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Never heard it, only heard of it, until now.

WHAT. THE. HELL.
 :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o :o

What the hell was anybody involved with this.... ehm... *thing* thinking? Was Dr. Eugene Landy completely out of his mind?
I have to admit that at the same time it's kinda funny, awfuly pathetic and terribly sad. Just wow.

I find it amusing that everyone's gotta blame this one on Landy, and basically blame anything bad the guy ever did on someone else, too, as if the guy was incapable of doing wrong. When you get down to it, Brian was the one who wrote this song. The idear of "Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, write a rap song! At fifty years of age!" may have materialized in good o' Gene's head, and as scary as the guy was, I doubt it was ever a gun-to-head situation. Brian agreed and wrote it. And oh my. :'(

Can't agree here. I can't imagine Bri writing such a truly awful politically correct wreck of a song, denouncing his own beauties from the past, without someone having prodded him to do so. I guess Landy wanted to create a 'new Brian', totally in sync with modern times. He truly was something of a doctor Victor Frankenstein.

Sue me, but I dig the lyrics on the chorus. Really dig 'em.

 :afro

How much dough would you realistically be able to free from your assets, then?

Not worth it, chum.  :-\

You haven't lived until you've heard Brian exclaim: "Big brains are AWESOME!"

YES.

(Lyrics may even have directly influenced the Wondermints?)

I like it. I think the samples are very creative.

I like this song, a lot. The chorus is great. I've listened to it far more times than I should admit.

You hold certain web people in very high esteem for a very long time, and then... this...

 :'(

Coming up next: Andrew G. Doe outs himself by saying that 'Kokomo' is the best song in the entire universe ever.

*looks discreetly for a noose and a chair*

I can corroborate my take on "Smart Girls". Sure, overall it's cheesy, offensively unimaginative, bad. But I agree with the soul-sucking Egyptian mummy: I kinda like how the samples are embedded and first and foremost: the lyrics sound like classic Brian. You've got to admit that. It's his silly.. goofball.. politically uncorrect.. doing what he feels like.. attitude that we all love. He's a big child. Who wouldn't secretly want to rap these lyrics?  ;D I do. Some of the lines in "Smart Girls" wouldn't be out of place on LOVE YOU or M.I.U., by the way.

It's certainly amusing, which is worth something.

It's not that far from something like "I'm Bugged At My Old Man" or "She's Goin' Bald" in being a humor song. Not commendable, but more fun than I thought it would be after reading about it.

Worse than anything Mike did on SIP. Don't forget Landy was Brian's "co-writer" during this period so the crappy lyrics may very well be his fault.
What a stinkarooo! Honesty it makes Summer of Love sound like Surf's Up by comparison.

Listen to The Beard at this point.

I think what sets those two apart is the tongue in cheek aspect.  I don't sense anything ironic about smart girls.

Sigh. Can't believe my first post here is going to be about "Smart Girls"...

The song is ridiculous, but somehow it's just totally Brian for me. To my mind, actually sitting down and dedicating time to recording that song is not terribly different from doing the same with "Shortenin' Bread" or "Ding Dang", or, God help us all, "Santa's Got an Airplane". It's the kind of song which works as an example no matter what your thesis about Brian's post-SMiLE work may be. If you think he lost it and that, say, Love You is absolute dreck, this song solidifies that opinion. If you think he has a very funny, very dry sense of humor, and that he was being funny all of the times when he's just sort of burst out with a non-sequitur in the middle of a concert or interview, this song works as a big put-on too. If you think Landy was responsible for every poor artistic decision he made during those years, it works for that, because his name is on there.

I do seem to remember him talking about it in that interview when he was on the cooking show. He was very animated in that interview IIRC, and he even delivered the first "My name is Brian and I'm the man" part, after which I seem to remember the crowd cheering. Which probably made Brian think "hey, yeah, they like it!" because he's Brian.

The whole set of Sweet Insanity tracks to me is pretty much required listening if you want to have a full picture of Brian as an artist. It sort of provides the context for something like TLOS being a small miracle, really.

As long as we're discussing Brian's weird outtakes, I say next up should be "Life is for the Living".  ;D

I don't think any amount of ad hoc rationalisations can save this song from being garbage. The awful attempt at sampling -- seemingly unaware that there's more to it than taking chunks of choruses and dropping them, basically unchanged, into a verse (Bomb Squad it ain't) -- is grounds enough to be rightly embarrassed by this horrid mistake of a song. The rhymes (such as they are...) do the song no favours either. Yeah, it's a funny song but I think Runaways is right: There is obvious and intentional humour in "She's Goin' Bald" or "Bugged"; if there is humour in "Smart Girls", it's surely from the song's ample shittiness. You're laughing (and cringing) at rather than with the song.

One of the most glaring problems with the samples is that they're almost never in the same key as the rest of the song, so it sounds like an amateur remix found online or something. There are ways of musically quoting earlier hits in a song and making it work. Ringo's "Back Off Boogaloo" springs to mind.

This song is almost as bad as Santa's Goin' To Kokomo for me. What worries me about the latter is that it was written much more recently by Mike without the help of someone like Dr. Landy. :'(

Thank you! And welcome to the madness that is smileymsile.  :)

Having never heard "Santa's Goin' To Kokomo", I'm still going to disagree with you.

BIG BRAINS ARE AWESOME, DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOD!!!!!

Hey don't knock Life Is For The Living - 'don't sit on your ass smoking grass' is such a great line that it just makes the entire song for me! As for Smart Girls, it's just so so breath-takingly dreadful that it's enjoyable, in much the same way as, say, a song by The Scatman or MC Hammer is. The bit when it goes 'God only knows - where I'd be without smart girls' makes me both simultaneously laugh out loud and cringe every time i hear it.

+ridiculously long number that's more fun to type than "infinity"

No disrespect meant for "Life is for the Living". I quite enjoy all of Adult/Child. But let's face it, those big band tracks are kind of an anomaly in their catalogue, unless you count the Mantovani-sounding Side 2 of their Christmas album. I can't help but picture Carl with top hat and tails, with a really skinny microphone, playing at the Copa or something.

Do people in general feel like "Smart Girls" is sort of a blight on an otherwise middling group of songs that make up Sweet Insanity? Or is the entire album a bust for people?

I haven't listened to it in its entirety, but from what I've heard: maybe some good ideas, but the production may be even more ridiculous than the 88 album. I can't believe it's so bad.

Also, hating on "Ding Ding"? :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'( :'(

Honestly, I'm glad it exists. It's such a jarring and terrible idea that it manages to transcend simple badness and rise up to a level of purely bizarre comedy. I especially love the loud and jarring samples.

Nah, I love "Ding Dang". But I'm not sure it's a song.

As for the rest of the album, of course we've heard finalized versions of some of it on GIOMH, but there are some interesting moments on it otherwise as well. There's a track where he talks about how basically his family sucks and his dad was mean, etc., as if he's doing Plastic Ono Band or something, except it's unclear if that's Landy or not. Frankly, even if it is Landy, I'm not sure it's any worse than Scott's approach to "Midnight's Another Day" or "Southern California", with their deliberately autobiographical lyrics, at least in terms of wanting to express Brian's state of mind on his own behalf. But then you've got the very very strange experience of Brian Wilson singing about getting "hotter", which just doesn't go with his otherwise sort of arrested-development frame of reference for things. It's just weird all around. All I'm saying by mentioning those other tracks is that "weird" isn't necessarily unwelcome in the BW canon. But sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Exactly. I regard this track and the whole Sweet Insanity project as a kind of Love You - 14 Years (ish) On. Eccentric, at times lacking in taste and at the same time rather touching and beautiful in places.

It might be fun to have a Jack Riely vs Landy Lyricists Smackdown thread   :lol. I mean, both came out with some world class psycho-burble in a lot of their lyrics.

There is no way that Rieley - who did a tremendous amount of good for the BB's both at the time of his management and for their subsequent legacy - is in any way comparable to the destructiveness of Landy.

Ouch. Even at his worst, Jack never went near the depths that Landy could. At that, I'll say Jack had a few pretty good sets of lyrics to his name during his time with the band (imoimoimoofasjkf)

Jack co-wrote A Day In The Life..., Long Promised Road, Feel Flows, Marcella, Steamboat, Trader and Funky Pretty. It's largely thanks to him that we have Surf's Up (album and awesome 1971 version of song), as well as Holland (a stunning album) and the curates egg that is CATP. He also instigated the bands greatest period as a live performing group, as evidenced on the amazing BB In Concert album. Anyone who chooses not to appreciate this because, what, he allegedly lied to the group about his CV...? Big f**king deal! the group could really use a guy like him today that's for sure. I personally find it offensive that anyone can even mention him alongside Landy. 

Now, maybe if Landy sang "Day in the Life of a Tree" in a more beauteous tone than Jack did, we'd have an argument.  ;)

*imagines Landy produced version of "A Day In The Life Of A Tree"*

;( fuckin hell

With a little deuce coupe
This is the worst trip
Help me Rhonda yeah
Get her outta my heart...

Doesn't no-one else just love that bit  :hat :hat :hat

Wow this is some strong stuff...

 :lol You're definitely not alone. That little bit of cacophony cracks me up every time. It's head and shoulders, in terms of ridiculousness, above the lyrics.

"Slice the mango, the drooling fool
Flare the nostril, feelin' cool
Sweating in the meadow of fame
Scratch me gently, burning flame"

Can anyone explain that part to me?

Imagine hearing Smart Girls on the radio. The first time I ever heard it was on Dr. Demento sometime in the early 90s.

Speaking of AWESOME, just think how great a mash up of Smart Girls and Summer of Love would be!

...cos its gonna beuh summa uh love
HEY NOW
well its uh LUV THANG!

My name is BRIAN and im da MAN...etc

Why do all rap songs by people who should never be doing rap songs start out with "My name is ____"?

Because the only thing they know about rap is ,well, absolutely nothing.

It's so bad it makes me just laugh man, chorus is catchy and love the old keyboard sound.. hahaha.

it's obvious it's ridiculous, but the only part that really got me "wtf" was the samples, so out of place.

Not counting the Paley/Was tracks I just hate the whole 1989-1998 period for Brian.

For what it's worth does anyone know which tracks The Traveling Wilburys performed on "Sweet Insanity".  Dylan is obviously on "The Spirit Of Rock And Roll" but Jeff Lynne and Tom Petty are apparently on the record as well.  Anyone know?

I'm sure Landy wrote all or part of the lyrics to "Smart Girls" and other parts of "Sweet Insanity," and may have suggested doing a rap track with samples to begin with.  Brian has never had kind things to say about rap music when he's been asked about it. 

The version with the samples is kind of neat to listen to, just to hear the effort they went through to chop all that together, if I remember correctly some of it's re-recorded as well.  Just insane.  

as for the genesis of the song, not everything bad that Brian had inflicted upon him was ONLY Landy doing it.  I think both of them were thick as thieves for awhile, and while it may be true that Brian was a sick man being taken advantage of, at the time he probably felt it was a good idea to do the song, or at least try it.  


This song wasn't a bad decision: it was just a decision made during a bad time.  I'll bet Melinda could tell you stories she's heard from Brian about those years that would make your hair curl.  

"Smart Girls" would work well on a remastered SIP someday in the year 2525.

If man is still alive  ;D

Spot on. Rieley was contributing, not destroying. He did not physically ruin Brian in a way that was almost irreversible, nor did he worm his way into Brian's last will and testament for 50% (some say 70%).

I enjoy the tune of it (not all the BB hits playing on there)

Big brains are AWESOME, DUDE!!!! :afro

Indeed Rieley was able to get Brian interested in working on many occasions. Though he was a bit of a con artist, I do think he creatively at least was a force for good.

What's this "con artist" business? I genuinely don't know. If it's lying about his credentials to get into his position, so what? If you can lie about your credentials to get in but still get good results (he did) and still be honest with the people you're working with (he seemingly was), I don't see much of a problem with that. Just a few minutes ago, a friend told me he completely lied his ass off to get the job he's had for four years now. He does his job well, knows his sh*t, takes it seriously, is happy overall and is well-paid. Good for him.

Srsly though, what would the fate of stuff like "Surf's Up" or "'Til I Die" have been if not for Jack Rieley?

Well read the Gaines book for info about Rieley. That book is not a place to learn about their music but if you want to know what went on business wise it's essential. Also Bruce has expressed many times that Jack was unethical. None of this has to do with the positive influence he had on their image, nor with his talent for lyric writing.

I really can't form a sound judgment on this. I hear that he lied about his c.v.; likewise, that he suggested he suffered from cancer where he did not in reality.

These may well be the symptoms of compulsive lying, or pseudologia fantastica, which is much more of a psychiatric illness than an insidious and malicious way of sneaking into any coveted position, jobwise. The victims often would have gotten where they wanted to be without the lying anyway, because they're certainly not bereft of talent and fantasy - but some kind of inferiority complex forces them to beef up their credentials to the max. And that almost always leads to painful exposition of it all, afterwards.

Ah. Well, lying about having cancer is never cool.

Plus when he made this claim in the early eighties he sponged off of Dennis and used the story to get money from others.

Smart Girls is no weirder than Country Feelings from the same period.
Isn't there a more demo like version, where instead of the BB samples Brian and crew are singing the BB parts.
Thinking about the BW rap efforts The TM Song with that gansta-like dialogue on the intro was a decade before similar efforts of Coolio.

The way their voices trade off each other is almost like a melody. Plus it is bit of a throw back to the filler tracks from the 1960s

Hm. But I don't exactly think that Coolio, Snoop, 50 Cent, LL and their ilk decided to create rap with the TM Song in the back of their collective minds. I mean, one can stretch an analogy (or causal relationship over time) only so far...  ;)

Games Two Can Play has a few lines that sound like rap.

In the world of Brian rapping, let's not forget about those silly lines in the middle of "Child of Winter", where apparently the Pied Piper makes a return for a minute to tell us about Mama making cookies and bread.

True, can't imagine those guys spending their pocket money on 15 Big Ones back in the day  :hat

Bruce also called Obama an asshole. Bruce is a twit, and I rate Rieley's contributions to the BB cannon higher than i do Bruce's. Can you imagine Holland with one of his schmaltzy puke-fests ruining the tone and flow?

Then there is Dennys' rap in Cabinessence

Incidentally, anyone able to make out what he's saying in that?

Was never able to make it out for myself until someone linked me to this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dje0M5b_9M

And my dream comes true. Thankee.

 :lol that is exactly what I was driving at... bull's eye!

The TM Song dialogue is funny sh*t even if it isn't quite gangsta is there a longer version floating around ?

You reminded me of when David Leaf came down to my office after a meeting with Don Zimmermann, then president of Capitol Records. He showed me a cassette of unreleased Beach Boys songs that he had given to him to evaluate for possible release. Next to We're Together Again, Don wrote, "This is not a song."

You reminded me of when David Leaf came down to my office after a meeting with Don Zimmermann, then president of Capitol Records. He showed me a cassette of unreleased Beach Boys songs that he had given to him to evaluate for possible release. Next to We're Together Again, Don wrote, "This is not a song."
[/quote]

Really? Ha, that's great. I mean, in a way it's unfair, because you look at stuff contemporaries of the Beach Boys have put out on albums and the same description is true. Seriously, Beatles? "Wild Honey Pie"?

Really? Ha, that's great. I mean, in a way it's unfair, because you look at stuff contemporaries of the Beach Boys have put out on albums and the same description is true. Seriously, Beatles? "Wild Honey Pie"?
[/quote]

"Wild Honey Pie" is more of a song than "Revolution 9."

"Ding Dang", "We're Together Again", "Revolution 9" etc. are indeed songs. Things don't have to have a "proper" rock/pop arrangement, verse/chorus structure, and be 3:30 to be considered a song.

Kinda upsetting that this Zimmermann fellow had the balls to say something was not a song. Hate to throw out the tired ol' "Let's see you do better" thing, as inability to do better doesn't mean you can't be critical, but it feels very appropriate for Mr.Zimmermann's attitude and all these other suits who think they know music yet probably never wrote a second of it in their life.

"Wild Honey Pie" is more of a song than "Revolution 9."
[/quote]

Well, sure, but at least with that you could say it was deliberate experimentation. "Wild Honey Pie" was more like mucking about.

No, "Revolution 9" is not a song because it lacks the distinguishing feature of a song, and that is singing. It's just instrumentation and loops. Not a song.

And it's crap. The Beatles thought a little too highly of themselves, methinks, when they put this one together. I guess they heard Varese or something and in a stoned stupid thought that they could just throw anything together and garner more respect from the avant-garde crowd. Maybe it worked, since people defend this piece to this day. In my opinion, though, "Revolution 9" is about artistically profound as "Kokomo." I'm not a luddite, I dig "Poeme electronique," "Peripetie," and "Chromatische Phantasie," but I think the Beatles overreached with this non-song.

(Just to clarify, I'm not implying there's a musical connection per se between the aforementioned pieces and "Revolution 9," just that they all similarly depart from classical, accepted musical vocabulary. However, I believe those three are examples of music that was difficult, jarring, and groundbreaking that was actually worthwhile, whereas "Revolution 9" was just a bunch of guys in a studio splicing together the first things they got their hands together without much thought to craftsmanship. Innovation for the sake of innovation.)

Yes, true. Whereas I don't think Brian was trying to be anything with "Ding Dang". He wrote it as another song, same as any other during that period, really.

So "Pet Sounds" is not a song.



No arguments here. Still don't agree at all with the idea that it's not a song, though. I took much more issue with the claims that "Ding Dang" and "We're Together Again" weren't songs, anyway.

I was mostly being glib with my statement about "Ding Dang". I wouldn't part with it on that album for the world. But it does work better in context than it ever could on its own, I think.

As for "Revolution 9", that whole album just sort of peters out somewhere around "Long Long Long". Side 4 doesn't come close to living up to the prior three sides. When I listen to it on my iPod, I swap out "Revolution 1" for the single version and "Revolution 9" with "Hey Jude", cause those were the A sides around the same time. Helps enormously, although no matter what you put before it, ending with Ringo on "Good Night" will always be a somewhat foolish way to end a double-album.

That said, intelligent chicks are dynamite.

How is 'WE're Together Again" NOT a song? I don't get that at all. I can sort of see an argument for Ding Dang n ot being a song, or at least not finished and Revolution 9, well, I like it a lot but I wouldn't call it a song, but We're Together Again? I mean what does it lack?

I agree with your first point. "Pet Sounds" isn't a song. Just as an example, here's the first sentence on the Wikipedia entry for "song": "In music, a song is a composition for voice or voices, performed by singing."

No singing, no song. So "Ding Dang" is definitely a song, "Pet Sounds" definitely is not. I mean, would you call the "Moonlight Sonata" a song? (Hint: you shouldn't!)

I know ^_^ no worriez.

No one has ever sounded as authentically snot-nosed hot-rod mullet-rock teenager as Mike Love in the sixties. I mean, a great actor playing a teenager singing about their new car might produce a sound something like Mike Love's but Mike Love was THE REAL THING.

 
[/quote]  I'd like to know Bob Zimmerman's opinion of "We're Together Again'.

Nice to see someone mentioning the 'Chromatische Phantasie'. It's one of the most difficult pieces of music I know.  It's not really listenable, the way the music of Charles Ives still is, to name but one. Yet it's brilliant.

But.... how is it different?

Are you being a snob? I don't see any difference between a talented/trained composer creating pieces like that and a pop musician doing the same. You seem to. But John clearly spliced that sh*t together with no rhyme or reason, because he's a popstar, never listened to this sort of thing at all, obviously never spent a lot of his free time over the last two years before Revolution #9 making tape loops, and wasn't at all involved in Avant Garde scenes of the period.

I'm struggling to think what else you would have wanted John/Yoko/The rest to do with Revolution #9, is all.

I'm pretty sure Revolution 9 was primarily John. We now know that Paul had been messing with tape loops and getting into the Avant Garde scene a lot more than John did around that same time, but he didn't release any of that stuff. I think John's means of entry was basically through Yoko, and that's where his exposure to it ended as well, unless something was introduced to him through her.

Tossing the master tape into an active volcano.

Your point would seem to be borne out by the wikipedia entry for "Pet Sounds" (instrumental) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Sounds_%28instrumental%29) not referring to the piece as a song.  However, a series of terrible errors have been made, because at the bottom of the page the article is indicated as being part of the following categories:

    1966 songs
    The Beach Boys songs
    Psychedelic rock songs
    Experimental rock songs
    Rock instrumentals
    Songs written by Brian Wilson
    Songs produced by Brian Wilson

When obviously the only category it actually belongs to is "Rock instrumentals".  I know you'll want to correct this gross oversight as soon as possible.

 :lol Pretty much.

hypehat, we can agree music is subjective, right? All that matters about it is that it tickles your fancy, correct? Well, with that in mind, I of course have no scientific, objective way of comparing "Revolution #9" with some of the other dissonant, experimental pieces I listed. It just comes down to how the sounds enter my brain through my ears, and how I interpret all the nuances. What I hear in "Revolution #9" is someone throwing anything together with no rhyme or reason. I hear someone who was very interested in the possibilities of tape loops, but didn't have a sophisticated understanding of them. That's to be expected when you're a pioneer, of course; the Wright Brothers were the first in flight, but you could hardly expect them to have created an F-15 fighter jet.

I appreciate that they were probably the first pop/rock group to do something that ambitious. However, I think it's as unlistenable to now as it was then, because it accomplished nothing except its own novelty. There's no durability to it. I can listen to groundbreaking pieces of music from other eras of the 20th century that were extremely jarring and dissonant in their times because they endure. There's something about them, a combination of innovation and inspiration. I hear the former in "Revolution #9" but not the latter. Like I said earlier, all I hear is random garbage thrown together with no thought to craftsmanship. John Lennon was a talented songwriter, no doubt, but I think he overstepped his artistic boundaries by trying to go too "avant-garde" for his own good.

It's not borne out of the Wikipedia article, so you can redact your snark, thank you very much. It's borne out of a basic understanding of musical forms. I only used the first sentence of the Wikipedia entry due to convenience, and therefore, laziness. Mea culpa.

To give you a non-user-edited definition, here's one from the Virginia Tech Music Dictionary: "song; Any composition designed to be sung, either accompanied or unaccompanied."
http://www.music.vt.edu/musicdictionary/

Therefore, like I said, "Pet Sounds" is not a song if it doesn't have singing. No need to debate any further, because regardless of what you, Brian Wilson, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster himself says, it ain't a song any more than it's a sonata or a fugue.

I'm not unfamiliar with the strictest definition of "song", I just don't see this kind of hardcore prescriptivism about it every day.

So... "Fire" is not a song but "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow" is because it has vocals? even though it's the same exact thing?

Off topic and glib and not at all useful, but now I want to name a band Hardcore Prescriptivism.