Good Vibrations devotes much-needed academic attention to the Beach Boys and their myriad contributions to music and cultural history. The collection tackles the band from the perspectives of music theory, musicology, literature and media studies, encompassing over 50 years of musical output. Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of the collection is the authors’ collective effort to look past the narrative of Brian Wilson as tortured genius, a too-common and problematic one whose effect is to focus on what Wilson didn't do – namely, follow up Pet Sounds with his creative masterpiece Smile – thus minimising the impact of his enormously influential career up to that point. Right away, Kirk Curnutt's opening essay calls out critics for reading Wilson's lyrics too narrowly through the tortured-genius trope, and the two concluding chapters on Smile discuss that project's reverberations through various cultural spheres rather than the circumstances surrounding its creation. In between, readers are treated to six in-depth accounts of Wilson's and the Beach Boys’ music, from their recording techniques to their chord progressions, from their early-1960s surfer hits to Wilson's recent album tracks, and from their teen-pop roots to their countercultural minglings.
Lambert has assembled an impressive lineup of scholars from various fields and countries to create what is sure to be a milestone in Beach Boys literature. (The remarkable diversity in background is unfortunately not matched by diversity in gender; eight of the nine essays are written by men.) Lambert organises the book in three parts – respectively titled ‘Musical Commentaries’, ‘Historical Inquiries’ and ‘Smile’ – although the essays do not divide so neatly. The bookending chapters – Curnutt's mentioned above plus Larry Starr's ‘A Listener's Smile’ – pair well as reminders that historical narratives are often disconnected from lived experience. Starr tells the story of the Smile material as he – and, presumably, a large contingent of American listeners – experienced it: not as an unreleased masterpiece derailed by Wilson's inner demons but as unidentified snippets of lukewarmly received Beach Boys releases in their post-Pet Sounds period. His essay reminds us that, for much of the listening public, the Beach Boys simply hit their creative peak in 1966 and declined from there (with the occasional resurgence, such as 1971's Surf's Up). Wherever our current understanding of Smile places it in the popular music canon, Starr reminds us that ‘history cannot be undone, of course’ (p. 259).
Starr also highlights Smile’s problematic ontology, a subject tackled with impressive detail in Andrew Flory's contribution. Flory chronicles the life of the Smile material from 1966 to the present, not through its fragmentary public dissemination, but in the underground trading markets of Beach Boys fan clubs. With the original recordings abandoned before release, bootleg material circulated through these communities in the decades leading up to the two ‘official’ album releases – 2004's Brian Wilson Presents Smile (entirely rerecorded) and 2011's Smile Sessions (from the original tapes). So what is this thing called Smile? The official releases do not seem to settle things: Flory suggests that ‘bootlegs might be the most authentic manner in which to experience Smile’ (p. 235). Ultimately, ‘we need to consider Smile as a set of possibilities whose variable final form may be influenced by events, temporality, and individuation’ (p. 225).
If the three essays mentioned above look outward from Beach Boys material, a complementary trio look inward, analysing elements of the recorded text. Daniel Harrison's essay – one of the collection's gems – investigates the Beach Boys’ use of ‘non-musical’ sounds and the resultant expressive effects. Harrison's essay reminds us that recorded music presents special challenges and opportunities for analysis in comparison with our printed score-based traditions. Philip Lambert's essay on ‘Brian Wilson's Harmonic Language’ borrows both the analytical approach and rhetorical style of Walter Everett's The Foundations of Rock (Reference Everett2009), cataloguing Wilson's chord progressions in relation to his stylistic peers and influences. For the most part, Lambert's essay confirms that Wilson's progressions are a slightly jazzier version of typical popular music progressions of his era; only occasionally does Lambert identify something as specifically Wilsonian. The third analytical contribution comes from Jadey O'Regan, who looks at the Beach Boys’ stylistic development from their early days through 1966's Pet Sounds. O'Regan, channelling John Covach (Reference Covach, Womack and Davis2006), divides this period into three phases – an ‘apprentice’ phase (1962–63), a ‘craftsmen’ phase (1963–64) and an ‘artist’ phase (1965–66) – and traces the evolution of the Beach Boys’ formal and lyrical structures through each.
The remaining essays look at cultural influences on Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. Keir Keightley's masterful essay ‘Summer of ’64’ argues that, despite canonisation as a preeminent rock composer, Brian Wilson's initial success was propped up by the early-60s culture of teen pop. Teen pop, a reflection of middle-class white American lifestyle, seemed antithetical to the rock ideal of countercultural uprising. Through Wilson and the Beach Boys, Keightley deconstructs the rock/pop binary, acknowledging both its falseness and its sociological importance. Dale Carter picks up where Keightley leaves off, chronicling Brian Wilson's engagement with various late-1960s underground scenes. Carter paints Wilson as someone who brought rock sensibility to pop music, here as a result of mixing with artists and icons in LA's countercultural communities.
On the whole, the collection is an invaluable resource for serious Beach Boys fans, scholars interested in critical studies of the band or really anyone hoping to learn more about one of America's most important rock groups. Most essays hit the rare sweet spot of broad accessibility without sacrificing academic rigour. Less clear is the extent to which this collection will resonate in the wider sphere of popular music studies. For some essays, broader significance is easy to see – for instance, Harrison provides a model for hermeneutic studies of recorded music, and Keightley makes a significant addition to discussions of genre. Others gesture toward wider issues but limit their engagement with popular music scholarship – for instance, Curnutt's distinction among Brian Wilson the individual, Wilson's star image and the various song personas he inhabits as singer and/or lyricist makes no mention of Simon Frith's work on voice in popular song (Reference Frith1996, Chapter 9), nor the many discussions on the topic since then (especially Moore Reference Moore2012). O'Regan's discussion of formal structures makes some odd analytical claims (e.g. that AABA was a nostalgic form in the 1960s (p. 142), or that ‘Help Me Rhonda’ contains a prechorus (p. 144)), which would have benefited from an engagement with the literature on rock form beyond Covach's articles (Covach Reference Covach and Stein2005, Reference Covach, Womack and Davis2006; and see de Clerq Reference de Clercq2012; Nobile Reference Nobile2011; Summach Reference Summach2011). However, for the most part, the essays are content to contribute to the Beach Boys discussion, a discussion in which academics too infrequently engage. By bringing these nine excellent essays together, Lambert's collection positions itself as the standard-bearer for critical study of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. As such, it is a vital contribution to the popular music literature.
