# The Beach Boys' Smile album



## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

Just found a quote by Jim DeRogatis that I really liked about The Beach Boys' masterwork:

Smiley Smile can almost be considered a work of art music in the Western classical tradition, and its innovations in the musical language of rock can be compared to those that introduced atonal and other nontraditional techniques into that classical tradition. The spirit of experimentation is just as palpable in Smiley Smile as it is in, say, Schoenberg's op. 11 piano pieces. Yet there is also a spirit of tentativeness in Smiley Smile. We must remember that it was essentially a Plan B—that is, the album issued instead of Smile. … Whereas a Schoenberg could have notated his compositions cheaply on paper and waited for sympathetic performers to play them, Brian Wilson composed in a recording studio that charged by the hour, employed professional musicians, and required the services of a record company to mass produce and distribute his work. Commercial failure simply cannot be tolerated in this regime, and a work like Smiley Smile has no place in it."[

Gotta love The Beach Boys being name checked as Schoenberg. Not even the Beatles...


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## elgar's ghost (Aug 8, 2010)

Despite Jim DeRogatis's purple prose, Smiley Smile sounds like a work-in-progress to me and with a running time of less than 30 minutes it was obviously difficult to cobble together enough material that could be considered, well, usable. However, it was a case of having to make the best of a bad job and although it was a great pity that Smile wasn't completed at least Smiley Smile gave us some kind of idea where Brian Wilson wanted to go with it.

File under noble failure.


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