Condorcet Poll: Best Prince Songs (Discussion Thread)

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Thread started 11/21/11 6:06am

electricberet

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Condorcet Poll: Best Prince Songs (Discussion Thread)

This thread explains the methodology for an upcoming Condorcet polling series that will rank Prince’s best songs, with the entries chosen based on the results of 39 individual polls conducted over the past six months. I am addressing this post to those who have participated in the earlier polls, or who would like to participate in the final rounds, and who want to understand or discuss the details of what we will be doing. If that’s not you, stop reading now and turn back before it’s too late—I’m sure there are other threads on the org that might be more fun. There is no need to understand all this in order to vote in the polls, but I’m posting the information here for any who may be curious.

With that warning out of the way, let me summarize how we got here for those who haven’t followed the Condorcet polls from the beginning. Earlier this year, I had the idea of starting a series of polls to rank all of Prince’s songs in a systematic way. There is a huge reservoir of knowledge on the org about Prince’s music, but the usual “favorite song” or “best song” threads that pop up regularly on here can’t lead to a meaningful ranking because there is no sophisticated mechanism to vote on the choices. I thought it might be interesting to use the free Condorcet Internet Voting Service (run by Cornell University) so that orgers could rank the songs on each Prince album as well as the various non-album tracks. Although I had to abandon the project after a few polls, fellow orger Javi courageously stepped in and has nearly completed the project. We have now conducted separate polls covering all of Prince’s official albums, the A-sides and B-sides of Prince’s U.S. singles, and other miscellaneous songs nominated by orgers. For a full list of the previous Condorcet poll threads with links, click here and scroll down:

http://prince.org/msg/7/370794

Now that the individual polls have been completed, we need to combine the results and hold final polling rounds to determine the best Prince songs overall in the opinion of the org. Javi and I have given considerable thought (perhaps too much thought) to the best way of accomplishing this. My stated goal at the outset was to determine the overall top 25 Prince songs. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, that number must have occurred to me subconsciously due to the way American college football teams are ranked: a topic which, I readily admit, has no significance for Prince’s music, although “Purple and Gold” shows that American football is not outside his field of interest. However, any other numerical cutoff would be equally arbitrary, and the system we’ve devised will result in a lot more than 25 songs being ranked in the final round, although the concept of the top 25 will play a role in our scheme (more on that below). We took our inspiration for the final rounds partly from a system that was helpfully proposed by orger UltraLash in the thread following the Crystal Ball poll, although we made some modifications to that proposal to better take into account all the data we now have.

One problem with ranking songs by such a prolific artist is that even a list of the best of the best will be very long, and we want to encourage people to vote by keeping the lists as short as reasonably possible. Ultimately, we decided that the final polling should occur in two rounds, and that the songs should be divided into two categories. The first category of songs are what we refer to as “automatically qualifying” (AQ) songs: songs that did so well in the individual polls that they will automatically make it to the final round without any intermediate vote. The second category of songs are “wild card” (WC) songs that did not do well enough to qualify as AQ songs, or could not be classified as they appeared on albums with no singles, but also performed well in the individual polls. The first round of polling would rank the WC songs, then the top 25 from that round would be matched up against the AQ songs in the final round. In addition, if all of the WC songs included in the first round from a particular album or poll make it to the top 25, one additional song from that album or poll will advance to the final round for every song that made the top 25 in the first round. This will result in two lists of songs that are fairly long, but (we think) not unreasonably so.

We decided to use the poll of A-sides from U.S. singles as a reference to determine the cutoff for the AQ list. Prince and his management were likely to choose what they considered his best songs to be released as A-sides on singles in his home market. While Prince’s fans haven’t always agreed with those decisions, the A-sides that are in fact popular on the org must be among his very best songs. Therefore, any song that did well in our A-side poll, or any album track, B-side, or unreleased song that ranked higher than such a song in one of the other polls, should automatically be included in our final round. Anticipating this, we included certain reference A-sides in the non-album song polls. To decide the cutoff for which songs should make it to the AQ round, we eventually settled on “Alphabet St.,” which ranked #13 in the A-sides poll and was used as a reference track in the miscellaneous song polls. Any song that beat or tied “Alphabet St.” in any of the polls is an AQ song, and any song that beat or tied a song that beat “Alphabet St.” in any of the polls is also an AQ song. We chose “Alphabet St.” not because we are particularly fond of that song (though it is catchy enough), but because using a higher-ranked song would have resulted in an AQ list that we considered too short, and using a lower-ranked song would give us an AQ list that was too long. Using “Alphabet St.” as the reference, we ended up with a list of 39 AQ songs, which we considered to be about right for the purpose of determining the top 25 overall Prince songs.

The next question was how to decide which songs would be ranked in the first round as WC songs. For the individual album polls, we decided to take into account two factors: (1) how well each album did in the initial poll that ranked the albums, and (2) how many discs made up the CD version of the album. Ultimately, we have assigned 2 songs per disc to the top 11 albums, and 1 song per disc for the remaining albums. The top 11 from the album poll is significant both because it includes The Black Album, which is unusual in being a high-ranking album that produced no singles, and because it is a stable group no matter which Condorcet completion rule you select (this is a technical point that I could discuss further if anyone is interested). We also felt that it was appropriate to award more WC songs to SOTT in the first group and Crystal Ball and Emancipation in the second, since those albums contained much more music relative to the other albums in their respective groups. We are aware that other albums were double albums on LP even though they are single CDs, but the difference is not meaningful for albums that were designed for the CD format, and 1999, the only double album from the pre-digital era that was released as a single CD, happened to produce three WC songs due to a tie between “D.M.S.R.” and “Lady Cab Driver.” In all cases where there was a tie for a qualifying spot, we included the songs that tied, and we took the top 4 non-AQ songs from both SOTT polls, since we had to have a revote after the first SOTT poll was terminated prematurely, which means that there are actually 5 WC songs from SOTT. To round off the list of WC songs, we chose the top 5 non-AQ songs from the B-sides poll and from the final round of the miscellaneous songs poll.

Since it is possible that some albums have more excellent songs than their ranking in the overall album poll would suggest, we have also stipulated that if every song included from a particular album (or from the poll of B-sides or the final round poll of miscellaneous songs) makes the top 25 in the first round, we will include one additional song from that album or poll for each song that made the top 25 in the first round. To suggest a hypothetical example, if the top two tracks from The Black Album end up making the overall top 25 in the first round, we’ll include two more songs from The Black Album in the final round (specifically, “Rockhard In A Funky Place” and “Superfunkycalifragisexy,” the songs that ranked third and fourth in that poll respectively), in addition to the two that ranked in the top 25 of the first round. On the other hand, in the event that the one entry from Rave makes the top 25, we’ll include one more song from Rave (the title track, which came in at #2 in the Rave poll) in the final round, plus the song that made the top 25 in the first round. However, if one of the tracks from The Black Album makes the top 25 in the first round and the other doesn’t, only the track that made the top 25 will advance to the final round and no additional songs from that album will be included. And if the top-ranked song from Rave fails to make the top 25 in the first round, no additional songs from Rave will be added to the final round. The same goes for all the album polls, along with the B-sides poll and the final round poll of miscellaneous songs. Given the number and variety of songs that made the WC list, we don’t expect many additional songs to make the final poll through this rule, but we won’t find out until the first round is conducted.

We know that our methodology is not perfect. In two subsequent posts, I will list the songs that we’ve determined to be AQ and WC songs. You may notice that some of your personal favorites didn’t make either list. For example, one of my all-time favorite Prince songs is the Lovesexy title track, but it didn’t make the cut for either of these rounds (though it has a chance if both WC songs from that album make the top 25 in the first round). These two lists form a snapshot of what most people on the org think at this particular moment in Prince history; if this had been attempted 10 years before, or if it is attempted again at some point in the future, the lists might be quite different. However, we had to come up with a system that made sense to us, and no system is flawless. Since anyone can use the CIVS polling website for free, there’s nothing to stop any of you in the future from doing a new poll ranking a different set of songs using your own preferred method (and, in fact, Marco81 has already done this for the Montreux 2009 performances, which is great). I would just ask that everyone let Javi have the first crack at doing a comprehensive poll, since he’s put in a lot of effort for many months and accomplished something that proved too daunting for me.

I have started this thread to give people a chance to comment on and discuss our methodology. When the polls are open, anyone posing questions about why and how we’re ranking these songs will be directed to this thread, in the hope that we can keep the actual poll threads free of controversy (except for the song “Controversy,” which made the AQ list). Some of you may find this project to be entirely pointless; that’s cool with us, and you don’t have to participate or even pay attention to our polls (though if you’ve read this far in this post, I’m guessing you have some interest). Others of you may not care about the details but may just want to vote on the songs, and that’s great! You don’t need to understand how we came up with the two lists in order to rank the songs. I’ve enjoyed voting in the polls and I hope others have as well; at least some of them have attracted a lot of participants.

The lists of AQ and WC songs will follow. If you happen to notice that any songs that meet our criteria above were somehow omitted from one list or the other, please let us know so that we can correct the error(s) before polling begins. We plan to start the first round poll in a couple of weeks.

Thanks!

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