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Summer’s Gone: Late Style and Popular Music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2021
Abstract
The Beach Boys’ 2012 album That’s Why God Made the Radio is typically nostalgic, filled with seemingly sunny reminiscences and retreads that hark back to the 1960s. And yet other parts of the album look back in a more critical fashion, exploring unresolved melancholy through a rich musical language. What makes this even more complicated is the fact that it is possible to hear these two ‘sides’ of the album differently, for the retreads to feel like eerie simulations and the melancholy parts to align with earlier, similarly complicated Beach Boys music. This ambivalence embodies the album’s dual relationship with what I describe as the primary strains of late style: Goethean serenity and Adornian intransigence. In exploring this contention and in applying late style to other examples of popular music, notably David Bowie’s 2016 album Blackstar, I argue that the late-style lens helps to shed new light on popular music’s increasingly complicated knots of nostalgia, ageing and death.
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References
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10 See Barone, ‘Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal”’, 40–4, for an overview of Winckelmann’s introduction of organicist late-style theory in Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764) and Goethe’s radical epistemological updating of the theory a few decades later.
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27 Daniel Harrison’s article on the Beach Boys, ‘After Sundown: The Beach Boys’ Experimental Music’, Understanding Rock: Essays in Musical Analysis, ed. John Covach and Graeme Boone (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 33–57, surveys many of these tropes, particularly harmonic complexity, in Wilson’s 1960s music.
28 Larry Starr, ‘A Listener’s Smile’, Good Vibrations, ed. Lambert, 242–62 (p. 256).
29 Tonal pairing, to be clear, is music organized ‘not on one stable sonority, but on the tension between two tonal centers’. William Kinderman, quoted in Rob Schulz, ‘Tonal Pairing and the Relative-Key Paradox in the Music of Elliott Smith’, Music Theory Online, 18/4 (2012), <https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.12.18.4/mto.12.18.4.schultz.html> (accessed 9 December 2020). Fragile tonics, meanwhile, are tonics that are stated but whose normal hierarchical status is weakened somehow – in Wilson’s case, often through the use of elaborate extended tonic chords: see Mark Spicer, ‘Fragile, Emergent, and Absent Tonics in Pop and Rock Songs’, Music Theory Online, 23/2 (2017), https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.17.23.2/mto.17.23.2.spicer.html (accessed 9 December 2020).
30 Harrison, ‘After Sundown’, 35.
31 Ibid., 36.
32 Doo-wop chord progressions are a ‘defining feature’ of Wilson’s songwriting, according to Philip Lambert (‘Brian Wilson’s Harmonic Language’, Good Vibrations, ed. Lambert, 63–104).
33 Kirk Curnutt, ‘“Brian Come Alive”: Celebrity, Performance and the Limitations of Biography in Lyric Reading’, Good Vibrations, ed. Lambert, 3–30 (p. 9).
34 Harrison, ‘After Sundown’, 46–9.
35 A slightly different case from these two would belong to the third type of late style identified earlier. In popular music, we might point by way of parallel to the unflagging creative energies of Bob Dylan or Neil Young, where all sorts of styles and reference points are engaged in these artists’ later years, or indeed to the Rolling Stones, who continue to sell out stadiums well into their seventies. This third late style, as already mentioned, is interesting when looked at from the perspective of ageing and creativity, but in terms of a study of late style does not offer all that much to analysis.
36 Jim Farber, ‘Dying Words: When Musicians Turn their Last Albums into Self-Eulogies’, The Guardian, 13 November 2017, <https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/nov/13/dying-words-when-musicians-turn-their-last-albums-into-self-eulogies> (accessed 27 April 2018).
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38 Stevenson, ‘David Bowie Now and Then’, 288–9.