Wouldn't It Be Nice (16 Bit, SNES) - The Beach Boys

one of the things that i've been sort of coming to terms with is that i am a very fundamentally emotional human being. one of the big moments in which i realized how that is illustrated was when i was doing this song and just being an utter mess working on it. could hardly see the screen half the time because i was stone-faced with tears welling up in my eyes listening to every detail of the arrangement. i have forgotten how to cry, but when the stars align, tears peek out and sometimes roll over. and it's a nice thing when that happens in such a purely joyful moment. beautiful composition. the low horns in the 'you know what's gonna' section especially really hit me for some reason. i had very mixed views on the beach boys for a long time. i always knew their discography pretty much front to back, but i struggled to appreciate them and brian fully. i think the big thing was that i was sold the narrative that they were competetors to the beatles, and so i always just went 'well i like the beatles better on a comparative level' and usually stayed in that lane. then i relistened to pet sounds and surf's up on a whim one night and i went 'oh wait i'm listening to this wrong' - that old maxim, 'comparison is the thief of joy', strikes again, eh? the beatles and the beach boys are fundamentally different groups. brian's stuff really is more comparable to classical sensibilites of 'i am gonna write a bunch of different sections and then put them together, and this will be a complete piece' rather than any contemporary - then and now - notions of pop songwriting. brian especially wrote music that was musically competent first and foremost, and understanding that distinction really made me like the beach boys a lot more. carl and bruce wrote killer songs, too (surf's up is one of my favorite beach boys albums, i think - go listen to long promised road and disney girls if you haven't), but they were closer to the sensibilities of pop songwriting for the time rather than brian who was trying to get his musical ideas out and arranged as he wanted them to be. i've grown to have a very very soft spot for brian. without getting to deep into my real world, schizophrenia has been present for my entire life directly in multiple different ways, so i always held symphathy for him in that regard. for the longest time, though, i really struggled to like him and his work, because a lot of the qualities that i saw in him were things that i was insecure about in myself and i couldn't bring myself to acknowledge how that scared me and instead just turned to 'i will simply not acknowledge brian wilson'. it's only been as i've been learning to love myself very recently and very slowly that i've gained a hell of a lot more love and grace (or maybe love and mercy hehe) for the man. i don't know how i feel about the rhetoric of brian being a mozart-tier-genius, though. it provably did him more harm than good. destructive ego inflation in people with mental states akin to brian's is a very very real thing that buds easily as is, but can be very easily inflated and hastened in the event of any sort of percieved external influence, and even if he hadn't been diagnosed when the original advertising campaign marketing him as a genius on par with mozart and bach, it shouldn't have been said like that to the public in the best interest of brian, i think. this isn't to say that he wasn't a genius composer, but it's more about the sentiment and the context surrounding what was starting and what would become. brian wilson was never the generation's mozart - he was the generation's brian wilson. you can't really compare him to anyone in the same way you can't compare any other auteur to anyone else. the creative spirit of humanity is a collective; observable and inherent in the fact that your mind is creating meaning from these words right now - but then you wonder how much of it is trained or otherwise learned externally, so on and so on, you get that junk. however, the means to singularity as a creative which separates, and really borderline separates any creative person from that same humanity, is one that sprouts best from within. he was a singular man and it's derogatory to compare him to other singular artists - i'd say the same about people who liken macca or lennon to anyone, or bach, mozart, beethoven, rachmaninoff, brahms, whatever. i don't want to honor brian or john by saying that they were comparable to other people, because they weren't and aren't. i'd hate for when i die to have people go 'he was like [person]'. being like someone isn't a goal, being someone is a goal. i want to honor people for who they are as individuals. i want to love people for who they are as individuals. not as i see them, or as i liken them to someone else, or as i think of them, but as they are. comparison is not only the thief of joy but the thief of reality and, by extension, love. thank you, brian. have a wonderful day, everyone. god bless. i love you.