Racializing Rock: The 1960s and the White Sounds of the Beach Boys’ ‘Pet Sounds’

Today, many don’t consider the racial implications of musical genres dominated by whites, including rock. However, some do recognize rock as white-dominated, and even the term “rockism” signals the dominance of straight white male tastes in music criticism.

For this reason, it’s important to read the Beach Boys‘ seminal 1966 album, Pet Sounds, in the context of race as a social structure and as an identity category. Brian Wilson, the album’s great auteur, said he was aiming for a “white spiritual sound”, and the Beach Boys were once quoted as saying, “We’re white and we sing white”, so reinterpreting the album’s racial history — including with its “Africanist presence”, as Toni Morrison calls it — is especially significant this year, the album’s 50th anniversary. Pet Sounds is a surprising text to apply race-based analysis to, so in addition to challenging the album’s ahistorical, timeless status as “great art”, we should attempt to theorize and historicize race in relation to music, a field largely neglected in the emerging field of Whiteness Studies.