Pet Sounds - classic or dud

its a weird one.

in 2019 i got to listen to this album while riding the Pacific Surfliner and walking around the San Diego Zoo (the site of the cover shoot). Balboa park instantly struck me as the visual universe of Pet Sounds, also this music loves giraffes. It was 70F and sunny, and there are so many plants i've never seen anywhere else in the zoo.

I don't think Pet Sounds is overrated by the dad rags, if anything it was underrated by the wider public for so long. i'm sure it's pretty hard to have an original thought about Pet Sounds but one dimension the title takes on for me- it's an album about the vulnerable, dependent kind of love, like that of a pet for its owner.

the thing with the dad rag praise, calling Pet Sounds the best album ever made implies a lot of things that i've grown uneasy with, like that art should never be limited by practical constraints...

i'm happy with my cd versions (1990 mono with trombone dixie etc, 97 box set)

I don't think Pet Sounds is overrated by the dad rags, if anything it was underrated by the wider public for so long.

I think so too. And also Rolling Stone (especially editor Dave Marsh) were actually pretty hard on it whenever I came across any mention of it published in the '70s or anything Marsh wrote in the '80s and '90s. They didn't hate it, but they constantly argued it was pretentious and beneath their earlier hits. Even Robert Christgau and I believe Greil Marcus maintain that argument.

They're older now, but the first newspaper critics I remember reading in the '90s were part of a later generation and really championed it. Everyone I knew back home who adored it was high school or college age at the turn of the millennium - Wilson's big revival (which began with that first Pet Sounds tour) probably fed off that and vice versa. I haven't heard as much about it now, but I think that's more reflective of changes in pop with the music most consciously influenced by Wilson having less of a mainstream presence now. I personally don't care - I never bought into the idea that musical trends defined "greatness" to the extent that a work is taken down a notch simply because other things have become trendy. Pet Sounds hasn't lost anything for me, it's still brilliant and beautiful for so many reasons - absolutely one of the great landmarks in rock history.