Google Ngrams, Volume Two: Colours, Isms and Beatles

Google Ngrams is a curious little service that Google offers. It's like Google Trends or Google Insights, but instead of looking at the frequency that words appear (or rather are searched for) on the internet, it somehow calculates the frequency of words' appearing in books over the decades.

Who knows how they do it? Google is omniscient.

Here are a few NGrams. I'll add more every now and then. Remember they'll be more readily visible if you click on them.

While this is just me playing with the Google Ngrams legend (blue is blue, red is red, etc...haw haw), the results are still interesting. Red is apparently more noteworthy than green or blue, which are neck-and-neck, and yellow is a distant last. But odd that from 1900 to 1945, people spoke about the colours in about the same volumes. Then, however, there was a post-war dip lasting half a century until 1995, after which it became cool again to write about colours.

This one is quite artistic. The Cold War, the great battle between political philosophies, waged in books. Communism slowly rises, peaking in about 1965, before fading away - which more or less reflects reality. Capitalism, though, is more interesting: a double-humped camel peaking at first in 1935 before dropping almost to the level of communism in about 1955 before rising again and blowing communism completely away in the 80s and 90s. In this century, people don't care much about capitalism either.

Lastly, the Beatles. This graph goes back to 1960, when there must have been someone else out there named George Harrison - that anomaly skews the numbers a bit, but by the 21st century the four Beatles are written about in the exact order that you'd presume they were: John, Paul, George and Ringo. What's interesting, though, is just how far ahead of the pack Lennon is and how McCartney spends the 80s and 90s merely neck-and-neck with Harrison. And poor Ringo. No-one ever writes about Ringo.

Preserving a Musical Legacy

I'd like you to imagine for a moment the following scenario:

When the Beatles, considered by most people to be Britain's finest and most revolutionary rock group, split up in the early 1970s, John Lennon and George Harrison go on to modestly successful solo careers while Paul McCartney, together with Ringo Starr, George Martin and some new recruits, carries on as "Paul McCartney and the Beatles".

A career of very well-recorded albums follows, mixing new songs with rerecordings of old Beatles classics. They sell extraordinarily well, due in no small part to the aggressive international marketing of McCartney's record company, while the classics from the 1960s languish in obscurity, issued haphazardly on chintzy small-label compilations.

A compilation released toward the end of the 1970s, Myth: the Best of Paul McCartney and the Beatles has gone on down the years to be the music industry's most successful 'catalogue release' and one of the best-selling albums in history. While it's an hour of wonderful-sounding and generally good music, it's a sad distortion of history, with latter-day hits like "Mull of Kintyre" and "Jet" overrepresented. "Drive My Car" and "We Can Work It Out" are on it, but in slicker late-seventies remade versions. Only a small smattering of golden-era songs are included, and only one, "Revolution", features John Lennon. Today's generation, university kids who buy Myth to play in their dorm rooms, are more likely to attribute the song and its strident political message to Paul McCartney.

Ultimately, John Lennon and George Harrison have been washed out of the picture. They're not unknown, but they're thought of today primarily for their meagre solo careers, not as members of the Beatles. If you ask the average music fan to name the 'original' Beatles, where most everyone would confidently list McCartney, most others would hem and haw past that. People see the Beatles as Paul McCartney's backup band, little more.

Those songs that burned up the charts in the 1960s are all but forgotten, their primitive recording and tinny sonics make them less an essential purchase than an inaccessible curio for interested fans, and the money to remaster them properly has just never been put forth. McCartney's latter-day record company has a vested interest in promoting those 1970s hits, and as such every few years puts out another compilation to compete with Myth that once again focuses on those latter-day albums and remakes instead of the originals. The vast majority of the Beatles' actual 'greatest hits' remain all but unknown today, seen as inferior to McCartney's 1970s work and, even more oddly, seen as stylistically 'not representative of McCartney's genius'. The 1970s songs are good, but they're a half-legacy. The other half of the legacy (arguably the more important half), and the contributions of John Lennon and George Harrison, are given an embarrassingly short shrift.

Such a situation as I've described it would be all but impossible to imagine. But while Britain's finest 1960s act has been spared it, Jamaica's finest act has not. The prolific and revolutionary ten-year recorded output of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, one of the most perfect 'supergroups' ever to enter a studio, is a joke, buried beneath a handful of 16-track studio productions made on Island Records in the 1970s, after Peter and Bunny had jumped ship.

People might be bothered at me equating Bob Marley, perhaps the closest thing the modern world has to a genuine prophet, with Paul McCartney, the eager-to-please vaseline-smile showman. But within the group dynamics, the more strident, angry and political Peter Tosh is John Lennon, while the quieter, more down-to-earth Bunny Wailer is George Harrison. Bob Marley was clearly the most prolific of the three and the one most likely to compose 'feel-good' songs. Plus, there ain't nothin' wrong with Paul McCartney. He's created a lot of great music, both with John, George and Ringo and without.

I'm slowly going through the Wailers' 1960s material and want to share with you what I find. This then is merely a shout out loud that such a rich legacy of music is so poorly treated. I don't want to slight Bob Marley, who I think is an amazing musician deserving of his reputation. It's more that I want to exalt Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, who could use a bit of that lustre that Bob Marley has posthumously come to possess.