The Ataris - San Dimas High School Football Rules (acoustic)The Ataris - Boys of Summer"San Dimas High School Football Rules" is a fine fine fine example of a guitar-based song written by a dude who was in the midst of fine-grained anguish over a woman in the late 90s to early 00s. I first heard this song in the loft of a woman who used to slip handwritten copies of Hafez poems into my books and desk drawers. I don't love the Ataris, but I have pretty good memories of listening to this song. It sounds very homemade, very discreet in a way, as though it were only intended to be played for a few friends who had been invited over for cards. A little diversion in the front room.The Ataris cover of "Boys of Summer," on the other hand, is a monstrosity. The original "Boys of Summer" has got to be one of the most disgusting songs ever conceived by a human. Whenever I accidentally hear this song, I feel like my pupils dilate and I enter a weird fugue fomented and structured by the song and its lyrics, and I imagine being trapped in an unairconditioned Chrysler Laser, being driven down an endless beach-side street, and all I can see out the window are people dancing to this song in vaguely sexual ways that aren't really sexual or even amusing, but more like calibrated to be the dancing analogue or translation of the words 'horny' and 'frisky,' or the choreographic representation of things like "Why Cucumbers Are Better Than Men" or Big Johnson t-shirts. The scents of sunscreen, body odor, and old seafood mix gently in the air. Not an exaggeration: this song makes me think of my own death every time I hear it, in a way that's not like a positive memento mori or anything, but more like I'm afraid of my own death because I suspect that, if there is an afterlife, I will be subjected for all time to the despair produced by this song (so more like a medieval memento mori). The Ataris' version is objectionable because a) it exists, and b) there's a weird note of youthful hopefulness woven into the song by the singer's voice, which makes it more effectively obliterating. I don't know...but, yeah, fuck this song.[Buy some Ataris songs]