Why the Beach Boys Matter
Of all the white American pop music groups that hit the charts before the Beatles, only the Beach Boys continued to thrive throughout the British Invasion to survive into the 1970s and beyond. The Beach Boys helped define both sides of the era we broadly call the sixties, split between their early surf, car, and summer pop and their later hippie, counterculture, and ambitious rock. No other group can claim the Ronettes and the Four Seasons as early 1960s rivals; the Mamas and the Papas and Crosby, Stills and Nash as later 1960s rivals; and the Beatles and the Temptations as decade-spanning counterparts.
This is the first book to take an honest look at the themes running through the Beach Boys’ art and career as a whole and to examine where they sit inside our culture and politics—and why they still grab our attention.
Why the Beach Boys Matter provides an excellent introduction to the band that might have evolved, Smucker suggests, into the Beatles…We were ready to abandon the Beach Boys. Now, with Smucker's book, we can reconnect to them.
Smucker's book on Why The Beach Boys Matter tells us exactly that, and quite evocatively.
It's a pretty tall order to tell the Beach Boys' oft-confusing, decades-long history in a 176-page, 5' x 7' book, but Tom Smucker does an admirable job in <i>Why the Beach Boys Matter</i>.
Smucker is a long-time fan of the Beach Boys, and his passionate defense of their importance is carefully thought out…Why The Beach Boys Matter packs a lot of content into a short volume. Smucker does an excellent job summarizing the Beach Boys' long career, examining their influences and their place in American pop culture.
Rather than land on a single thesis in answer to the book’s title, Smucker gives the reader myriad starting points for determining why the Beach Boys matter...While the rhizomatic nature of the book’s short, chronologically nonlinear chapters may frustrate some academic readers, others will find that the structure is a perfect metaphor for the answer to the problem posed by the book’s title. There is a multiplicity of reasons for the importance of the Beach Boys, musically and historically, and to say otherwise for the sake of a central thesis would be to attempt to insert an intellectual square into an intellectual circle...the arguments...[are] just right.
[Why the Beach Boys Matter] is one of the great books for anybody who likes to think about pop music (or the USA). Smucker efficiently shares fresh sociocultural thinking right along with answering the crucial 'but is it good listening?' questions.
Smucker’s mix of unabashed fanboy enthusiasm with razor-sharp analysis makes him the perfect teller of this story.
Having spent a lifetime digging into everything the Beach Boys have recorded, Smucker knows it to be fun fun fun, great art, and a barometer of our class, race, and gender politics since World War II.
Smucker perfectly captures the world the Beach Boys made. This is the band in full career ricochet, summing up and summoning a whole way of life.
Tom Smucker pointed me in the right direction for what became my life’s journey.
1. Harmony and Discord
2. Cars and Guitars
3. Suburbs and Surf
4. Studio and Stage
5. Fathers, Shrinks, and Gurus
6. Girlfriends, Wives, and Mothers
7. When Did the Early Sixties End?
8. Jan and Dean
9. Innocence and the Second-Best Pop Album Ever
10. Hip and White
11. The Best Unreleased Pop Album Ever
12. The Beatles
13. Into the Genres
14. Dennis
15. Carl
16. Al, Bruce, and David
17. Mike
18. Brian Solo
19. Storytellers, Historians, and Fans
20. Summer’s Gone, the Endless Summer
Epilogue: Suggestions
Acknowledgments
Notes
Discography
A Chronological Listing of DVDs
Mentioned in the Book
Bibliography
