When David Bowie died in January 2016, much of the British media – which, by that point, was largely run by those who had grown up in his pop-cultural shadow – sank into that specific sort of mourning only fans are capable of: deeply felt, self-reflexive, nostalgic for what a stranger had brought into their lives. This included the New Statesman, where I was a staffer at the time. After the news broke, our focus in the office pivoted abruptly from whatever internal Labour Party matter was on the editorial planner (probably anti-Corbyn resignations) to Bowie’s music, his persona, his influence not only on pop and rock but on the worldviews of generations. He became our cover story.
It’s hard to imagine the death of someone like the Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson, who passed away this week, receiving similar treatment outside the music press, even though he was once by far a bigger star than Bowie. That’s understandable, in a way. The Beach Boys, a phenomenon in their long-ago prime, have for years been maligned with a reputation for being the antithesis of cool. They were America’s biggest-selling and perhaps most acclaimed rock’n’roll group of the early-to-mid-1960s, whose chamber-pop masterpiece Pet Sounds still lurks near the top of countless “greatest albums of all time” lists. (It has been at second place on Rolling Stone’s for decades.) Yet, by the early 1970s, they were largely dismissed as burn-outs, eclipsed by more overtly introspective singer-songwriters, harder-edged bands such as The Doors and awesome hit-makers from the fast-evolving soul and disco scenes.
If they prematurely turned into old news, a hangover from the past, it was perhaps because they had once helped to define an era, and that era was over. In effervescent songs such as 1963’s “Surfer Girl” and “Little Deuce Coupe”, they had not only reflected Californian preoccupations with surfing and cars but had also turned them into symbols of a very American fantasy of postwar freedom. Even their more personal pieces, such as 1965’s “Please Let Me Wonder”, with its chorus that so perfectly captures the hopeful uncertainty of young love, had sold the decadence of an increasingly wealthy, ascendant America that could offer its people the precious luxury of introspection. The fraught, more paranoid decade that followed, which in the US probably began in earnest with the Watergate scandal in 1972, brought a new cynicism that made the innocent promises made by these teenage symphonies feel all of a sudden hollow, at least to many.
The US mainstream eventually re-embraced the Beach Boys and, under co-founder Mike Love’s stewardship, the group came to embody a kind of proto-normcore conformism. They never quite reclaimed coolness. In 1983, Ronald Reagan’s then interior secretary, James Watt, nixed the band’s Independence Day gig at the National Mall in Washington, DC, citing fears that rock music would attract “the wrong element”. George HW Bush, who was vice-president at the time, personally intervened and forced Watt to apologise. The Beach Boys were friends, after all. In 2020, a later incarnation of the group accepted a booking to play at a hunting group event at which Donald Trump Jr was a scheduled speaker. Lame.
None of this, of course, was Brian Wilson’s doing. The genius behind the Beach Boys, who wrote, produced and orchestrated the band’s most enduring records, had stepped back from his role as band leader as his mental health deteriorated, while working on what was intended to be Pet Sounds’ follow-up, Smile. The increasingly strung-out Wilson abandoned that project in 1967, and his time at the top, competing with the likes of Paul McCartney, effectively came to an end. But his talent remained. In his more lucid moments, it would emerge in songs such as the haunting 1971 Beach Boys track “’Til I Die” and albums including his weird-and-wonderful 1995 Van Dyke Parks collaboration Orange Crate Art. Best of all was 1977’s The Beach Boys Love You, a surprisingly lo-fi synth-pop record featuring songs about the solar system and “honkin’ down the gosh-darn highway”. In its own style, it’s an equal of Pet Sounds or Smile, which itself was finally completed in 2004 as a solo album.
Wilson’s sad, well-documented struggles following his mental collapse had the effect of insulating him from Love’s tarnishing of the Beach Boys brand, and critics have admitted the best of his work into the US rock canon. But his music is all too often afforded a different kind of appreciation to what Bowie’s, say, or Bob Dylan’s work enjoys. Where those singer-songwriters are considered heroes of their own creative destinies, Wilson has long been spoken of by many as a sort of victim of his own wild imagination, talent and mind – a savant, rather than a true master. In the studio as a young man, though, he was “in charge of it all”, as the session player Carol Kaye once recalled. And I don’t think he ever lost that capacity to expertly make us feel and fantasise, and let us wonder. Like the most accomplished of his peers, he shaped our worldviews, in his case crafting a vision of a more playful, gentler America that should and could still exist. In these pretty dark times, surely there’s not much cooler than that.
[See also: Addison Rae and the art of AgitPop]
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