Don't pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches.
Andy Warhol
[A] brilliant arrangement of words describing experiences for which our language has no vocabulary.
Timothy Leary, Introduction to The Joyous Cosmology
It doesn’t matter what you’re studying: art, literature, music, anthropology. And it doesn’t matter what decade you happen to be living in. There are those default research questions – I suspect there’s a secret master list somewhere – that turn up again and again. Professors were asking them in the 1960s, and they were asking them in the 1980s, and odds are they’ll be asking them a hundred years from now.
One of those questions is this old standby: what was the contemporary critical response to [blank]? If you’re a literature student, the blank might get filled in with Moll Flanders or Moby Dick. If you’re an art student, it might be Braque or Seurat. You get the idea.
I think that’s a very difficult question, because it asks you to elaborate an entire past ecosystem. To understand the contemporary view of a given work, you first have to understand where to look: where did reviews and critical pieces appear, back in the day? And once you have an answer to that one – if you do – you have to hunt them up, hoping they exist in some readily accessible form. And then there’s the matter of assigning relative weights to the respective critical responses. That can be a challenge, even in the case of comparatively recent works. In 1948, did a playwright care more about the review from the New York Herald Tribune, or the one from the Times? How about 1958 – any difference? You see what I mean.
Oh, but that shouldn’t be a problem any more, at least not for anything composed or written or painted in the last couple of decades – right? Because we have the Internet, and everything should be out there, live or archived, freely available; so it should be easy, in theory, to put together a reasonably complete picture of the critical landscape of the day.
Only it’s not that simple. Old books and periodicals may deteriorate over time, and they may be hard to track down; but as long as they haven’t turned to dust, they still exist. Not so with online reviews and essays. Links die. Entire sites disappear. And unless the industrious bots of the Internet Archive have crawled and captured the pages in question, they’re just…gone.
Which explains, hopefully, the rationale behind this little piece.
In 2004, into 2005, when I was working intensively on this group of essays, I made a practice of searching out and scavenging every online SMiLE article I could find. I never knew when an out-of-the-way newspaper review might contain a valuable quote from Brian Wilson, or Van Dyke Parks, or Darian Sahanaja, or somebody else. I did a lot of copying and pasting, saving the text for possible future use.
Well, twenty years have passed. Most of those pages have faded into oblivion; a handful are still accessible, mainly in archived form. But the text files are still there. And I think they represent a fairly complete snapshot of the critical reaction to SMiLE, at the time of the concert premiere and the album release.
The relevant passages follow, with attributions and (in some cases) a bit of commentary. As I reread them, after all this time, I found myself smiling at some, nodding along with others, and shaking my head at one or two. SMiLE is a work that crosses genres, mixes styles, and generally defies pat categorization. As such, it taxed the writing skills of the reviewers almost to breaking-point. There are no footnotes or citations; most of these pieces have long since disappeared into the digital ether. The reviewers’ typos, misheard lyrics and grammatical infelicities have been left uncorrected, without being sic’d.
I have every sympathy for these folks. It's easy enough to recount a version (sometimes lurid, often inaccurate) of the SMiLE history. It's no challenge to quote from the lyrics or to document the running order of the songs. But when it comes to describing the album as a whole – to capturing the experience of listening to the entire work – things get much more complicated. It's not that there's some sudden shortage of adjectives: one might call SMiLE "intricate," or "lush," or "groundbreaking," or even "psychedelic,” and not go far wrong. But the adjectives get you only so far. If you're sincerely seeking a phrase, a formula of words, that will help the reader to understand what it's like to listen to the music…that’s a tall order.
I’ve divided the reviews up into arbitrary categories, according to style, level of writerly ambition, etc. This certainly isn’t any species of artistic criticism, but I still think there’s value in the exercise. One day a professor, trying to come up with a new twist on that old question, may ask about the contemporary critical response to SMiLE. Taken together, these quotations just might add up to the beginnings of an answer.
Level One: Eerily Disturbing But Celebratory
This is fairly straightforward, factual, off-the-rack stuff; but it's been dressed up with a few choice accessories. These folks are clearly reaching back for a little something extra here.
Showing remarkable restraint, the Boston Globe manages to make do with a couple of unexpected nouns:
[SMiLE's] stretches of pure bliss spill into moments of whimsy.
The Los Angeles Times:
SMiLE emerges as a beautiful and cohesive work, at times deeply moving, at others oddly whimsical, at still others eerily disturbing but celebratory.
FHM:
SMiLE is the pinnacle of the psychedelic, avant garde concept that pop music could be so much more than just music.
From MSNBC:
SMiLE is nothing more or less than advertised: at times it’s beautiful, thoughtful, rocking and even silly at points. As a whole it really is an American masterpiece.
NOW Magazine calls SMiLE
a three-movement psych-symphony that manages to be both whimsically absurd and surprisingly profound.
Rolling Stone weighs in:
Anchored by deft quotes and thematic repetitions, SMiLE is beautiful and funny, goofily grand.
The Village Voice offers a sentence whose opacity stubbornly defies explication:
[SMiLE is] ennobled—the material limitations of its sunny artifice and pretentious tomfoolery acknowledged and joyfully engaged.
From the Philadelphia Inquirer:
Almost every one of the melodic motifs...is the equal, in terms of sheer grace, of the sprawling orchestrations and outsized sonic tableaus.
The New York Times calls SMiLE
quite likely the most coherent long-form composition in rock. It's a kaleidoscope of styles and emotions, from reverent to goofy.
From one Times to another: this, finally, from the usually reserved Times of London:
[I]ts epic gestation has, if anything, only increased the profundity of this, pop’s first and greatest symphony.
Level Two: Artful Ellipsis and Aloof Nostalgia
One level up: now it's getting serious. These writers have a loftier goal: to devise imaginatively descriptive phrases that capture something of the music's essence. We're dipping deeply into the great big adjective barrel here, friends.
USA Today :
[T]he music is glorious and surprisingly coherent considering the lack of self-contained songs and the conjoined remnants of psychedelic rock, doo-wop, sunny pop and esoteric noodling.
From the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, two paragraphs:
[SMiLE] is still an astonishing achievement. Arranged into three movements, it hurtles from Plymouth Rock to Hawaii via Old West cantinas, compressing America’s history, geography and musical traditions into vivid, transporting sound pictures. The ambition of the project remains breathtaking,
The pop wunderkind has created a stunning symphony of sounds -- part Beach Boys, classical, folk, children's music, circus music, jazz standards, choral music, barbershop harmonizing and church music. In short, "SMiLE" is a timeless, incomparably luxurious tapestry of American music.
The Observer, raising the ante with the word "scarifying":
There is much to marvel at: "Cabin Essence", which moves from sepia-tinged lament for the old West to raucous celebration of the coming of the railways, all in three minutes; the inversion of that song's dominant riff to produce a scarifying cacophony in "Mrs O'Leary's Cow" (the animal blamed for starting the great Chicago fire of 1871); the drenching harmony of "Child Is Father of the Man".
[Wilson] called those compositions, best typified by "Good Vibrations," "teenage symphonies to God," and that's accurate: They're episodic marvels, moments of cooing quiet followed by fireworks. The fragments are each beautiful in isolation, yet become magnified when put together, a succession of impossibly uplifting recurring motifs, each reaching higher than the last.
The Chicago Tribune:
"SMiLE" plays like an episodic western movie for the mind. In tracks such as "Our Prayer," "Wonderful," "Cabin Essence" and "Surf's Up," Wilson and Parks hit upon a uniquely spiritual vision of Americana. With its stacked voices and ornate instrumentation, this music suggests a prairie church service."
Billboard, speaking with its customary authority:
Rolling harpsichords meet multilayered vocal harmonies; abrupt stops and tempo changes lead to majestic orchestral swells; and there is fantastic, dreamlike imagery. This is pop music like nothing before it, or since.
Special award for artful hyphen usage goes to the website ShakingThrough:
SMiLE is nonetheless an arresting, audacious, unabashedly whimsical slice of junk-drawer Americana (thanks to acclaimed arranger-lyricist Van Dyke Parks) and can-do pop craftsmanship.
The Amazon editorial review describes SMiLE as
a collage of arcane 19th century Americana that's equal parts artful ellipse [sic] and aloof nostalgia.
The AMG online music guide calls SMiLE
a jaunty epic of psychedelic Americana, a rambling and discursive, playful and affectionate series of song cycles. Infectious and hummable, to be sure, and a remarkably unified, irresistible piece of pop music....
And Pitchfork, taking top honors at this level, dusts off and repurposes a decidedly 1960s term:
[SMiLE] still burns with lysergic intensity....
Level 3: Toy Fire Engines, Acid-Laced Blenders and Hallucinogenic Disney Rides
OK: all bets are off. Not content with album-review boilerplate or euphonious phrases, each of these reviewers has taken on a truly daunting challenge: to come up with a single metaphor that will do justice to a work as complex and diverse as SMiLE. You know the sort of thing: "SMiLE is like a psychedelic hurdy-gurdy cranked by an American Indian shaman who periodically falls asleep and dreams of dancing chickens...." Make no mistake: these are fearless writers indeed.
From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, an embarrassment of linguistic riches. The changing-leaves image is particularly interesting:
[SMiLE] is a fresh and dazzling work, shiny as a toy fire engine. Although the record's playful spirit rekindles the psychedelic sensibility of its pinwheel-eyed original era, Wilson's sophisticated songcraft and pristine production make it sound ultramodern.
'SMiLE' builds on the Beach Boys' 1966 masterpiece "Pet Sounds," itself an ultramodern album. But where "Pet Sounds" songs compressed their ideas into fluid melodic lines, the grandest 'SMiLE' songs - "Heroes and Villains," "Cabin Essence," "Surf's Up," "In Blue Hawaii" and "Good Vibrations" - expand into multipart mini-epics that dramatically and repeatedly reinvent themselves.
Listening to these tunes is like watching leaves change color in warp speed.
From Entertainment Weekly, another of the seemingly mandatory LSD references:
SMiLE fulfills its 37-year promise, detailing what'd happen if you threw Stephen Foster's parlor folk, Aaron Copland's orchestral Americana, the Four Freshmen, some kiddie pop, and a sound-effects record into an acid-laced blender.
From psychedelia to dementia: the Sunday Herald calls SMiLE
a wonderful thing: a distillation of Wilson’s acid-fried 20-something thoughts which loops back on itself like a demented Möbius strip. Melodies and motifs occur and recur, the boundaries between “songs” are eliminated, while vocal harmonies and themes run through several tracks.
From the New Musical Express, a dense paragraph drawing comparisons to works of all kinds, including Gershwin and Miles Davis:
Comparing SMiLE to pop music is like comparing the poster paint daubings of an infant to the vast canvasses of Velasquez. But SMiLE stands up with any of the great music of the 20th century. In its interweaved and repeated melodic strands it echoes Prokofiev's Kije Suite. In its appropriation of American folk it stands up there with the work of Gershwin and Copeland [sic]. In its sheer contemplative beauty it rubs shoulders with Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue. One of the greatest albums of the 21st century.
DotMusic (seeing into the future, perhaps, and anticipating Brian’s 2011 solo album?) invokes Disney:
'SMiLE' is like a hallucinogenic Disney ride through America's history - from the arrival of the Mayflower to the Age of Aquarius. Combining show tunes, folk, psychedelia, harmony and humour it's brilliant and almost beyond criticism.
On the other hand, the Minneapolis City Paper makes a comparison to the Universal CityWalk:
From the opening soar of godly harmonies, into the kaleidoscopic, episodic, cinematic "Heroes and Villains," it is clear that SMiLE is a record about America. But it's not the huffing, sweating, sardine-packed trolley-car America of Walt Whitman or Robert Altman or other strongman chroniclers of the width and breadth of national passions. It is the slide-whistle, jew's-harp, silent-movie-organ America of Michael Eisner. It is a theme-park U.S.A., where the listener tours the continent as if on the tram at Universal CityWalk; a pious exhortation to "Roll, roll, roll, Plymouth Rock roll under" is subsumed by the appearance of Mrs. O'Leary's cow--the destroyer of the city of Chicago--followed by a detour "In Blue Hawaii."
For the Detroit Free Press, the experience resembles a railroad excursion more than an amusement-park ride:
[P]assion and precision employing orchestral links to take us on a time-suspended train trip of a Carl Sandburg America - where even impenetrable lyrics like "And sunny down snuff I'm alright" become poignant and meaningful, and the abstract harmonies of "Wind Chimes" provoke summer dreams far removed from surfing and hot-rod fantasies, but oddly dependent on them as well.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, however, this isn't a ride at all, but a journey through a sort of maze:
With symphonic orchestrations, layers of celestial choral parts and sure-footed rhythm sections clearing the paths, Wilson leads the way through this elegant labyrinth of extravagant musical ideas and rich, dreamy melodies, one after another. The music travels from epiphany to epiphany, sliding across gorgeous harmonies and golden pastoral passages like something from another lifetime.
Finally, The Scotsman takes leave of Earth altogether, losing itself among the planets:
Throughout its 47 minutes, SMiLE does not allow the listener a moment’s rest. Motifs wander teasingly in and out of earshot, songs accelerate, reverse, jump off cliffs, collapse in on themselves. There are more ideas on this one disc, there is more melodic, rhythmic and instrumental invention, than most bands manage in an entire career.
Is there a high point among high points? If SMiLE were a solar system then ‘Surf’s Up’ would be its sun.
So there you have it. Let me be clear: the point here isn't to poke fun at these efforts. Far from it. I find it noteworthy that these writers have all – to a greater or lesser extent – felt the need to go beyond the ordinary verbs and nouns that make up the everyday currency of their reviews. I sense no cowardice, no reluctance to indulge in what might seem to be, in another context, outright linguistic extravagance. That fact suggests that something interesting was going on here.
This takes us back, after all, to our opening: that scholarly curiosity about the contemporary critical response to a given work of art. There's a reason that question has endured: with the passage of time, some critical voices diminish, while others grow more insistent. Narratives, driven by all sorts of motives and agendas, ossify into accepted history. Napoleon is alleged to have said that history was a fable agreed upon; today we might amend that statement, substituting “narrative” for “fable.”
The year 2004, at two decades’ distance, is a dwindling dot in the rear-view mirror. These critical quotations, good, bad or indifferent, afford an opportunity to understand the reaction to SMiLE in the moment. And in the moment – there’s no argument on this point – it was viewed as a major artistic achievement. SMiLE inspired these writers. SMiLE energized them. SMiLE prompted them to invoke Stephen Foster and Carl Sandburg, Aaron Copland and Walt Whitman. And SMiLE challenged them to search their own imaginations for verbal ingenuity to match the creativity of the work about which they were writing.
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