A Day in the Life & Good Vibrations

Here, try this: Imagine you’ve never heard The Beatles’ “A Day in the Life” and The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” before. Which is more likely to blow your mind?

I posed this question to a friend over email the other day, and he suggested that such a match-up would be a decent premise for a blog. So, here we are.

The idea is song pairings. Songs with a kinship. Songs that are getting at the same thing, or share the same sense of “bigness,” or that otherwise have an intangible connection… songs that you would file closely together in your mental bookshelf.

I should mention that I have absolutely no interest in trying to pin down which song is “best.” I’m trying to think of it like this: when a museum hangs a Gaugin next to a Van Gogh, it’s not to prod you into picking a winner. Rather, it can simply be a way of drawing out the unique properties of each, and, ideally, enhance your appreciation of both. (Disclaimer: I don’t know much about music beyond the fact that I really like it. So, I’m not making any pretenses at educating people here… it’s just a blog. Let’s all calm down.) Also, to completely contradict what I just wrote, I might include a voting feature just for kicks… and just to see if anyone’s actually looking at this.

So! First up: “A Day in the Life” and “Good Vibrations.” The Beatles/Beach Boys history and rivalry are well known. To me, what I see in these songs are the bands at their most ambitious… these songs seem to contain multiple songs within them. Let’s have a listen, shall we?

Returning to the original question (Which is more likely to blow your mind if you hadn't heard it before?) I have no idea. "A Day in the Life" comes off as a bit more complicated, a bit more grown up. The complete shift in singer/narrator/perspective has that jarring quality that it has when an author pulls off a similar feat in a short story. "Good Vibrations," however, to me feels a bit more musically accomplished... more "of a piece." It can be hard to give it adequate credit if you grew up, as I did, hearing this song lumped in with the more simplistic, be-true-to-your-school Beach Boys. Indeed, it seems like everyone's musical education includes that moment when you figure out that, wait, The Beach Boys are actually pretty fucking amazing.

So... what are we thinking? Talk to me, people.