ALBUMThe Beach Boys: Music From The DocumentaryThe Beach Boys
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The Beach Boys's Popular Music Videos
California Girls (Live)
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Sloop John B
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Good Vibrations
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Good Vibrations (Live at Live Aid, John F. Kennedy Stadium, 13th July 1985)
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I Get Around (Live)
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God Only Knows (Live)
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That's Why God Made the Radio
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Artist Playlists
The Beach Boys Essentials
These Californians transformed American pop into an art form.
The Beach Boys Video Essentials
Watch the all-American boys turn into art-pop auteurs.
The Beach Boys: Influences
Their sound didn't just spring from the ether.
Inspired by The Beach Boys
Follow the legacy left behind by one of the most influential bands ever.
The Beach Boys: Love Songs
Let these masters of heartache pin you to the wall.
The Beach Boys: Chill
Lean back and relax with some of their mellowest cuts.
The Beach Boys: Deep Cuts
Their angelic voices and pop savvy continue to charm audiences.
The Beach Boys: Sing
Grab the mic and sing along with some of their biggest hits.
About The Beach Boys
Artist Biography
In their early-’60s inception, The Beach Boys were nothing less than the sound of America. But over the next half-century, they’d come to symbolise its divided soul and the psychic tug-of-war between flag-waving optimism and darker truths. After forming in the L.A. suburb of Hawthorne in 1961, brothers Brian, Carl and Dennis Wilson, their cousin Mike Love, and high-school pal Al Jardine defined the sunny California fantasy forevermore with wave-riding soundtracks like “Surfin’ U.S.A.” As the surf fad dried up, Brian expanded his primary-songwriter role to become the band’s all-knowing creative director and, on mid-’60s delights like “California Girls”, he refashioned The Beach Boys into the male equivalent of the girl groups ensconced within Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound. Brian’s auterist vision—and his increasingly poignant songcraft—achieved peak clarity with 1966’s chamber-pop masterpiece Pet Sounds, the album that inspired The Beatles to venture into Pepperland and heralded rock’s elevation into high art. But Brian’s obsessive tendencies dovetailed with his worsening mental health (spurred by the lingering trauma of an abusive upbringing), resulting in the abandonment of Pet Sounds’ would-be grandiose follow-up, Smile (which was strip-mined for 1967’s loopy psych-pop pastiche Smiley Smile). As Brian entered an extended period of seclusion, the band took a more democratic approach in the studio, resulting in a series of irreverent, eclectic records—epitomized by 1971’s self-effacing Surf’s Up—that were proudly out of step with the dominant acid-rock trends of the day, but whose inspired fusion of soul, psychedelia, and orchestral pop would be later reclaimed by future generations of home-recording indie savants. The subsequent decades have seen a whirlwind procession of lineup changes, legal infighting, tragedies (the deaths of Dennis and Carl in 1983 and 1998, respectively), and surprise late-career novelty hits (1988’s Club Med perennial “Kokomo”). But the eternally youthful promise embedded in their music ensures that, when you hear a Beach Boys classic, the American Dream feels real all over again.
Hometown
Hawthorne, CA, United States
Genre
Pop
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