Quote:

Harvesting clunkers that range from The Doors' The End to Aqua's Barbie Girl entailed more digging than expected.

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Whoa! The kind didn't like "The End"?!!!

PS: I agree that Simon and Garfunkle are, in a way, the worst of pseudo folk-rock, but they were damned good at it, and I do like their songs musically, but then I like a lot of pop songs that some people would say are vapid and lacking of true content. However, good song writing is still good song writing, and they are now part of our collective memory. I can't think of a better song for the Mike Nichols film, "The Graduate," which was a seminal work in the history of a changing American cinema in the 1960s...

Quote:

The entry most likely to peeve fans is Simon & Garfunkel's The Sounds of Silence.

"It's the freshman-poetry meaningfulness that got our goat," Marks says. "With self-important lyrics like, 'Hear my words that I might teach you,' it's almost a parody of pretentious '60s folk-rock.

"If Frasier Crane wrote a song, this would be it."

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Then, it occurred to me what was wrong with what he said, and it is the following...

If Frasier Crane wrote a Simon & Garfunkle song, it would NOT be the "The Sound of Silence," with its oblique references to larger societal issues and a person's place within that society during turbulent times -- he's not that political. Frasier Crane would have written, "The Dangling Conversation," an intimate, interpersonal, rumination, replete with literary name dropping, and a detailed picture of bourgeois domesticity. Think about it...

Whereas, it might be possible that Frasier would also pen, "Goodbye Frank Llyod Wright," I sincerely doubt it. No, if Frasier Crane were to write a Simon & Garfunkle song, it would be the following:

The Dangling Conversation
by Paul Simon
(c) 1966 Paul Simon (BMI)

It's a still life watercolor,
Of a now late afternoon,
As the sun shines through the curtained lace
And shadows wash the room.
And we sit and drink our coffee
Couched in our indifference,
Like shells upon the shore
You can hear the ocean roar
In the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs,
The borders of our lives.

And you read your Emily Dickinson,
And I my Robert Frost,
And we note our place with bookmarkers
That measure what we've lost.
Like a poem poorly written
We are verses out of rhythm,
Couplets out of rhyme,
In syncopated time
And the dangling conversation
And the superficial sighs,
Are the borders of our lives.

Yes, we speak of things that matter,
With words that must be said,
"Can analysis be worthwhile?"
"Is the theater really dead?"
And how the room is softly faded
And I only kiss your shadow,
I cannot feel your hand,
You're a stranger now unto me
Lost in the dangling conversation.
And the superficial sighs,
In the borders of our lives.

PS: This is the only song of the Simon & Garfunkle cannon which has ever really bothered me, and I think I'm beginning to figure out why. My thanks to the misguided music critic who put me on the trail of my discontent...