I've written before about how I felt as a kid that the Beach Boys were too cool for me. Avoiding their music meant that, for a long time, I had a Brian Wilson-sized hole in my musical appreciation. But in the meantime, I became quite a little film buff, and inevitably I found myself watching the incomparable P.T. Anderson epic film Boogie Nights. Boogie Nights follows a group of people in a horrible line of work who are castoffs from all their home backgrounds, talentless, hopeless failures in much of what they truly aspired to do with their lives, but finding acceptance and meaning doing what they do together. It is, strangely, a perfect metaphor for a family. A family is a place in this acidic culture where ultimate perfection is neither attained nor expected. It is a haven where one who is not especially competitive may learn they have secret super powers of affection and connection that earn them not a dime or an ounce of respect in the public world, but they do get exactly the love back that they put in, without having to outdo anyone to achieve it.
The film traverses decades, showing our de facto family of outcasts at their greatest peaks and deepest depths, falling out with one another and ultimately reconnecting before all is lost. In the spare montage that ends the film, we are treated with scenes of rapprochement, then a kind of epilogue to see the better things our characters (those who survived) move on to do. These montage scenes have enough emotional punch on their own, after all these threads of story have been heading to these resolutions for so long. But their power is multiplied by being set to the score of "God Only Knows" by the Beach Boys.
After one of the many times I watched this film's ending through tears, I finally had had enough and needed to look up who wrote this closing, literally perfect song. And I learned about the Beach Boys and their album Pet Sounds, where "God Only Knows" resides.
The lore is out there to find easily. I don't feel like I need to go deep into it here. The album is greatly heralded, basically universally. Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' chief songwriter, was moved to attempt writing it after hearing the advances of the Beatles' Rubber Soul album. He not only surpassed Rubber Soul but has also spent every subsequent moment of his life trying to equal Pet Sounds himself.
Some funny little tidbits stick out though. By the time of the Pet Sounds album (released 1966), Brian Wilson had long since stopped letting his bandmates actually take part in album recording. Instead, he hired ace session musicians to execute his compositions, then left it to the Beach Boys (sans him) to replicate these things in concert. But for Pet Sounds, he went one further and hired a renowned ad man to be his lyricist. He essentially went out and got Don Draper to fashion the most lethal word-bombs possible to convey/overlay his musical concepts. This is simultaneously inspired and insidious.
So let's not forget what this means: "God Only Knows," the most sublime pop musical statement on divine intentionality and the feeling of helplessness in the face of the happenstance of love, was dreamed up by a guy who spent most of his time trying to convince women to buy Max Factor cosmetics. Are we being inspired or played? Is this the nature of prophecy in the first place? What is great art but prophecy designed to mystify us to our own enjoyment?
Apparently the lyrics were written in under an hour too. Approximately the length of a marketing board room meeting. We are being played. But sorry, it works.
It works because every note Brian Wilson designed around this poison little word-pill redeems absolutely everything. The music is the prism, the spiritual rendering software, the dimensional portal that converts the dark energy of the ad man's emotional manipulation into good faith.
In some previous entries, I've spent lengthy passages praising and dissecting instrumentation. There is a good chance every one of these previous songs owe their ideas about instrumentation to the Pet Sounds album, possibly this song in particular. This is the Ur source of pop/rock complex instrumentation. Phil Spector had his wall of sound, but that's what it was - a wall. Brian Wilson orchestrated his instrumentation to achieve true interaction and counterpoint between all the players. It's not about all blasting at once. There are sectional intricacies here.
We have the rock band: Bass, drums, and I assume some guitar back there somewhere.
We have the "orchestra": French horn, harpsichord, accordion, sleigh bells, tambourine, viola, cello, flutes.
We have the voices: Carl Wilson's lead, plus so, so, so many more in harmonies that God only knows.
It is hard to overstate how perfectly these elements have been put together for texture, timbre, space versus crowding, dynamics, tension, beauty, and meaning.
It is hard to overstate the harmonic potency of this song. This is also well-documented, but the chord progression fails to truly resolve. Each change moves along to another theoretically correct position but that is followed by just another, excellently, without setting down on the resolving chord. Pro-jock critics have postulated plenty about how this leaves a central uneasiness at the core of this song, just as the lyrics are also filled with this unease about the twin uncertainties of how one would carry on without someone so important in their lives and what force brings us into these relationships in the first place - and is it benevolent or malevolent?
All that is great. The chord progression is truly one of the most satisfying series of harmonies you can ever hear. It makes the wistfulness and earnestness of the song palpable.
Within the chord harmonies, the melodies performed by all the instruments and band are each, on their own, independently staggering. The main vocal is unforgettable but also negotiates all those chord changes like there was only one path to take from the get-go. That, of course, is an illusion. Brian Wilson labored and tired and labored some more to provide the line its seemingly inexorable way. He spent just as much life force on those French horn cues, flute trills, and all the rest; and not only their individual beauty but the relationships they share with each other as the song elapses.
That was all not even mentioning the vocal harmony sections in the middle and ending of the song, upon which the real reputation of this song rests.
Paul McCartney has called "God Only Knows" the most beautiful song ever written. Ever! How much must it hurt to admit this, as the Beach Boys' chief rival and a musician himself obsessed with writing beautiful songs?
The Beatles wrote ingenious music. They did nothing approaching the gossamer elegance of "God Only Knows."
The Beatles dealt with insightful, impactful ideas. There is no song they wrote that I can hear and actually forgive close people in my life over the course of one play-through.
This song did more than take an ad-man's manipulation and redeem it into good faith. This song can redeem relationships.
It is a miracle.
