These albums might have have been ground-breaking at the time but over time through overplay and being churned out on the likes of "Smooth Radio" etc they lose potency. As always, context is key and you have to think about the time and place that these albums were made.
If you listen to music before an album like "Pet Sounds" and music after it, it's striking. It helped to create the idea that an album isn't just 12 singles put together, they should tell a story and it is one of the first concept albums. The vocals, musicianship and production on it is sublime. To create that sound and harmonies - regardless of era - is something else.
Whilst Good Vibrations isn't on the album, I'd say that it easily ranks as one of the finest pop songs ever written and one of the most important pieces of music of the 20th Century - regardless of genre. It literally is one of the first songs that could only be created in a studio. It is one of the songs that signposts music away from the 'simple' pop songs of the 50s and 60s and points musicians to a level of complexity that was previously unheard.
Good Vibrations and Pet Sounds were also hugely influential and it pushed The Beatles to go and make Sgt Pepper which is arguably the most influential rock album made. Without Pet Sounds, pop/rock music wouldn't be the same - it's as simple as that. I'd also add that, quite simply, just 2 or 3 years earlier it wasn't something you could imagine - it literally was groundbreaking.
That said, 60 years later it sounds dated maybe (I love it) but like any artwork, without the context you hear it as a collection of songs and tunes. Without question, it's a hugely important album though. Imagine hearing it for the first time in the mid-60s.
I hear what you are saying and I get it, but I get the argument you are countering too.
It demonstrates or reminds me why I have kind of shied away from a lot of the music threads I used to frequent.
There is nothing I’d like better than to bore you all with my taste in music but there’s the rub. Music is totally subjective.
It doesn’t matter how recognised any piece or any artist is as genius. If you like it, it’s great. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter what popular opinion is. It just doesn’t float your boat.
For me a true classic is something I come back to over and over and it never grows old. Still stirs your soul. Not only in a nostalgic way.
Pet Sounds is from 1966 and so was Good Vibrations.
Groundbreaking? Yes, I get it. But to me it was still a surf music band. I being a teen in the 70’swould be listening to it retrospectively as I would have listened to Axis Bold as Love and Are you Experienced by Hendrix which came out only 1 and 2 years after Pet Sounds.
Basically Hendrix was starting to record in the latter part of that decade and I always recall that line in 3rd Stone from the Sun where I subjectively take it as a dig at the Beach Boys pop, when he says something like,
‘ with your superior Catholic hand, your people I do not understand, and so to you I will put an end…. And then you’ll never hear surf music again’…
That’s from memory, so I hope that’s accurate.
Whatever about the objective argument of what this means, I subjectively find this music from basically the same time in a totally different realm. A different stratosphere to The Beach Boys.
I did when I first heard them and I still do now.
Good Vibrations is a good tune and by and large lasts the tests of time but I’d take a Hendrix tune over it any day.
And as full albums go, subjectively Pet Sounds for all the nostalgia in history, doesn’t have anything like Spanish Castle Magic
Bold As Love
If 6 was 9
Castles Made of Sand
Little Wing ……….
to name a few.
I remember The Beach Boys on the radio as a kid. They were safe.
I had to discover Hendrix.
To this day it is much more what I regard as classic music even though objectively it could be argued it has dated too.
