Why the Beach Boys Matter

The musical, historical, and cultural argument for the centrality of the Beach Boys."Having spent a lifetime digging into everything the Beach Boys have recorded, Smucker knows it to be fun fun fun, great art, and a barometer of our class, race, and gender politics since World War II."-Robert Christgau, author of Is It Still Good to Ya? Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017Of all the white American pop music groups that hit the charts before the Beatles, only the Beach Boys continued to thrive throughout the British Invasion to survive into the 1970s and beyond. The Beach Boys helped define both sides of the era we broadly call the sixties, split between their early surf, car, and summer pop and their later hippie, counterculture, and ambitious rock. No other group can claim the Ronettes and the Four Seasons as early 1960s rivals; the Mamas and the Papas and Crosby, Stills and Nash as later 1960s rivals; and the Beatles and the Temptations as decade-spanning counterparts.This is the first book to take an honest look at the themes running through the Beach Boys’ art and career as a whole and to examine where they sit inside our culture and politics—and why they still grab our attention.