Cinematic Inspiration: Lou Reed’s favourite song by The Beach Boys
Lyrics only tell half the story of a song, just as dialogue only tells a fraction of a film. Music, at its best, twists words and melodies in magical ways, one hand-washing the other in a marriage of meaning and mystery. In the Nick Cave classic ‘Mercy Seat’, the protagonist might plead their innocence, but the building fever pitch of the screeching melody implies an implosive end is neigh. Few have been better at this than Lou Reed.
“Lou’s lyrics have two lives: as they are sung and heard, and as they are read on the printed page. And I think that they could only have come from someone who grew up in the New York area and came of age in Manhattan, who moved and wrote and sang from the pulse of life in this city,” director Martin Scorsese wrote for The Guardian. “They describe the city as it was, but they also incarnate it. You feel it in the rhythms.”
The Beach Boys were brilliant at this, too. They didn’t just sing of summer and the seaside, they wove Vitamin-D and Factor 50 into the notes of the song. This was a big inspiration to Reed. You might not think of him as a huge fan of their happy-clappy stylings, but he dug anything done well. Much like Brian Wilson at his best, Reed’s music is as cinematic as it gets—just look at Berlin (or rather listen to Berlin, though it might feel like you’re watching it), and that’s not even set in his most familiar realm. Reed’s ability to create fully-formed, almost voyeuristic vignettes that are nevertheless full of affected drama.
If it’s drama you’re after, well, songs don’t get much more dramatic than ‘God Only Knows’, a masterpiece that Reed ranked among his 100 favourite songs of all time. It not only sings of devotion—it imparts it in the music, too, capturing Reed’s ability to musically “incarnate” emotion and meaning.
It’s the sound of summer, it’s the sound of love, and Reed is one among many who would say it’s also the sound of one of the greatest songs ever written. The Beach Boys classic is a watermark in pop music. There is a before ‘God Only Knows’ and there is an after ‘God Only Knows’ with the masterpiece representing the moment that pop went baroque and stood firmly on the shoulders of all that had gone before, gazing ahead and forecasting the beach-bright future.
With ‘God Only Knows’, Brian Wilson and his band seemed to escape the notion of these restrictions and push pop to new heights. As Wilson explained himself: “It’s not really in any one key. It’s a strange song. That’s just the way it was written. … It’s the only song I’ve ever written that’s not in a definite key, and I’ve written hundreds of songs.” This was melded even further as elements were layered by the technology. This was the moment that pop went baroque.
Thus, the moment it hit the radio, it wobbled every musician’s head in that era. It was a flawless piece of music—somehow pairing innovation and beauty in a manner where one elevated the exultancy of the other. In short, ‘God Only Knows’ is a song that shaped the second half of the 20th century and beyond. And we can all be thankful for that because it is the sort of beautiful utopia where prettiness unrivalled revels in progress and stirs us all with the same simple loveliness as a sunny day.
Reed might not have been interested in recreating that per se, but when The Velvet Underground got rolling, he did want to see how the newly expanded world of music could infuse his literary lines with new dimensions. As Reed put it, “Will none of the powers that be realize what Brian Wilson did with the chords. Deftly taking from all sources, old rock, Four Freshman, he got in his records a beautiful hybrid sound.”
