Why did God make the radio? The answer, obviously, is so that we could cruise along a coastal road with the windows down and the blue sea in the distance, listening to the sweet harmonies of The Beach Boys singing the music of Brian Wilson.
Which is exactly what I did the day after he died (though it wasn’t strictly a radio). I even shed tears – and I’m the man who didn’t weep for his own mother! Insofar as you can love someone you only know through his work, I loved that guy.
So he wasn’t always very nice in his personal life? I don’t care. So his politics were conservative? I don’t give even a tiny fraction of a shit. This was a very wounded man who had a rotten, abusive childhood and who, instead of making the bitter, angry, miserable music one might expect from someone with that history, chose instead to express the love and mercy that every child from a rotten family longs for.
You might say that I’m being sentimental but I would strongly dispute that. We are so frightened of being sentimental these days that we overemphasize the hard emotions – lust, anger, the will to power – just to show how sophisticated and liberated we are. But that’s all nonsense. Being hard-boiled and cynical is just being sentimental in reverse. Sometimes you have to be prepared to risk sentimentality if you are to be to be real.
In one or other of the tributes to Wilson, someone referred to ‘Good Vibrations’ as a song about lust. But listen to it! It’s a man thinking about a woman who seems to him utterly lovely in every way. And yes, okay, it would be naive to pretend this feeling has nothing to do to do with sex, but to my mind it’s not so very different to other non-sexual kinds of tenderness, such as the way my heart melts when my 6 year old granddaughter comes running cheerfully out of school. To just call it ‘lust’ is ludicrously reductive. Gentle and tender feelings are also real, and they’re what comes pouring out in Brian Wilson’s lovely music.
Here is one more beautiful little fragment.
