Til I Die (16 Bit, SNES) - The Beach Boys

mister wilson was a master at his craft - in other news, the sky is blue and i still nearly light my hand on fire every time i light a candle (i just lit a candle mmm candle mmmmm) - but i think, among everything that he had such intuitive strength in, he really really excelled in writing strong codas. the god only knows coda and the surf's up coda are the two big ones that come to mind when talking brian wilson codas; god only knows is an unending profession of externalized love and appreciation for someone in one's life - the three-part harmony evokes a sense of a three-being love (as in, in a connection shared between people, i would wager that there are individuals who create a synthesis of the love which they have for themselves (i.e., creating the love that they have for each and other, which in turn is something maintained by the individuals) ; surf's up is a nauseating (in the beautiful way) treatise on cycality that closes a song ostensibly about the cessation of one period of someone's life (recall: the traditional reading of surf's up according to the big vdp himself is that it is about class conflict, but most would sooner raise the 'guy experiences religious awakening' reading - i personally like the variable 'it's about a proverbial prison as societal structures and institutions that suffocate people to their breaking points (so yeah, similar to vdp but allows for more variability in individual interpretations)') as they move forward into the next; but i can't even begin to describe this tune's coda. i guess the first thing that it evokes in me is that it makes me feel like i'm being hugged. i miss being hugged. the production that brian pulled off (throughout his entire career, but especially from '65 to '72) is above all an auditory swaddling. these are sounds that are not hostile but instead welcoming and safe; brian's music is a respite from the sounds that can hurt people; sounds that come from the outside, sounds of shame and violence and pressure and struggle, at least that's how i've come to think of it. frequencies (and thereby harmony) are so integral to the ways that humans process stuff. the brain has such a knack for recalling and storing combinations of frequencies in sounds and something utterly essential to the human corpora is the magneticism of the frequencies that humans emit. i can play fancy schmancy logic man and logic my way through things for myself in most circumstances, but i cannot explain the eterial qualities of magneticism/attraction no matter how hard i try to wrap my head around contingencies and causes and premises and blah blah. i'm okay with not knowing where this magneticism comes from, because allowing space for the unknowable is beauty, i think. it seems to me generally improbable that anyone would call something that they can entirely comprehend beautiful - and this, i suppose, is a quality of subjective perception, which is fair and accurate (not to say that there is not beauty to be found in things that one can and does understand, or that they're used to, etc etc, but i am attempting to suggest that even in the state of 'knowing something' there is an unending amount of things about a subject that one cannot know; maybe 'knowing something' is familiarity with the exercising and effects of qualities which may thereby be interpreted as indicators of some kind of intrinsic quality but never quite revealing a 'why', so basically, not with essence and totality) but that there's magic in not entirely knowing everyhing - and i guess in extending that sentiment, that's just a fact of reality; we do not and cannot know everything, so everyone can find beauty in their own places in their own ways. i think that the term 'sublime' as it is commonly understood is a good actor for the way i concieve of beauty, but with its use case reserved for contextual moments where they work best. things are beautiful because we don't understand them. like, on the level of stuff like this - i do these covers, i write my own songs, but really, do i understand what music is? do i know what makes it so electric and emotive? i know theory, i've got perfect pitch, i can play piano and banjo and bass and gee-tar and ukulele (fun fact: ukulele is my favorite instrument tied with piano), blah blah great, but that's not where the beauty comes from, if it comes from the unknowable emotive qualities that create these binding ties in the ether of love and constance. that we as human beings exist as manifestations of that ether's love (in the sense of the fact of cognition being constant-conception/perception of the self; conception/perception being love; all as derivative from an idea of a body of nothing - excuse the reverse and short premises lol) connects us. y'know? life is beautiful, and i don't know a darn thing about it. thank you very much for watching. have a great day, everyone (i'm uploading this in the evening, so to cover my bases, i'll also wish you a good night). i love you.