Cultural impact of the Beach Boys

Overview

The Beach Boys began as a garage band playing 1950s style rock and roll, reassembling styles of music such as surf to include vocal jazz harmony, which created their unique sound. In addition, they introduced their signature approach to common genres such as the pop ballad by applying harmonic or formal twists not native to rock and roll. Among the distinct elements of the Beach Boys' style were their voices' nasal quality and the use of falsetto in their harmonies over a run-on melody.

The group's surf music was not entirely of their own invention, being preceded by artists such as Dick Dale. However, previous surf musicians did not project a world view as the Beach Boys did. Their early hits helped raise the profile of the state of California, creating its first major regional style with national significance, and establishing a musical identity for Southern California, as opposed to Hollywood. This also associated the band with surfing, hot-rod racing, and a contemporaneous teenage lifestyle and fantasy. The California Sound gradually evolved to reflect a more musically ambitious and mature world view, becoming less to do with surfing and cars and more about social consciousness and political awareness. Between 1964 and 1969, it fueled innovation and transition, inspiring artists to tackle largely unmentioned themes such as sexual freedom, black pride, drugs, oppositional politics, other countercultural motifs, and war. Since the 1990s, there has been an increasing tendency to recontextualize the Beach Boys outside of their typical iconography, with author Kirk Curnutt citing such examples as the use of "Sloop John B" as Vietnam allegory in the film Forest Gump (1994) and "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" as an LSD-inspired underscore for one episode of the television drama Mad Men (2012).

The Beach Boys continued to display an increasing level of sophistication during the period where Brian Wilson consistently acted as the group's primary bandleader, songwriter, producer, and arranger for the group, culminating in their most commercially and critically successful work. As of 2005, they routinely appeared in the upper reaches of ranked lists such as "The Top 1000 Albums of All Time." Many of the group's songs and albums including The Beach Boys Today! (1965), Pet Sounds (1966), Smiley Smile (1967), Sunflower (1970), and Surf's Up (1971) are featured in several lists devoted to the greatest of all time. In 2004, Pet Sounds was preserved in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant." On Acclaimed Music, "Good Vibrations" is ranked the third best song of all time, while "God Only Knows" is ranked twenty-first; the group itself is ranked eleven in its 1000 most recommended artists of all time.

Critical assessment and rejection

Throughout their career, the Beach Boys struggled with their public image and audiences. Music critic Kenneth Partridge blamed the lack of "edginess" on the group's early records for why they're "rarely talked about in the same breath as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and when they are, it’s really only because of two albums". Musicologist Charlie Gillett explains, "By 1965, the Beach Boys had become an American pop institution, but although they continued to cultivate a visual image in line with their name and early repertoire, there was a limit to how many different ways Wilson could celebrate the wonders of living in Southern California … Originally, many serious pop fans dismissed the group as trashy pop for kids." As a result of their initial target demographic and subsequent failures to blend with the hippie movement, the group was viewed as unhip relics, even though they had once been, as biographer Peter Ames Carlin wrote, "the absolute center of the American rock ’n’ roll scene".

Their public image took a cataclysmic hit following their withdrawal from the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival for the reason that they had no new material to play while their forthcoming single and album lay in limbo. Biographer David Leaf explained: "Monterey was a gathering place for the 'far out' sounds of the 'new' rock, and the Beach Boys in concert really had no exotic sounds (excepting 'Good Vibrations') to display. The net result of all this internal and external turmoil was that the Beach Boys didn't go to Monterey, and it is thought that this non-appearance was what really turned the 'underground' tide against them." Author Steven Gaines expressed that their cancellation was seen as "a damning admission that they were washed up [and] unable to compete with the new music."

The growing complexity of the band's music caused their live performances to suffer in the mid 1960s, when the group began to be derided by audiences for their uniformed striped shirts compounded by low key reproductions of songs that required complicated orchestrations. Because of their early hits, which celebrated a politically unconscious youth culture, the group's legitimacy in rock music became an oft-repeated criticism toward the band. In 1970, the group ceased wearing matching uniforms on stage and began emphasizing political and social awareness. Drawing from their associations with Charles Manson and Ronald Reagan, Erik Davis observed, "The Beach Boys may be the only bridge between those deranged poles. There is a wider range of political and aesthetic sentiments in their records than in any other band in those heady times—like the state [of California], they expand and bloat and contradict themselves." Carlin summarized the group's various phases: "Once surfin' pin-ups, they remade themselves as avant-garde pop artists, then psychedelic oracles. After that they were down-home hippies, then retro-hip icons. Eventually they devolved into none of the above: a kind of perpetual-motion nostalgia machine."

Referring to the groups' reaction to the commercial success of their 1974 greatest hits compilation Endless Summer, Harrison writes, "they returned to the beach, knowing they would never leave it again." Erik Davis wrote that by 1990, "the Beach Boys are either dead, deranged, or dinosaurs; their records are Eurocentric, square, unsampled; they've made too much money to merit hip revisionism." From the same period, Jim Miller wrote, "They have become a figment of their own past, prisoners of their unflagging popularity—incongruous emblems of a sunny myth of eternal youth belied by much of their own best music. … The group is still largely identified with its hits from the early Sixties." Responding in 1982 to critics who disparaged the group for "not going beyond 'Good Vibrations'", Bruce Johnston said: "I think they love the band so much that they get crazy because we don't top ourselves. ... every time there's a new Beach Boy record it competes with so many old Beach Boy records on the radio. ... the audience is so young and they're reacting more to the Beach Boys sound-alike commercials on TV and the three or four really big, quadruple platinum repackage albums. I'm not down on any of that stuff, but ... growth in this business is tough."

Reappraisal

Professor of cultural studies James M. Curtis wrote in 1987,

We can say that the Beach Boys represent the outlook and values of white Protestant Anglo-Saxon teenagers in the early sixties. Having said that, we immediately realize that they must mean much more than this. Their stability, their staying power, and their ability to attract new fans prove as much.

Historian Darren R. Reid added in 2013, "Imagine, if you will, a world in which the Beatles were known only for their early hits whilst The White Album or Abbey Road were of interest, or even known, only to the group’s biggest fans, and you will have some grasp of how the Beach Boys’ distorted public image has helped to bury their most important artistic works." In 1967, Lou Reed famously wrote, "Will none of the powers that be realize what Brian Wilson did with the chords?" Pitchfork Media posited, "At some point, you learn that the Beach Boys weren't just a fun 1960s surf band with a run of singles that later came to be used in commercials; at their best, they were making capital-A Art. … Once you've absorbed [Pet Sounds], you find yourself going back through songs like "Don't Worry Baby", "The Warmth of the Sun", and "I Get Around", finding a deeper brilliance where you once heard only pop craftsmanship." Discussing the 2011 release of The Smile Sessions, The Los Angeles Times wrote, "certainly every library of American recording history needs this; university composition departments, music professors, budding recording engineers and composers should study it."

Online publication NewMusicBox—which normally covers new American music outside the commercial mainstream—argued that the Beach Boys could never earn themselves "the same pride of place in American music history held by other great innovators" because of their mistaken reputation as a "light-hearted party band that drooled over California Girls while on a Surfing Safari," hampered not only by the over-saturation of their early songs being used in film, commercials, and other media, but also "...their latter-day cover-band-version-of-their-former-selves concert appearances." Music theorist Daniel Harrison contests that the group produced work that could "almost" be considered art music in the Western classical tradition, and that group's innovations in the musical language of rock can be compared to those that introduced atonal and other nontraditional techniques into that classical tradition. He explains, "The spirit of experimentation is just as palpable in Smiley Smile as it is in, say, Schoenberg's op. 11 piano pieces." While the group "went into the great void beyond", such notions were not widely acknowledged by rock audiences nor by the classically minded at the time. Harrison concludes: "What influences could these innovations then have? The short answer is, not much. Smiley Smile, Wild Honey, Friends, and 20/20 sound like few other rock albums; they are sui generis. … It must be remembered that the commercial failure of the Beach Boys' experiments was hardly motivation for imitation. In the end, we must conclude that the Beach Boys' late-1960s experiments were not reproducible."

Recording, composition, and songcraft

Brian Wilson is widely considered one of the most innovative and significant songwriters of the late 20th century, and his work is credited as a major innovation in the field of music production. Through the Beach Boys, "[he] pretty much single-handedly raised the craft of pop songwriting from the awkwardly sub-lunar to the gracefully sublime," writes Jeff Miers of The Buffalo News. According to Erik Davis, "Not only did the Beach Boys write a soundtrack to the early '60s, but Brian let loose a delicate and joyful art pop unique in music history and presaged the mellowness so fundamental to '70s California pop." The A.V. Club wrote that Brian was among "studio rats ... [that] set the pace for how pop music could and should sound in the Flower Power era: at once starry-eyed and wistful."

As one of the first music producer auteurs, he (along with George Martin) popularized the idea of the recording studio as a compositional tool. Only 21-years-old when he received the freedom to produce his own records with total creative autonomy, Wilson ignited an explosion of like-minded California producers, supplanting New York as the center of popular records, and becoming the first rock producer to use the studio as a discrete instrument. The Beach Boys were thus one of the first rock groups to exert studio control. Brother Carl Wilson explained the significance of Brian's control over the group's productions: "Record companies were used to having absolute control over their artists. It was especially nervy, because Brian was a 21-year-old kid with just two albums. It was unheard of. But what could they say? Brian made good records. Music producers after the mid 1960s would draw on Wilson's influence, setting a precedent that allowed bands and artists to enter a recording studio and act as producers, either autonomously, or in conjunction with other like minds. In the late 1960s, Wilson also started a trend of "project" recording, where an artist records by himself instead of going into an established studio.

Professor of American history John Robert Greene stated that "God Only Knows" (co-written with Tony Asher) remade the ideal of the popular love song, while "Sloop John B" and "Pet Sounds" broke new ground and took rock music away from its casual lyrics and melodic structures into what was then uncharted territory. He furthermore called it one factor which spawned the majority of trends in post-1965 rock music, the only others being the Beatles' Rubber Soul (1965) and Revolver (1966), and the 1960s folk movement. "When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)" was one of the first rock songs to explore the subject of impending adulthood.

Album format

The dominance of the single as the primary medium of music sales changed with the release of several iconic concept albums in the 1960s, such as A Christmas Gift for You from Phil Spector (1963), the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (1966), the Mothers of Invention's Freak Out! (1966), and the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967). Music journalist Stephen Davis believed Pet Sounds to be the first rock concept album for its "trenchant cycle of love songs [that] has the emotional impact of a shatteringly evocative novel, and by God if this little record didn't change only the course of popular music, but the course of a few lives in the bargain." The New York Observer wrote that "Pet Sounds proved that a pop group could make an album-length piece comparable with the greatest long-form works of Bernstein, Copland, Ives, and Rodgers and Hammerstein."

Experimentation and pioneering

Ethnomusiclogist David Toop posited that the Beach Boys' effect on sound pioneering could be related with the pioneering of Les Baxter, Aphex Twin, Herbie Hancock, King Tubby, and My Bloody Valentine. In 1997, Sean O'Hagan of the High Llamas named Wilson "the most experimental pop pioneer of our time ... The same way Sun Ra was utilizing those ideas in the '60s, those guys [Wilson and collaborator Van Dyke Parks] were actually playing around with pop experimental music". Professor Bill Martin states that the Beach Boys opened a path in rock music "that went from Sgt. Pepper's to Close to the Edge and beyond". He argues that the advancing technology of multitrack recording and mixing boards were more influential to experimental rock than electronic instruments such as the synthesizer, allowing the Beatles and the Beach Boys to become the first crop of non-classically trained musicians to create extended and complex compositions.

Pet Sounds is recognized as an ambitious and sophisticated work that advanced the field of music production in addition to setting numerous precedents in its recording. Sound engineer Eugene Gearty called "God Only Knows" a perfect example of "how much [Brian] modulated from key to key. He was far more complex than the Beatles and mostly like [Igor] Stravinsky in orchestral music where the key changes and key centers change four or five times within a pop tune, which is unheard of." "Good Vibrations" is acknowledged to have further developed the use of recording studios as a musical instrument. When Pet Sounds was released to a four-month chart stay in the British Top 10, many British groups responded to the album by making more experimental use of recording studio techniques.

According to Domenic Priore, the making of "Good Vibrations" was unlike anything previous in the realms of classical, jazz, international, soundtrack, or any other kind of recording. Author Mark Brend summarized: "Other artists and producers, notably the Beatles and Phil Spector, had used varied instrumentation and multi-tracking to create complex studio productions before. And others, like Roy Orbison, had written complicated pop songs before. But 'Good Vibrations' eclipsed all that came before it, in both its complexity as a production and the liberties it took with conventional notions of how to structure a pop song." AllMusic's John Bush wrote that "Good Vibrations" "announced the coming era of pop experimentation with a rush of riff changes, echo-chamber effects, and intricate harmonies."

1960s

A 1966 article discussing new trends in rock music writes that the Beach Boys popularized a type of drum beat heard in "Surf City", which sounds like a "a locomotive getting up speed", in addition to the method of "suddenly stopping in between the chorus and verse". However, "the more obvious elements of the Beach Boys' style — the nasal quality of their singing voices, their use of a falsetto harmony over a driving, locomotive-like melody, and the sudden chiming in of the whole group on a key line — these characteristic elements were not absorbed into the [rock] genre." Cars were not central to a genre of music until the Beach Boys' success, releasing a string of early hit singles with a surf song on the A-side and a car song on the B-side. The single "409" (1962) is often credited with starting the hot rod music craze which lasted until 1965.

Starting in the 1960s, pop musicians and record producers like Phil Spector and Brian Wilson began placing the harpsichord in the foreground of their arrangements. Slate's Forrest Wickman credits Wilson and Martin as some of the men "most responsible" for the move into baroque pop. Among the orchestral arrangements appearing on Pet Sounds (1966), "God Only Knows" is considered "exquisite baroque pop" by The Sydney Morning Herald. Concerning the Beach Boys' involvement with sunshine pop, the orchestral style of Pet Sounds (1966) was imitated by many Los Angeles record producers in the 1960s, but as The A.V. Club notes: "Though [they] ... were hugely influential on the sunshine pop acts that followed, the Beach Boys' music was rarely in step with the genre."

When Pete Townshend coined power pop, he mentioned the Beach Boys' "Fun, Fun, Fun" as an archetypal example of the genre. Nancy Miler of Spin defined power pop: "that ringing, often melancholic, always melodic music inspired by the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and the Who." AllMusic defines power pop: "the sweet melodicism of the Beatles and the Beach Boys, with the ringing guitars of the Byrds thrown in for good measure."

Psychedelia and progressiveness

The Beach Boys are credited for helping to usher the psychedelic era. They, along with the Beatles, were the only acts to have high-charting psychedelic rock songs at the end of 1966. On "Good Vibrations", Popmatters stated: "Its influence on the ensuing psychedelic and progressive rock movements can’t be overstated, but its legacy as a pop hit is impressive as well." Their song "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" is credited for being the first in popular music to feature the Electro-Theremin (Tannerin) and the first in rock music to feature a theremin-like instrument. When the instrument was reused in "Good Vibrations" and released as a single several months later, it prompted an unexpected revival in theremins while increasing awareness of analog synthesizers, leading Moog Music to produce their own brand of ribbon-controlled instruments. Former Atlantic Records executive Phillip Rauls is quoted saying, "I was in the music business at the time, and my very first recognition of acid rock — we didn't call it progressive rock then — was, of all people, the Beach Boys and the song 'Good Vibrations'. ... That [song's theremin] sent so many musicians back to the studio to create this music on acid."

In the mid-1960s, British newspapers were referring to Pet Sounds as "the most progressive pop album ever". Writing about progressive rock, Bill Martin said: "Many groups and musicians played important roles in this development process, but none more than the Beach Boys and the Beatles ... [They] brought expansions in harmony, instrumentation (and therefore timbre), duration, rhythm, and the use of recording technology. Of these elements, the first and last were the most important in clearing a pathway toward the development of progressive rock." Pet Sounds inspired many progressive rock bands, and in 2010 was listed in Classic Rock's "50 Albums That Built Prog Rock".

1970s–1990s

In the 1970s, they were paid homage by punk rockers such as Ramones, Patti Smith, and Lester Bangs. Partly due to the Ramones, many acts that Stereogum called "punk or punk-adjacent" showed influence from the Beach Boys: Slickee Boys, Agent Orange, Bad Religion, Shonen Knife, the Queers, Hi-Standard, the Donnas, M.O.D.. and the Vandals. Writer Carl Wilson (no relation) wrote: "For the artier branches of post-punk, Wilson’s pained vulnerability, his uses of offbeat instruments and his intricate harmonies, not to mention the Smile saga itself, became a touchstone, from Pere Ubu and XTC to REM and the Pixies to U2 and My Bloody Valentine." Heavily reliant on 1970s analog synthesizers, the Beach Boys' album Love You (1977) has been recognized as an early work of synthpop. Adam Theisian wrote: "What’s especially amazing about Love You, though, is its prescience. It totally anticipates new wave experiments, arty bands like Talking Heads and synth-pop in general years before they hit the mainstream."

The group eventually bore a strong influence on indie rock, which Smile was a progenitor of. In the 1990s, the Beach Boys received a resurgence of popularity with alternative rock groups and young record-buyers of independent music. According to Sean O'Hagan of the High Llamas, "[they] stopped listening to indie records" in favor of the Beach Boys. Bands who advocated for the band included founding members of the Elephant 6 Collective: Neutral Milk Hotel, the Olivia Tremor Control, the Apples in Stereo, and of Montreal. United by a shared love of the Beach Boys' music, they named Pet Sounds Studio in honor of the group. Smile also became a touchstone to bands who were labelled "chamber pop", a genre influenced by the lush orchestrations of Brian Wilson, Lee Hazlewood, and Burt Bacharach.

Bootlegs

In 2003, Stylus Magazine named the Beach Boys' unreleased albums Smile, Landlocked, Adult Child, and Dennis Wilson's Bambu "A Lost Album Category Unto Themselves". In 2011, Smile was voted by Uncut as the number one "greatest bootleg recording of all time". Because of its amorphous nature, Smile inspired a community of fans who create, exchange and disseminate innumerable versions of the album. As visual artist Jeremy Glogan writes: "Smile and conceptual art both emerged from the same Era. Each signaled a radical from what had preceded in popular music and art respectively, and each heralded a shift away from 'the art object', whether LP record or formal art object, as a definitive self-referential statement. ... Smile was to dematerialize only to instantaneously rematerialize with new signification as bootleg, as MP3, as rumor and as myth." Van Dyke Parks has since attributed Smile to be a "pioneering event" for interactive record design.

Cover versions

Over the years, the group's songs have been the subject of many tribute albums, some of which are contributed by various artists from a wide range of backgrounds including Japanese noise, pop punk, rockabilly, and trip hop.