PopKrazy Store PopKrazy Guide
to Pop
Culture

Beach Boys



SUMMER MEANS NEW LOVE

 

 

WikiPedia and Amazon and All Music Guide almost make this unnecessary, but for the record, I want to argue that the combo package of The Beach Boys Today! with Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!) [love those exclamations points-although I don't think the Beach Boys ever released an album with three (!!!) exclamation points in the title] [I do think, however, that is because of the Beach Boys' abuse of ! that I learned to do the same thing on my own writing-or maybe it was Mad).

Anyway, the point being that this remarkable CD combo, with some editing, still sends shivers down my backbone even though I have gone way way past the age counting-up fadeout on "When I Grow Up (To Be a Man)"....(they end it when they get into their twenties, of course).

So, I'd get this thing if you don't have it. And then create a new CD with these cuts, and you will own one of the greatest albums ever made!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1. Do You Wanna Dance
2. Good To My Baby
3. Don't Hurt My Little Sister
4. When I Grow Up
5. Help Me, Rhonda (use LP version only)
6. Dance, Dance, Dance
7. Please Let Me Wonder
8. I'm So Young
9. Kiss Me Baby
10. She Knows Me Too Well
11. The Girl From New York City
12 Then I Kissed Her
13. Salt Lake City
14. Girl Don't Tell Me
15. California Girls
16. Let Him Run Wild
17. You're So Good To Me
18. Summer Means New Love
19. The Little Girl I Once Knew
20. And Your Dreams Come True

No shit, pal. Create this and you have one helluva a summer album.













THE UBIQUITOUS POP MASTERPIECE

 

“Sometimes I almost feel/Just like a human being.”
–Elvis Costello, “Lipstick Vogue,” 1978

The discovery of self, getting to know the inner you, is the very stuff of our troubled and crazy times. The growing number of support groups, the proliferation of psychotherapists, and the overwhelming and seemingly all-powerful self-help sections at bookstores attest to this fact. “Feel the pain,” sez Zippy the Pinhead as he hands a friend a box of Milk Duds just before he heads spiraling into a nervous breakdown.

Pop music abounds in such eccentric edifices of the inner self. In fact, pop music is such a refuge for so many selves in search of self that pop and rock are probably nothing more than the babble generated by a series of cathartic experiences. Many of rock’s landmark albums are probing works, painfully introspective, almost dull in fact, until you hear them in the isolation of your empty room after a long night of dark fear and sweaty terror.