The Beach Boys

There’s something so appropriately disheartening about a movie about The Beach Boys being too superficial. For generations, people accused the band behind hits like “God Only Knows” and “California Girls” of being too disposable, a pop candy confection compared to the denser work of bands like The Beatles or the many artists that followed them in the counter-culture wave of the ‘70s. It took time for their legacy to be cemented as a band who was always doing more than it seemed, whether it was their dense harmonies that sounded almost impossible or the way they distilled California culture into melodies. As Don Was says in the new Disney+ documentary about the band, they were “the most articulate spokespeople for the California dream.”