Selling Out: What Happened to Folk?

a success elsewhere. Simon and Garfunkel also contributed to the birth of folk-rock: "Sound of Silence", which was originally an acoustic-guitar-only folk song on the Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. album, was "re-engineered" without the artists' consent, which means that a drum background and electric guitar were added. This version of the song isn't necessarily bad; it's probably actually the only one you know. The crime didn't lie in what happened to that song, but in what happened to Simon and Garfunkel. Whereas Wednesday Morning was a complex yet simple piece of folk art, with elegant finger-picked guitar being the only complement to the poetic lyrics, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme ('66) had completely succumbed to the call of electricity of studio manipulation. The words are still beautiful, and the music is still complex, but it seems to be lacking the inspiration of their debut album. It seems as if they realized that this was the new direction music was going to take, so they needed to change their style in order to succeed. This is the true crime; their motivation was no longer musicality, but profit. The music is just as good, maybe even better; all the "Best of" albums either have songs that date from after '66 (which is also when the "Sounds of Silence" album was released) or the electrified versions of earlier songs. But still, it wasn't the same. No longer could you find a "He Was My Brother" or "Bleeker Street" on any of their albums. The worst example of this (in my opinion) is "Somewhere They Can't Find Me", on the Parsley album, which is nothing more than a horrible mutilation of "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M." on the album of the same name (listen to them both for yourself to understand).

Folk-rock was a good thing. It led to a greater amount of people understanding the world they lived in and a huge amount of artists becoming more than just simple beat-makers. Certainly it helped San Francisco's economy prosper. But at the same time, it was a sell out. The music had become too important, and gradually, the words began to lose their purpose. At the beginning, I mentioned that this was ironic. Well, the irony lies in the fact that while Folk was selling itself out, Rock music, the king of sell outs, was doing exactly the opposite. As I have discussed previously, the Beatles and

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