Pet Sounds: Most Overrated Album of All Time?

1-10  of all Music .

Best of Rock = 2

Jazz= 7 

Folk music = 6 

Classical Music =20 , 

Just about anything, taken out of context, is over-rated decades after it was state of the art. We went from window fans to air conditioning, black & white TV to color and from launching a dog into space to man walking on the moon during that decade - and the music grew by leaps and bounds as well. If you weren’t there, you really can’t grasp how cutting edge Pet Sounds, Sgt Pepper, Hendrix etc were.

Compare 1963 pop music: Lesley Gore It’s My Party, The Chiffons He’s So Fine, The Kingsmen Louie Louie, The Cascades Rhythm of the Rain, to 1967: The Doors Light My Fire, The Beatles All You Need Is Love, Penny Lane, Procol Harum A Whiter Shade of Pale, Strawberry Alarm Clock Incense And Peppermints. Music was changing from mono singles and AM radio to stereo albums and FM radio - look at both The Beatles and The Beach Boys and how they evolved during these changes (that they were partially the cause of).

Hate to say it, but you had to be there.

@orgillian197

Well said.

Impressions and evaluations will always be subject to present circumstances but it's worth remembering that everything is/was initially of its own time.

I feel the same way about punk rock.

No one today who wasn't there can really know what it was like to watch it unfold back in 77 - 78.

lonemountain, "work of all originals"?

Hardly, the lead song, "Sloop John B" goes back to 1916.  

And I remember the Kingston Trio releasing it in 1958.

Not to detract from Brian Wilson's contributions, but let's be accurate at least.

Paul McCartney:

"The thing that really made me sit up and take notice was the bass lines on Pet Sounds. If you were in the key of C, you would normally use the root note...a C on the bass. But you just get a completely different effect if you play a G when the band is playing C. There’s a kind of tension created."

That tension is created because when the brain hears an inversion (what McCartney is in the above quote referring to), it yearns to hear the chord "resolve" (return "home"). Brian Wilson uses chord inversions (which he played on piano) throughout "God Only Knows", to great effect. But remember, Wilson often wrote parts for three basses: a 4-string electric, a 6-string electric, and a 4-string upright acoustic. He has them playing all kinds of interesting musical parts throughout Pet Sounds. Very sophisticated writing, far above the level of his peers. I consider "God Only Knows" to be amongst the greatest songs of the 20th Century.

Learning about inversion is what radically changed McCartneys bass playing, first heard in the Revolver album. Very different from his playing on Rubber Soul, before he had heard and absorbed Pet Sounds.

To hear the master of using inversion in bass playing, listen to James Jamerson in Jimmy Ruffins recording of "What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted", as well in "Ain’t No Mountain High Enough" by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell.