HATE TO ADMIT IT, BUT…
The Beach Boys
“Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”
Pet Sounds
1966 | Capitol Records

Okay, so Pet Sounds isn’t exactly a guilty pleasure album. If you don’t like Pet Sounds, you’re probably deaf and you’re definitely a fucker. Nerds should talk about the Genius of Brian Wilson in the same hushed, reverent tones as they do about George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry. People everywhere should shut the fuck up about The Beatles for a year or two (but not forever, because The Beatles are, you know, The Beatles), and bask in the glory of resounding five-part harmony and crisp, near guitar-free (weird for the 60s, compare The Beach Boys to Animal Collective today, and realize that Wilson and Co. were way ahead of their time; still, fuck Animal Collective) arrangements. Smile, not Abbey Road, should have been the cornerstone album of the 1960s.

But as an admitted rock snob, I can’t help but experience a knee jerk reaction when any big single comes on the radio. Something about the smug satisfaction a record executive must feel whenever the song he picked comes in on the dial makes me kind of queasy. And so, every time I drop the needle on Pet Sounds, I feel a twinge of anxiety at what’s about to come. Wouldn’t want people to think I’d gone soft and started listening to oldies, would I?
More on The Beach Boys | “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”

HATE TO ADMIT IT, BUT…
“Life is a Highway”
Tom Cochrane
Mad Mad World
1991 | Capitol Records

Once in a while, a song so permeates the American musical landscape that it seems to clog every pore of our culture. You see it in ads and movie trailers. You hear it on the radio, first as a hit single on the “edgy” station in your town, later on the “lite” station, and then in commercials for local auto dealerships and furniture stores. The song eventually becomes not a song (with lyrics, melody and rhythm) by an artist (with integrity), but a series of ads for the products it’s been attached to. Tom Cochrane’s main contribution to American culture, the 1991 smash hit “Life is a Highway,” is an ad for Colgate, for Honda, for Disney, and for Applebee’s, before it is a song.
More on Tom Cochrane | “Life is a Highway”

HATE TO ADMIT IT, BUT…
“Life is a Highway”
Tom Cochrane
Mad Mad World
1991 | Capitol Records

Once in a while, a song so permeates the American musical landscape that it seems to clog every pore of our culture. You see it in ads and movie trailers. You hear it on the radio, first as a hit single on the “edgy” station in your town, later on the “lite” station, and then in commercials for local auto dealerships and furniture stores. The song eventually becomes not a song (with lyrics, melody and rhythm) by an artist (with integrity), but a series of ads for the products it’s been attached to. Tom Cochrane’s main contribution to American culture, the 1991 smash hit “Life is a Highway,” is an ad for Colgate, for Honda, for Disney, and for Applebee’s, before it is a song.
More on Tom Cochrane | “Life is a Highway”