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Post by boogieboarder on Sept 25, 2021 9:35:25 GMT -5
Do you think that the Beach Boys' masterpiece Pet Sounds deserved some kind of soft-ball comparison like Beach Boys Party? No way. Let's find out once and for all if Dennis Wilson was telling the truth when he said about Smile "In my opinion it makes Pet Sounds stink - that's how good it is."
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Post by Rick Bartlett on Sept 25, 2021 12:19:21 GMT -5
Oooh! Now that was just plain 'Nasty' to pick. I'm disgusted with myself, and either way I think, I deserve a 'lashing' either way....
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Post by filledeplage on Sept 26, 2021 10:31:55 GMT -5
Lining up those tracks, in that way, no question for me.
Pet Sounds. Each of those tracks has legs. Strong and independent. In the way that Rubber Soul tracks have their own legs to stand on independently.
With Smile - you have to put the legs together, to stand in unison.
As much a sort of thematic masterpiece, Surf’s Up, is almost a different genre and impossible to compare. Surf’s Up narrates an epic. Pet Sounds is an anthology of sweet, short stories.
It is like loving your kids. You love them in different ways for different reasons, but none-more-than-the-other. Who’s your favorite? An impossible question. Endless love for each.
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Post by boogieboarder on Sept 26, 2021 11:50:53 GMT -5
It is like loving your kids. You love them in different ways for different reasons, but none-more-than-the-other. Who’s your favorite? An impossible question. Endless love for each. Yes, of course. But who never got hit with the “Why can’t you be like your older brother?” once in a while by frustrated parents? An insult one never forgets. |
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Post by filledeplage on Sept 26, 2021 12:47:47 GMT -5
It is like loving your kids. You love them in different ways for different reasons, but none-more-than-the-other. Who’s your favorite? An impossible question. Endless love for each. Yes, of course. But who never got hit with the “Why can’t you be like your older brother?” once in a while by frustrated parents? An insult one never forgets. That is just a foolish parent reflex coming out of frustration - you are correct about the place it comes from. That just has to blow over. I happened to be looking up at a Rubber Soul LP at the time. Those two albums are apples and oranges. Great works and coming from different places for different reasons. 45s were still king in 1965 / 1966. By 1967 (and I mean Smiley) there was a falling off of that dynamic in favor of the LP and fm radio leaning in that non-commercial direction, only to complicate the comparison. |
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Post by boogieboarder on Sept 26, 2021 14:09:01 GMT -5
Yes, of course. But who never got hit with the “Why can’t you be like your older brother?” once in a while by frustrated parents? An insult one never forgets. That is just a foolish parent reflex coming out of frustration - you are correct about the place it comes from. That just has to blow over. I happened to be looking up at a Rubber Soul LP at the time. Those two albums are apples and oranges. Great works and coming from different places for different reasons. 45s were still king in 1965 / 1966. By 1967 (and I mean Smiley) there was a falling off of that dynamic in favor of the LP and fm radio leaning in that non-commercial direction, only to complicate the comparison. Like The Beatles did after Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, The Beach Boys backed off from their complicated productions and started producing simpler records again - even much too simple for my taste - with Smiley Smile and Wild Honey - the next two albums to be compared. There really isn't any good reason to compare their albums anyway, it's all supposed to be for fun. As for comparing children, I am still smarting from being seriously and unfairly compared to the boy who lived across the street (58 years ago) by my mom. |
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Post by filledeplage on Sept 26, 2021 14:25:58 GMT -5
That is just a foolish parent reflex coming out of frustration - you are correct about the place it comes from. That just has to blow over. I happened to be looking up at a Rubber Soul LP at the time. Those two albums are apples and oranges. Great works and coming from different places for different reasons. 45s were still king in 1965 / 1966. By 1967 (and I mean Smiley) there was a falling off of that dynamic in favor of the LP and fm radio leaning in that non-commercial direction, only to complicate the comparison. Like The Beatles did after Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, The Beach Boys backed off from their complicated productions and started producing simpler records again - even much too simple for my taste - with Smiley Smile and Wild Honey - the next two albums to be compared. There really isn't any good reason to compare their albums anyway, it's all supposed to be for fun. As for comparing children, I am still smarting from being seriously and unfairly compared to the boy who lived across the street (58 years ago) by my mom. People do compare work - albums are like butterflies- all different. People sort of got on overload with some of that work. So intense. I think that is partly why the repacks after the war was over sold so well. Well, you are still smarter than the boy across the street because you are a BB fan. 🎶🎈 |
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Post by boogieboarder on Sept 26, 2021 15:45:53 GMT -5
Like The Beatles did after Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, The Beach Boys backed off from their complicated productions and started producing simpler records again - even much too simple for my taste - with Smiley Smile and Wild Honey - the next two albums to be compared. There really isn't any good reason to compare their albums anyway, it's all supposed to be for fun. As for comparing children, I am still smarting from being seriously and unfairly compared to the boy who lived across the street (58 years ago) by my mom. ... Well, you are still smarter than the boy across the street because you are a BB fan. 🎶🎈 Yes, we all are!  |
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Post by jds on Sept 26, 2021 16:33:17 GMT -5
I'm tempted to say Pet Sounds wins by default because it actually exists an album, whereas Smile was a projected album project that seems to have gone through several conceptual stages and "featured" about two-and-a-half individualized albums' worth of music in various states of completion. This isn't a snarky rejoinder as much as a commentary or the difficulty of comparing the defined object with the non-defined, especially when you're doing a track-by-track deal. (Wind Chimes '66 or '67? Are we back to considering Love to Say Dada as a Smile track? Wasn't Look finally cannibalized for a Good Vibrations section? etc.)
I'll say Pet Sounds is married to some fairly traditional/rote mid-century romantic aesthetics whereas Smile at its best (Wind Chimes '67) has the thrilling feel of a creator finally achieving escape velocity outside of that sort of paradigm. On the other hand, Pet Sounds lyrics have an easy and honest facility within the normalized subject matter whereas Smile's takes on what sometimes seems to be a naïve intellectualized ideal of "mature" or "sophisticated" subjects (was anyone wondering what the Beach Boys thought of the plight of Native Americans? or the transcontinental railroad?) sometimes come off as labored and ornamental. Pet Sounds is also comfortable with presenting its songs as organically continuous art objects, and the few Smile tracks that seem to have reached a master stage rely on the self-conscious application of the modular organizational method to separately composed and recorded sections, lending a "start-stop" quality to the finished tracks whose discontinuity is balanced by a sort of kinetic panoramic dynamism. The difficulty then comes in use what we know of the few finished-or-near-finished tracks to pass judgment on tracks whose "structure" is based on educated guesswork but were anything but finalized when abandoned, a difficulty exacerbated by the composer's tendency to revisit tracks after months-long intervals and record new sections, if not completely rework what had already been recorded.
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Post by boogieboarder on Sept 26, 2021 17:47:45 GMT -5
I'm tempted to say Pet Sounds wins by default because it actually exists an album, whereas Smile was a projected album project that seems to have gone through several conceptual stages and "featured" about two-and-a-half individualized albums' worth of music in various states of completion. This isn't a snarky rejoinder as much as a commentary or the difficulty of comparing the defined object with the non-defined, especially when you're doing a track-by-track deal. (Wind Chimes '66 or '67? Are we back to considering Love to Say Dada as a Smile track? Wasn't Look finally cannibalized for a Good Vibrations section? etc.) I'll say Pet Sounds is married to some fairly traditional/rote mid-century romantic aesthetics whereas Smile at its best (Wind Chimes '67) has the thrilling feel of a creator finally achieving escape velocity outside of that sort of paradigm. On the other hand, Pet Sounds lyrics have an easy and honest facility within the normalized subject matter whereas Smile's takes on what sometimes seems to be a naïve intellectualized ideal of "mature" or "sophisticated" subjects (was anyone wondering what the Beach Boys thought of the plight of Native Americans? or the transcontinental railroad?) sometimes come off as labored and ornamental. Pet Sounds is also comfortable with presenting its songs as organically continuous art objects, and the few Smile tracks that seem to have reached a master stage rely on the self-conscious application of the modular organizational method to separately composed and recorded sections, lending a "start-stop" quality to the finished tracks whose discontinuity is balanced by a sort of kinetic panoramic dynamism. The difficulty then comes in use what we know of the few finished-or-near-finished tracks to pass judgment on tracks whose "structure" is based on educated guesswork but were anything but finalized when abandoned, a difficulty exacerbated by the composer's tendency to revisit tracks after months-long intervals and record new sections, if not completely rework what had already been recorded. My comparison list was between the songs on Pet Sounds and the songs on the actual Smile CD released by Capitol Records in 2011, with the songs listed in the order they appeared on the CD (but link tracks removed.) How and when Capitol chose the takes, edited them, and sequenced the tracks was entirely up to them, so any bias I might have had would be eliminated. (And it’s just for fun anyway.) |
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Post by jk on Sept 27, 2021 4:06:16 GMT -5
Sorry, bb, but I can’t choose between these. One is a complete and indivisible album and the other is, well, SMiLE.
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Post by boogieboarder on Sept 27, 2021 9:25:46 GMT -5
Sorry, bb, but I can’t choose between these. One is a complete and indivisible album and the other is, well, SMiLE. You’re not supposed to choose between the albums, you’re supposed to choose between pairs of songs. They are individual songs, banded separately on LPs, downloadable as individual songs, streamable as individual songs, copyrighted as individual songs, etc. But if you can’t separate them in your mind as such, I understand. |
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Post by jds on Sept 27, 2021 9:43:13 GMT -5
Sorry, bb, but I can’t choose between these. One is a complete and indivisible album and the other is, well, SMiLE. You’re not supposed to choose between the albums, you’re supposed to choose between pairs of songs. They are individual songs, banded separately on LPs, downloadable as individual songs, streamable as individual songs, copyrighted as individual songs, etc. But if you can’t separate them in your mind as such, I understand. In that case, literally shakeing that "Don't Talk" is getting its lunch eaten. Maybe the best backing track of Brian's career. |
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Post by dauber on Sept 27, 2021 9:57:26 GMT -5
Not really fair comparing finished to unfinished.
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Post by boogieboarder on Sept 27, 2021 12:55:58 GMT -5
You’re not supposed to choose between the albums, you’re supposed to choose between pairs of songs. They are individual songs, banded separately on LPs, downloadable as individual songs, streamable as individual songs, copyrighted as individual songs, etc. But if you can’t separate them in your mind as such, I understand. In that case, literally shakeing that "Don't Talk" is getting its lunch eaten. Maybe the best backing track of Brian's career. It’s actually close between the two songs, within two votes as I write this. And “Cabinessence” has a great backing track too, good enough to have been released stand-alone on disk 5 of the Good Vibrations: 30 Years of The Beach Boys box set. Brian is such a genius, after all! |
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Post by boogieboarder on Apr 15, 2022 12:51:05 GMT -5
The final vote was close, with Pet Sounds coming out ahead of Smile. Seven to Five with one tie. Smile might have done better if it had been completed in 1967.
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