It's probably time to start taking the Beach Boys seriously. I'm not saying this to the music world en masse, since they already know it, and I'm not saying it to you, because who knows if you, like me, dismissed them as California prep boys first, and then sappy wimps second (and maybe aging Full House boomers third). I'm just saying it to myself. I knew who the Beach Boys were since birth because they are ubiquitous; I knew since 2004 that they created one of the most highly-rated albums of all time in Pet Sounds, and that album was not like "I Get Around" and "Surfin' U.S.A." and all that shit. But I couldn't get past the idea that they'd ever sound anything but lame, ya know?
I should probably be clear here: I think Pet Sounds is overrated. That's probably the fault of the body of music criticism writ large more than anything (i.e. "There's no way Pet Sounds is the second best album of all time!! It's just pretty good at best!!"). It's okay for what it is. But I never liked it enough to, like, go deeper down the rabbit hole here.
As it turns out, the hole goes pretty deep. Back to the beginning of this blog post: the music world takes the Beach Boys seriously, and that's mostly because they seem to have a wide and deep influence on a lot of disparate genres of music (versus being the end all, be all of surf music, basically). For example: in following up with Pet Sounds, the Beach Boys went smaller—much smaller—with their next couple albums, including Wild Honey, and pretty much invented lo-fi bedroom pop. It sounded slight to critics at the time, because it is, but no one thought to consider that maybe that might not be to its detriment? (Seeing now is easier with 54 years of hindsight, of course).
(There is also an argument that a later Beach Boys record, The Beach Boys Love You, invented the genre of punk rock, but I haven't gotten around to that one yet—but would obviously like to soon.)
I'd love to be genre-blind, but the extreme gap in sound in between Pet Sounds and Wild Honey is so fucking interesting to me, and that's because of genre. Also interesting is when you consider the fact that some of this album, on top of being lo-fi bedroom pop, is also straight-up soul music. This is especially interesting when you place it beside Otis Redding from last week—at the same time Redding was influenced by the Beach Boys' peers in creating his later music. the Beach Boys were getting into records from Redding's peers, and letting that seep through.
So you have a Stevie Wonder cover next to something like "I'd Love Just Once to See You," through which you can draw a line right on through to 1990s Of Montreal (especially seeing as the conclusion of the song extends the title to "...in the nude"). Or move that line slightly north and you get to Shy Boys, who clearly, clearly were influenced by Wild Honey.
But more importantly than the influences and the influenced, we have this particularly point in time, this wonderfully little nugget of music (it's less than a half hour long). Now that 30% of indie rock on Bandcamp sounds exactly like this album, it's probably time that we all get on board with the Beach Boys praise. What else did they do?
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