Genrecide; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Beach Boys

The first issue of Crimson Arts this semester featured a trio of messianic Backstreet Boys descending from the rafters on space-age surfboards. The surfboards may have been props, but they recalled a more innocent time when surfboards were real and America's first great boy band, the Beach Boys, rode them.

Originally a surfer band and nothing more, the Beach Boys always retained a corny novelty sound that combined with their dated harmonizing and often nave lyrics to make them less than popular at present. Yet in their day they were America's best rock band, peaking in 1966 with their Pet Sounds album, which topped the charts in Britain, outselling even the Beatles' Revolver.

An unprejudiced listener will probably be able to understand their former popularity; indeed, a lot of the Beach Boys' sound still exists in modern music. It's hardly recognizable without the beach-party harmonzing, but it's there. As a band of handsome youths that, with increasing self-consciousness, sang songs of innocence, the legacy they left is a bifurcated one.

On the one hand, the legacy of '66 lives on in '99 with the Backstreet Boys. When in the interim has a white quintet been so crucial to pop music? Some critics have optimistically observed that the Backstreet Boys might take their music in hand and morph from tools of industry to pop-craft artists, just as the Beach Boys went from the straight-up teen fun of "Surfin' USA" to the angst of Pet Sounds and the mastery of "Good Vibrations." Then again, Brian Littrell is no Brian Wilson, and such a turnaround seems unlikely.

The Beach Boys' other legacy includes Belle and Sebastian and a host of other indie and foreign follow-ups, all of whom owe a debt to the Beach Boys in both instrumentation and nostalgia for the romanticism of puberty. As a result, the Beach Boys have actually enjoyed some critical attention in the '90s, usually focusing on ther instrumental experimentation which so closely foreshadows the wall of soothing-sound popularized by today's quasi-techno chill-out groups.

While Belle and Sebastian fans might equate the trendy British band's tight pin-wheel melodies to guitar-and-drum approximations of electronica rhythms, it really just sounds like the Beach Boys redux. Listen to B&S' 3..6..9..Seconds of Light or the piano on "Seeing Other People" or the guitar on "If You're Feeling Sinister" and then go to the library and check out "Sloop John B." from Pet Sounds. Such musical similarities can't be a coincidence, considering the thematic overlap between, for example, Pet Sounds and If You're Feeling Sinister. In the former, a boy goes from youthful abandon to mature disenchantment over the course of the album; in the latter those themes are visited in each song.

Furthermore, this inheritance is not limited at all to Belle and Sebastian, for a great deal of current indie rock is mellow, child-like and backward-looking. And most such bands are aware of their forerunners. If you can't hear the Beach Boys in everything from ber-hip Elephant 6 (Beulah, Neutral Milk Hotel, The Apples in Stereo), then you need look no further than their official press releases.

The Beach Boys, seemingly mere proto-Fonzes, have in fact done as much for America's sound as Elvis, as long as you listen around. The cool kids in middle school have their Backstreet Boys, the keen kids at Harvard have their Belle and Sebastian. And everyone has the Beach Boys.

--BENJAMIN E. LYTAL