Brian Wilson, the Voyeur of Surf and Sun

Rob Tannenbaum in the NY Times:

Even though Brian Wilson grew up only five miles from the Pacific Ocean, he rarely went to the beach. He’d felt scared by the size of the ocean on his first visit. Being light-skinned, he also feared sunburns. He tried surfing, but got hit on the head by his board and decided once was enough.

And yet, in songs like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls” and “Good Vibrations,” Wilson did as much as anyone to depict Los Angeles and California as a land of bikinis and warm, honey-colored sunsets. The songs he wrote about the West Coast, he said in “I Am Brian Wilson: A Memoir,” were “more about the idea of going in the ocean than they were about actually going in the ocean.” Wilson didn’t like waves, but realized how they could serve as a metaphor for life.

And this, a point I have tried to make here many times:

Brian, a classic “indoor kid,” wrote about those adventures from a position of voyeurism. In a 1965 interview with The Los Angeles Times, he mentioned “our West Coast sound, which we pioneered.” The songs, he added, tell stories about teenagers. “We base them on activities of healthy California kids who like to surf, hot rod, and engage in other outdoor fun.” He saw these activities the same way he saw the ocean — through a window.

A songwriter doesn’t need to have firsthand experience with his subject matter, only an inquisitive imagination, an emotional link to a topic and an eye for detail. As an observer, Wilson could write exuberant songs about teenage frolic. 

But he wasn't a frolicsome teenager and never had been; he was the sad son of an abusive father and struggled with depression all his life, rarely even setting foot on a beach.

In art, "authenticity" is baloney. No actual surfer ever wrote a song about surfing as good as Wilson's, and, to quote the Hagakure, "this understanding extends to all things." The best art about poverty and oppression was not created by poor, oppressed people. The best art about war was not all created by soldiers. The whole notion that art draws from deep personal experience is – well, not exactly wrong, just a lot more complicated than much of the world wants to believe. People say, "You can tell that's he's been there," but you can't tell that at all. Maybe he has and maybe he hasn't, and if he has, it was not that experience that made him an artist. Art is sideways to real experience.

Shakespeare was not a soldier, a courtier, or a woman, although thousands of people have insisted he must have been, because he conveyed those experiences so well. He was just very, very good at putting experience into words.

Brian Wilson never surfed and never enjoyed the kind of life he sang about. He saw it, and then from other parts of himself, the artistic parts, the parts that are so weird that people used to insist that they didn't come from inside us at all, but from the muses or the gods, summoned the magic to put that vision into song.