On the day that Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys died, invariably there was always going to be remarks on social media inevitable mentions of their 1966 album "Pet Sounds"
https://x.com/cosmicjester/status/1933007646036275528
"Listening to ‘Pet Sounds’. It’s pretty good"
- Cosmic Jester, via X, 12th Jun 2025
https://bsky.app/profile/bencrazy.com/post/3lrem5kxqlk2x
"Took a nice long walk listening to Pet Sounds, Smile, and Pacific Ocean Blue"
- Ben, via BlueSky, 12th Jun 2025
There is something that I just don't get about the Beach Boys album "Pet Sounds" but rather than just have an opinion, I am reminded by something that my Year 7 English teacher said: which is that it is perfectly okay to have an opinion about something, provided that you can reasonably articulate why you hold the opinion. This is distinct and slightly different to the premise that people can like what they like and dislike what they dislike, without having to justify why. I neither like nor dislike Pet Sounds for the simple reason that I can not get attached either way.
Pet Sounds is an undeniably and unequivocally pretty album. The harmonies on the album are very tight, the instrumentation was basically unheard of in 1966, and the musical density of the album is a technical wonder.
I absolutely understand why Pet Sounds is seen as a defining point in popular music, and it absolutely deserves its place as a hinge point in music history; so much so to the point where we are still talking about it 60 years later. Aspects about this have been emulated, copied, parodied, and pastiched again and again and again.
But all of that still doesn't get at my core problem with the album. Even though it is pretty, and technically brilliant, I still don't get it at all. It remains somehow inaccessible to me.
From a lyrical standpoint the first song sounds interesting and I think that it was clever if the lyrics are intentionally ironic. If they are not, then they are still amusing enough to be memorable.
Beyond that though, most of the album is pretty standard fare: boy wants girl, boy can't stop talking about girl, boy has sad existential crisis. It's the kind of cheesy and relatively unsophisticated stuff which knows exactly where it is on a pop album.
I'm not even complaining that it sounds nothing like The Beatles, Rolling Stones, or Bob Dylan. It is perfectly acceptable that this isn't psychedelic, or savage, or raw. This is designed to be something else; I just don't understand what that something else means, or what its telos is.
Pet Sounds is an album that is trying to sound like it is pure and wholesome; without bitterness or rage or angst. It sounds as though it wants to sound innocent or evoke some kind of beauty. Maybe that's why I don't get it.
People make art because they like making art. People like listening to music because they enjoy listening to the art which has been made. The impression that I get from Pet Sounds though, is that deliberate choices were made for an audience in mind, and that audience is not me.
I like some music that is tragically pretty. I understand and get why Erik Satie or Claude Debussy are trying to pull silk through your head. I even think that Procol Harum who were contemporary to the Beach Boys, totally nailed a piece similar to "Air on the G String". Pet Sounds sounds like it should be as good as any of this, and it is extraordinarily well executed, but it just can not make me care.
I think it's because I like The Beach Boys earlier albums, which is why I think that Pet Sounds misses that one important thing that they had: Fun.
I have a similar kind of problem with The Beatles after "Revolver". Sgt Pepper is a landmark album but it simply isn't fun. "With The Beatles" is not really an album but a collection of songs that they played and I think that it is their best work because it is the funnest.
Pet Sounds sounds mature and pretty but I just don't have fun listening to it. Perhaps they hinted at this when they sang that "she'll have fun fun fun, 'til her Daddy takes her T-Bird away". Well that has already happened by Pet Sounds. Daffy took her T-Bird away and now she works in a shirt with her name tag on it, drifting apart like a plate tectonic; all she wants to be, is a million miles from here and somewhere more familiar.
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