I read your article and one element I think you might be missing, is the impact that Pet Sounds had on music production.
A Love Supreme is great, but it is pretty simple from a production standpoint. A group of talented musicians playing great music together.
Pet Sounds, on the other hand, is IMO widely regarded as an innovative musical production masterpiece. So leaving the quality of the songs aside, I recommend re-listening (maybe on high-end headphones) to how each of the sounds has been placed and fit together. I think often when people describe the album as being ‘symphonic’ they are in some way referring to the fact that this is a piece of pop music that feels like it holds a similar breadth and sophistication as an orchestra in terms of the raw sound.
I don’t know that it will change the overall argument, but I thought you might be interested.
What about Like a Rolling Stone? This has a full wall of sound that has space for all the instruments, and that seems hard to achieve. It was recorded in 1965, a year before before Pet Sounds.
There is so much going on:
Dylan’s turn into electric sound and the issues with that
Its negative, scornful theme and ambiguity of its subject.
It clocked in at a impractically long 6 minute time.
These choices should have really hurt commercially, and looked pretty crazy at the time.
Now it’s like the canonical rock song of all time.
I thought more and now I think Jack Gillespie’s comment above is right, and my reply above is wrong.
Jack’s comment also answers Holden’s question about what Holden is overlooking about Pet Sounds.
I think the idea is that:
Brian Wilson, by creating Pet Sounds, was a builder. He innovated and created a new “technology” that others could build off of.
In contrast, Bob Dylan is a “harvester”—his innovations laid fewer foundations for others to work.
(I am writing the above as a Dylan fan and not liking the pop aesthetic of Pet Sounds.)
I’m not fully sure, but my guess is that we can’t see this because many of the new ideas in Pet sounds have become cliches (overproduced shopping mall music) or used by others.
More datapoints:
The composer, Philip Glass, who is pretty cerebral, says this about Pet Sounds:
Philip Glass referred to “its willingness to abandon formula in favor of structural innovation, the introduction of classical elements in the arrangements, [and] production concepts in terms of overall sound which were novel at the time”.
Also:
In August, the Beatles performed their last live show of their final tour, at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. And as 1966 neared its end, the group began work on “Strawberry Fields Forever,” a song written by Lennon that would guide the band’s musical direction in the coming year.
In 1967, when Brian Wilson first heard the song, he pulled over in his car, broke down in tears and said, ’They got there first.”
This sort of awareness suggests how Brian Wilson is a lot more than a tinkerer or just has good instincts with melody.
It’s inexplicable how Holden overlooks Brian Wilson’s contributions, especially since he sticks in a giant quote with links showing the influence of Pet Sounds:
Promoted there as “the most progressive pop album ever”, Pet Sounds garnered recognition for its ambitious production, sophisticated music, and emotional lyric content. It is considered to be among the most influential albums in music history …
Holden uses Coltrane’s musical content as a contrast:
Pet Sounds came out more than a year after legendary jazz album A Love Supreme! I don’t want to get carried away about what my subjective taste says, but … even if A Love Supreme isn’t your cup of tea, I’d guess you’ll think it’s a great deal more complex, cohesive, impressive, and interesting in just about every way (other than the lack of prominent “studio effects”) than Pet Sounds. And it’s not even clearly less accessible—looks like they sold a similar number of copies?3
So I’m probably going to get black balled from future funding, but I don’t understand jazz or Coltrane. My knowledge of jazz comes from La La Land:
But my guess for what is going on that Coltrane is different in style and has a more cerebral focus on musical content, so it’s unfair and prejudicial to use it as a lens to judge Brian Wilson’s contributions (in studio production, popular music and psychedelic music, etc).
The obvious answer to what frame of mind are you missing here is that you have to actually like the genre of music Pet Sounds is working in relation to.
Andyway, it’s worth noting that critical admiration for Pet Sounds only emerged about 20 years after it came out, so lots of the discussion of ‘at the time’ effects on critics doesn’t fit that directly.
Simply put, there isn’t any popular, jazz, or avant-garde music that was written and produced like Pet Sounds before Pet Sounds. It’s literally an unprecedented work of art.
It’s not just about the fact that it had an exorbitant budget, but the fact that it was composed and directed almost singlehandedly by Wilson. It’s the fact that Wilson found a way to be as successful and sophisticated to the degree that he was. He created commercial AM radio pop music with very complex forms and structures within an industry whose markets clamored for either simple three-chord rock ‘n’ roll, bubblegum, throwaway novelty songs, or schmaltz - an accomplishment that no one had thought possible back then.
Every track contains dozens of different musical parts played and sung by a full-sized virtual orchestra (virtual because many of the parts—mostly the vocals—were overdubbed). These tracks were designed to be as intricate as possible without forcing the listener to struggle with the bombardment of information they’re receiving. And it worked. Newly married couples around the world still choose God Only Knows as their wedding song—a song that was crafted so incredibly well that nobody notices that it has no key center until they try to learn to play it.
“But it’s doubtful that it used the recording studio better than today’s music does.” I don’t know, I guess this comes down to whether you prefer:
A) the kind of music that would be composed by one guy with strange ideas about music, recorded organically with analogue equipment and real singers and musicians, and then released as-is
B) the kind of music that is composed by algorithms, programmed in a DAW, recorded with autotuned singers, and then screened by test audiences to take out all the “weird” parts
“But it’s inevitable that pop music would have gone in more complex directions.” Another weird point. It’s also inevitable that man will develop civilizations on other planets. Is the “inevitability” supposed make it any less impressive to us?
Yet, 55 years later, there’s still no album that hits every checkmark that Pet Sounds does. So much for the inevitability. So much for progress.
I’ve heard albums with one or two tracks that sorta sound like Pet Sounds, but none of those attempts are structured as complex as songs like Here Today and Don’t Talk. The soundalikes use bass harmonicas and harpsichords, but they don’t really mess with time signatures, or feature six-part vocal arrangements, or use chord extensions like m7sus4/b5, or modulate keys several times in less than 2 minutes without sounding like free jazz. On the rare occasions that they do, then it’s only when they’re directly quoting/referencing a line from Pet Sounds.
Yes, there’s plenty of complex music out there with all those weird chords and key changes, but it’s not pop, it’s jazz, prog, heavy metal, and so on and so forth. It’s very difficult to be complex and stay pop. That is what makes Pet Sounds so amazing.
Miles Davis could not have written Pet Sounds, and Brian Wilson could not have written A Love Supreme. Why even compare the two? Different backgrounds, different genres, different types of musicians, different markets. So silly.
I’ve felt flummoxed for a while about Pet Sounds. I first tried listening to it in high school (after learning of its acclaim) and couldn’t make it through. When I listen to it now, over a decade later, I feel I can clearly hear and appreciate the “symphonic” quality of the songs, and the care and craft that went into the production, instrumentation, and compositions. It’s not difficult for me to believe that it was a major leap forward and I think it’s not too difficult to hear how influential it’s been. A song I love, “John Allyn Smith Sails” by Okkervil River is partly an adaptation of “Sloop John B”.
Moreover, when I listen to Pet Sounds with ‘audiophile brain’ the sounds, melodies, and harmonies all sound great. But I just don’t enjoy listening to the album. The vocals sound detached and clinical to me. For such an acclaimed and highly-ranked album, I feel it doesn’t have many raw emotional hooks.
Compare to others on the top of the lists Holden linked: Marvin Gaye, Nirvana, The Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Dylan. Their songs have some powerful emotional energy that Pet Sounds seems to lack—and will typically make you feel something, even if it’s not your cup of tea. To me, Pet Sounds sounds like the odd one out, so I still feel confused why it’s so high on these lists.
Also, I would definitely rank A Love Supreme much closer to the top.
The Velvet Underground & Nico might be a better comparison for Pet Sounds. I have some similar feelings about that album as for Pet Sounds—of course there are huge differences in the sophistication of the production, compositions, and sound quality—but I think some similarities in apathetic-sounding vocals (at least to me), influence on later artists, slow songs, light psychedelia. I doubt I’d put either in my top 30, but I do go out of my way to listen to TVU&N sometimes. It’s got some of that “raw” quality.
I had a similar reaction on my first listen to Pet Sounds. I think the impact it had on production means that you need to have not heard any music after it to fully hear its importance.
It sounds like a solid pop album to my ears. God only knows sounds beautiful to me but not other-worldly. But I’m assuming it would have blown my mind (as it did the Beatles) had I not heard the last 50 years of music.
Other than A Love Supreme, what albums have you found really impactful? Could you write 500-1000 words off the top of your head on why one of those albums is a work of genius? Have you ever taken over a conversation at a party (without really intending to) to explain how good some piece of music is and how everyone should go home and listen to it right away?
I am really really not trying to call you a philistine, there is nothing wrong with not having super strong feelings about music. But my guess is that most music critics (professional or armchair) would answer yes to both. If you don’t answer yes to these questions, maybe you’re not responding to music the way that other people do. (Which, again, is okay.)
Personally, fine art (painting, sculpture) does almost nothing for me. I couldn’t offer any authentic opinion at all on whether Jackson Pollack was a more important artist than Georgia O’Keefe. So I have to assume that the people who do care about that question are perceiving something that I’m not.
For what it’s worth I consider Pet Sounds to be sublimely beautiful, but I have no idea how I’d explain what exactly is so beautful about it in a way that would convince anyone else.
To some extent I think a comparison between Pet Sounds and A Love Supreme is apples and qumquats.
But still...I suspect that someone who is capable of listening to and understanding A Love Supreme, whether or not they like it, is also capable to listening to and understanding Pet Sounds, whether or not they like it. But I don’t think the converse is necessarily true. That is, having the ability to listen to and understand Pet Sounds does not imply that one can also understand A Love Supreme or, for that matter, a Beethoven piano sonata.
i wondered whilst reading through this if framing / comparing your take on a “complex” album (like A Love Supreme) is useful if we don’t actually dive into why you think that is more complex and layered than an album like Pet Sounds. would it be useful to contextualise A Love Supreme within Coltrane’s works as well and across the jazz landscape of the time? would a jazz purist consider Coltrane’s album, which is arguably in the popular music arena (as much as a jazz album can be), to be less complex than other contemporaries that someone with a more intense affinity for jazz might pick out (making assumptions here about your love/knowledge of jazz, but also thinking of the people i know that can only reference A Love Supreme or Kind of Blue when talking about great jazz). and do we all suffer from comparing pop rock music to pop jazz music and giving overwhelming weight to jazz just because of its supposed higher end status (which leads me back to the Beethoven writings and the way people perceive older classical music vs new music, etc.). these were all the questions that popped in my head when reading and would love to find some deep dives into these things.
I’d love to hear your take after doing a similar listen-through of Radiohead’s discography up through Kid A. They dominated the top 5 of Pitchfork’s reader poll of the best albums of all time, and that judgement feels much more representative to me of what a contemporary rock fan might choose than Pet Sounds.
I personally like Radiohead a lot, but I don’t feel like my subjective opinions are generally important here; with Pet Sounds I tried to focus on what seemed like an unusually clear-cut case (not that the album has nothing interesting going on, but that it’s an odd choice for #1 of all time, especially in light of coming out a year after A Love Supreme).
Placeholder for comments on Beach Boys post
I read your article and one element I think you might be missing, is the impact that Pet Sounds had on music production.
A Love Supreme is great, but it is pretty simple from a production standpoint. A group of talented musicians playing great music together.
Pet Sounds, on the other hand, is IMO widely regarded as an innovative musical production masterpiece. So leaving the quality of the songs aside, I recommend re-listening (maybe on high-end headphones) to how each of the sounds has been placed and fit together. I think often when people describe the album as being ‘symphonic’ they are in some way referring to the fact that this is a piece of pop music that feels like it holds a similar breadth and sophistication as an orchestra in terms of the raw sound.
I don’t know that it will change the overall argument, but I thought you might be interested.
I don’t really get it.
Pet sounds seems like cute radio perfect hits.
What about Like a Rolling Stone? This has a full wall of sound that has space for all the instruments, and that seems hard to achieve. It was recorded in 1965, a year before before Pet Sounds.
There is so much going on:
Dylan’s turn into electric sound and the issues with that
Its negative, scornful theme and ambiguity of its subject.
It clocked in at a impractically long 6 minute time.
These choices should have really hurt commercially, and looked pretty crazy at the time.
Now it’s like the canonical rock song of all time.
I thought more and now I think Jack Gillespie’s comment above is right, and my reply above is wrong.
Jack’s comment also answers Holden’s question about what Holden is overlooking about Pet Sounds.
I think the idea is that:
Brian Wilson, by creating Pet Sounds, was a builder. He innovated and created a new “technology” that others could build off of.
In contrast, Bob Dylan is a “harvester”—his innovations laid fewer foundations for others to work.
(I am writing the above as a Dylan fan and not liking the pop aesthetic of Pet Sounds.)
I’m not fully sure, but my guess is that we can’t see this because many of the new ideas in Pet sounds have become cliches (overproduced shopping mall music) or used by others.
More datapoints:
The composer, Philip Glass, who is pretty cerebral, says this about Pet Sounds:
Also:
This sort of awareness suggests how Brian Wilson is a lot more than a tinkerer or just has good instincts with melody.
It’s inexplicable how Holden overlooks Brian Wilson’s contributions, especially since he sticks in a giant quote with links showing the influence of Pet Sounds:
Holden uses Coltrane’s musical content as a contrast:
So I’m probably going to get black balled from future funding, but I don’t understand jazz or Coltrane. My knowledge of jazz comes from La La Land:
But my guess for what is going on that Coltrane is different in style and has a more cerebral focus on musical content, so it’s unfair and prejudicial to use it as a lens to judge Brian Wilson’s contributions (in studio production, popular music and psychedelic music, etc).
The obvious answer to what frame of mind are you missing here is that you have to actually like the genre of music Pet Sounds is working in relation to.
Andyway, it’s worth noting that critical admiration for Pet Sounds only emerged about 20 years after it came out, so lots of the discussion of ‘at the time’ effects on critics doesn’t fit that directly.
Simply put, there isn’t any popular, jazz, or avant-garde music that was written and produced like Pet Sounds before Pet Sounds. It’s literally an unprecedented work of art.
It’s not just about the fact that it had an exorbitant budget, but the fact that it was composed and directed almost singlehandedly by Wilson. It’s the fact that Wilson found a way to be as successful and sophisticated to the degree that he was. He created commercial AM radio pop music with very complex forms and structures within an industry whose markets clamored for either simple three-chord rock ‘n’ roll, bubblegum, throwaway novelty songs, or schmaltz - an accomplishment that no one had thought possible back then.
Every track contains dozens of different musical parts played and sung by a full-sized virtual orchestra (virtual because many of the parts—mostly the vocals—were overdubbed). These tracks were designed to be as intricate as possible without forcing the listener to struggle with the bombardment of information they’re receiving. And it worked. Newly married couples around the world still choose God Only Knows as their wedding song—a song that was crafted so incredibly well that nobody notices that it has no key center until they try to learn to play it.
“But it’s doubtful that it used the recording studio better than today’s music does.” I don’t know, I guess this comes down to whether you prefer:
A) the kind of music that would be composed by one guy with strange ideas about music, recorded organically with analogue equipment and real singers and musicians, and then released as-is
B) the kind of music that is composed by algorithms, programmed in a DAW, recorded with autotuned singers, and then screened by test audiences to take out all the “weird” parts
“But it’s inevitable that pop music would have gone in more complex directions.” Another weird point. It’s also inevitable that man will develop civilizations on other planets. Is the “inevitability” supposed make it any less impressive to us?
Yet, 55 years later, there’s still no album that hits every checkmark that Pet Sounds does. So much for the inevitability. So much for progress.
I’ve heard albums with one or two tracks that sorta sound like Pet Sounds, but none of those attempts are structured as complex as songs like Here Today and Don’t Talk. The soundalikes use bass harmonicas and harpsichords, but they don’t really mess with time signatures, or feature six-part vocal arrangements, or use chord extensions like m7sus4/b5, or modulate keys several times in less than 2 minutes without sounding like free jazz. On the rare occasions that they do, then it’s only when they’re directly quoting/referencing a line from Pet Sounds.
Yes, there’s plenty of complex music out there with all those weird chords and key changes, but it’s not pop, it’s jazz, prog, heavy metal, and so on and so forth. It’s very difficult to be complex and stay pop. That is what makes Pet Sounds so amazing.
Miles Davis could not have written Pet Sounds, and Brian Wilson could not have written A Love Supreme. Why even compare the two? Different backgrounds, different genres, different types of musicians, different markets. So silly.
I’ve felt flummoxed for a while about Pet Sounds. I first tried listening to it in high school (after learning of its acclaim) and couldn’t make it through. When I listen to it now, over a decade later, I feel I can clearly hear and appreciate the “symphonic” quality of the songs, and the care and craft that went into the production, instrumentation, and compositions. It’s not difficult for me to believe that it was a major leap forward and I think it’s not too difficult to hear how influential it’s been. A song I love, “John Allyn Smith Sails” by Okkervil River is partly an adaptation of “Sloop John B”.
Moreover, when I listen to Pet Sounds with ‘audiophile brain’ the sounds, melodies, and harmonies all sound great. But I just don’t enjoy listening to the album. The vocals sound detached and clinical to me. For such an acclaimed and highly-ranked album, I feel it doesn’t have many raw emotional hooks.
Compare to others on the top of the lists Holden linked: Marvin Gaye, Nirvana, The Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Dylan. Their songs have some powerful emotional energy that Pet Sounds seems to lack—and will typically make you feel something, even if it’s not your cup of tea. To me, Pet Sounds sounds like the odd one out, so I still feel confused why it’s so high on these lists.
Also, I would definitely rank A Love Supreme much closer to the top.
The Velvet Underground & Nico might be a better comparison for Pet Sounds. I have some similar feelings about that album as for Pet Sounds—of course there are huge differences in the sophistication of the production, compositions, and sound quality—but I think some similarities in apathetic-sounding vocals (at least to me), influence on later artists, slow songs, light psychedelia. I doubt I’d put either in my top 30, but I do go out of my way to listen to TVU&N sometimes. It’s got some of that “raw” quality.
I had a similar reaction on my first listen to Pet Sounds. I think the impact it had on production means that you need to have not heard any music after it to fully hear its importance.
It sounds like a solid pop album to my ears. God only knows sounds beautiful to me but not other-worldly. But I’m assuming it would have blown my mind (as it did the Beatles) had I not heard the last 50 years of music.
Other than A Love Supreme, what albums have you found really impactful? Could you write 500-1000 words off the top of your head on why one of those albums is a work of genius? Have you ever taken over a conversation at a party (without really intending to) to explain how good some piece of music is and how everyone should go home and listen to it right away?
I am really really not trying to call you a philistine, there is nothing wrong with not having super strong feelings about music. But my guess is that most music critics (professional or armchair) would answer yes to both. If you don’t answer yes to these questions, maybe you’re not responding to music the way that other people do. (Which, again, is okay.)
Personally, fine art (painting, sculpture) does almost nothing for me. I couldn’t offer any authentic opinion at all on whether Jackson Pollack was a more important artist than Georgia O’Keefe. So I have to assume that the people who do care about that question are perceiving something that I’m not.
For what it’s worth I consider Pet Sounds to be sublimely beautiful, but I have no idea how I’d explain what exactly is so beautful about it in a way that would convince anyone else.
To some extent I think a comparison between Pet Sounds and A Love Supreme is apples and qumquats.
But still...I suspect that someone who is capable of listening to and understanding A Love Supreme, whether or not they like it, is also capable to listening to and understanding Pet Sounds, whether or not they like it. But I don’t think the converse is necessarily true. That is, having the ability to listen to and understand Pet Sounds does not imply that one can also understand A Love Supreme or, for that matter, a Beethoven piano sonata.
i wondered whilst reading through this if framing / comparing your take on a “complex” album (like A Love Supreme) is useful if we don’t actually dive into why you think that is more complex and layered than an album like Pet Sounds. would it be useful to contextualise A Love Supreme within Coltrane’s works as well and across the jazz landscape of the time? would a jazz purist consider Coltrane’s album, which is arguably in the popular music arena (as much as a jazz album can be), to be less complex than other contemporaries that someone with a more intense affinity for jazz might pick out (making assumptions here about your love/knowledge of jazz, but also thinking of the people i know that can only reference A Love Supreme or Kind of Blue when talking about great jazz). and do we all suffer from comparing pop rock music to pop jazz music and giving overwhelming weight to jazz just because of its supposed higher end status (which leads me back to the Beethoven writings and the way people perceive older classical music vs new music, etc.). these were all the questions that popped in my head when reading and would love to find some deep dives into these things.
I’d love to hear your take after doing a similar listen-through of Radiohead’s discography up through Kid A. They dominated the top 5 of Pitchfork’s reader poll of the best albums of all time, and that judgement feels much more representative to me of what a contemporary rock fan might choose than Pet Sounds.
I personally like Radiohead a lot, but I don’t feel like my subjective opinions are generally important here; with Pet Sounds I tried to focus on what seemed like an unusually clear-cut case (not that the album has nothing interesting going on, but that it’s an odd choice for #1 of all time, especially in light of coming out a year after A Love Supreme).