The Smiley Smile Message Board

I saw this post on The Flaming Lips' board.

The user foxtrot stowaway made a pretty amazing hip-hop remix of SMiLE called MiLES
if you want to check it out:

https://soundcloud.com/foxtrot-music-1

If you're out there, kudos foxtrot stowaway! :)

Hip-hop Smile? I think we could all do with this.  :lol
Sounds amazing!

Sorry, not my scene at all… so much variance in sound quality, some loud, some quiet, painful stereo balance, that my ears feel bleedin'…

Totally brilliant. This is what Smile could/should have been. On my iPod now.

over and over a square peg in a round hole in the cornfield.

Wow this is great. The most refreshing and  interesting smile mix I've ever heard. Thanks for sharing.

VOOOWWW...
this is great..really gives you an idea how it could all fit together in a messy but logical way..will incorporate some in my mix..

Heard the first 30 seconds.

Why these morons feel the need to take other peoples music, stick their stupid, shitty drums over the top, then sit back and imagine they're in some way creative or talented is beyond me


The perpetrator should be publicly beheaded. I'd happily bring the sandwiches.

Will there be pickle?

The slack-jawed moron who did this would be in a pickle if i caught up with him!

No, actually heard a bit more. Enough to tell me that anyone with a computer could have done this. The sad dumbing down of music when people actually applaud this rubbish. Tragic.

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What I like about you Hal, is one is never sure whose position you're attacking.

rather extreme but I dont fully disagree.  ;)

call me old fashoned... make mine a double

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I'm content to be kept guessing. {Insert appropriate smiley here}

Each to their own, although as a musician than posts your own work here, I'd have thought you might be a little more sensitive in your critique. He could be a poster here for all we know.

I actually found this mix more creative than any I'd previously heard. He completely disregards the structure or existing personality of the songs and creates something fresh and unpredictable out of each one.

For example, he's looped the weirdest section of Heroes & Villains so the line "innocent & spanish girl" is repeated over and over. It's nonsensical, fun, and entirely within the spirit of Smile if you ask me.

I was joking.

I'm sure he knows I wouldn't really bring sandwiches to his execution.

Peanut butter?

Can't, I'm intolerant.

I also saw foxtrot post this on the Flaming Lips board, liked what I heard and I urged foxtrot to post it here.  He never did though, I'm glad some people found it.  


Let me ask you this: do you think it takes no talent to create visual collage art?  A collage artists is "sampling" other works, isn't he?  Or we can take a literary example...  is TS Elliott's The Wasteland without artistic merit because he has essentially "sampled" elements of other literary works?  

There are a finite amount of chords to be played on a piano or guitar...  Do we criticize Brian Wilson or whomever by saying "Why these morons take a D chord and an F#m chord  stick their stupid, shitty drums over the top, then sit back and imagine they're in some way creative or talented is beyond me"

We don't.  You have to remember foxtrot and other electronic artists are using samples as instruments themselves.  

Sorry, PEANUT BUTTER?

Not a huge fan of collages no. I think it's lazy.

I'm no literary expert, but didn't TS Eliot take small lines from other writers and use them to comment on a wider picture?


In that context I have nothing against someone taking a small  musical sample and using it to augment a work that contains mostly original work.

And I'm a great admirer of what you've done with your Smile mixes, in most cases.

As for the old 'there's nothing original left to do in music' argument, this is an apologist argument, usually from people who can recognise great art but are unable to create it. Unfortunately we are living through creatively stifled times, where originality is not valued. We are living through a time where 'anyone can have a go' and 'all creativity is valid'. Its like when parents praise their child for every single thing they do. Just one bunch of idiots clapping another bunch of idiots for being able to wipe their arses

Using 100% someone else's work and just adding a drum loop (itself unoriginal) is lazy and uncreative. Anyone could do it.  Let him prove me wrong. Lets hear some original work from him.


Admittedly I was being somewhat flippant in my initial post, but the sentiment is real. It annoys me to see comments like "This is what Smile could have been" Dear God!!!

To me, one of the most original things about Brian Wilson is that he doesn't rely on drums. The percussion is sparing, and for effect. He uses it like a good chef uses  salt and pepper. To hear his work being cheapened in such a way, Well I find it offensive and I'll damn well say so.

I am a snob, and proud of it.

If he reads this then he can feel free to criticise my work. As my work is 100% original, and I invest a lot of time and thought in creating it though, any criticism from him will carry zero weight with me. As harsh as it sounds, if he can't stand criticism, he should keep his 'efforts' private. I'm fully within my rights to criticise someone for lazily stealing someone else's (much respected) music, and sticking house music drums over the top of it.

If this was just existing Beach Boys songs with drums layered over the top, you might have a point. However this guy is selecting specific sections of Smile songs, looping them to create new rhythms that weren't in the original music, isolating sounds, reversing them, layering samples from one smile song over another. The hip hop drums are a small part of the process so I think it's disingenuous to suggest that that's all that he's doing and that the work is lazy. And after all, it's just a mix! The whole point is that existing music is restructured to create something new as opposed to writing one's own new music. Something tells me, if he were to remove the drums you'd be much less negative about it.

Well said.

Damn you Buddhahat for being so reasonable!

OK, apologies to foxtrot for my harsh criticisms. I'm mean sometimes. I'm grieving over Rik Mayall.

To me, I compare it to liking/disliking modern art.

Some people say, "Stuff this, this isn't art!" but to others, art has to go somewhere else so the concept becomes the work.

This mix in particular reminds me a lot of Danger Mouse's The Grey Album.

If that music style isn't your bag, fine. IMO, this is art and therefore music.

I applaud the mixer for doing something unique with this awesome material. However...I'm really not a fan of this. Not my style at all, and while it's a fun "lets see what we can do with the pieces we have" type mix, I disagree with the assertion that it upholds the spirit of the original album. Just my two cents.

Best post you've written.

So they did a "The Beatles HATE" with it, essentially.  Very similar.

Right on brother!:)
I feel need to explain what I said about "this is how smile should have went". of course that I didn´t meant that BW should have used drums/repetitive forms in 1966 with his Smile, but what struck me in this mix is free flow , mixing parts of song in a beautiful way! Listen for example Barnyard with pig stuff in the middle.. This is how smile could have went somewhere in november 1966! At least for me..

That, I can agree with. I think SMiLE would've been a "musical stream of consciousness" type thing. I think the Psychedelic Sounds bootleg is more important than it gets credit for. The "You're under arrest" of H&V, buried "Truck Driving Man" in CE seem to indicate the idea of Easter eggs and spoken word humor was already in his mind. I think what was recorded for Psychedelic Sounds was a rough guide for similar ideas to be spliced in with at least some of the other tracks. Maybe they would've been rerecorded and fleshed out with the Boys or Wrecking Crew.

I think Smiley can also serve as a guide for some of the crazy off the wall ideas Brian had. The middle section of Wonderful with all the talking, the tape sped up part of She's Going Bald, the "good!" in With Me Tonight, laughing in Little Pad, etc...

Even if these things weren't in the songs, I think some of them couldve been used as links between the tracks. It seems to be pretty well agreed upon that the Garden Fight with Hal lead into Vega-Tables. And if you listen close to George Fell you can hear someone (speaking thru his horn of course) say "wait'll they hear the next track!" presumably talking about Surf's Up.

Tl;Dr: It wouldve been way more complex and weird than TSS Disc 1 would have you believe.

it succeeds on mark with its purpose, which is to present the music in a new way that's interesting

I applaud the effort, but the results are unlistenable for me.  It totally dumbs down the beauty of the songs and creates more or less repetitive boredom and jarring edits.

I have to agree. Sounds like a ton of talent/time went into this mix, thus I applaud the effort as well. There are parts I enjoy (especially Blunderful), but the repetitive nature of some of the samples ruins it for me.

What I love about the J Dilla/Bullion Pet Sounds: In The Key Of Dee mashup/mixup is that the songs are chill, the edits are tasteful. I'll give this new Smile mix another go in the future. I recall not being a great fan of In The Key Of Dee at first either. So who knows.

Bizarre! Like  a spin-art version of Smile. My favorites were Cabin Presents and Song For Chilled Hens. Some of it reminds me of a group named Tipsy that I used to listen to. Ever heard?  Nice work.