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By all accounts, Brian Wilson was a genius.
Fellow greats Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney both used the word in their tributes to the creative force behind the Beach Boys, who died this week aged 82.
So did John Cale, Mick Fleetwood and Elton John. And so did his bandmates, who wrote in a joint statement that “the world mourns a genius today”.
You may imagine Wilson gradually accrued such a vaunted standing. Artistic legacy is largely dependent on the longevity of mass appeal, and the fact that the Beach Boys’ opus Pet Sounds remains one of the most celebrated and beloved records of all time almost 60 years since its release is proof enough of his incredible talent.
Wilson’s claim to genius status began with a 1966 PR campaign masterminded by ex-Beatles publicist Derek Taylor.
Fortunately, Wilson’s output justified it, and after spreading like wildfire through the British music press, the “Brian Wilson is a genius” rhetoric quickly caught on “especially with the UK public”, says Wilson’s biographer, David Leaf. It has been the consensus ever since.
Do we just imagine musical geniuses are anointed in retrospect because we no longer have any?
It is extremely difficult to argue that any artist of the last 30 years has reached the trailblazing standard of Wilson, Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell and David Bowie.
The remaining members of those acts are all over 80 (with the sole exception of Ronnie Wood at 78); Stevie Wonder is 75, Brian Eno is 77, Ralf Hütter, the surviving founder of Kraftwerk, is 78.
The most recent claimants to the musical genius title are generally considered to be Michael Jackson and Prince, both of whom died relatively young. Soon, the very idea of a living legend will be a thing of the past.
In pop music, which reveres the new, genius is synonymous with innovation.
Obviously, it is no coincidence that all of our unique and innovative musical minds were of a similar generation, starting work in the 1970s – at the very latest – when all the new drum, guitar and keyboard sounds and most resonant, memorable melodies were there for the taking. Such was the virgin territory before them, the Beach Boys even had the opportunity to sonically codify California, one of the most culturally significant places on the planet.
“I guess I just wasn’t made for these times,” Wilson once sang. But if he hadn’t been operating in those lonely years, would he have even been considered a genius at all?
What is also quite clear is that musical progress didn’t abruptly end half a century ago. There is still as-yet-unheard music to be made – and made it is, all the time. Generic fusions, formal variations and experimental production techniques are not infinite, but they are definitely not exhausted, and some have even coalesced into era-defining movements, as 21st-century genres such as grime, trap and hyperpop prove.
Adele, Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift – inoffensively palatable
Some genres – including grime, which can be convincingly traced back to the British producer Wiley and his turn-of-the-millennium experiments; and hyperpop, the brainchild of London producer AG Cook and his PC Music collective – even have specific originators. Yet they still haven’t produced any bona fide musical geniuses.
First: the entirely explicable part. The demise of the monoculture – due to technology’s fracturing of the media and cultural landscape – means only the most aggressively mainstream and inoffensively palatable acts (Adele, Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift) are able to command the same level of fame and musical familiarity as their 1960s counterparts.
Meanwhile, invention has remained staunchly at the cultural fringes – and if it does get anywhere near the zeitgeist, the journey is leisurely.
Grime took off a full decade after its creation, thanks to Skepta and Stormzy; so did hyperpop, which reached the masses last summer in the guise of Charli xcx’s Brat.
This is another reason why musical genius is so thin on the ground: the people who do the actual innovating rarely end up in the spotlight themselves.
This seems especially slow in compared with the 1960s; it is impossible to separate personal achievement from the decade’s goldrush – a manic crusade to push pop and rock to its absolute limits.
The famous rivalry between Wilson and the Beatles – healthy competition for the latter, says Leaf, if not so much for the former – accelerated progress and incentivised change. The pressure is also thought to have contributed to the decline in Wilson’s mental health later in the decade.
But then comes the more mysterious part. What is so astonishing about Wilson is how many different groundbreaking things he did simultaneously.
In the studio, “he was inventing a new way of making popular music,” Leaf says. “What he called modular recording – recording bits and pieces of a song and then piecing it together.” He also pioneered the idea of one person helming all elements of a recorded song: composition, arrangement, performance, mixing, production. On top of that, he did something lyrically radical. He transformed pop into an “emotional autobiography,” says Leaf.
“He was determined to put his feelings on to the recording tape and share it with the world,” Leaf adds, which was at that time very much not the norm. Many of pop’s canonical artists were similar: Dylan didn’t just single-handedly make popular music a vessel for poetry, he also infused it with an all new attitude and emotional palette (cynicism, disgust, rebellion), while conflating his previous folk fare with rock to create an entirely new sound.
Dylan’s decision to go electric has become emblematic of the musical genius’s requirement to shock. Even Pet Sounds, an onslaught of loveliness, disturbed the band’s record label with its leaps of progress, says Leaf.
Pop, sex and violence
Nowadays pop music is only really controversial where it overlaps with sex and violence; it is practically impossible to sonically surprise the listening public.
The prospect of the end of musical innovation is something students and lovers of guitar music have already had to make peace with – at this point nostalgia is inherent to the genre. “I’m aware it’s impossible to make genuinely new, novel guitar music, and so I tend to lean into anachronism,” is how Owen Williams, frontman of my new favourite old-sounding band, the Tubs, once put it.
Just as selling out became a respected career move, explicit derivation is now an artform in itself; in recent years Beyoncé has stayed at the forefront of pop by essentially becoming a kind of musical historian.
There is one thing that does feel jarring about the slowed pace of musical progress. Technological advancement has always been woven into sonic novelty – the advent of synths (which Wilson also anticipated), for example, or sampling. Considering technology has accelerated in unimaginable, terrifying ways over the past 20 years, you’d think that might be reflected in the pop zeitgeist.
Instead, we have a chart stuffed with tracks that could have essentially been made at any point in the past 50 years. Perhaps the late 20th century – and particularly the 1960s – created a sort of natural selection of music: we found the combinations of notes and rhythms that appealed most to the western human ear and that is what we have continued to rehash.
AI to the rescue?
Surely, then, this is a problem artificial intelligence may be able to solve. This is technology determined to get to know us more intimately than we know ourselves – what better way to continue the quest for novel pop perfection that Wilson embarked on 60 years ago? In theory, it could supplant human creativity.
In actuality, AI is unlikely to wrest control of pop’s soul from humans. That’s because musical innovation, and even catchy melodies, have ceded importance to the branding of people. If Swift’s gargantuan success is anything to go by – which it probably is – pop’s future depends on the carefully honed appeal of an individual human personalities, not what they can do on a keyboard (the musical kind).
Swift’s approach to her public image and the music business in general is groundbreaking in its own way, even if her music isn’t. We will be mourning her as a cultural figure at some point, but a musical genius – that would take some real cognitive dissonance. It seems unlikely we will do so with anyone by the end of this century; we have no currently minted visionaries, although time will tell if anyone retroactively earns the title. What is certain is that as the pop canon continues to splinter into thousands of smaller, personal rosters, we will be losing musicians who mean everything to some people, but not – like Wilson – something to almost everyone.
