Credit: Far Out / Alamy / Bernard Gotfryd

Why do The Beach Boys sound much more dated than The Beatles?

Tue 15 October 2024 20:27, UK

Feuds and rivalries between bands just weren’t the same in the 1960s as they are today. Artists were rarely at odds with one another in terms of who was better, and there was little ‘beef’ to speak of in the same way as you might imagine between the likes of Drake and Kendrick Lamar. Rather, bands were constantly trying to improve on their previous works due to being inspired by the work of another artist, using their peers’ successes as a motivation to better themselves.

One notable example of this during the period was between The Beatles and The Beach Boys, two titans of pop music on either side of the Atlantic who pushed each other to their creative limits. While both bands enjoyed commercial success in the earlier stages of their respective careers, there came a point in the mid-60s where simply crafting a radio-friendly hit wasn’t quite cutting it for either act, and there emerged a burning desire within both to create more lavish masterpieces.

The first major turning point in this saga came courtesy of the Liverpudlians, whose 1965 effort Rubber Soul was considered a marked development on their five previous records to date by critics and fans alike. Among those fans was Brian Wilson, who believed that the album was the Beatles’ defining statement and that the record “blew [his] mind”.

This drove him to create Pet Sounds the following year in response to the album, and much like Rubber Soul before it, it was considered to be leagues beyond anything the Beach Boys had previously released. With opulent orchestral arrangements and an approach to melody and harmony unlike anything heard before it, Pet Sounds still stands the test of time as one of the greatest pop records ever made and is testament to the singular vision of Brian Wilson.

It wasn’t always as beloved as it is now, though. While the band had seemingly shaken off the notion that they were only capable of writing corny yet competent pop songs about surfing, fancy cars and chasing girls, it was almost so far removed from their prior work that it took listeners time to adjust to the record’s ingenuity. With the proposed follow-up Smile abandoned and reworked into the arguably lesser Smiley Smile due to Wilson’s declining mental state, it could be argued that the band never attempted anything quite as adventurous in the years following, save for the sole exception of the underrated masterpiece Surf’s Up.

That doesn’t mean by any stretch that the work the Beach Boys created outside of Pet Sounds was below par, but it certainly failed to be quite as elaborate. On the other hand, the Beatles would follow Rubber Soul with increasingly adventurous records in Revolver, The White Album and Abbey Road, to name a few, before calling it quits in 1970. When the band believed they had pushed their sound as far as it could go, they called proceedings to a halt.

Wilson’s obsessive nature and insistence on trying to create perfection may have been one of his biggest obstacles, and it could be argued that the childlike naivete of some of his work, such as ‘Vegetables’ or later scrapped album Adult/Child, is one of the main reasons that their work sounds more of its time than that of the Beatles, whose combined visions along with the production mastery of George Martin were able to prevent there being such a marked difference in how well their material has aged.

Furthermore, the early surf rock years of the Beach Boys were following a trend that didn’t survive long beyond the ’60s. In contrast, the work of the Beatles is far more widely referenced in modern music and is helped by its members, having had illustrious solo careers where they continued to push the boat out and innovate in different styles. There is no reason to slate the music of the Beach Boys, and it can be argued that their highs even eclipse the finest moments in the Beatles’ catalogue, but for the most part, their English counterparts have stood the test of time far better than the California group.