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6/14/2025, 9:25:53 PM
>>126710844
Amazingly that's not even the most obnoxiously pretentious review of BWPS.
>Sacred or silly? Sublime or ridiculous? Disney or Zappa? Dali or Rockwell? Mozart or Mancini? If Smile had appeared when it was meant to, it would have been an LA orchestral pop masterpiece that, like the tacky English pop masterpiece Sergeant Pepper, would have been a breathtaking example of ultimately banal thinkers attempting self-consciously to make art, a square version of freaking out, musically sophisticated, aesthetically conservative. Now, it sounds like a goofy souvenir of a white, nostalgic, middle-American leisure music that burnt up in the LA sun halfway through the Vietnam war. It is a kitsch classic, both for what it is and what it yearns for. It's Wilson brainwashed by perverse musical archivist Van Dyke Parks [the album's lyricist]. It's a camp combination of the bygone, the neo, the exotic, the folksy, the showtune, the corny. It's pure artificial Hollywood in the way it patches together the inauthentic, the whitewashed, the brazenly commercial, the sentimental, the censored. It feels like drowning in the Pacific and having a sweetened history of mid-20th-century American life flash before your eyes. I needed a quick shower of Ramones, Dre and Hendrix afterwards, just to rinse away the clingy bits of fake myth.
Amazingly that's not even the most obnoxiously pretentious review of BWPS.
>Sacred or silly? Sublime or ridiculous? Disney or Zappa? Dali or Rockwell? Mozart or Mancini? If Smile had appeared when it was meant to, it would have been an LA orchestral pop masterpiece that, like the tacky English pop masterpiece Sergeant Pepper, would have been a breathtaking example of ultimately banal thinkers attempting self-consciously to make art, a square version of freaking out, musically sophisticated, aesthetically conservative. Now, it sounds like a goofy souvenir of a white, nostalgic, middle-American leisure music that burnt up in the LA sun halfway through the Vietnam war. It is a kitsch classic, both for what it is and what it yearns for. It's Wilson brainwashed by perverse musical archivist Van Dyke Parks [the album's lyricist]. It's a camp combination of the bygone, the neo, the exotic, the folksy, the showtune, the corny. It's pure artificial Hollywood in the way it patches together the inauthentic, the whitewashed, the brazenly commercial, the sentimental, the censored. It feels like drowning in the Pacific and having a sweetened history of mid-20th-century American life flash before your eyes. I needed a quick shower of Ramones, Dre and Hendrix afterwards, just to rinse away the clingy bits of fake myth.
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