Did ‘Pet Sounds’ pave the way for modern pop?
There was a time when pop music was largely a culturally cheap and saccharine area, complete with dodgy haircuts, sweaters, and questionable lyrics. There was a perennial problem of cheese coursing through much of the work that, in part, persisted like a barnacle of bad taste in certain surface areas of the regurgitated genre.
Now though, pop music and the charts have changed. Truly enormous acts such as Billie Eilish and Taylor Swift conjure vivid sonic aesthetics underpinned by undoubted artistic panache, creating a distinctly different climate to the days when songwriting powerhouses like Stock Aitken Waterman were ubiquitous in the charts, and the formula was obvious. Of course, some of the industry powers still regularly use a recipe, but it’s quickly becoming obsolete.
There are a range of reasons for this sea change, but technological advancements have been vital. The proliferation of the internet and the mass of information this offers makes listeners more discerning than 40 years ago, with their taste encompassing a far broader spectrum than what the radio and weekly variety shows dictated. This, in addition to the fact that the studio and instruments are more advanced adds to pop’s transformation. The studio now is an instrument.
We are now firmly lodged in the postmodern era, where boundaries of all sorts are being moved, blurred and questioned, with one-time definitive signifiers of genre losing their relevance. Indicative of this zeitgeist, pop music takes from more places than it has ever done. As Rina Sawayama recently made headlines calling out The 1975 frontman Matty Healy at Glastonbury 2023, most people who were not aware of her music became alerted to the fact that the introduction to her song in the background of the viral video sounded like that of Korn’s nu-metal classic ‘Blind’. This incorporation of metal into pop signposted that the days of Brotherhood of Man singing the cloying ‘Save Your Kisses for Me’ were a long way away.
Elsewhere, the artists considered at the forefront of the hyper-pop scene, the likes of Charli XCX and Caroline Polachek, have also had a significant hand in pulling pop music forward by embodying the postmodern creative spirit, with sonic worldbuilding and production that is second to none. The musicians cherrypick from various areas, forms and genres to establish a dynamic palette unique to themselves whilst also having mass appeal. What was once deemed experimental has now gone mainstream, meaning that, in essence, pop music has more value than ever before. The tables have turned, and pop is at the forefront of the conversation. Other familiar genres struggle for relevance in the face of such widespread innovation.
This brings us to the broader point. There’s an argument that The Beach Boys paved the way for pop’s present juncture with their 1966 album, Pet Sounds.
The story of the record is famous. Universally regarded as the Californian band’s crowning achievement, Pet Sounds is a progressive pop masterpiece produced, arranged, and almost entirely composed by frontman Brian Wilson, with the help of guest lyricist Tony Asher. Constructed during the period when Wilson had stopped touring with his group, the influence of marijuana, spiritual enlightenment, and the works of Phil Spector and The Beatles were prominent.
Pet Sounds signalled what was to come with the postmodern period by drawing on pop, jazz, exotica, classical and the avant-garde. He might not have been the first to do so, but it was the way he did it through layering that proved seismic. Moreover, The Beatles specified Pet Sounds as the main inspiration for their own masterpiece, 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s, which challenged them to “get further out” than Wilson, according to Paul McCartney, who even said they “nicked” ideas from it.
Drawing on a host of genres, as well as layering vocals, found sounds, and instruments seldom associated with popular music, such as the French horn, flutes, Theremin strings, bicycle bells and beverage cans, Wilson moved into a new area altogether. Tracks like ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’, ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘Sloop John B’, are early highlights of modern pop, imbued with real character, exhibiting that the borders of genre do not have to be rigid.
One of Wilson’s most significant triumphs with this album was demonstrating that the designation of genre is an obstacle when there’s so much content available for the creator to pull from. He displayed that genuine eminence can be achieved by removing these barriers, allowing a more distilled version of the artist to be poured into the art. After all, people are inherently complex. Even the most apparently one-dimensional human beings are multifaceted.
Elsewhere, Pet Sounds is connected to today’s pop in the way that it revolutionised production. Wilson pioneered the studio-as-instrument praxis, something Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas, Taylor Swift, Charlie XCX, and Caroline Polachek have all become experts at. Through mastery of the studio, these pop heroes have created a range of modern masterpieces that would not have been so otherwise. The computer and mixing desk facilitates bringing vivid creative dreams to life.
The artistic triumphs of Pet Sounds saw pop music be further culturally legitimised. As we know, in the intervening years between then and now, the genre would spawn an almost innumerable number of questionable and downright terrible artists, yet, Wilson had already made history. His album was the example of what could be achieved in pop if artists ignore tradition and follow their own course. It might have taken years for its attitude to permeate popular culture, but that’s how far ahead of its time it was. The penny slowly dropped as the world moved into the future, and pop reinvented itself aided by changing attitudes and technological advancements. In terms of the music, there’s no way this would have happened without Pet Sounds.
