Welcome back to Can’t Get Much Higher, the internet’s favorite place for music and data. If you enjoy this newsletter, check out my book Uncharted Territory: What Numbers Tell Us about the Biggest Hit Songs and Ourselves. It’s a data-driven history of popular music that I wrote as I spent years listening to every number one hit in history. Now, let’s talk about The Beatles.
The Worst Beatles Song
By Chris Dalla Riva
My colleague—and fellow newsletter writer—brendan varan likes to rag on me for spending too much time listening to bad music. I swear I’m not a musical masochist. I’m just a curious guy!
While Bruce Springsteen, my favorite artist, was trying to get his career off the ground, he was regularly being outsold by the likes of Captain & Tennille. Yes, I want to hear the great records but understanding that “Muskrat Love” outsold “Born to Run” in the 1970s helps make it clearer what a groundbreaking record the latter was.
That said, I was a bit of a musical masochist this week.
It started with “The Star-Spangled Banner.” After Martha Reeves sung a truly abysmal rendition of the patriotic anthem to kick off the season of the newly established Women’s Pro Baseball League, I decided to go on a hunt for other bad anthems.
But then I felt the need to witness more horrors. I wrote up some code that looked for playlists on Deezer named some variant of “Worst Songs Ever.” I then aggregated the songs across all the playlists to see what your average listener felt the greatest musical travesties were.
I learned a few things from this exercise. First, if you concocted some objective standard for musical badness, I don’t think any of these songs—outside of Rebecca Black’s “Friday” and “It’s Everyday Bro” by Jake Paul—would meet it. Most of these songs are just popular records from the recent past that are at best redundant and at worst annoying. Truly unlistenable music is usually not reaching enough people for listeners to care.
Second, people really hate “Dance Monkey” by Tones and I. Like really hate. I posted about these findings on my TikTok page, and no song inspired more vitriol in the comments than that one.
“Dance monkey. It makes me physically ill.”
“Dance monkey has a special place on my hate list”
“That’s Dance Monkey? I never knew the name of the song, but I can’t stand it. Makes my ears hurt”
“dance monkey is audible torture”
As I continued to mull over people’s notions of musical badness, my mind went to a very unexpected place: The Beatles. The four-headed musical beast composed of John, Paul, George, and Ringo is widely considered the greatest band in history. How would people’s notions of musical horror intersect with their discography?
“We Were Just a Band …”
When many Beatles’ outtakes were released in the 1990s as part of the Anthology series there was a snippet of dialogue from John Lennon included that I’ve always enjoyed:
We were four guys, that’s it. I met Paul, said, “Do you wanna join me band?”, you know. And then George joined and then Ringo joined. We were just a band who made it very, very big. That’s all.
Of course, this is the understatement of the century. But I think it is also helpful framing when approaching The Beatles’ catalog. They were just “four guys.” Now, those four guys composed some of the greatest songs yet to exist. But because they were four human guys, they were also fallible. In other words, there are bad Beatles songs.
Unlike my exercise with the worst songs generally, there aren’t people who make playlists called “The Worst Beatles Songs.” I had to resort to other means to avoid writing a bland essay where I just rant to you about the Beatles songs that offend my ears.
What’s nice is that because The Beatles are so famous, many people have gone to the pains of ranking every song in their discography. Bill Wyman at Vulture did it. Charles Curtis at USA Today did it. Mark Beaumont at NME has done it. And, of course, scores of random Redditers and bloggers online have done it.
I built a database of every Beatles catalog ranking I could find. I didn’t care if the ranking was done by a seasoned music critic or someone listening to The Fab Four’s oeuvre for the first time. They just had to have ranked every song. I then tossed out all covers, outtakes, and any songs released after they broke up. Then I took the average across all the lists.
So, the worst Beatles song is … “Dig It.” “Dig It”? Yes, “Dig It,” the 50 seconds on Let It Be culled from a longer jam where John Lennon shouts out the FBI and the CIA and the BBC and BB King.
Beyond the fact that I kind of like “Dig It,” I’ve always felt weird including it on lists like these. It resembles an outtake more than an actual song. Similarly, ranking sonic experiments like “Revolution 9” and “Wild Honey Pie” also feels a bit unfair.
They do technically fit my criteria, so I will include them. But, if we ignore those for a second, then we get to what I think is a much better answer to the what-is-the-worst-Beatles-song question: “Little Child.”
Beyond John Lennon honking on the harmonica he was soon to put down for good, “Little Child” is aptly described by Vulture as “Filler from the second album.” It will not offend your ears, but in a catalog of gold, the sub-two minute “by-numbers Merseybeat”—in the words of NME—is a dud.
Outside of their weird sonic experiments, most of the lowest ranked songs are those “by-numbers Merseybeat” cuts that you mostly find on their first few records. The lowest post-Revolver album cuts are sadly two Harrison numbers, “Only a Northern Song” and “For You Blue.” That said, I would listen to all of these songs before willingly turning on “She’s a Woman,” “Yes It Is,” and “I’m Down” again.
They are Pretty Great, Though
We are talking about The Beatles. And they are worth the hype. So, this entire essay shouldn’t be a downer. If we average all song ranks from their studio albums, Revolver just ekes past Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to come out on top.
Despite the fact that our ranking of songs only looked at originals, I decided to include covers in this album ranking, especially since many of the early albums have a good deal of them. Now, let’s just pull out the covers and rank those.
I’m fine with “Dizzy Miss Lizzy” being at the bottom. It might be the worst closer in the rock era, especially since you have to listen to John Lennon’s half-rate Little Richard impression right after the majesty of “Yesterday.” But in my heart, I would move “Mr. Moonlight” to the bottom. It’s a truly drab number with an organ solo that sounds like a stomach on the verge of illness.
When The Beatles got a cover right, it could be transformational, though. I don’t think most people even realize “Twist and Shout” was written by someone else. I’m sure depending on who you talk to, they might think the same for Motown classics “You Really Got a Hold on Me” and “Please Mister Postman.” For my money, their cover of The Music Man’s “Till There Was You” represents their finest adaptation, George Harrison’s solo a text for how to integrate beautiful melody into lead lines.
But let’s not just talk the best covers. The Beatles are much better known for their originals. To close out this piece, let’s use the same methodology we applied to find the worst originals to find the best originals.
It’s nice to see “A Day in the Life” come out on top. Not only would I declare that The Beatles best work if push came to shove, but it’s widely hailed as their magnum opus. It’s always a good check on a statistical methodology, no matter how simple, if your results make some intuitive sense.
Had this been a list based on my personal tastes, I would have ranked “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “Don’t Let Me Down,” and “For No One” a bit higher. I don’t think those songs are underrated—is it possible for a song by the most famous band to be underrated?—but I do like them quite a bit. After a week of listening to terrible tunes, I think it’s time to spin that trio by the grandest quartet a few times.
A New One
"Betty’s in the Band" by Abigail Rose and Weston Hunter
2026 - Folk
Moments ago, I just mentioned The Beatles folk pastiche “I’ve Just Seen a Face.” When I first heard the Help! album cut, I was infatuated. I must have listened to it on loop for at least two hours. Abigail Rose and Weston Hunter’s new song “Betty’s in the Band” has given me a similar feeling.
Like “I’ve Just Seen a Face,” “Betty’s in the Band” lives in the world of folk music, although at a much slower tempo. But no matter the speed, both of these numbers convey a joy that is infectious. The former’s joy is built on falling in love hard and fast. The latter takes a different path. It captures the euphoria of a drifter on the road making so much music that she’s “got bruises on her legs from the tambourine.”
An Old One
"Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" by P.M. Dawn
1993 - Psychedelic Rock
I’ve only recommended a Beatles song once in this newsletter. And even though it was a deeper cut (i.e., “I’m Happy Just to Dance With You”), I still felt silly doing it. Do we really need to spill more words on the most successful band in history given how hard it is for smaller artists to get any press? Probably not. So, no, I won’t be recommending a Beatles recording here. But I will recommend a song by the group: “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” by P.M. Dawn.
I spend a lot of time writing about P.M. Dawn in my book. I think the psychedelic hip-hop group was quietly influential. Their cover of The Beatles Rubber Soul classic is a great example of how inventive they could be while still respecting their source material.
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I feel like you can play the Muskrat/Born game for any watershed moment in music. "(Everything I Do) I Do it For You" was the #1 song when "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was released. The summer charts in 1967 are full of dross. Schmalz always plays.
I love your inclusion of PM Dawn's great cover of "Norwegian Wood" - agreed that they're under-appreciated today (incidentally, their big breakthrough "Set Adrift on a Memory Bliss" came out the same month as "Smells"). My personal favorite cover of that song is Cornershop's pointed Punjabi-language version of the song at the end of their brilliant When I Was Born For the 7th Time
My 6 year old has been listening to Cotton Eyed Joe all day. Send help.
Maybe I should introduce him to dance monkey, I like that better.
It would be an honor to have a list of worst songs like the Beatles worst songs...