The fourth Sunday of Lent is Mothering Sunday, so let’s talk about the Beach Boys. It’s a Sunday, so I can talk about what I like, and I very much am interested in The Beach Boys, whether I like them or not. Some things to know about The Beach Boys: in any group photo, from any era, all the Beach Boys are dressed badly. This is remarkably consistent. I don’t usually believe ‘dressing badly’ is a thing that can exist, but for the Beach Boys, I make an exception. There was a period when, as I understand it, contracts obliged them to put out three records a year. If you listen through their entire catalogue, including solo records and unreleased records, you have thirty or by now forty records of material. What this means is, a Beach Boys ‘Best of’ album is absolutely golden. They have so many good songs. But that’s at least partly because... they have so many songs. A Beach Boys album, chosen at random, can be a bit of a curate’s egg, if you’re lucky.

I could speak at length about their histories - both the official one and the other, less often told one - but I’ve already made an audio-drama about their lives, so I’ll stick to a handful of thoughts on theology and gender.

The Beach Boys were the first band to have a pop-song in the charts with the word ‘God’ in the title. ‘God Only Knows’ is one of their highlights, though it is fairly God-adjacent rather than God-centric. God comes up a fair few times in their lyrics, mostly with regards to whether a woman will return their affection. At their core, the BBs sung about surfing, women and cars, and after a very few years they lost interest in cars, so few songs can be said to have a theological focus. ‘In My Room’ is one of a few songs to explicitly mention prayer, as something to do alongside dreaming and scheming. Brian Wilson’s song ‘Our Prayer’ has the following lyrics: ‘Ahhhh ahhhhh / Ooooooh / Ahhhhh ahhh ooooh / Hmmmmm’, which to be honest is valid Prayers don’t need to be loquacious so long as there is sincerity of intent behind them. The boys sing that one in harmony, and I can hope they all meant the prayer sincerely. Or is it like in Hamlet, ‘my words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to Heaven go’.

Jesus gets a mention in two songs, one in Brian Wilson’s ‘Still I dream of it’: ‘A little while ago / My mother told me Jesus loved the world / And if that's true then / Why hasn't he helped me to find a girl’. Poor Brian, always in the friendzone.

The other is ‘He Come Down’, by Brian, Al Jardine and Mike Love:

People have you heard of the world plan / To know the inner nature of every man? / Jesus came down to save the world from sin / Sayin' 'seek ye first the kingdom within'. / Maharishi teaches us to meditate, / To dive deep within come out and radiate / All of the saints through all creation / Sing the same song of revelation’.

It puts Jesus into a category with Krishna and with Maharishi Haresh Yogi, who so inspired both the Beach Boys and the Beatles to take up transcendental meditation. The Beatles made better meditation-themed music, and I think ‘He Come Down’ is trying to ape George Harrison’s ‘My Sweet Lord’, which does a more cohesive, and musically satisfying job of blending Hallelujah - literally, praise ‘Jah’, which is specifically the name of Jehovah, and ‘Hare Krisha’, a prominent Hindu mantra. Personally I’m very sceptical about including Jesus as a Hindu mystic, as I think it requires you to take his aesthetic hippy side but ignore his Jewish, Messianic, son of God side, and leaves you with a vaguer and less vital person than the Christ we know. Nonetheless, ‘My Sweet Lord’ is the better song.

One other song I’ll look to is Brian Wilson’s ‘Let the Wind Blow’, which takes the form of a prayer, to God or otherwise, which requests that natural processes continue - wind, rain, birds, moonlight - and for Brian to keep a girl who is becoming estranged from him.

One line which I find especially egregious is this: “Let the bees make honey, let the poor find money”. ‘Let the poor *find* money?’ I know this is a set of low-effort, low-stakes requests, but this is a request for an end to poverty which is so utterly divorced from real social justice, which ought always, always to be a neighbour to prayer. Praying that the poor merely *find* money, by happy coincidence, completely ignores the social mechanisms from which poverty emerge — and Brian’s ability to help with that, either through donation or by inspiring social change. ‘Let the poor find money’, is a refusal to accept that we, individually and as humanity, have a part to play in making things better. In the early 1980s, Ethiopia was ravaged by famine. Evangelicals prayed passionately and powerfully, but most did nothing to materially help with relief and development work - so much so that a controversial but to-my-mind spot-on campaign saying sprung up: You can’t eat prayer. If you neighbours, however distant are starving, do pray for them, but don’t just pray for them. Prayer isn’t instead of action. Faith without action is dead, as the book of James tells us. You can’t eat prayer. You can’t eat ‘good luck’. ‘Let the poor find money’ grazes my heart, because as well-meaning as it might have been, it’s built on a refusal to held, a refusal to do even the bare minimum. I will say it again. Do pray, prayer changes thing, but you cannot eat prayer. Even if our practical impact is a mere drop in the ocean, we have to do something and not do nothing.

The only other thing I will say about the Beach Boys. They have weird gender politics going on. And by weird I mean ‘distressingly standard for the mid-20th Century’. To give a tiny glimpse, they wrote at least four songs which talk about how women ought to have long hair. ‘Where did your long hair go?’ is our first insight we get into why Caroline is being told ‘No’. ‘Baby let your hair grow long’ is another Brian favourite. ‘She’s going bald (It’s too late mama, ain’t nothing upside your head)’ is another song in their catalogue. But one of the most blisteringly peculiar is ‘Hey Little Tomboy’, addressing the central tomboy to give up skateboarding, baseball and ‘rough living’, with the chorus ‘hey little tomboy, time to turn you into a girl’. Do these songs represent creepy and conservative gender policing? Perhaps, but I prefer to take at least the last of them in a different light, proactively supporting a trans woman as she seeks to present more feminine. That’s surely not what was intended, but it is the least appalling take. Even from that view, it’s still pushy and weird. Brian Wilson, trans women don’t owe you your narrow view of femininity. Cis women do not owe you your narrow view of femininity. No woman should be obliged to perform the proper sexy dance of acceptability in order to be acknowledged, and to do it to be attractive to a Beach Boy?! Utter tosh.