Onto-Historical Worlds

The Beach Boys were considered one of the first few “American” bands. They took their home and their culture of California girls, sun and surf, of cruising down highways in a convertible, of innocence and youth, and popularized it into a world-wide image for America. People could listen to the Beach Boys anywhere else in the world and hear those guitars and pianos soaked in reverb while those boys sang their tight harmonies and they think in their head that that was how all of America was. Never mind the fact that in 1966, the United States was not all fun in the sun—racial and civil tensions were high and disparities were everywhere.
So does there thematic material, which some could make an argument for being inane and naive, and it’s popularity make it symbolic of the white escapism of the 1950’s and 60’s? Still, they never planned any of this. The Beach Boys starting writing about what they knew; there is a sense of earnestness to their works and their sound ground them as one of the more actually serious bands of the time. That is especially evident in this song.
Musically they can be considered to be the first true “garage band” as argued by David Walsh in his insightful, and very unknowinglyonto-historical article “Listening to Brian Wilson”. The group was a true family outfit made of three Wilson brothers and a first-cousin Mike Love who started out first playing in their garage under the band called the Pendletones. Each had their own tastes and brought their own influence to the group,

“Wilson's melodic genius, almost unparalleled in the history of pop, was fashioned as much by Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue as by the close-harmony singing of groups such as the Four Freshmen: from an early age, his taste inclined towards the complex, the ambitious, the operatic. But little brother Carl turned him on to Chuck Berry guitar riffs, and his well-off cousins the Loves converted him to the R&B” (Walsh).

Thus, what we get from their music is an indirect collage of all the sonic movements going on around America.