wrote.

So that leaves We Can Work It Out. Kinda weird how it just begins without warning. Very insistent, like somebody making a point in an argument. Was it always meant to start like this, I wonder? In another universe, there is a Beatles Archives series with We Can Work It Out (Extended Intro) on it and it will cost £120 for the CD box set.

Maybe the box set would would also feature a 24 page colour booklet with notes on all the songs and we'll hear all about the fella who came in to play the accordion on the song but he wasn't booked in advance and they had to sen a taxi through London to get him from, I don't know, St. John's Wood or something, and he came in to the studio and oh, you should've seen the look on his face, here a Frenchman looking baffled and John said an acerbic thing about Agincourt or maybe Trafalgar in his mock loudspeaker WW2 man voice. He (the accordion player) played the chords, then left.

Did George Martin like the change into relative minor? I don't mind it, but I'm not 100% on the vocal harmonies here. A bit grating, somehow.

Did George Harrison like the sudden switch into a oopah-waltz? Who knows if he even plays on it anyway. I imagine he was having a cup of tea, planning his next song with sitars in it and all of that.

Who couldn't agree with the overall message though? Life is short. There's no time for fussing and fighting with friends, absolutely there's not. I suppose it's not as easy to practice what you preach though.

As a nomination I want to select Cry Baby Cry. This one is likely to make some people upset, I know. It was either this or Love Me Do and I think the latter edges it, really. I'm just going on gut reaction so don't cry or wah-wah cos George doesn't need that.

Bye!

#91 Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey

Here's the deal. I'm really tired right now. I'm posting my cut and nom right now so that I don't accidentally fall asleep before I get to. Yes, I am actually afraid of that. More details will follow in a bit.

92 - She Said She Said

Worst trip sitter ever.

Finally, we’ve reached the point where I can start weeding out the lower end of Revolver. This is actually kind of an underwhelming song if I were to be honest. Really it’s kinda boring. Imagine having an argument while being high, yeah it’s gonna ruin anyone’s mood, just… chill out brah, I can see why John was pissed enough to write a song about this.

Well anyways, since we’re a little more than halfway through this rankdown, let’s do a little a personal recap. Goals checklist:

• practice creative writings. Well I still suck at it

• stick to the spreadsheet. Nope.

• no deals. Well at least that one is still fulfilled

Placeholder: 4 none
Skip: 2
Word count: ain’t even gonna bother with that

…

😬Sssss oooohhhh yeah you know what it might not be looking good but hey I’m still chugging along.

As for my nomination, with utmost and sincere respect to We Can Work It Out but I’ll have to call you up to the stand.

And as always, thank you for watching, smash that subscribe button, hit the bell for notifications, and don’t forget to like the video, I’ll see you next time, goood bye!

Y’know, I really wish samh would have used that idol on You Never Give Me Your Money.

93 - I Feel Fine

Man this song is a fun one.

I did a whole thing about 2 minute songs before so I’m not gonna rehash that but this is more of the same, sometimes going from one good melody immediate into another one over and over feels like crack, there doesn’t have to be much else to it.

I mean they’re singing about all the same early Beatles stuff, they hit all the usual buzzwords and themes of girls and love etc but they’re doing it well at least, the quality of the harmonies and melodies is what made them famous, they hadn’t grown up yet.

I don’t feel fine at all, I’ve actually had a pretty shit fucking day but this is as joyous as it gets, it’s true driving in the sun on a good relaxing day music, something that becomes a bit more rare from John as time goes on.

This song won’t make you feel fine, but if you already do it makes a pretty nice companion to your happiness.

This is a pretty good pool but unfortunately the good cuts were all my noms. Of the 3 left, 2 are excellent, 1 is great, and that unfortunately leaves...

93: She Came In Through the Bathroom Window

Look, I like the medley, okay? They may not work very well as individual songs, but that was never the point. Abbey Road came out 30 years before the invention of the Mp3, so you couldn't just listen to, I don't know, Sun King on its own. You had to find it in the album itself, and while you were there, you might as well listen to the next song in the medley given that it's probably pretty short, and on, and on, and oh look, you finished the album. If the medley was ranked as one conglomerate, or even split into 2 or 3 sections, all of these songs would be much higher.

In general, the medley songs are either great or weird. Golden Slumbers is great. Mean Mr. Mustard is weird. Carry that Weight is great. Sun King is weird. And so on. But She Came In Through the Bathroom Window isn't either of those. It sorta exists in a weird limbo state where it's normal, and that makes it honestly my least favorite of the medley (besides Her Majesty, but that barely counts).

Obviously, it has the polish of every other song on Abbey Road, but I feel like it makes the least use of said polish. If this was one of the interludes on Let It Be I don't think anyone would find it particularly jarring.

That's about all I can say. I think this might be the last song left which I don't have entirely positive opinions on (excluding the ones I can't cut), so the rest of this rankdown will be rough for me.

I’m gonna do it. Fuck a balls

#94 - A Day in the Life

So. The best Beatles song of all time.

In fact, I think Omni said that ‘A Day in the Life’ was, and I quote, arguably the single most acclaimed song from the Western canon from the 20th century on. Not the most acclaimed Sgt. Pepper’s song. Not the most acclaimed Beatles song. Not even the most acclaimed rock song (though it is definitely all those things too.) No – the most acclaimed piece of popular music ever. Of all time. Ever. Period.

It’s the best Beatles song. It’s ‘A Day in the Life’. Read any list where the author is ranking Beatles songs and they’re over thirty – literally, any of them – and ten times out of ten the top song will be ‘A Day in the Life’. Nobody’s arguing this. It’s born to be number one.

It’s also, in just about every single way you could possibly think of, the most archetypical Beatles song: a song that exemplifies every element that the Beatles became famous for and typifies every feature that they changed the musical landscape with. That’s particularly special because normally you get one or two of those on a song. ‘I Feel Fine’ has the feedback, sure, and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ has the tape loops, true, but ‘A Day in the Life’ has everything. It has the direct, catchy melody that nevertheless fraternises with a Wagner-like complexity, thereby satisfying both stoned teens and snooty musicologists. But it has the noise too – my God does it have the noise – that chaotic orchestral build that announces the McCartney section, and then pops up a second time to announce one of the biggest-sounding chords you’ll ever hear, especially on a stereo setup; this one might be what really introduced the truly avant-garde into the mainstream. It’s incredibly psychedelic and I don’t doubt that literally thousands of people have experienced ego death listening to this on some sort of hallucinogenic. It’s performed masterfully. It’s the grand finale to what many people once considered the best album ever made. And I think that for many people, what’s more important than all that is that it’s the Lennon-McCartney original: a song that captures, with astounding clarity, the features that make both songwriters a) the best of all time and b) entirely unique from one another; it has Lennon’s booming confidence (Paul would never write a line like ‘he blew his mind out in a car’) and Paul’s showman joie de vivre (John would never write a line like ‘woke up, fell out of bed, dragged a comb across my head’), and the presence of the two songwriters is almost exactly at parity; it’s the dance of creative expression between two generational geniuses distilled into a single burst of sound and colour, and really, when you lay it all out like that, how can you deny its ascendance?

‘A Day in the Life’ is like the eldest son of a great big family who has dirty blonde hair and a winning smile and perfectly proportioned features and a resting heart rate of 30 bpm and biceps that could juice a watermelon with a single flex and he’s also extremely smart and extremely funny and extremely charismatic and extremely sensitive too (he writes poetry) and can play four instruments and is the tennis champion at his college (that college being Harvard) and all the girls (and guys) in his cohort fall in love with him and deep down kinda wish they were him and not silly little people with tedious things like flaws and mistakes and one day he’ll probably win an EGOT and a Nobel, and then he’ll be elected president of the world, and slowly but surely he will replace all world governments with puppet states led by Manchurian candidates, and by proxy of them he will slowly institute significant restrictions on social, political and economic agency, leading to the formation of a singular United World Order (UWO) that will free him up to open up concentration camps for his personal and parliamentary enemies, and eventually those concentration camps will be expanded to take in all citizens of the world who will spend the rest of their days starving and building shrines to him under threat of torture, and when he’s on his deathbed at the age of 138 he’ll upload his consciousness to a computer so he can maintain his rule forever. But that’s okay. He’s the best song of all time.

‘A Day in the Life’ is a very good song. Maybe the best song ever. The Lennon melody at the beginning is perfectly wistful, with the descent between the words ‘oh boy’ surely being the keys to its success, capturing that sort of faded, greyscale dejection produced by one’s awareness of their own mortality. And what about that drum entry, am I right? Some of Ringo’s best work here, for sure. Not to mention that it’s probably the most interesting use of a piano on a Beatles song, with that little question mark of a lick following some of the lines in the Paul section being particularly entrancing. Also the lyrics make an actual attempt to, you know, say something about something, and I think Paul is the one who best understood the assignment there but John did pretty damn well also. Absurdity, fate, monotony, the small pleasures of trivial things – all of it can be found in these lyrics, the lyrics to a good Beatles song.

Oh, and should you forget that ‘A Day in the Life’ is a solid Beatles song, you don’t have to worry because its fans won’t ever shut the fuck up about just how good it is, so hu-freaking-zzah, right? You’ll be told that this is the best thing short of a cure for cancer should you even so much as set foot into any rock-centred music community. If you don’t call ‘A Day in the Life’ the best Beatles song at least ten times, beatings will resume and the schoolmaster will deny you your pudding that night.

So thank you for reading and in conclusion ‘A Day in the Life’ is a song by The Beatles that I’m really rather pleased is going here even though it’s obviously the best song of all time and you shouldn’t think about it too hard. Like for instance you shouldn’t think too hard about how Paul’s section is actually quite annoying and weirdly written, with a super forced syllabic pattern that fits very awkwardly over the bars in a way that’s rather unbecoming of a songwriter who loves nothing more than geometric order in songs. It also just sort of doesn’t have a melody, or at least not one that had much real care put into it. In fact really the one melody here that really deserves all the hype is the one I mentioned earlier, the ‘I read the news today, oh boy’ that starts off the song; it’s kinda hard to see what all the fuss is about with all the other bits. Don’t think about it though it’s the best song of all time. It’s definitely not the worst song of all time. It’s good, we can say that with confidence.

Why did we need the orchestral build twice? Why, Paul? Once was enough – do something different the second time because as a prelude to The Chord or whatever Beatles fans call it it loses its lustre big time.

There’s a song by Animal Collective called ‘Spirit They’ve Vanished’ and throughout it all is the most annoying fucking high pitched whine, which is a shame because there’s a really good song underneath it. I’ve seen compelling intellectualisations of its use on that one – my favourite is that it’s meant to be a song that deliberately antagonises people under the age of, say, 35, so that it forbids comfortable listening until you’re actually old enough to understand its representation of childhood (how’s that for a paradox?) – but on ‘A Day in the Life’ it seems to serve no purpose except for annoying my cat and making me scramble to the skip button at five minutes in.

That’s all there is to it, them’s the breaks. I think #94 is valid placement for the best song of all time. Looking forward to writing about some better ones though.