The Beach Boy genius
The Guardian 14 Jun 2025 Who today innovates like Brian Wilson?
By all accounts, Brian Wilson was a genius. Fellow greats Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan both used the word in their tributes to the creative force behind the Beach Boys, who died this week aged 82. So did Mick Fleetwood, John Cale and Elton John. And so did his bandmates, who wrote in a joint statement: “The world mourns a genius today.” You may imagine Wilson accrued such standing gradually. Artistic legacy is largely dependent on the longevity of mass appeal, and the fact that the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds remains one of the most famous, celebrated and beloved albums of all time almost 60 years since its release is proof enough of his incredible talent.
In fact, Wilson’s claim to genius status began with a 1966 PR campaign masterminded by the ex-Beatles publicist Derek Taylor. Fortunately, Wilson’s output justified it, and after spreading through the British music press, the “Brian Wilson is a genius” rhetoric quickly caught on, says Wilson’s biographer, David Leaf. It has been the consensus ever since.
Do we just imagine musical geniuses are anointed in retrospect because we no longer have any? It is extremely difficult to argue that any artist of the last 30 years has reached the trailblazing standards of Wilson, Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Joni Mitchell and David Bowie.
The remaining members of those acts are all over 80 (with the exception of Ronnie Wood at 78). Stevie Wonder is 75, Brian Eno is 77, Ralf Hütter, the surviving founder of Kraftwerk, is 78. The most recent claimants to the title of musical genius are generally seen as Michael Jackson and Prince, both of whom died relatively young. Soon, the very idea of a living legend may be a thing of the past.
In pop music, which reveres the new, genius is synonymous with innovation. It is no coincidence that our most innovative musical minds were of a similar generation, starting out in the 1960s and 70s, when all the new drum, guitar and keyboard sounds and most memorable melodies were there for the taking. Such was the virgin territory, the Beach Boys even got to sonically codify California, one of the most culturally significant places on Earth.
Wilson once sang: “I guess I just wasn’t made for these times.” But if he hadn’t been active precisely when he was, would he have been considered a genius?
Of course, musical progress didn’t abruptly end half a century ago. There is still as-yet-unheard music
nd to be made. Generic fusions, formal variations and experimental production techniques are not infinite, but nor are they exhausted, and some have coalesced into era-defining movements, as 21st-century genres such as grime, trap and hyperpop prove.
Some genres even have specific originators. Grime can be convincingly traced back to Wiley, and his turn-of-the-millennium production experiments, while hyperpop is the brainchild of the London producer AG Cook and his PC Music collective. But these pockets of innovation still haven’t produced any bona fide musical geniuses.
The demise of the monoculture has a part to play, here. Technology’s fracturing of the cultural and media landscape means only the most aggressively mainstream and inoffensively palatable acts (Adele, Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift) can command a similar level of fame and musical familiarity to their 60s and 70s counterparts. Meanwhile, invention remains staunchly at the cultural fringes – and if it does get anywhere near the zeitgeist, the journey is leisurely.
Grime took off a full decade after its creation, thanks to Skepta and Stormzy; so did hyperpop, in the guise of Charli xcx’s album Brat. This is another reason why musical genius is so thin on the ground: the people who do the actual innovating rarely end up in the spotlight themselves.
Rivalry between Wilson and the Beatles accelerated progress and incentivised change; the pressure is also thought to have contributed to the decline of Wilson’s mental health later in the 60s.
But then comes the more mysterious part. What is so astonishing about Wilson is how many different groundbreaking things he did simultaneously.
In the studio, he invented “a new way of making popular music”, says Leaf, “recording bits and pieces of a song and then piecing it together”. He also blazed a trail for the idea of one person helming all elements of a recorded song: from composition, arrangement and performance to mixing and production. On top of that, says Leaf, he did something lyrically radical, turning pop into an “emotional autobiography”.
This determination to, in Leaf’s words, “put his feelings on to the recording tape and share it with the world” was genuinely surprising at the time. Today’s pop music is only really controversial when it overlaps with sex and violence; it is practically impossible to sonically shock the listening public.
The prospect of musical innovation coming to an end is something students and lovers of guitar music have already had to make peace with: at this point nostalgia is inherent to the genre. “I’m aware it’s impossible to make genuinely new, novel guitar music, and so I tend to lean into anachronism,” is how Owen Williams, the frontman of my new favourite old-sounding band, The Tubs, once put it.
Just as selling out became a respected career move, explicit derivation is now an artform in itself. In recent years Beyoncé has stayed at the forefront of pop by becoming a kind of musical historian.
There is one thing that does feel jarring about the slowed pace of musical progress. Technological advancement has always been woven into sonic novelty – the advent of synths (which Wilson also anticipated), for example, or sampling. Given that technology has accelerated in unimaginable and terrifying ways over the past 20 years, you’d think that might be reflected in the pop zeitgeist.
Instead, we have a chart stuffed with tracks that could essentially have been made at any point in the past 50 years. Perhaps the late 20th century created a sort of natural selection of music. We found the combinations of notes and rhythms that appealed most to the western ear and that is what we have continued to rehash.
Surely, then, this is a problem AI might be able to solve. In theory, it could supplant human creativity. In actuality, AI is unlikely to wrest control of pop’s soul – and that’s because musical innovation and even catchy melodies have ceded importance to the branding of people. If Taylor Swift’s gargantuan success is anything to go by, which it probably is, pop’s future depends on the carefully honed appeal of an individual’s human personalities, not what they can do on a keyboard (the musical kind).
Swift’s approach to her public image and to the music business in general is groundbreaking in its own way, even if her music isn’t. We will be mourning her as a cultural figure at some point, but as a musical genius? That would take some real cognitive dissonance. It seems unlikely that we will mourn anyone of similar vintage in such a way by the end of this century. We have no currently minted visionaries – though time will tell if anyone retroactively earns the title.
What is certain is that as the pop canon continues to splinter into countless smaller, personal rosters, we will find ourselves losing musicians who mean everything to some people, but not – like Wilson – who mean something to almost everyone.
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