#I’ve just loved this song forever it’s a kind of silly kind of transcendent emotional rollercoaster

[judasisgayriot]

I’m sure I posted the same thing back in s1, but Mika did this for the good omens girlies fr

[d-debased]

chapter 2: when i was a monster

An excerpt from “Debaser: The Life & Times of D Debased (An Oral History)”  

Morrisey: “We had been invited to a club - somewhere in LA, I forget the name. Very exclusive. D was adamant that I’d be there. I mean, verging on desperate. We had a session booked at Sound City for the following day. I show up to the club and I’m not on the guestlist. And so I stand outside - in the impossibly long line-up - like an asshole. I’ve nearly given up, when I look up to the balcony - and there he is - smiling, very pleased with himself. Decidedly making eye contact with me, and he mouths ‘fuck you Morrisey.’ Then disappears. Obviously he never showed up for the recording session.” 

David Bowie: “It’s cliche of course, but fame destroys. It’s destroyed so many. And precious few are aware of it while it’s happening. Until it’s too late. Brian Jones, Amy Winehouse, Jim Morrison, those silly twats from the Backstreet Boys, most of whom are in rehab now - no one’s immune. Some are more susceptible than others. But D was an anomaly. Fame didn’t destroy him - he destroyed the very notion of fame.” 

Leonardo DiCaprio: “It started around the time ‘Almost Beautiful’ came out (D’s most celebrated acting role, 1998). ‘The emotional impact of James Dean & the virtuosity of Marlon Brando’ - that’s what they were saying about him. Before this film came out… everyone thought he was a washed up former child star - you know, dragging around a bruised ego and expensive prescription pill habits. Now he was an A-list actor - overnight. And imagine how he must’ve felt. Fuck all of you! And he didn’t hide the fact that he considered himself among the greatest actors of all time. At the age of 22, no less. We were close. But after ‘Almost Beautiful’ I never heard from him again. And no one saw it coming - he walked away from acting forever.”

Winona Ryder: “He loved Kerouac. Worshipped him. He wanted to create an idea of himself that was larger than life. He always told me that - ‘my life must be larger than life.’ We dated for a while, but he was too out of control to really commit to anything. This was right when music became consuming for him. His Brian Wilson period.”

Courtney Love: “D Debased, against all better judgement, decided that he was a rock star and not an actor. And that he didn’t really need to try - it would just happen. We were friends-of-friends through Sandra (Bernhard) - anyone in LA or New York who was up to no good in the late 90s knew D. He played me some demos. They sounded like shit, in terms of fidelity.. But they were amazing. And he knew it. Kind of a Daniel Johnston aesthetic, but the songs had fucking Bruce Springsteen-sized emotions - and ambition. And they were as good as any Springsteen songs”

Kim Deal: “I played on some of the early demos. One night he told me ‘The Pixies had a couple good songs. But isn’t it crazy how I’ve transcended their entire body of work in a week of barely trying?’”

Mary Timony: “I remember that. It was a sincere comment, too. Like not a hint of irony.”

Kim Deal: “And then he was quick to add, “No offense or anything. You played bass with them for an album, right?”

D: “I was Kerouac for a few years. It was all very uncreative. Dressing up pointless hedonism as though it were something meaningful, artful. It was all very selfish. And unimaginative. Jack Kerouac died a sad alcoholic living in his mother’s place. That’s what I’d modeled my career on up to that point. I could do much better than that.”

Bowie: “Fame made him a monster, and he didn’t deny it. He didn’t run from it. He embraced it. And, very consciously - unapologetically - he became the anti-Christ, the embodiment of the most vulgar qualities of celebrity. All of the descriptors that a celebrity fears most - out of touch, narcissistic, deluded, bloated, egomaniacal - he personified these things. Very enthusiastically. And for a while it seemed like he was in control of the narrative.”

Tom Waits: “I was there at Sound City while D was… whatever he was doing there, I’m not sure what that was exactly. He was charming - in a way he didn’t mean to be. I’ve never met anyone so aware of how offensive they’re behaving yet... comfortable, totally comfortable in that role. He asked me at what point it occurred to me that I’d transitioned from cultural icon to pathetic cliché - and how was I managing that? Very earnestly - as a matter of fact. No trace of malice. He was a stranger, and I was more devastated by that 5 minute exchange than by anything anyone has told me since.” 

Scott Weiland: “He called me up one night, this is the early days of Velvet Revolver - I’d sent him the demos for our first record, expecting some light praise. Nope. D lectured me on why my album was the worst piece of shit ever made. For an hour. He’d prepared notes on each song. It was surreal. This all coming from a former child actor who’d never picked up an instrument in his life.”

Bowie: “Yes, the legendary ‘98 sessions. Our record label executives had finalized what was to be a simply massive collaboration between D and I. Mostly I was confused, but I suppose it was a bid for relevancy at this stage in my career, which seemed wise at the time.” 

Rob Zombie: “We were doing very bad things one night in 98, maybe 99. All night, at this scummy hotel on Sunset. He told me he had Bowie at the studio but didn’t think he’d bother making it that day. Obviously I thought he was full of shit.”

Bowie: “We had 5 days booked. He showed up on day 2 - fucked out of his head - demanding that I dress up in the Labyrinth suit before we sat down to write. He kept saying ‘Bowie, we need to see your package. Let’s see that package! Dance Magic Package!’ It was so beyond disrespectful. I almost found it endearing. He was clearly just a monster of a human being at this point - out of control, utterly debased. But, oddly, in control. Spiralling but fully in control.”

D: “I was a high functioning fuck-up. For a while I pulled it off. And then I didn’t.”

Chloe Sevigny: “Hideous people. He surrounded himself with hideous people. He was Kerouac and Styles Immaculate - sycophantic little rat - was his Neil Cassidy. And if you’ve read On the Road then you know how highly they valued the women around them.” 

Courtney Love: “His entourage was just pure evil. Like the worst people on the planet, with D as their center of gravity. D made Bobby Brown’s crew seem like mormons.” 

Lindsay Lohan: “Our history is well documented. I have no comment.”

Corey Feldman: “We were best friends for a number of years. Then he stopped returning my calls. Vanished. I saw him at the Viper Room a few months later and - it still seems surreal - I walk up to him and he pretends he’s never met me. I pleaded with him. It got ugly. I couldn’t believe he would pull this shit. They kicked me out of the club, and I know why. I should mention in the span of those few months we went from two former child stars to one former child star and one superstar who’d just achieved massive success. Coincidence? He left me for dead.” 

Styles Immaculate: “The more shameless and evil he became… you’d think it would turn people off. But they wanted more. They loved the abuse. Everyone, me included”

Whitney Houston: “We frequented the same clubs for a year or two. He came on too strong, and I felt embarrassed for him. But he certainly wasn’t embarrassed. The way he treated the people around him… it was shocking. But they adored him for it. It was a cult. We started spending more time together - intimately. I really can’t explain it.”

----

D: “So many of us are secretly hoping, waiting for the apocalypse. I grew impatient. I made it a reality for myself.”

Jodie Sweetin: “I was there when there right around the time the clubs turned into meth dens. He was living a double life. And no one knew. We lived in a bombed out hotel - Sunset Pacific Hotel - for probably two months. You didn’t have to wait til night time there - it was 24 hours non-stop all the time. That hotel ruined my life. You’d think it would ruin D’s too, but somehow he came out of it unscathed. And then… well everyone knows what happened next. He was bigger than God.”

D: “They want you to die young. So they can hold you in time forever. You’re a projection, an impossible ideal. If you stick around too long you become human. And no one’s interested in that. I refused to die young. And they hated me for it.”    

[redscullyrevival]

Take You There: Vid Notes

This here post will mostly focus on inspiration, the process, and some technical stuff for my vid Revolutionary Girl Utena “Take You There”. 

‘Cause I’ll tell ya what; I may have spent months working on this dumb thing but in a years time I will absolutely be like “LOL why’d I do that?”

I don’t even know where to begin talking about how I got to where this vid ended up. It’s a messy ball of so many things. 

Finding a song was not even remotely difficult thanks to Mr. Baz Luhrmann. Dude always pulls through with soundtracks that I’m cool listening to for a full year non-stop every single time and The Get Down has been no exception.

Miguel’s “Cadillac” is a sampled and refitted version of Hot Chocolate’s “Heaven’s in the Backseat of my Cadillac” and is a complete euphonious joy. But while the lyrics are good for an amused chuckle thanks to the creepy car obsessed Akio Ohtori, they weren’t exactly enough of a pull to justify the amount of work required for the vid. Five minutes and fifteen seconds in life is nothing, but as far as a song goes it’s on the longer side of pop and in the vidding world it’s a goddamn eternity - and that’s after I had edited it down some.

The real reason I even bothered with this monster of a song is for it’s ending, which is jazzy, breezy, and just a little bit sad. I figured the later half of the song was were I’d put my vid’s soul. I, uhh, have no idea if I’ve actually pulled such a thing off mind you, but that’s expected.

For those of you who don’t fan vid, here is the thing: Eventually you get to a point of no longer being able to discern if what you’re toiling for is any good - which is horrifying but that’s just what working on a lengthy long term project is like a lot of the time. Your enthusiasm winds down and you enter the chasm, which is when you have to trust that your idea is solid enough to pull you through your own disassociation with having heard the same song and seen the same images so many times they no longer hold any meaning.

Going in I knew that hallow chasm feeling was going to be the hardest part (I’m an idiot who picked a five minute song after all) so I outlined the shit out of what I wanted to do. When in doubt, when lost, I’d consult my outline and notes. I even took extreme measures and only ripped the first few episodes and then the Akio and Apocalypse Arcs of the show. I didn’t want to be tempted to dive off from the planned idea and waste time combing footage (I already have to fight for editing time as it is). And that pained me and scared me. Having limited footage meant I needed to really prioritize and focus. Ugh, ew.     

My biggest visual inspiration are those old VHS recordings of the Revolutionary Girl Utena musicals. Back in the days before youtube the best most of us could hope for peaking a glimpse at the stage productions was to wait a full day on dail-up downloading a horrible quality clip from a fan site. The humor of using all that new technology for mere glimpses of grainy off tracking glory wasn’t lost on me back then and once I ripped my beautiful limited edition DVDs I slowly became convinced the best idea I’ve ever had would be to take this pristine cleaned up footage, to make the best I’ve ever seen Utena look (until those blurays are mine anyways!) and drag it back down to fuck-all quality.   

I stand by that choice but like many of my best ideas it was also kinda dumb. The process of making “from scratch” effects in adobe premiere pro is a doozy and I know from experience that that’s why Sony Vegas has such a following; it’s presets aren’t total shit.

But, eh, what can I say? Getting the footage to look how I wanted wasn’t hard necessarily, just a time consuming vacuum that created a rendering hellscape! 

The majority of my footage has been adjusted to look “old”. Overlaying tracking footage onto images does not give an accurate feeling of “old”, what it does is make nice footage look like it has bad tracking on top of it. As such, the entire video has had a noise overlay added to it (in varying degrees of grainy, as needed) and the overwhelming majority of my used clips have been ‘adjusted’. 

A quick rundown for posterity’s sake: I had to copy a clip three times and with each copy assign a RGB value, blend them together, then adjust the most bottom, the original clip, to be larger than those above it - a simple but somewhat tedious method of giving footage a saturated, worn, slightly off look. 

The next big thing was to overlay that sweet, sweet tracking footage. Big thanks to the weirdos out there who are sharing blank footage of VHS players being shit. Love you guys. The easy thing would have been to simply overlay tracking footage in it’s entirety and let it be but I’m controlling as all hell and had in mind specific tracking visuals for every damn use I had for tracking. So, I amassed a sturdy collection of tracking footage and combed through them marking which squiggles and wiggles I liked best then found homes for them peppered throughout my vid. Yikes Scoob!

This vid took me a little over five months to complete from planing to final edit and in the end I’m pretty… Honestly, I’m pretty ambivalent about it. Mostly I feel kinda exposed. Again, this isn’t like the vids I’ve shared in the past, this is a lot more like the editing stuff I do for my eyes only and the natural feeling of showing others that is kind of weird? I feel weird. I like what I’ve done, I’ve gotten as close to replicating my idea as best to my ability (sans the instances of footage I made up in my head to fit my vid - the forever dilemma) but I don’t think it’s particularity what-people-want-from-Utena a lot of the time? So why am I even sharing it? Le sigh.

Basically, I’m having a lot of doubt and I’m hoping that has more to do with me feeling uncomfortable putting something so full of ME out there and not because I’ve actually made something shit. And, of course, some overall massive overthinking.

My thematic goal was to try and simultaneously capture both the goofy and emotional side of Utena - which in reality are one and the same. The general over-the-top-ness of Revolutionary Girl Utena isn’t a up and down experience traveling hills of emotion down into zany valleys; it is an all around extremely level experiment in information totality, with the absurd meaning just as much as the emotional. 

I like to think I’ve pulled off my silly song choice hitting emotional home runs. A very Utena-like goal. 

BORING TECHNICAL STUFF: Footage - Ripped from Nozomi’s Limited Edition DVD release of Revolutionary Girl Utena (plus a few sneaky shots from Adolescence of Utena)  Original Footage Dimensions - 1440x1080; beautiful and transcendent  tumblr Dimensions - Who the fuck knows; eyeball garbage Audio - "Cadillac" by Miguel (from The Get Down soundtrack Part I) Completion Time - Five-ish months

[raisingsupergirl]

An Unpleasant Fiction: Writing a Goodbye Letter to My Daughters

"Winning the argument doesn't always mean winning the person," my pastor said a few weeks ago, and the sentiments have stuck with me. No, they reawakened something within me. In college, I often asserted that I would give up my life if it was necessary to bring one person to Christ. Some friends didn't believe me, but I meant it, because I held the Great Commandment and the Great Commission close to my heart. I knew that it was our job, as Christians, to save souls, not lives. It's counter cultural. It's counter intuitive. And it's something I haven't really thought about since my first child was born. But recently, the constant debate and contention in the world have dug this idea back up within me and forced me to deal with it. Am I willing to back down from arguments that I strongly believe in if I can see that I may be winning the battle but not the war? Am I willing to lose the argument to win the person? Do I hold others' souls higher than my own ego, self-satisfaction, and personal plans? And if so, do I still hold those souls higher than my own life? 

And... despite the fact that I'm not perfect, that I don't stop and create relationships with homeless individuals or go on mission trips to Africa... I still like to think that if the hard decision met me face-to-face, I would have the strength to make that sacrifice. Imagining my little girls growing up without their daddy makes me nauseous. Leaving my wife to raise them without her husband makes me sick. But the idea of living out my life at the expense of someone else's soul is impossible to rectify. And so, I've decided to do something hard this week. Something that makes me anxious to think about. I've written a goodbye letter to my daughters in the specific case that I would have to leave them to save someone else. Maybe you think it’s silly. Maybe you think it’s going too far. But it's something that needs to be done, mostly as a personal soul-searching exercise--an experimental fiction to delve deeper and grow as a person (in the vein of the song Sleeper 1972 where the lead singer of Manchester Orchestra imagined what it would be like if his dad died). And so, without anymore stalling, justification, or excuses, here’s a goodbye letter to my little girls...

Avery and Annabel,

My sweet, sweet angels. My little super girls. First, I don't know how old you are upon your first reading of this. Maybe you'll read it many times. Maybe you won't ever finish the whole thing. I hope that you'll never have to read it with the weight of it's true intention. I pray that you'll read it with me sitting beside you or after I've died peacefully with a life fulfilled. But, in the event that you are reading it after I've left you too soon, I'm sure that there will be some things that you won't understand. And that's okay. Please, PLEASE, read it again and again as many times as you need until you hear my voice. Until you see my eyes, my smile. Until you feel my squeezey hugs and know that I'm here with you. Because I am. And I'm counting the days until I can give you squeezey hugs again.

Second, I'm sorry. I'm SO sorry. You are my everything. Just the thought of leaving you brings tears to my eyes. You know I lost my dad early, unexpectedly. His death ripped out a part of me, and there was nothing he could have done about it. So I can't imagine the pain you're feeling. But neither can you know the pain I'm feeling writing this (unless you're reading with children of your own, the thought of which actually brings a little smile through my tears). Breathe in. Breathe out. I'm breathing with you.

Third (and this is the most important point, and my greatest hope is that you need these words the least of all because you know them already), you have to know why I left. You have to know who I am. You have to know who God made me and who Jesus gave me the freedom to be. On this earth, I love you and your mother more than anything. Anyone. Every emotion, thought, and decision has revolved around you from the first moments we met. And so, too, did my decision to leave. Your life from that moment has been harder. I know that. And it tears me apart to know I had a hand in it. But, more importantly, your life from that point has had more meaning. I died so that you could know true compassion. I died so you could see a glimpse of what Christ--the Son of God--did for us. I died so another human, another unique child of God, could find salvation. Lives come and go, but souls live forever. We live forever. And we were created to live forever with the One, and with one another. You and I are apart for a while, but it is nothing compared to the eternity we will enjoy in paradise. It is nothing compared to the promise and the salvation that another soul may spread in my absence.

And lastly, you have to live on. You have to find compassion in your heart for that other person or persons who may be one or many. They may continue to be a part of your life, or you may never see them again. Either way, you have to not only forgive them but also LOVE them. You have to see me IN them. Because, like me, they now have a claim on that most important inheritance. They are now a part of the family--OUR family. A family that transcends politics or poverty or poor decisions. A family that extends beyond this life into the next.

There will be times when this truth is hard for you to see. When you feel anger, resentment, and sadness. And that's okay. It really is. But the truth has to be your rock--your foundation. The home to which you always return. The home where I am always waiting with open arms. You will find me there. You will find me here. And until we truly meet again, carry with you these truths and extend them to every person you meet. They are the purpose for our creation. Love God, and love others.

Stay strong, girls (as if there was ever any doubt). But also stay kind. Show compassion. A day is coming when all will be made right, and until then, there's plenty of happiness to be found. So go out there and grab it, and then share it with others.

I love you,

Dad

Oh, and mind your mother. I don't care how old you are or whether she's around when you read this. It'll just make everything easier. Trust me. I know from experience.

[jefferyryanlong]

Fresh Listen - The Beach Boys, Pet Sounds (Capitol, 1966)

(Some pieces of recorded music operate more like organisms than records. They live, they breathe, they reproduce. Fresh Listen is a weekly review of recently and not so recently released albums that crawl among us like radioactive spiders, gifting us with superpowers from their stingers.)

I’ve always thought of the Beach Boys as a necessary evil pulsing within the diseased body of 20th Century popular music. Their lauded vocal harmonies, despite the sophistication, struck me as helium-fueled and off-putting, even as a kid. The songs of the Beach Boys, while in a few cases gorgeously complex and soulful, I thought tended to revel in miniature desires and self-pity, about daddies taking the T-Bird away or mooning about in the sand for some water woman way out of their league.  

Equally unappealing to me was the visual representation of the group. Chubby, baby-faced guys in matching striped shirts, accompanied by two prematurely balding dudes who looked as though they would be arrested if they actually engaged, with their teenage paramours, in any of the behaviors they sang about. One cool drummer, yes, but even if he appeared ambivalent about all the silliness his mates were up to, he tacitly participated in the incessant doo-wopping toward a teenage ideal out of which he had already aged.

Not that I hated, in general, the music of the Beach Boys. “Help Me Rhonda,” with its repetitive, desperate callousness (essentially, the song is about wanting a new girl to take the place of an old girl so the boy’s heart doesn’t hurt so much anymore) still grabs my ear when it is summoned, like Mephistopheles, from the depths of Oldies radio. And I enjoy the band’s version of “Barbara Ann,” with its faux fuck-ups, even if the “live” atmosphere was calculated in advance. At least for a moment, the Beach Boys weren’t taking their drag races so damned seriously. With the group exhorting a loose-playing Carl on acoustic guitar, and the percussion comprised of what sounds like pens on ashtrays, the song is a blast, and recasts the spooky vocals of the reverb-laden original as a laid-back singalong.

In 1966 the band released Pet Sounds, an album Brian Wilson sweated over and celebrated with California’s elite session musicians while exploiting seemingly unrestricted studio time, the rest of the Boys touring with a replacement for the touched genius of the band. This was the point in the Beach Boys career when they resembled, as a music collective, more the Monkees than the Beatles (whom Brian Wilson loved and emulated and with whom he felt he was in a life and death competition for the hearts and minds of the record buying youth); except the narrowing contributions of other band members (Mike Love, Al Jardine, Carl and Dennis Wilson) to the Beach Boys endeavor were not programmed by television producers and hack songwriters. The whole thing was micromanaged by the progressively obsessive and meticulous Brian Wilson. As a record-making operation, the group was essentially a barbershop quintet backed by the formidable Wrecking Crew. (On record, at least–the band continued to play their own instruments in live performances.) Wilson claimed that with Pet Sounds he intended to manifest “the greatest rock record ever made.”    

Pet Sounds, though, is hardly a rock record. It is too baroque and overwhelmingly sad, the kitchen sink arrangements heavy on unconventional instrumentation and light on electric guitars. A close listen will reveal much beauty in Pet Sounds, and a closer listen will bring forth all the awkwardness of the record, the uncomfortable and unintentionally funny expressions that make Pet Sounds as ridiculous as it is sublime.

What Pet Sounds lacks is stakes. Though sad, these songs aren’t the lamentations of a mid-twenties millionaire with a drug habit. The lyrical content of Pet Sounds is most closely aligned with the conventions of Beach Boys’ music as we all know it, the arrested development gripes of a teenage misfit. Wilson covered teenage angst well–“Don’t Worry Baby,” comes across, on its surface, far more meaningful than the deeper narrative about illicit hot-rodding. However, when Wilson sidesteps elemental physical urges and instead wallows in the idea of spending the night together as part of the tableaux of an idealized marriage (”Wouldn’t It Be Nice”), you have to wonder where this grown man’s head is at. Is it an appeal to his base listenership, or does he really believe what he’s singing? 

When you are in high school, the slightest tremor of heartbreak feels monumental. While his contemporaries were breaking cultural conventions and seeking new ways of expression to transcend the status quo, Wilson and his lyricist, Tony Asher, took an almost reactionary stance to all the upset, insisting that the parlance of popular music (definitely not “rock music” by any stretch) be grounded in the middle class, suburban drama of who dumped who, a nightmarish landscape in which a date to the prom is a matter of life and death. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is what it suggests: nice. A perfectly realized pop song. Its conservative philosophy, though, is antithetical to what powerful pop music is supposed to express.

All this to say that I really like Pet Sounds. There are noises on this record, chords and melodies, that seem as if directly transplanted from Brian Wilson’s head, as if he were lucidly dreaming in time the potentialities of perfect music from a perfect band with a set of perfect singers. For every unexpected and just-right turn of musical phrase, though, there is another sad-sack couplet in a keening falsetto wail, pressing itself under the skin as if it had no where else to go. Just get over it, man.

“You Still Believe in Me,” “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder),” and “I’m Waiting for the Day” is a trilogy of tears following the exuberant opening track. The emotional pull of “You Still Believe in Me” is undercut by a bicycle bell and, later, a bicycle horn, reminding us that it’s all just kid stuff, nothing to weep so deeply about. Though “I’m Waiting for the Day” opens joyfully enough, with Wilson exhorting the Wrecking Crew into a jubilant bounce, it quickly descends to a depressed meditation before the combined vocal forces of Carl and Mike knock Brian out of his funk.

“Let’s Go Away for a While,” one of the albums two instrumentals, illuminates Wilson’s proficiency of shaping otherwise clumsy musical textures into something easygoing and affecting. There are shades of Burt Bacharach in the song’s structure, but it maintains, somehow, the essential quality of a Beach Boys song without any of them singing on it.

“Sloop John B,” a traditional sea tune that Wilson metamorphoses into a conventional Beach Boys manifest, displays the group in rare high spirits, maximizing the capacity for happiness to which these white fellows had access. Each of them take turns singing lead, and in their energized performance I can only imagine how the album might sound if they’d decided to perform as drunken sailors throughout, instead of as pubescent drips.

Wilson and the Beach Boys finally take upon their narrow shoulders the mantle of adulthood in “I Know There’s an Answer,” which has a passing resemblance in theme to the Byrds’ “Psychodrama City” or the Association’s swinging “Along Comes Mary.” When the fabric of society frays so rapidly and significantly as it did in the Sixties, there are bound to be new hangups and increased excess to muddle through. Wilson here comments upon the discontent of his peers as he tries to path his own path through interesting times, and if he’d released the more straightforward “Hang on to Your Ego,” this struggle I think could be more resonant with his hipper, more mature fans. From what i understand, Mike Love gave an ultimatum to change the lyric, which resulted in the less pointed “I Know There’s an Answer.” (Love would later be grappling with his own ego under the guidance of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, in the company of the Beatles and Donovan).

“Here Today,” a decent pop song in itself, seems a concentrated effort to unleash the thus-far neutered virility of the Wrecking Crew. Hal Blaine impressively rumbles against Carol Kaye’s nimble, rocking bass line, mitigated somewhat by Wilson’s insistence on excessive changes. In the context of Pet Sounds, though, the noise between the bass and drums comes across as hammer of the gods. The lyrics are drivel (Mike Love had the uncanny ability to make words sound worse than they really were), but the bass breakdown at the end is a saving grace, the one bit of true rock music in album anything but.

On its face, “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” is Wilson’s excuse, or apology, for his obsession with the kind of extended teen-hood exalted and cried over throughout Pet Sounds, the justification for old-fashioned lyrics in an advancing rock milieu. In Wilson’s mind, maybe he couldn’t keep up with the times, and sought retreat to that space in his head where he continued to get around, where he continued to safari for surfin.’ Maybe I expect too much from the song, which is in itself four minutes of self pity. A song about a guy who’s got something, but has never applied himself. When that last refrain comes in (”Sometimes I feel very sad”), you can’t help but be moved by the depth of feeling, no matter the narrow spectrum of Wilson’s maturity in his music. 

A dedicated listen to Pet Sounds guides us toward a new appreciation. Maybe not for the album’s lyrical content, nor even Wilson’s musical vision. Rather, it inspires an appreciation for one’s station in life, reminding us that we ourselves have moved beyond crippling insecurity and awkwardness the album has frozen in forever time. That day we are waiting for is not, as Wilson suggests, when we will love again, but that day when love becomes less predominant, less a particularized, aching throb, when love will fill our heart without insisting on some stunted form of youthful romance.