“Pet Sounds” at 60
A Hinternet Symposion Podcast, with Ross Barkan, Sam Jennings, and Justin Smith-Ruiu
Our friend Ross Barkan, whom you will know as founding editor of The Metropolitan Review, among several other distinctions, has recently averred in a Substack Note that he has been struggling to keep before his mind all the many things there are in this world to think about besides The Beach Boys. The implication was that it would behoove us very serious people to get back to these other things without too much more dalliance.
Well, not so fast. We’ve still got an episode of the Hinternet Symposion podcast to share, in which Ross, Hinternet Associate Editor Sam Jennings, and Hinternet Founding Editor JSR, all discuss the genius and the legacy of Pet Sounds, which first appeared in May, 1966.
Ross seems to have got the proverbial fireman’s hat stuck on his head after writing a majestically long tribute to the album, “Let Me Hear Your Heart Beat”, at his personal Substack, Political Currents. More or less concomitantly, Sam (also resident film critic at Metropolitan Review, and author of the excellent Vita Contemplativa), published a moving and magisterial ode to that same album, entitled “Pocket Symphonies”, here at The Hinternet.
JSR, meanwhile, is probably the least obsessive of the three parties to the conversation, and couldn’t even be bothered to write a Pet Sounds 60th-anniversary piece of his own (“That was supposed to be Mary Cadwalladr’s beat”, he wrote to us when gently pushed).
Mary did, indeed, write a stunning eulogy for Brian Wilson when he left us last year. And even JSR, whose dad took him to see The Beach Boys at the California State Exposition and Fairgrounds Amphitheater in 1983, with David Lindley y el Rayo X opening, has devoted some considerable space, as recently as 2024, to reflection on the historical legacy of this band, even if primarily within a dialectical framing that pits them antithetically, and no doubt somewhat simplistically, against the Beatles.
We are all more or less convinced, anyhow, that the scene of Brian Wilson driving in the Hollywood Hills in 1963, and pulling his car over to the side of the road in sheer psychic and emotional overload upon hearing Phil Spector’s production of the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby”, really was something like the “burning bush” moment of the Old Pop Testament that shaped the world into which we were all born.
We strongly recommend that you fulfill the prerequisites for fully appreciating this podcast conversation by first going back and reading, or, ideally, memorizing word for word, all these important pieces of writing.
—The Editors
