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January 23, 2004
I see that Brian Wilson, the former Beach Boy, is going to present his long lost Smile album live at the Royal Festival Hall in the South Bank Centre in London.
It would be great to hear the intertextual exploration of the fragments of the diverse landscape of pop music 40 years on. Smile was to be an album constructed from fragments of different kinds of American folk/pop music.
 It was worked on during 1966 and '67. It would have been more along the lines of Pet Sounds, but moved beyond the lived experience of boy/girl relationships to an expression of social criticism and the sacred.
Smile Links.
Though a product of the culture industry, Smile was to have been an experimental artist pop album, not a commercial one to keep the band financially alive. It would have been difficult for the rest of the band to go out night after night and perform such complex songs on the road. But that is art not commerce. The rest of the band was into commerce.
Here is a link to the songs on the album.
Pet Sounds had said goodbye to the fun-in-the-sun from the surfing Doris Days, who so longed to be accepted as hip. Smile was the Beach Boys attempt to move beyond the Californian hedonism of cars, surf and girls in an endless summer by creating teenage symphonies to God.
The suburban Californian dream was over.
There is an aura around this never completed album. Smile is now enveloped in myth. But Smile had already been enveloped in the myth of Brian Wilson as the romantic musical genius. Many fans see him as akin to a demigod rather than original, despite Wilson's well-known history as a fallible human being with a neurotic and damaged personality.
In Aesthetic Theory Adorno oberves that:
"Though subjectivity is a necessary conditon of the work of art, it is not by itself an aesthetic quality. It does become one, though, as a result of objectification....Works of art are their own standard of judgement." (p.243)
Adorno goes on to say that what:
"What is wrong with the aesthetics of genius is that it denies the importance of the moment of making or fabrication (techne) overemphasizing the aspect of art's absolutely primordial status and viewing art as natura naturans. In doing so it helped foster the misconception of the organic, unconscious nature of art which eventually emptied into the murky stream of irrationalism."
With Brian Wilson it is important to focus on the fabrication of Smile as an artwork.
Adorno does qualify this throwing out the category of genius as a residue of romanticism. He says:
"The concept of genius has an element of truth. It can be found in the art object, more specifically in the openness of that object rather than in what is trapped in it and what can reiterated.....The redeeming feature of genius is its subservience to a work of art. We might rightly speak of a passage in a work as being ingenious when the term 'fantasy' does not adequately describe what is present. The ingenious is the dialectical knot signifying the presence of the unstencilled, the unrepeated, the free----in the midst of a sense of necessity."
We should concentrate on Smile as an artwork and les on Brian Wilson as a tortured romantic genius.
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