PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
| Thursday, November 6, 1997
|
Page: A35
|
Edition: SF
|
|
| Section: EDITORIAL
|
Graphics: CARTOON
|
BASIC ROCK MATH: A RATIO, A SQUARE, A BIT OF MULTIPLICATION.
AS I SAID, THE STONES ARE THE BEST
By Crispin Sartwell
On this page a few weeks ago, I asserted that I could prove with
mathematical precision that the Rolling Stones were better than the Beatles.
This has provoked an overwhelming and gratifying response from you, the
readers of this fine newspaper. To the reader who writes to tell me that I
``deserve to suffer and die,'' I can only say: Thanks for your input. And to
those of you who call me a ``numskull,'' a ``fool,'' an ``idiot,'' or things
unprintable in a publication with the high moral tone of The Inquirer, I
respond: That's true. I am a fool and an idiot and a numskull.
Nevertheless, I'm right, and you're wrong. Why? Simply because I have the
numbers. Fellow idiots, you cannot argue with numbers. To whom do we turn
when we need answers? Experts. Pollsters. Social scientists. Marketing
consultants. People with numbers. These numbers, obviously, have nothing to
do with the values or the opinions of the experts in question. Why? Because
they're numbers. Views supported by statistics are no one's views in
particular.
Whatever you do, never listen to your own experience or to your gut sense
of what is true. Listen only to numbers. For God's sake, don't make any
professional decisions without hiring consultants to do the demographics and
focus groups. When you are trying to figure out what TV show to watch, ask the
researchers who spend their lives counting acts of violence. When you are
deciding which candidate to support, abase yourself before the experts who
calculate the percentage of negative campaign ads or the voting preferences of
soccer moms.
Like me, these consultants, researchers and experts are fools. But they've
got the numbers, and so we must defer to their expertise, just as you must
defer to mine.
Like all the most important things, goodness, beauty, love and rock and
roll can be reduced to numbers, and should be, as quickly as possible. To
that acute reader who wrote that I might ``just as well try to quantify
flowers as rock music,'' I say: Exactly, and I am working on the formulas. Sir
Isaac Newton reduced the diverse phenomena of the universe to a few simple
mathematical laws. I have done the same with popular music. My achievement
is at least as important as Newton's. And it is even more impressive, because
Newton was a genius, and I am a numskull.
Just to remind you, or to provoke you again to violence, Sartwell's First
Law: The quality of a rock band is inversely proportional to its
pretentiousness. Corollary to Sartwell's First Law: The pretentiousness of a
rock band can be expressed as a ratio of its artistic ambition to its artistic
accomplishment. Sartwell's Second Law: The quality of a rock song varies
inversely as the square of its distance from the blues.
After decades of exhaustive research, funded exclusively by generous grants
from the office of Jesse Helms, I am now prepared to collapse these laws into
a single number: the Rock Quality Index or RQI. Let us compare the Rolling
Stones to Elton John, who recently called Keith Richards an ``arthritic
monkey.'' The Stones' pretentiousness ratio is 1:8. That is, on a scale of
1-10, their artistic ambition is a 1 and their artistic accomplishment is an
8. (On ``Gunface,'' from the recent Bridges to Babylon, Richards strips the
basic Stones riff down to a single incredibly alive chord repeated three
times. That is perfection.) Convert this to a fraction (1/8). Convert that
fraction into a decimal (0.125): That is the pretentiousness quotient. Now
calculate the distance from the blues in light years (for the Stones, 0.1).
Square this distance: 0.01. That is the blues quotient. Now multiply the
pretentiousness quotient by the blues quotient (0.00125). That is the RQI.
The lower the RQI, the better the music. And 0.00125, you must agree unless
you are utterly irrational, is a very low number.
Elton John is too vapid to be very pretentious, and that is good. Sadly,
though, he occasionally tries to be profound and touching, as in ``Candle in
the Wind '97.'' His pretentiousness ratio, therefore, is 2:1. Pretentiousness
quotient: 2. With regard to the blues, Elton is, in the words of the Rolling
Stones, 2,000 light years from home. Square that and you get 4,000,000.
Elton's RQI, thus, is 8,000,000. Elton John is precisely 6,400,000,000 times
worse than the Stones.
When I listen to Billy Joel's song ``Piano Man,'' I have the sensation that
human life is a meaningless morsel in the all-devouring maw of fate. Now I
can prove, believe me, that mine is the only rational response to that song.
The worst song in the history of rock music, however, is ``Spirits in a
Material World'' by the Police, the RQI of which can be expressed only by
using the mathematical concept of nondenumerable infinities. Don't get me
started on Oasis.
Several readers ask me how I assign numbers to such things as artistic
accomplishment. They suspect that this whole process is just an absurdly
elaborate justification for things that I already believe for no scientific
reason at all. Like Carl Sagan and the other noble enemies of irrationality,
I despair of people like these readers because they do not realize that
scientific proof of the sort I've just provided is the only decent reason to
listen to anyone, including rock and roll bands.
Professor Crispin Sartwell, who teaches philosophy at Penn State
Harrisburg, has more degrees than you do.
Copyright 1997 PHILADELPHIA NEWSPAPERS INC.
May not be reprinted without permission.