Auditory Abominations: San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in your Hair) - Scott McKenzie

What? The 60's is far enough from the 1980s. Also, I needed to add another song to my 1960s category, so I figured I may as well.

Let's be fair here, the 1960s were one of the most important decades for music. Although I stand that the 70s is still the best decade, the 60s were when multiple genres really took off. We had early heavy metal with Steppenwolf and The Jimi Hendrix Experience, in fact many of the earliest heavy metal bands like Black Sabbath, Rush and Led Zeppelin formed in 1968. We had the Billboard charts in full effect this decade, listing the top 100 and still doing a poor job of doing so. The British invasion happened and the British were inspired by American up-tempo blues artists like Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, who were arguably the god fathers of rock and roll. Also on that note, many important landmarks of rock and roll history happened, Woodstock, The Summer of Love, Altamont, even the shifting political scene was important to music. This gave rise to the protest song, made popular by Bob Dylan.

Of course, the 1960s gave us so many staples of music that we still use today, one of those topics is making a song that reflects the times, and also have them not be as unbearable as a sawblade running through our ears. Before we got the classic about Woodstock, aptly titled "Woodstock". We got the song about The Summer of Love known as "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)". Which I'm going to get extremely tired of typing out, since there is also the title of this blog, any time I have to type it down for track records, yeah I put a lot of effort into these blogs, so from here on in I'm just going to refer to it as "San Francisco" or better yet "That song that makes San Francisco wish The Summer of Love was somewhere else." Okay, I'll be very honest, the one place I want to see more than any other place is the corner of Haight and Ashbury where The Summer of Love was held. So, I get it, I understand the appeal of this song at the time, but this is another victim of a song that has aged about as well as cheese with fly larvae living inside of it. It's an acquired taste to put it lightly, and apparently goes great with wine, and in this case, lots of it.

The opening instrumentals of this song are, fluffy, little actual substance and mostly just air. Which, you know, fine 1960s hippie track, summer of love I get it, but it's just so bland on top of that, even when things are genuinely fluffy and full of air, there is still something of flavour there. Anyone else feel like a mousse or something?

Song first! Anyway, the instrumentals are definitely better than the opening vocals, which just seem to drag on the first line in the song. You can emphasize certain things in your song, like "San Francisco" it's pretty much the subject of the song, but why do you have to emphasize the word "Going"? Yeah, people headed to San Francisco, but I think that most of the people headed to the Summer of Love, were already there when the song was made, even if not, it's still a weird word to put emphasis on, it's almost as if they didn't have enough lyrical content to fill out a three minute song. but that would just be ridiculous right? Even the following line drags, like seriously from the opening instrumentals and the first two lines of the song, we have already spent twenty-five seconds here, I mean, by this point in "Summer in the City" we not only got our first verse, but we were already two lines into the chorus, and that is two minutes, two and a half even. I get that this is a feel good song, but even then a feel good song shouldn't feel like it drags.

The song, as mentioned prior, is about the Summer of Love, so it goes on about all the nice things you can find there, like gentle people, and gentle people with flowers in their hair, and you will know that you will find a love-in, which is actually a term used to describe gatherings like The Summer of Love, so you know, points in that regard, but the lyrics are repetitive. The line "People in Motion" is said thrice, as is the phrase "Summertime will be a Love-in there", look, I'm not asking for much, I'm not asking for "BYOB" or "Octavarium", but I am at least asking for something that does not repeat the same damn line three times, and no those are not parts of the chorus, this song doesn't have one.

About the third stanza is when there is an actual shift in the sound of the song. It sounds different, and that's really it. Like, the guitar is gone and given to light tapping of drums, and even Scott himself sounds a little different, he isn't dragging the majority of the lyrics. This is, okay I guess.

Well, since I am on positives, Scott himself does a decent job singing. I mean, his voice doesn't sound too bad. He kind of reminds me of the guy from The Killers.

However, that doesn't save this awful song, which became one of the biggest selling singles in the world. The vocals drag the lyrics, the lyrics themselves are repetitious, the instrumentals are fluff, over all this song is one of the most pointless songs I've ever heard, and also one of the most dated in the worst ways possible.

I'm the Entity of Darkness, and have a good Easter, or at the very least, try to.

Ace Audio: "The Sound of Silence" - Simon and Garfunkel / Disturbed

A good song never ages, it may even get better over time. These are not just good songs, these kinds of songs are masterpieces. Typically, I don't talk about these songs on this blog, because everybody already knows that these songs are amazing and classics, but there is another reason I wish to talk about this particular song. When an amazing song gets covered, the cover runs the risk of being not only inferior, but also really bad, see my Auditory Abominations on both Pat Boone's "Smoke on the Water" and Richer Cheese's "Guerilla Radio" for more proof of that. At the same time, not only could the songs be good, but there are times when they could be better than the original, and I am not talking about songs that are mostly just good or meh, like "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails. I am talking about songs that are not only unrivaled, but also masterpieces in their own way such as "Bohemian Rhapsody", "More Than a Feeling" and of course "Stairway to Heaven", the songs that very few artists would ever try to cover, yet in 2015 a cover of this song appeared from a heavy metal band no less.

Disturbed not only did a good cover of the song, but they also did a version that was as good, and even debatably better than the original. Personally I like both versions equally, but both versions have their strengths. I'm going to compare both versions to talk about what each version does better over the other.

To begin, let's start with the vocals. There is no doubt that David Draiman has much deeper vocals than Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, but at the same time they had the voice that worked for the style that the original song was in. It was much softer and lighter, but David's voice works for the heavier cover. Really, the vocals match each song for what they are, the lighter vocals for the acoustic ballad, and the heavier vocals for the heavy metal cover.

Another thing to consider is indeed the instrumentals, as they too play a large roll in both songs. One starts with a nice acoustic guitar strum and the other begins with a heavy piano. The instrumentals in both set the moods for each song perfectly, one being slower, but at the same time it is much more somber and yet has a tone of optimism in it. "The Sound of Silence" is not a happy song at all, but it indeed carries a very pleasant tone with the instrumentals.

Now the cover on the other hand is a lot more somber and at the end, very uplifting. Both versions have this weird feeling by the end where they dispatch the melancholic tone from the beginning and adds a little bit more positive energy by the end, although both with different means. Simon and Garfunkel accomplish this by simply, but effectively raising their voices which, in the 1966 remaster at least, matches perfectly with the instrumentals and creates an interesting experience. The Disturbed cover does this the sae, but differently, as not only does David's voice raise, but towards the end he also starts belting, which gives the song it's own experience.

In the end, I guess it only matters which version of the song you enjoy, the melancholic but hopeful one, or the kind of depressing but strangely uplifting one.

Personally, I love both. Simon and Garfunkel not only made an amazing song, but they mad a masterpiece. However, Disturbed not only made an incredible version of the song, but they also made a masterpiece. It depends on what you yourself prefer, the folk tune or the metal tune.

I'm the Entity of Darkness, and gun to my head I would indeed choose the Disturbed cover, mostly because I like the sound more, but I can not deny that it is only by a very narrow margin.