The early-60s track “She Never Talked to Me That Way” projects a hapless ineffectuality every bit as pronounced as that in “Sloop John B,” with singer Rudy Lewis delivering a weepy lament of childish emasculation as the strings surge above a railroad chug and the backing vocals echo him with sad mockery. The Drifters, a band the Beach Boys covered on occasion, seem like a particularly relevant touchstone. By the same token, many elements of the Beach Boys sound which seem coded white-the fussy arrangements, the pure harmonies, the childish vulnerability-come out of a tradition of pop R&B. The thing is, though, that while “Sloop John B” came to Wilson via the very white Kingston Trio, it was originally a traditional song from the Bahamas. “I want to go home / Let me go home / This is the worst trip / Since I have been born” is a deliberately infantile lament, a performance of ostentatious innocence inseparable from the Beach Boys’ sun-bleached whiteness. The one cover song on Pet Sounds isn’t a deep-soul track but rather “Sloop John B,” a tune popularized in 1958 by the vigorously unsoulful folk revivalists in the Kingston Trio. Their carefully rapturous harmonies framed narratives of vulnerability or inoffensively wiggy wistfulness. Compared to the Rolling Stones or the Beatles or Dylan, the Beach Boys lacked grit and soul. Bring Pet Sounds into contact with a James Brown LP, and the two will annihilate each other-vulnerable white feyness and masculine black swagger vanishing in a puff of incompatible aesthetics. In fact, in some ways it’s thought of as an anti-R&B album, or even as an antimatter R&B album. OK, it’s true: Pet Sounds isn’t usually thought of as an R&B album.
Best of Chicago 2022: Music & Nightlifeīrian Wilson performs at Pitchfork on Saturday night, celebrating the 50th anniversary of his great work of sensitive, idiosyncratic genius, the seminal R&B album Pet Sounds.Best of Chicago 2022: Sports & Recreation.
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