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    How “Pet Sounds” Became the Beach Boys Masterpiece

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    Brian Wilson’s 1966 masterpiece is now considered a crowning achievement of music. The album’s reputation grew over time.Making a list of the best rock albums ever is easy: Something old (the Beatles), something new (or newer; perhaps Radiohead), something borrowed (the Rolling Stones’ blues or disco pastiches) and Joni Mitchell’s “Blue.”And, of course, bursting into the Top 10 — and often higher — of any respectable list: “Pet Sounds.”The overwhelming brainchild of Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ chief songwriter whose death at 82 was announced on Wednesday, “Pet Sounds” is beautiful — with gorgeous vocal harmonies, haunting timbres and wistful lyrics of adolescent longing and estrangement. It was a landmark in studio experimentation that changed the idea of how albums could be made. But one thing that stands out about the Beach Boys’ masterpiece is how gradually it came to be widely celebrated, compared with many of its peers.“When it was released in the United States,” said Jan Butler, a senior lecturer in popular music at Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom, “it did pretty well, but for the Beach Boys, it was considered a flop.”Released in the spring of 1966, “Pet Sounds” represented a break from the catchy tunes about surfing, cars and girls that the group had consistently rode to the top of the charts. The opening track is called “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” but previous Beach Boys songs had described how nice it was.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Brian Wilson and Sly Stone: Pop World Builders Dogged by Darkness

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      Two of music’s powerful visionaries died this week. The songs they meticulously constructed offered an escape their makers struggled to realize in their own lives.In a cruel coincidence, this week has brought the deaths of two pop world builders at 82: Sly Stone and Brian Wilson. Both were exemplars of 1960s California, with Sly & the Family Stone representing psychedelic San Francisco as a diverse, utopian commune and Wilson’s Beach Boys (with members of his own family) bringing the world a Southern California teen mythos of sun, surf, girls, cars, dancing and romance.As producers and songwriters, both were architects of joy. They devised irresistible pop hits that were ingenious, eclectic and full of vital details. Those studio masterpieces were beautiful, indelible artifacts. But the humans behind them led troubled lives.Wilson had barely reached his 20s when he emerged as the Beach Boys’ songwriter and producer, commandeering not only his band members but seasoned studio musicians to execute his pop innovations; the pros took him seriously. At first Wilson latched onto a sport he didn’t participate in — surfing — as a peg for his increasingly sophisticated musical constructions. But he quickly outgrew the connection — and bade it a cosmic farewell in “Surf’s Up,” with lyrics by Van Dyke Parks, in 1966.Wilson’s early songs lifted guitar licks from Chuck Berry, but they also reveled in vocal harmonies derived from both doo-wop, with its basic chords and its rhythmic nonsense syllables, and from the Four Freshmen, who sang intricate arrangements with chromatic jazz chords. With “I Get Around,” in 1964, Wilson cut loose with multiple key changes, a cappella sections, sudden instrumental interjections and exultant falsetto wails; it was a No. 1 hit. His innovative side had paid off.In 1965, Wilson decided to stop touring with the Beach Boys in order to concentrate on songwriting and studio recording — an unconventional but brilliant choice, one he had foreshadowed with a song from 1963, “In My Room.” It’s an introvert’s confession, closely harmonized by Wilson with the Beach Boys, savoring the sanctuary where he can “lock out all my worries and my fears.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Ex-Girlfriend Will Return for 22nd Hour of Testimony

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      “Jane,” taking the stand under a pseudonym, is expected to face her final questions from the mogul’s lawyers on Thursday.On the 22nd day of Sean Combs’s federal trial, the defense is scheduled to complete its cross-examination of “Jane,” an ex-girlfriend who has testified about the affection and passion she once shared with the famed music producer — as well the degrading sex marathons with hired men that she says she endured to please Mr. Combs and retain financial support from him.Mr. Combs is charged with sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy; prosecutors have said that he directed bodyguards and executives at his company to enable and cover up his crimes — including coercing women into sex — as part of a “criminal enterprise.” Jane, who is appearing under a pseudonym, is the second woman the government has put forth as a victim of sex trafficking, after Casandra Ventura, the singer known as Cassie, who testified for four days last month.Mr. Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and has strongly denied that any of his sexual activities were nonconsensual.On Thursday, Jane, who was in a relationship with Mr. Combs from 2021 until his arrest in 2024, will get on the stand for a sixth day; since she first began testifying a week ago she has been questioned for about 21 hours. Even with the torrent of details she has provided, Jane’s testimony has centered on one of the key aspects of the case: whether she was coerced into sex, or acted as a willing participant.During her time on the stand, Jane has recounting grueling experiences about what she and Mr. Combs called their “hotel nights,” in which she had sex with male escorts while Mr. Combs watched. She said she once vomited after having sex with two of them, and then was encouraged by Mr. Combs to have sex with a third. She said she developed urinary tract infections as a result of the frequent encounters. And after a violent brawl with Mr. Combs that started with an argument over another woman he was dating, Jane testified, she took part in yet another sexual encounter with an escort, wearing makeup to cover up her black eye and welts.In cross-examination, Teny Geragos, a lawyer for Mr. Combs, focused on dozens of text exchanges between Jane, Mr. Combs and others in which Jane appeared to express excitement about hotel nights and took an active role in planning them. In an exchange from 2021, a pornographic actor who took part in many of these encounters wrote about the “roughest sex we ever had.” Jane called it “def one for the books” and added a “mind-blown” emoji.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Turning VHS Tapes of Gay Men’s Choruses Into a Powerful Celebration

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      Matthew Leifheit’s “No Time at All,” culled from recordings made at the height of the AIDS crisis, plays through speakers nestled in the New York City AIDS Memorial.On a recent sunny morning in Lower Manhattan, Matthew Leifheit heard applause.It wasn’t for a live performance, but for many old ones — the source material for “No Time at All,” his sound installation that continues through June 30 at the New York City AIDS Memorial in the West Village.Culled from 53 VHS tapes, the piece is a continuous mix of music and songs performed by gay men’s choruses from 1985 to 1995, complete with the distortions and degradations that occur when magnetic tape ages and deteriorates.The piece runs 65 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of silence, a quieting that tells as much of a story as the golden baritones. There are seven “recitals,” as Leifheit calls them, that play every day through June from speakers nestled within the memorial’s 18-foot white steel canopy.Leifheit, 37, said he deliberately included music from concerts that took place in the middle of the darkest early years of the AIDS crisis before the use of highly active antiretroviral treatments (HAART) in the United States. It was a decade, he said during an interview at the memorial, when many gay chorus members “were reckoning with what they were going through, through music.”Leifheit said the project’s title refers to how the passage of time might feel to people who remember going to so many funerals — and to the haste with which AIDS killed many of the men whose anonymous voices carry through the memorial.Documenting the loss, and musical joys, of those early AIDS years was his artistic attempt to “dramatize the absence” and honor chorus members who “are still with us and thriving.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      6 Hidden Shops in New York Worth Visiting

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      You didn’t come to New York to wander fluorescent aisles hunting for someone to unlock the fitting room. You came for the locked-door city — where nothing’s labeled, the elevator grumbles and whoever buzzes you in has already decided how the afternoon should go.You might leave with a sterling silver carabiner, a fossilized dinosaur foot or a record that makes everything else on your shelf sound flat. Or maybe it was just a book you didn’t know you were missing until it looked back at you.But don’t bother dropping by. These places don’t do foot traffic. You email. You call a landline. You wait. Maybe you DM. There’s no signage, no small talk, no piped-in jazz. What there is: hand-forged armor, prehistoric bones with six-figure price tags, music that’s never been digitized, a jewelry showroom with the logic of a toolbox, and — if you’re buzzed in — a private library (with all the books for sale) that reads like someone’s inner filing system.This isn’t retail. It’s an invitation-only obsession. And if you knock with purpose, that helps.889 Broadway, Union Square, ManhattanGlobus WashitsuA kimono-styling class at Globus Washitsu, near Union Square.Up a nondescript elevator near Union Square, through a quiet hallway and a final sliding door, is something few New Yorkers expect to find above Broadway: a Kyoto-style tatami room meticulously built by the investor and longtime Japanophile Stephen Globus. Think shoji screens, hinoki beams, seasonal scrolls — nothing here is an approximation. It’s the real deal.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Rapper Silentó Gets 30 Years in Prison for Fatal Shooting of His Cousin

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      The songwriter, whose real name is Ricky Hawk, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and three other charges in relation to the killing.Silentó, the rapper known for his viral hit “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae),” was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Wednesday after pleading guilty to charges related to the fatal shooting of his cousin.The rapper, whose real name is Ricky Lamar Hawk, pleaded guilty but mentally ill to voluntary manslaughter, aggravated assault, possessing a firearm while committing a crime and concealing the death of another, District Attorney Sherry Boston of DeKalb County said in a statement.Mr. Hawk, 27, was arrested in connection with the shooting of his cousin, Frederick Rooks III, 34, in the early hours of Jan. 21, 2021, after the police found him bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds in a residential neighborhood in Decatur, Ga., seven miles northeast of Atlanta, according to a police report. Emergency workers pronounced him dead on the scene.Several people nearby heard gunshots, and security footage from doorbell cameras showed a white BMW S.U.V. fleeing the scene a few minutes after the gunfire, according to the district attorney’s office. A relative of Mr. Rooks told officers that he was last seen with Mr. Hawk, who had picked him up in a vehicle that matched the description.After he was taken into custody on Feb. 1, 2021, Mr. Hawk told investigators that he had shot Mr. Rooks, according to the district attorney’s office. Mr. Hawk initially faced a murder charge, which was dropped as part of the plea agreement on Wednesday.His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.On the day of his arrest, Mr. Hawk’s publicist at the time said that he had been “suffering immensely from a series of mental health illnesses” in recent years.Mr. Hawk became famous in 2015 while he was still in high school through his single, “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae),” which started a social media dance craze. Tutorial videos have millions of views, and the official music video has been watched about 1.9 billion times on YouTube.In 2019, Mr. Hawk went on the interview show “The Doctors” and described his struggles with depression.“Depression doesn’t leave you when you become famous,” he said. “It just adds more pressure.”“I don’t know if I can truly be happy,” he added on the show. “I don’t know if these demons will ever go away.”With a plea of guilty but mentally ill, the state’s Department of Corrections is responsible for evaluating and treating Mr. Hawk’s mental health needs, according to Georgia law. More

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      Brian Wilson, Songwriter and Leader of the Beach Boys, Dies at 82

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      Brian Wilson, who as the leader and chief songwriter of the Beach Boys became rock’s poet laureate of surf-and-sun innocence, but also an embodiment of damaged genius through his struggles with mental illness and drugs, has died. He was 82. His family announced the death on Instagram but did not say where or when he died, or state a cause. In early 2024, after the death of his wife, Melinda Wilson, business representatives for Mr. Wilson were granted a conservatorship by a California state judge, after they asserted that he had “a major neurocognitive disorder” and had been diagnosed with dementia.On mid-1960s hits like “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” “California Girls” and “Fun, Fun, Fun,” the Beach Boys created a musical counterpart to the myth of Southern California as paradise — a soundtrack of cheerful harmonies and a boogie beat to accompany a lifestyle of youthful leisure. Cars, sex and rolling waves were the only cares.That vision, manifested in Mr. Wilson’s crystalline vocal arrangements, helped make the Beach Boys the defining American band of the era. During its clean-cut heyday of 1962 to 1966, the group landed 13 singles in the Billboard Top 10. Three of them went to No. 1: “I Get Around,” “Help Me, Rhonda” and “Good Vibrations.”At the same time, the round-faced, soft-spoken Mr. Wilson — who didn’t surf — became one of pop’s most gifted and idiosyncratic studio auteurs, crafting complex and innovative productions that awed his peers.“That ear,” Bob Dylan once remarked. “I mean, Jesus, he’s got to will that to the Smithsonian.”Mr. Wilson’s masterpiece was the 1966 album “Pet Sounds,” a wistful song cycle that he directed in elaborate recording sessions, blending the sound of a rock band with classical instrumentation and oddities like the Electro-Theremin, whose otherworldly whistle Mr. Wilson would use again on “Good Vibrations.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Beach Boy Brian Wilson’s 12 Essential Songs

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      The Beach Boys leader, whose death was announced on Wednesday, was a brilliant writer, arranger and producer whose ambitions propelled his band — and contemporaries like the Beatles — into the future.The gimmick of the Beach Boys was to package the 1960s California dream in pop singles that wed up-tempo guitar songs with multipart harmonies. The reason the group endured was Brian Wilson, the group’s resident genius, who died at 82. Wilson wrote, arranged and produced most of its catalog. (He also sang and played bass.) As he exhausted the possibilities of the group’s original approach, his music grew more ambitious.Although his sonic experiments frustrated some of the Beach Boys’ fans (and other members of the group), it also resulted in an uncommon body of work, documentation of Wilson’s lifelong quest for musical beauty and grace. Even when Wilson spent years caught in the riptide of drug abuse and his own psychological struggles, his music was his life preserver — it provided solace for both him and his listeners.Hear 12 of his greatest tracks. (Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.)The Beach Boys, ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’ (1963)Wilson borrowed the music of Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” like it was a buddy’s T-Bird and took it for a joyride, with new lyrics about surfboard wax, huarache sandals and the ecstatic mood of a teenage crowd. What made the single irresistible: the Beach Boys’ five-part harmonies on the chorus, which felt like California sunshine to anyone within earshot of a transistor radio.The Beach Boys, ‘In My Room’ (1963)Becoming the Beach Boys’ full-time producer and creative force, Wilson wrote one paean after another to the pleasures of being a teenager in California, but his music was also suffused with melancholy: “In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears,” he sang of his own bedroom. He deployed his falsetto for the first time in these sessions, accentuating his emotional frailty.The Beach Boys, ‘California Girls’ (1965)As Wilson told the tale, the inspiration for “California Girls” came from his first acid trip: After spending some time marinating in self-doubt with a pillow over his head, he went to the piano and played “bum-buhdeeda” cowboy music for an hour. That loping rhythm became the bedrock of one of the Beach Boys’ defining hits. The lyrics, by Wilson and his bandmate Mike Love, elided the song’s psychedelic origin in favor of clean-cut California hedonism.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Brian Wilson’s Life in Photos

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      Brian Wilson (top right) posing with the rest of the Beach Boys during a photo shoot in 1962. The band released its first album on Capitol Records that year.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesBrian Wilson (center, with bass guitar) as the Beach Boys rehearse at home in 1964 in Los Angeles.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesBrian Wilson in 1964 staring intently at sheet music while playing the piano. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWilson (far right) performs on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in September 1964. Just months later, he decided to quit touring to concentrate on songwriting and recording.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWilson, with the bass guitar, holds a copy of the 1963 Beach Boys album “Surfer Girl.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesBrian Wilson (center) and the Beach Boys perform during an appearance on the Christmas episode of the TV show “Shindig!”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWilson with his first wife, Marilyn Rovell.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesBrian Wilson directs from the control room while recording “Pet Sounds” in 1966 in Los Angeles. The album is now widely regarded as one of the greatest in pop music history.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWilson (left) poses for a portrait with the rest of the Beach Boys in 1967.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWilson shares food with his dog.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesBrian Wilson (far back left) poses with the rest of the Beach Boys on a sailboat in 1976. The group had a nostalgia-fueled comeback in the mid-70s.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesWilson performs in 1976.Ed Perlstein/Redferns, via Getty ImagesThe Beach Boys receive a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1980.Lennox Mclendon/Associated PressWilson plays the piano at Wembley Stadium in London in 1980.Terry Lott/Sony Music Archive, via Getty ImagesWilson (left) with Dr. Eugene Landy. Landy was a psychotherapist who helped Wilson in his recovery from drug abuse, and then became a dominant presence in his life before being blocked from contacting Wilson after an intervention by the musician’s family.Ebet Roberts/Redferns, via Getty ImagesBrian Wilson (rear center, in purple) Beach Boys appear on a 1988 episode of “Full House” that helped introduce the group to a younger generation.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesWilson photographed at home in Beverly Hills, Calif., in 2004.Marissa Roth for The New York TimesWilson (seated, center-right) during a performance of songs from the album “Smile” in 2004. The album featured music from the famously abandoned album of the same name from the 1960s.Karl Walter/Getty ImagesWilson performing in 2006.Michelle V. Agins/The New York TimesWilson accepting the best historical album award for “The Smile Sessions” onstage at the Grammys in 2013.Kevork Djansezian/Getty ImagesA barefoot Brian Wilson in 1988.Ann Summa/Getty Images More