DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Read it.

The New York Review of Books makes it to the second paragraph before descending into Social Justice Warrior territory:

The story of the Beach Boys is a kind of philosophical problem. Not that they didn’t make some albums still eminently worth hearing, if we go by the unit of the album: Pet Sounds, from 1966, is the prize pony, full of confident hits as well as deep-purple self-absorption (“God Only Knows,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Caroline, No”). For anyone justifiably wary of the whole idea of the pop masterpiece, Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!), from 1965, is a great uncool record—cornball, hard-sell with its lists of proper nouns and tour-stop shout-outs (“Amusement Parks U.S.A,” “Salt Lake City,” even “California Girls”), but getting grand-scaled in tone and mass. SMiLE, started in 1966 and not really finished till 2011, is the art-song project, a kind of underground labyrinth of melody, exhaustingly effective in its final form.

But time and social change have been rough on the Beach Boys. Their best-known hits (say, “California Girls,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” “I Get Around”) are poems of unenlightened straight-male privilege, white privilege, beach privilege. It is hard to imagine that they helped anyone toward self-determination or achieving their social rights. Brian Wilson’s great integrative achievement as a songwriter and producer was absorbed in bits and pieces by others—Paul McCartney especially—but it mostly worked for him alone. In their rhythm and humor the Beach Boys sound squarer all the time compared to Motown, the Beatles, and the Stones, and a lot of Phil Spector. Of course, it comes down to individual songs.

Unbelievable.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 26th, 2016 at 15:46 and is filed under Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.