I was 16 years old when I listened to an album that changed my relationship with music forever. There wasn’t anything particularly special about how I got there – I had just looked up Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of all time. At #1 was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, which I was already familiar with from my middle school art teacher, who would switch between that and Lupe Fiasco’s Food & Liquor while we were in class. Shout out to middle school art teachers. At #2 on the list was 1966’s Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys.
My knowledge of The Beach Boys up until that point was just the song “Fun, Fun, Fun,” which meant that I thought they were unbelievably corny. But this was something different altogether. Pet Sounds is melancholic uncertainty of the highest order. Compared to his earlier material, “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” sounds like a suicide note. The instrumentation was unlike any music I had listened to before. I was in high school during the peak of the blog era. I was exclusively listening to J. Cole, Wale, & Drake at this point. And then here was Brian Wilson opening up pianos to pluck individual strings with a fucking hairpin to get the sounds he wanted. Sonically, I was a fish out of water. I couldn’t get enough.
I was already a big music fan at this point but what made this experience different was that I became obsessed with learning how this strange sounding music was made. I researched online and listened to hours of studio sessions. It was insane to me that an entire orchestra’s worth of music was just percolating in one person’s mind like this. The Beatles famously stopped touring in 1966, which is when they put 100% of their energy into pushing the boundaries of their sound in the studio. Brian Wilson had done the same two years earlier and the decision essentially served as a limitless pill for his creativity. Here was a 23-year old kid who was deaf in one ear and conducting The Wrecking Crew - one of the greatest groups of session musicians of all time, as if he was teaching a kid to walk. On his own, he took on all 4 Beatles in a musical arms race during the mid 60’s (Rubber Soul → Pet Sounds → Sgt. Pepper’s → Smile).
Once I had exhausted all of my time on Pet Sounds, I downloaded a 200 song Box Set off BitTorrent and listened to it all summer. It was a perfect mosaic that encapsulated the Brian Wilson story, from his early days writing about surfing and cars, to his ascendance to indisputable genius, and finally his decline to the eccentric recluse afflicted by a whirlwind of drug use and mental illness. I inherited his beef with Mike Love the same way Pusha T crucifies anyone who’s ever even looked at Pharrell the wrong way. I came out of my Beach Boys phase ready to see what other shit was out there from the past waiting for me and never looked back. The Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, & Aretha Franklin came soon after. I went from someone who believed anything pre-Michael Jackson wasn’t worth a listen, to almost exclusively listening to music from the 60’s and 70’s for years.
If I never came across Brian Wilson, I imagine I would still have eventually found myself diving through the history of American music through some other avenue. It doesn’t matter, because this was my avenue. For some reason this Ethiopian kid living in Section 8 housing in Seattle spent an entire year listening to The Beach Boys. The internet is fucking crazy. There’s a clear throughline between that day listening to Pet Sounds for the first time and me writing this blog today. For that I’ll forever be thankful. Rest in peace.
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