Tracks
Brian Wilson: "Smart Girls"
Unreleased (2007)
By Joel Elliott | 4 February 2008
To say that "Smart Girls," a recently unearthed bootleg on the WMFU blog, feels like a lost artifact is a vast understatement. Sure some weird stuff happened towards the end of the ‘80s, but even with one of the Dust Brothers supposedly at the helm for this one the track doesn't seem to belong to any era. It's like a giant hunk of metal in a museum without the explanatory plaque in front of it; something that seems to belong to some other civilization but which we, in our ignorance, can't forge any meaning out of. Or better yet, the inevitable extension of post-modern pastiche into schizophrenic nightmare: here are recognizable elements of pop history -- the high era of sample technology (from Paul's Boutique [1989] through Odelay [1996]); the splices of old Beach Boys tunes -- that together, don't do anything that we expect pop music to do. Just like how the scariest behavior of deeply troubled minds is not in their complete detachment from reality, but how they provide a warped and exaggerated mirror of society's conventions, "Smart Girls" is a journey into the heart of darkness, a furious attempt to capture the zeitgeist from a man so out of touch he makes Billy Corgan look like Girl Talk. Proceed with caution.
It's no surprise that the era of the unreleased album Sweet Insanity is, just as the title suggests, one of Wilson's most psychologically unbalanced periods. As if the album was intended as some kind of warped art therapy, his psychologist Eugene Landy gets co-production credits. Oh: and also, Brian Wilson raps. Witness: "My name is Brian / And I'm the man / I write hit songs with a wave of my hand." He mocks and defiles old Beach Boys songs in a way only their creator could, making new lyrical gems like "Wouldn't it be nice...if PhDs / stroked me with hypotheses" and singing about "sexy ladies with high IQs." Pet Sounds (1966) is said to contain the best thinly-veiled evidence of Wilson's loneliness and despair, but nothing suggests he was truly an outcast quite like this track. If classic Beach Boys songs are teenage symphonies to God, then "Smart Girls" is God deciding to let loose and be an adolescent again.
It's no surprise that the era of the unreleased album Sweet Insanity is, just as the title suggests, one of Wilson's most psychologically unbalanced periods. As if the album was intended as some kind of warped art therapy, his psychologist Eugene Landy gets co-production credits. Oh: and also, Brian Wilson raps. Witness: "My name is Brian / And I'm the man / I write hit songs with a wave of my hand." He mocks and defiles old Beach Boys songs in a way only their creator could, making new lyrical gems like "Wouldn't it be nice...if PhDs / stroked me with hypotheses" and singing about "sexy ladies with high IQs." Pet Sounds (1966) is said to contain the best thinly-veiled evidence of Wilson's loneliness and despair, but nothing suggests he was truly an outcast quite like this track. If classic Beach Boys songs are teenage symphonies to God, then "Smart Girls" is God deciding to let loose and be an adolescent again.