Was ‘God Only Knows’ secretly the first prog-rock song?
While The Beach Boys were firmly considered to have been one of the finest pop groups to have ever existed, their forward-thinking approach to composition is something that often sets them apart from the rest of the field when it comes to definitively calling them a ‘pop’ act.
Of course, their origins were rooted in the surf rock and doo-wop sounds that were emerging from California at the time, and there’s certainly a lot of similarity between their early material and the other vocal groups that existed in the early 1960s. However, by the middle of the decade, primary songwriter Brian Wilson had started to draw his attention towards the more expansive sounds of bands such as The Beatles and producers like Phil Spector.
This spurred Wilson on to create a more symphonic take on what could be reasonably construed as pop music, and with the release of their 1966 album, Pet Sounds, he managed to produce a masterpiece that would continue to be a reference point for how albums ought to sound for decades afterwards. Its centrepiece, the simply glorious ‘God Only Knows’, is regarded as one of Wilson’s greatest achievements in song, but did it secretly do more than just signify the high-point of The Beach Boys’ career?
Some may wish to argue that ‘God Only Knows’ inadvertently invented prog-rock without there ever having been a reference point for the genre beforehand, and while it doesn’t necessarily pack the same punch as other generally agreed-upon progenitors of the genre such as King Crimson’s ‘21st Century Schizoid Man’, there are certainly a handful of elements that still fit the brief.
One feature of progressive rock that was established a few years later, when artists began adopting the term, was its incorporation of non-standard instrumentation for rock music. Rather than simply settling on the use of guitars, bass, drums and potentially keyboards that had been established as the norm for rock groups, prog-rock doesn’t shy away from using jazz and classical instrumentation in its arrangements. With all of the orchestral elements that Wilson managed to squeeze into ‘God Only Knows’, it certainly ticks those boxes for being classifiable as prog-rock.
Not only that, but the structure of the song is far more elaborate than your typical pop fare of the period, with diversions into interludes played in different time signatures, multiple parts being mulched together despite seeming disparate, and different instruments being played in two different keys simultaneously. This is the sort of bonkers experimentation that only prog bands are thought to dabble with in the rock world, and for Wilson to have included them in a pop song makes you think that it may be more closely related to prog-rock.
However, the ‘rock’ vs ‘pop’ aspect of the debate is where we reach a major sticking point. Progressive rock, by the very nature of the words it combines, is a subgenre of rock music that aims to take the heavier sounds of rock and distort them into something more elaborate. The complete lack of rock instrumentation or feel to ‘God Only Knows’ does make it more akin to the pop music of the period, so, in actual fact, would it be better to class it as being the first ‘progressive pop’ song?
Well, yes and no. It’s certainly an early example of ‘progressive pop’, but Wilson had already been experimenting with making music in this vein for around a year at this point. Throughout 1965, there were a handful of songs that demonstrated The Beach Boys’ ascension into being something beyond a straightforward feel-good pop act, and they were maturing significantly. In this case, there’s an argument to be made that ‘The Little Girl I Once Knew’ or ‘California Girls’ showed a sense of progressiveness, and even 1964’s ‘The Warmth of The Sun’ could be in contention.
It all leans on whether or not you consider something to be rock or pop, or a merger of both, and even though The Beach Boys had been releasing a number of prog-leaning works prior to the release of ‘God Only Knows’, it shows an even greater leap forward in terms of its experimentation and daring that makes it easy to see why you’d want to call it prog-something. Prog-rock or prog-pop, it’s still a masterpiece that was way ahead of its time, and is rightly seen as a major turning point not just for the band, but for the direction that contemporary music was heading in.
