
My friend Meg from Desperately Seeking the `80s posited a question on social media, this morning, and I mentioned that I had a hard time committing to a firm response. She asked me for a more nuanced appraisal, so here I go. You’re welcome.
I should say this, from the get-go: I never really gave one single crap about the Beach Boys. Sure, “Good Vibrations” and “I Get Around” were perfectly fine (the theremin on the former was a nice touch), but they never captured my imagination in the same manner their alleged peers did. I remember reading that the Beatles considered them (or Brian Wilson, more specifically) their biggest competition, and thinking “surely, you can’t be serious.” I just didn’t hear it. Like, at all.
After years of reading that Pet Sounds, their supposed landmark achievement from 1966, was this mammoth influence on so many bands, I picked up a copy and dutifully spun it. It did nothing to change my mind. I mean, it wasn’t BAD music, but in absolutely no way, shape or form did it rival anything recorded by the Beatles, much less the Stones, The Who, The Doors, Pink Floyd, _____ (your favorite classic rock band here), etc. Not even slightly. Maybe it’s because I’m a New Yorker?
I think I kept my copy of Pet Sounds for a while (I believe I may have used it as a coaster, at one point), but parted with it in a bag bound for Goodwill years ago. I don’t miss it.
There were other factors. Vocalist Mike Love seems like a roundly disagreeable and noxious character. Even their unwitting associations with the nefarious Manson Family (another thing they shared with the Beatles) did nothing to stoke intrigue for me (and I generally love that sorta stuff). The Beach Boys were always too cute, too clean cut, too choreographed — they were devoid of any semblance of edge. That was probably by design, but no edge, for me, usually means no interest. Even ABBA has fucking edge. The Beach Boys? Not at all.
So, when my friend Meg, in last week’s episode of Desperately Seeking the `80s, invoked “Kokomo,” the mid-`80s track the Beach Boys supplied to the soundtrack of “Cocktail,” I did not have the same immediate, visceral reaction that so many others describe. I mean, to my ears — with the aid of soap star heartthrob John Stamos on bongos or not — the song wasn’t a tremendous departure from the hallowed Beach Boys canon, if possibly a bit self-plagiaristic. I mean, is it trite, saccharine, cloying and dippy? Sure, but any more so than “God Only Knows” or “Don’t Worry Baby” or “Wouldn’t it Be Nice”? I don’t think so.
I actually heard it again quite recently, fittingly while an oral surgeon was doing unimaginable things to a collapsed root canal in the back of my mouth. The song’s mellifluously insidious harmonies matching the overall discomfort of that scenario to a tee.
That all said, were I ever lounging poolside, sipping on a pina colada at some hackneyed tropical getaway (not likely to happen any time soon), “Kokomo” probably would seem like the apt song to score that experience (as opposed to, say, “Logic Ravaged by Brute Force” by Napalm Death, or something). It’s a complete cheese-monkey anthem, but what exactly were you really expecting from the Beach Boys?
CODA:
I was also struck by the amorphous nature of the concept of Kokomo — an overall amalgam of all the actual destinations cited in the song, as if to suggest that the realm of Kokomo is not so much a place on a map as possibly an inter-dimensional state of being. It reminded me a bit of the lost city of Carcosa, first invoked in the shadowy texts of Ambrose Bierce in the late 1800’s and later alluded in the equally ominous works of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers’ “The King in Yellow.” Witness, if you will, how seamlessly Chambers’ first introduction to Carcosa fuses with the Beach Boys’ depiction of Kokomo…
Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Kokomo
Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is
Lost Kokomo.
Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Kokomo.
Song of my soul, my voice is dead,
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed Shall dry and die in
Lost Kokomo.
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