Genius at Work

True genius knows no bounds.


The title of this post is "Genius at Work", and it in no way reflects the author, but people the author considers genius.

There's something about people that produce great things (whether they be works of art, music, literature, etc.) that I find completely compelling. In fact, I have no problem DVR-ing an hour-long documentary about the making of the Sydney Opera House (Jorn Utzen you clever bastard!) or full length features on the evolution of 8-track recording (about that rapscallion Tom Dowd, see "Tom Dowd and the Language of Music") or the making of Duran Duran's Rio on VH1 Classic.


Duran Duran: Genius comes a-yachtin'.

What intrigues me about these endeavors is the process involved. We look at something like the finished product of the Sydney Opera House, for example, and we see a cool looking building with some spheres and cones and shit. Pretty sweet. But what's more interesting to me, is how in the hell:

1. They came to that design.
2. They actually made it!


The Sydney Opera House, which its architect has never seen in person.

I think we take for granted the process of execution when we see the finished product. I don't have to be a world-famous (or relatively obscure) architect to appreciate how f***in' hard it must have been to create those spheres out of concrete, put them up, and make sure the building didn't crash down around them!

So, yeah, I'd say that's pretty genius. Now, that's genius by committee, but still pretty bad ass.

The same can be said for the way I approach music. Now, this is not to say that all musical endeavors are genius (see Michael Bolton, The Jonas Brothers, and Soulja Boy), but there are some that certainly are.

To wit:
"Wouldn't It Be Nice" by The Beach Boys.

	BEACH BOYS - 01 - Wouldn t It Be Nice .mp3
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

Now, it seems rather innocuous on its surface, as a lot of Beach Boys' songs do, but I ran across this, and it helped further embed Brian Wilson as a genius of popular music and music production. Take a look:



Listening to Brian Wilson direct that assemblage of studio musicians (that's the "Wrecking Crew" who played on just about every song that came out of LA in the 60s/70s) I am blown away at how he can put those layers together.
Keep in mind that this is also 1966. At most they had 8 tracks (if Tommy Dowd was there, see supra note), but they probably had 4. So, they had to have all the music played live, no room for overdubs, no individual tracks to punch in and out of, and according to [*ahem*] Wikipedia, it only took 21 takes...pretty amazing. Then you've got the tight harmonies of the vocals, that blend with that overall production. It really is amazing (and this is before The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper, too, an album that everyone tried to replicate once it came out in 1967...yet that album and Pet Sounds, from which "Wouldn't It Be Nice" comes, sound like peers).

My appreciation for it skyrocketed once I saw/heard the process of recording. There is so much value to the end product that is not seen because the end product is so good! The process is invisible, and you're left with a work of art. Also, I find this stuff incredibly interesting. To see Brian Wilson's process is to peer inside of his creative mind a bit. Obviously, he's not the best communicator, but the ends justify the means here, for sure.

I also think the construction of the song itself is pretty genius. To me, as is said in that short tube YouTube documentary above, it's "a happy song about not getting what you want". That's pretty apt. And pretty genius. Brian Wilson wrote a song that could come across happy, and yet be pretty depressing when you look at it through that lens.


Robert Smith of The Cure did not invent 'happy to be sad', after all.

That's how I've always viewed the song. Though, in my frame of reference, I don't even think it's all that happy.

Wouldn't it be nice if we were older, then we wouldn't have to wait so long,
And wouldn't it be nice to live together, in the kind of world where we belong?

That's not really that "happy" of a sentiment, you know? It's framed by the "Wouldn't it", which really makes it a song that laments the current state of the singer, while couching it within an upbeat context. He's saying, it's not great or nice right now, but wouldn't it be if the following things happened? Really, it's no different than the lamentations of say, "Somewhere Over The Rainbow", "I'll Follow the Sun" by The Beatles, or "I Wish" by Skee-Lo.


Skee-Lo probably wishes he had 8 'D' batteries.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could wake up, in the morning when the day is new,
And after having spent the day together, hold each other close the whole night through?

Ouch. That right there is heart-wrenching, isn't it? I mean, if you've ever loved and lost (author's note: check that box, 'yes'), then this is a kick-in-the-stomach kind of line. When you find yourself in that category of people then that's how you feel: it would be nice to do those things, but they are past. So this can also be read as a lamentation of the past, when things were better, and you wish you could return to them (see also, "I Wish" by Stevie Wonder, and "Glory Days" by Bruce Springstein). And yet the music remains pretty happy throughout. Damn you Wilson!


5 out of 5 experts agree: getting dumped feels like this.

Maybe if we think and wish and hope and pray it might come true,
Baby then there wouldn't be a single thing we couldn't do
We could be married
And then we'd be happy

Wouldn't it be nice?

Again, taken from the perspective of the singer that wants these things but can't have them, or has lost them along the way, this takes us further down the spiral of depression. He says "maybe if we wish and think and hope and pray"...so he's trying to be positive about the possibility of all these future things out of reach that might make him happy, yet he really can't bet on it. How true is that, Brian Wilson?

And again, it closes out with "wouldn't it be nice", which is a question, not an answer to all the problems the singer has presented us with throughout the song. Does the person he's singing about know he feels this way? Does that person want these things, too? Does the singer even want them, or is it just a comfortable nostalgia for a relationship that never was? At the end of the song, there isn't an answer to Brian Wilson's question; we don't know if it "would be nice". We think it would, but instead of answering definitively, he just lets it linger.

I'd call that genius.

Further proof of the powerful juxtapositioning this song can provide can be seen in Michael Moore's film, Roger & Me, a fantastic little piece about my depressing hometown of Flint, Michigan. Seen in the clip below is Ben Hamper, an auto worker who had a bit of nervous breakdown the day he lost his job and heard "Wouldn't It Be Nice" on the radio on the way home. He recounts a bit of the story below, and then Moore uses that to jump into a montage about the Flint of 1985. Check it out:



So, yeah, that's kind of what the song embodies for me, too: a lost ideal that we will still hold on to, even when everything around us begs us to question the ideal's very existence. But for me, I believe it does exist - and it would be nice.

Genius.