The greatest Fleetwood Mac song, according to data science
Science and Fleetwood Mac combine like oil and water.
I have very little time for spiritualism and the perverts and numbskulls it attracts, but there’s no doubt that the majesty of the classic rock band lingers beyond anything traditionally measurable. Somehow, the external drama of the group imbues their rather simple pop songs with a hue of halcyon sorcery.
Even Lindsey Buckingham agreed, commenting on the success of Rumours, “Whatever was going in the band, specifically between the two couples, very much informed the material, and I think that was a very great appeal of the album. If you look at the success that the album enjoyed, I think it goes a little bit beyond the music itself.”
However, even if you were entirely unaware of the backstory, the music somehow seems inseparable from a smattering of deeply human drama anyway. No song displays that quite as profoundly as ‘Go Your Own Way’. It’s a song about as subtle as a policeman’s knock, and more piercing than tinfoil on a filling.
Buckingham’s rolicking effort is the heaviest cut on Rumours. His guitar work is slick and instantly recognisable, but it also carries more potent pantomime in its wake than an entire box set of Married at First Sight. So, if it’s drama that Fleetwood Mac do best, then maybe it is no surprise that data science crowns ‘Go Your Own Way’, their most openly dramatic song, as their finest too.
Henrik Franzon has crunched the data from critics from tens of thousands of sources, and his scientific study asserts that the Buckingham-penned song has never been beaten by the eternally cursed British band. In fact, the beauty of the song is that it almost sounds like the reckoning of that curse.
There’s a nastiness and spite that somehow lands quite sweetly on the era of the listener. As Stevie Nicks would later say when she was forced to sing her figurative slap, “It was certainly a message within a song. And not a very nice one at that.” It doesn’t take a listener with an Oxbridge education in English Literature to figure out that message either.
However, at least Nicks got her own back with the song that ranks as their second best effort, according to the data science. As she told Mojo, “‘Dreams’ and ‘Go Your Own Way are what I call the ‘twin songs’. They’re the same song written by two people about the same relationship.”
In a strange way, the twin songs are also musically the inverse of each other. ‘Dreams’ is daringly simple consisting of literally just a few notes, but its message contains complex multitudes. ‘Go Your Own Way’, on the other hand, has a uniquely choppy guitar style, but its message never strays beyond a brutal ‘fuck you’.
While the latter wins out for now, the two tracks are both timeless enough for all that to change if ‘Dreams’ keeps trending. Wouldn’t it just be like Fleetwood Mac to alter the results of science, the magical, mad bastards.
