Study names Pet Sounds as an early concept album
- Release Date: 17/12/2008
- Country of Issue: United Kingdom
- Category: Cambridge Journals
An article in the journal twentieth-century music explores the narrative structure of the Beach Boys iconic album Pet Sounds and argues that it exhibits all the classic features of a "concept album”.
Through a thorough examination of the texts and music of the songs, the author of the article, Philip Lambert (Baruch College and the Graduate Center of The City University of New York), identifies a unified art work projecting a coherent textual narrative. The musical ideas contained within it are a culmination of Wilson’s earlier work – they are the ‘pet sounds’ that he had been raising and nurturing since the early 1960s – but they appear in an unprecedented artistic context.
The author says ‘Pet Sounds has a song-to-song narrative and a coherent point of view; the songs are interconnected by recurring musical ideas. The albums primary creative force, Brian Wilson, conceived the album from musical ideas he had been exploring in Beach Boys songs since the early 1960s. The result is not just a milestone of Wilsons career and a work of art of extraordinary elegance and accomplishment, but also a milestone of popular culture.’
Brian Wilson once explained: “If you take the Pet Sounds album as a collection of art pieces, each designed to stand alone, yet which belong together, you’ll see what I was aiming at.”
You can read this article without charge here: journals.cambridge.org/petsounds
twentieth-century music is a unique publication dedicated to leading research on all aspects of the music of the twentieth century and is published by Cambridge University Press.
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