Dana Gioia: evaluation

Transcript context

…How good a lyricist is Brian Wilson? Pretty good for what he did. The Wilson family is from my hometown of Hawthorne. In fact, my uncle Giacomo many years ago was called in for a carpentry assignment that he thought was ridiculous. He came and he said, “I had the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen today. There’s this guy, he made me pull out his rug and build a sandbox for his living room. That guy’s crazy.” We said, “What’s his name?” He says, “Wilson. ” I have that, but I think the Beach Boys’ greatest songs from almost a decade are among the high points of American popular music. They are at this moment especially valuable because they are in some ways the purest expressions of a personal and collective optimism that America had about, in a sense, the goodness of life, and we’ve lost that to our detriment. For me, a lot of the songs are quite tragic and melancholic. That’s what I enjoy about them. That there’s the shiny surface but underneath, my goodness.…

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