I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times: Pet Sounds, 50 Years Later

by Claire Haldeman

The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds is one of the greatest rock albums ever released, but that is news to no one. Listening to Pet Sounds is like wandering through a green glass cathedral. It enthralls us with the depth and majesty of its sound, delights us with the whimsy of bicycle bells and Coke can percussion. Everything from the album’s structure down to single beats and sub-beats, was designed with precision and intention. This is rock music as art, as something to be listened to, not just danced to—a divergence from the Beach Boys’ earlier discography. Pet Sounds is a technical masterwork, the magnum opus of Brian Wilson, the band’s creative powerhouse. Wilson succeeded in crafting what he described as “chapel rock,” an almost religious musical experience. Fifty years since its original release in 1966, the many virtues of Pet Sounds have been well documented. Through critical and cultural consensus, it has been burnished to untouchability. It revolutionized instrumentation, rhythm, and musicality in rock music, and is a cornerstone in the cannons of experimental and psychedelic rock.

But in these fifty years, music production and consumption has evolved considerably.  We’ve migrated from Victrolas and 45s to bottomless streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal. This broadens access to music while making it a more individualized experience; the image has more pixels, and is brighter and richer because of it. There is more room in today’s music industry to produce outside the socially dominant narratives than there was in the 1960s. Keeping that in mind, we can still recognize that Pet Sounds is an album by and for the socially dominant.

The voice of the album is one that today we know as the prototypical sad boy, average in everything except his capacity for consumptive love. Divorced from the transcendence of the music, the album’s values and ideas do not raise the intellectual bar or challenge the social scape. To be sure, Wilson is not the sole cause of this unchallenging material. He plies the themes of lost innocence, thwarted love, and vibrato longing straight from his target demographic: the white men of an over-sated inter-generation. Pet Sounds is mainstream, even as it breaks new ground.

Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing. As it was, Pet Sounds faced critical and popular reproach that the Beach Boys had rarely experienced in the American market, because the sound was so novel. Though support for the album has burgeoned and buoyed it to acclaim over the past five decades, this rising tide may have been undermined had Wilson not maintained familiar thematic content.

This is not to say that the lyrics are not beautiful—they are. It is also not to say that they do not cohere to the musicality and technical brilliance of the album—they do. The album is remarkable for its consistency and its wholeness. But it is precisely that which makes it so interesting. It is a hallmark from a time when the privilege and significance of the narratives that music held were not questioned or explored. Sad white boys were on top, so it was sad white boys that were fed to the masses.

So fifty years later, amidst these shifting musical sands, this explosion of diversity in voices and massive broadening of access to music, where are we? In a more democratic age, certainly. In an age when music is viewed through a more critical thematic lens. But the summer of 2016 was still, in the words of MTV’s Anne Donohue, “a summer of sad boy pop”. Justin Bieber, Drake, and Charlie Puth were just some of the guilty parties, their music thick with pining and lamentation, with women featured as primarily as objects. Mainstream music has been a home to the uncritical male ego for lo, this past half-century.

So, in 2016, we can listen to Pet Sounds and revel in its expansive musical and technical quality, its growth and influence, its beauty. But we can also think critically about the album as an exercise in privilege and responsibility. Wilson had the talent and insight to change the terms of engagement with his medium, but he used the popularity and social capital that the Beach Boys had built up to catapult the experiment that was Pet Sounds. He inspired a new genre and generation, but he could only do it because he had a voice the world would listen to.