“He had a gift”: The musician Brian Wilson said invented the pop song
There’s a good case to be made for Brian Wilson changing the landscape of all recorded music.
He didn’t set out to be one of the legends of rock and roll by any stretch, but if you look at the amount of harmonies he overlaid on top of each other with The Beach Boys, there are pieces of his catalogue that could stand up next to the greatest works of Bach or Beethoven if they happened to be played on classical instruments instead of the rock and roll setup. Wilson was more than willing to make the best music he could, regardless of genre, but he did have a few lessons from the greats years before he started.
But before The Beach Boys’ generation of rock and roll, pop music tended to look a whole lot different from what it turned into. The biggest names at the time were people like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, and while both of them had voices that could hold the attention of an entire room, there was a lot more to offer when Chuck Berry and Little Richard started breaking out of the American South and singing about partying all night long.
Wilson had already been a fan of rock and roll, but it was Phil Spector who really turned his head. Here was a genius beyond anyone’s comprehension at the time, and while he did have more than a few moments where he proved to be an absolute menace in his spare time, you couldn’t deny the massive Wall of Sound that he created every single time a song like ‘Be My Baby’ came on the radio.
That was the model that Wilson was working with, but there was no real reference point for the strange chords in some of his songs. The Ronettes weren’t going to be making the strange detours like in ‘God Only Knows’, and The Four Freshmen weren’t going for the choir-like counterpoint harmonies that appeared on Pet Sounds, but that was instilled in Wilson from the days of listening to soundtracks from the theatre.
If we really break everything down, Broadway was where the true pop music had started, and Tin Pan Alley was ground zero for what the manufactured side of popular music was supposed to be. But even though a few artists were more rudimentary, George Gershwin helped open up everyone’s minds. His affinity for different jazz chords helped bring a lot more emotion out of every song he wrote, and when Wilson started reinterpreting his pieces later in life, he started to understand how important they were.
No one was thinking of this kind of harmony, and Wilson put Gershwin down as the true originator of what pop music was supposed to be, saying, “Along with Irving Berlin, Gershwin basically invented the popular song, but he did something more. He had a gift for melody that nobody has ever equalled, yet his music is timeless and always accessible.” And the same thing applies to everything that Wilson had worked on.
He may have had inspiration from The Beatles when he started to push himself further on his records, but when combing through albums like Surf’s Up, there’s a reason why people like Leonard Bernstein were taking notice. This was the kind of songwriting that pushed the boundaries for what pop music could be, and rock and roll was bound to follow in Wilson’s footsteps in the next few years.
There was no sense in anyone trying to duplicate what Wilson had done, but they seemed to be taking cues from him the same way that he took cues from Gershwin in his prime. All any musician can hope to do is inspire the next generation, and you can hear people who were angry to pick apart everything that Wilson did and apply it to whatever they were going to work on.
