Ian Penman reviews a new Brian Wilson biography and raises the vexed question of whether the Beach Boys’ Quixotic project known first as Dumb Angel, then SMiLE, should ever have seen the light of day:
For some fans it should have remained a glorious dream, better left unrealised. A labyrinth without a centre. The Arcades Project of pop.
Penman’s writing in the London Review of Books so maybe he doesn’t feel it necessary to explain a reference to Walter Benjamin, because the readership would get it (or feel too embarrassed to admit they didn’t get it). That said, given his previous form, I suspect he’d have done the same thing when he was writing for the NME.
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