Comment by gabriel666smith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gabriel666smith | Hacker News Reader

gabriel666smith

This is hard to take. Unquestionably, to me, Brian Wilson was the greatest composer of pop music we've ever had.

Even Wilson's most recent work - when he was very clearly suffering a lot - is so deeply interesting, and weird, and moving, and has a total mastery of his craft.

From 2021 - "Right Where I Belong":

'''

I get anxious. I get scared a lot. That's what I live with. It should get better, really, any day now - - those were my teenage years.

They said: "Go out and get a steady job." That was the worst idea! All night and day, another lonely song - - to get me through again.

In my fantasy I'm never far from home. But in reality I know where I belong.

For me, the love - that's what the music really is. I know that love is what I rеally want to share.

So I went out and got a steady a job - - so many golden years. That rhapsody to me: the music calls - - to ride the wave again.

https://youtu.be/FToNl9VyI0g?si=VEIOlTCsbYz2yy7g

'''

He was America. The idealism, the bizarro suburban sincerity, the descent into late-century darkness, the total mastery of the form: the ability to write a two-minute song as if it were a perfectly manicured lawn, capturing all its layered uncanniness. Melodies and harmonies that have beauty beyond language - he really did write for the entire universe. It didn't matter if his songs were to girls, or waves, or particularly quick cars.

He was a prophet of his time in the same way that William Blake was. It all feels so incredibly inevitable. I really hope he understood that he was as important as Bacharach and maybe Bach - though I don't get the sense, as much as one can from the outside, as a fan, that he'd particularly care. He had too much love for his work.

Surf's up, I guess. Thank you very much for it all, Brian, if you're reading this. Your work makes me believe that you could.

> He was America. The idealism, the bizarro suburban sincerity, the descent into late-century darkness, the total mastery of the form

I often thought that Brian Wilson and David Lynch were like mirror images of each other and now they're both gone

David Lynch died??

Yes, in January

Wow, you're going to be having a doubly-rough day. I'll raise a cold one to you.

not a cold one.

for those two, you should celebrate with a cup of coffee from a diner and a coca-cola from the drive-in

Now that I can get behind.

A pack of Metropolitan cigarettes...

> not a cold one.

Why not a nice cold Heineken?

Heineken?! HEINEKEN?!

Pabst. Blue. Ribbon.

oh on you didn't. fuck that shit!!

I typed "Lynchian" then deleted it - it's overused, but, for Brian Wilson (and Lynch - a compliment to them both) I think, in hindsight, it's appropriate, just about.

Tough for me as well. I'm at an age where I can expect a lot of my icons to head out. And already so many have.

There is something I think undeniably innocent about the time in the U.S. when The Beach Boys were on top of their game. Never mind Milner from American Graffiti "I don't like that surfin' shit. Rock and roll's been going down hill ever since Buddy Holly died."

They were a part of an America I don't even recognize anymore. Thank god those of us old enough got at least a glimpse of that time. And I suppose to the degree Brian captured it in The Beach Boys music, maybe we can hold on to the memory of it at least.

And I think that's what's toughest. I'm seeing the luminaries of a better time winking out one by one.

Lest I sound too down, I am always hopeful though for the generations that are coming up being able to make a brighter future for themselves.

I wasn't there - I won't politically nitpick about the innocence of the period - and to do so would also be wildly inappropriate to the very sad topic.

But positively, and optimistically, I do think things are passed on, even if we don't quite understand how.

From Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

'''

"I saw [Buddy Holly] only but once, and that was a few days before he was gone. I had to travel a hundred miles to get to see him play, and I wasn’t disappointed.

"He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away. He was mesmerizing.

I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about him. He looked older than twenty-two.

Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction.

Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something.

Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.

I think it was a day or two after that that his plane went down."

'''

Though Dylan loves to self-mythologize, if I'm going to believe anybody alive about how a baton, or muse, or torch, or access to transcendent beauty might be passed on, I'd choose to believe him. Especially given the context in which he implied this unusually (for him) sincere thing: "take this and run with it."

Even reduced to something as material and measurable as 'influence', I think that's worth a great deal of optimism. We won't get another Brian Wilson. That's very, very sad. But his work remains - even if his time doesn't. Bob was of another time to Buddy. There will always be young people.

Wild story.

Yeah, it's easy to shoot holes in "innocent time" but god knows, just in terms of the complexity of what you have to know just to function in society — I am sure it is somehow measurably more complex now then it was then.

So maybe I should have said a simpler time.

I completely understand what you mean - and that there's certainly a psychological weight to the complexity we've added to interpersonal interaction over the last half-century. Spending extended time in cash-focused, relatively low-tech environments (the more rural parts of southern Europe, for example), the difference in psychological load is extremely noticeable. I feel a sort of basic non-comprehension in the US and UK that I don't feel in some other places.

For example - something as simple as going to a grocery shop during the specific hours in which you know it is open, and saying hello to the person you know works that shift, and exchanging metal circles and numbered paper for produce: this process requires significantly less abstract thought - and abstraction of oneself from society - when compared to using a self-checkout and Apple Pay (let alone a delivery app).

That tech all came in before I was 18, so I don't think it's an age thing - I think it's just weird, and complex, and unnatural for the animal brain if one's economic and social dealings don't primarily involve other animals. I don't like living in a vending machine!

I didn't want to shoot holes in any way, to be clear. Innocence is a very reasonable synonym, now that I understand what you mean (without sounding too luddite / romanticising).

What does “the bizarro suburban sincerity” mean?

Apologies, late seeing this. I was attempting to describe the lack of cynicism in Brian Wilson’s work regarding the beauty of the tropes of mid-century American suburbia that, when taken to its extreme, felt like it made the work land, to me, often somewhere between the hyperreal and surreal. In this sense, it feels somehow beyond sincerity - an inversion of it, or an inversion of an inversion.

I used ‘bizarro’ to point towards both the surreal inverted-ness, but also to reference the Superman character, to try and link that part of the sentence to 1950’s USA, and Wilson’s childhood.

To me (it’s a subjective experience, of course) there are compositional aspects that create this feeling. In the early hits, for example, there’s an astounding lack of low-frequency sounds (bass guitar, kick drum mixed low, etc). It’s very much mixed for tinny radio - partly a product of the time, but also very much due to his arrangements. As if to say: ‘no darkness here’.

And equally (though I don’t think Brian was writing lyrics, but an arrangement of the sounds they create is enough for me) lyrically, even the early stuff is batshit weird:

“When some loud braggart tries to put me down, and says his school is great, I tell him right away: What’s the matter buddy? Ain’t you heard of my school?”

“A bushy bushy blonde hairdo”

Etc. I think the early work goes beyond ‘Americana’ into something weirder, but non-cynical. Very fever dream technicolor, and I think anticipates a lot of the work ‘darker’ Americana artists, like Lynch, who another commenter referenced, would later do.

Another commenter mentioned that Wilson’s father was, by many accounts, incredibly, incredibly cruel, and I think that’s perhaps not irrelevant to the uncanniness of Wilson’s work. Maybe there was a conscious choice to write only about the beautiful parts of his milieu, but that’s impossible to know.

A song like “In My Room” is terrifyingly beautiful / uncannily sincere in its optimism, given what we know about Wilson’s childhood. A lot of people, especially artists later in the century would, I think, find its hopefulness bizarre. And very moving.

That’s a very long version of what I was trying to say, or point towards - the usual cliches about the impossibility of writing about music apply!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com