Word: beachings
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...first issue of Crimson Arts this semester featured a trio of messianic Backstreet Boys descending from the rafters on space-age surfboards. The surfboards may have been props, but they recalled a more innocent time when surfboards were real and America's first great boy band, the Beach Boys, rode them...
Originally a surfer band and nothing more, the Beach Boys always retained a corny novelty sound that combined with their dated harmonizing and often nave lyrics to make them less than popular at present. Yet in their day they were America's best rock band, peaking in 1966 with their Pet Sounds album, which topped the charts in Britain, outselling even the Beatles' Revolver...
...unprejudiced listener will probably be able to understand their former popularity; indeed, a lot of the Beach Boys' sound still exists in modern music. It's hardly recognizable without the beach-party harmonzing, but it's there. As a band of handsome youths that, with increasing self-consciousness, sang songs of innocence, the legacy they left is a bifurcated...
...with the Backstreet Boys. When in the interim has a white quintet been so crucial to pop music? Some critics have optimistically observed that the Backstreet Boys might take their music in hand and morph from tools of industry to pop-craft artists, just as the Beach Boys went from the straight-up teen fun of "Surfin' USA" to the angst of Pet Sounds and the mastery of "Good Vibrations." Then again, Brian Littrell is no Brian Wilson, and such a turnaround seems unlikely...
...Beach Boys' other legacy includes Belle and Sebastian and a host of other indie and foreign follow-ups, all of whom owe a debt to the Beach Boys in both instrumentation and nostalgia for the romanticism of puberty. As a result, the Beach Boys have actually enjoyed some critical attention in the '90s, usually focusing on ther instrumental experimentation which so closely foreshadows the wall of soothing-sound popularized by today's quasi-techno chill-out groups...