The Beach Boys: Both Timeless and Not


In September of 1964, the Beach Boys appeared for the first time on The Ed Sullivan Show. In their matching striped shirts, they looked as innocent as their music sounded, and their faces reflected awe at a future full of possibility. Smiling and bobbing along to the beat, they played “I Get Around.” It was the height of Beatlemania, but it was that song—their song—that was number one. The band exported their trademark sunshine pop around the world: in the mid-Sixties, they toured Australia, Europe, and Japan. Despite the endless adolescence they sang about onstage—cars! girls! surfing!—backstage, the veneer of innocence had cracked. They did drugs and fought with each other. They slept with prostitutes and left boyhood behind.

In 1965, Brian Wilson, the band’s musical mastermind, took a break from touring with the goal of producing the greatest rock and roll album of all time: Pet Sounds. This was an inflection point, when the music of the Beach Boys began to mature under Wilson’s genius direction. Last month, almost exactly 52 years after that first Ed Sullivan appearance, Brian Wilson shuffled onto the stage of Charlotte’s Belk Theater to perform Pet Sounds in its entirety. Wilson’s current tour celebrates the 50th anniversary of the record’s release and features fellow Beach Boys, Al Jardine and Blondie Chaplin, as well as Jardine’s son, Matt, and a band. In an interview with NPR, band member Probyn Gregory described his initial reaction to Pet Sounds: “It was like he made manifest in an audio fashion what it was like to go from a teenage boy into a man. That’s part of what Pet Sounds is really about.”

Much of the beauty of the band’s early music is that the nostalgia doesn’t rely on real memory: You’ll be transported to a more innocent time anyway, whether it’s your first or fiftieth time listening to it. That’s what was so appealing about the Beach Boys in the Sixties—a decade of unrest and uncertainty—and that’s what remains so appealing, so fundamentally American, about the Beach Boys today.

Time is insidious, though, and Brian Wilson’s voice is no longer what it was. As he walked offstage for breaks during the performance, a crew member stepped out of the wings to support him as he stepped over the cords lining the stage. The crowd was not all, but mostly Baby Boomers. As Wilson played the opening chords to “God Only Knows” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” the crowd seemed palpably aware of being in the presence of a legend, a giant in the landscape of American music. But the Pet Sounds lyrics juxtaposed with his singing them was jarring: Brian Wilson was 17 going on 75. Here was a man who had seen the deaths of both of his younger brothers, had suffered crisis after crisis, singing the songs of a time when all of that was unknowable. Life seemed suddenly so short, the workings of time suddenly laid bare.

But then, after the Pet Sounds part of the concert ended with the haunting and wistful closing notes of “Caroline, No,” the band finished the performance by playing some of their earliest hits. “We’re both 74,” Al Jardine quipped near the beginning of the show. “But we’re still the Beach Boys.” And they were. “Barbara Ann” and “Help Me, Rhonda” filled the room, and all of the sudden, we were no longer in the staid and elegant Belk Theater. We were together in some beautiful elsewhere, full of hope and innocence. We were right there with Brian Wilson on the Ed Sullivan stage, basking in a future as bright as the California sun.

Spanish Practice


Al amanecer, el mundo cantará de nuevo,

con una voz distante, acercando—

en la cima de las mareas

debajo del batir de las alas de golondrinas,

en un susurro, la voz serpenteará entre los juncos

con el viento, armonizando.

El mundo gira como un disco

bajo la aguja de tiempo.

Pero aquí, bañados en la luz lechosa de la luna,

existimos entre canciones,

en un silencio con arañazos.

The Metaphysics of Wanting It All

In which I speculate about things much, much beyond the limits of my understanding.

In the multiverse, all things are true. Every possibility will happen, is happening, has already happened. In the blear of unreality following a nap, I want it all: I want to live in Charlotte and simultaneously live in Atlanta, in London, in Montevideo. I want to stay close to my family and simultaneously exist at the edges of the Earth, beyond reach. I want my relationship to last forever and simultaneously want a thousand other relationships. I want to inhabit the me of this universe and many others.

Schopenhauer theorized that the sum of the world’s phenomena is the product of a single metaphysical will. Universal principles of time and space don’t necessarily apply to other universes in the multiverse: It would be impossible to translate your consciousness from one to another. You couldn’t visit another universe; you couldn’t send a postcard back. Would Schopenhauer’s metaphysical will, unconscious and unseeing, extend across the otherwise uncrossable frontiers between universes? Are the universes themselves, with all their diverse phenomena, representations of the same will?

Thunder shakes the bed. Warm under the duvet, I wonder what it would mean to consciously inhabit the will of the multiverse, to be aware of every possibility unfolding at once. It’s impossible, even theoretically—an untenable recursive loop of will and consciousness. But in the melancholy late afternoon light, I unspool the impossibility.

I imagine a glimpse of the infinite being immediately lethal. Would it be worth the moment that kills you? The pain, the pleasure, the resulting, simultaneous insanity seems too much for any consciousness to contain. It’s hard to imagine being able to maintain both omniscience and existence. When confronted with omniscience, the existence must necessarily end, making omniscience an impossible state. But if one were the will, inseparable from the phenomena of the multiverse, ceasing to exist would mean everything else ceasing to exist, too. To know the infinite for an immeasurable moment would mean the end of it all.

The knowledge would be worthless. An unfathomable number of worlds would collapse into nothingness. Every conceivable and inconceivable possibility would become suddenly fruitless, and every barren universe would shrink out of existence, the last manifestation of a dying will. The absence of what was would converge to the size of a proton, containing infinite heat and mass—the raw debris of everything that could have been and, with enough energy, the raw materials of everything that could possibly be.