1 Late style and popular music

Late style has been seen as a shift in idiom that takes place late in an artist’s life or work towards what Edward Said (riffing on Theodor Adorno) has called a spirit of ‘intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction’.Footnote ¹ Adorno focuses his own account on the ‘furrowed, even ravaged’, ‘bitter and spiny’ late works of Beethoven that for him ‘do not surrender themselves to mere delectation’.Footnote ² In an essay on Wagner, he zooms in on contradiction as a key marker of late style: he identifies the composer as ‘the first to draw the consequences from the contradiction between traditional forms, indeed the traditional formal language of music as a whole, and the concrete artistic tasks at hand’. This contradiction, Adorno thinks, ‘had already made itself felt, rumblingly’ in Beethoven, and indeed ‘in essential ways generated his late style’.Footnote ³ In a famous phrase, Adorno elsewhere sums things up: ‘In the history of art late works are the catastrophe.’Footnote ⁴

Other accounts of late style echo Adorno’s and Said’s emphasis on contradiction in the face of death or old age. Amir Cohen-Shalev sees late-style art as ‘dealing with unresolved contradictions and offering a distillation of artistic perception and a dispensing with ornament in favor of essentials’.Footnote ⁵ He locates these characteristics in the ‘reflexive, philosophical style’ of late Puccini operas such as Turandot,Footnote ⁶ though we could equally well identify them in Liszt, where austere, enigmatic pieces like La lugubre gondola and Nuages gris use augmented and diminished chords, spare textures and (in the latter case) quartal harmony to call tonal functionality and integrity into question. Margaret Notley shifts the frame of late style to what she calls ‘music-historic lateness’ in her discussion of Brahms’s late music. But she nevertheless stresses the composer’s struggles with a central musical and cultural contradiction: in this case, the promotion of ‘striking harmonic effects and lyrical, self-contained melodies at the expense of a complex formal whole’ (which maps directly for her onto the late nineteenth-century tension between individuals and society).Footnote ⁷ Finally, Anthony Barone speaks through earlier critics such as Hans von Wolzogen and Carl Dahlhaus about the ‘dialectic of artistic subjectivity and objectivity’ allegorized in Wagner’s Parsifal, where for him similarly contradictory dualities can be heard that are ‘inherent in the late-style concept – of decline and transcendence, of stasis and evolution’.Footnote ⁸ As we can see, alongside contradiction and Adornian intransigence all of these descriptions circle around ideas of dissonance, disruption and distillation, and these are further in evidence in late-style interpretations of composers such as Mozart, Schubert and Britten.Footnote ⁹ Late-style works here serve as critical commentary on earlier works and music culture in general, often in a distilled or dissonant manner.

By contrast, figures such as Johann Winckelmann and Goethe wrote accounts of what would later be codified in English-language literature as late style, which focused in an organicist way on late work as a crowning expression of artistic senescence and old age (even if Goethe’s late-stage organicism rested as much on a sort of solemn transcendence as it did on crowning glory).Footnote ¹⁰ These accounts saw in late works what Said later described as ‘reconciliation and serenity’, ‘harmony and resolution’ and even ‘a renewed, almost youthful energy that attests to an apotheosis of artistic power and creativity’.Footnote ¹¹ By these lights, late works such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs and Verdi’s Otello achieved a sense of resolution that seems to contrast sharply with the ‘formal ambiguity, expressive intensity and lessened attention to detail or to finished surfaces’ that Cohen-Shalev thinks of as characteristic features of the late style described by Adorno and A. E. Brinckmann.Footnote ¹²

We therefore have two principal strains of late-style thinking: Adornian contradictory intransigence and Goethean organicist resolution. A third strain, finally, sees late-stage creativity flourishing basically uninflected by morbidity, death or eccentricity. This is illustrated by the late work of composers such as Elliott Carter and Leoš Janáček. While this late productivity is surely an interesting phenomenon, its emphasis on unusually flowing and fluent, yet stylistically typical late work means that it does not necessarily offer anything to a discussion of style. As such it will not be addressed here.

Although there are clearly important differences between the two principal strains, in practice they often blur into each other in interesting ways. Beethoven’s late works are exemplary ‘late’ monuments in this sense in how they express both intransigence and serenity – particularly for those of us looking back through centuries of a scumbling reception history that dulls radical edges. Key texts from figures such as Dahlhaus, Maynard Solomon and Michael Spitzer, as well as Adorno and Said, connect Beethoven and late style.Footnote ¹³ They speak to the formal disunities and expressive ambiguities that run through pieces such as the fractured Grosse Fuge; to the curiously naked, concise and atomized conventions of the Missa solemnis or shorter movements like the Presto from the op. 131 String Quartet in C♯ minor; and to the topically stacked, schizophrenic opening movement of the op. 132 Quartet in A minor. Beethoven’s late music has been read in this way as providing an ‘image of shattered subjectivity’, in the words of Susan McClary.Footnote ¹⁴ But these texts also periodically slip into an organicist biographical frame that to some degree recuperates aesthetic strangeness via narratives of ageing as a natural letting go in the face of death. In this way they use biography to blur together the Adornian and Goethean schools described above. Solomon’s book does this most explicitly and consistently, but Dahlhaus’s critical and historical approach encompasses a careful consideration of the biographical subject.Footnote ¹⁵

We can identify a number of basic critical premisses running through our two primary strains of late style. The first is that late style and old age/death have invariably been closely linked by authors writing on the topic, as we have just seen in relation to Beethoven. In fact, it is often taken as read that ‘the work of the last few years of truly “great” creative artists is marked by a profound change of style, tone and content’.Footnote ¹⁶ Even if the concept of artistic autobiography is complicated in a source such as Adorno, where the ‘private individual’ is ‘the exponent and locus of social tendencies’ rather than merely personal ‘psychological arbitrariness’,Footnote ¹⁷ late age and late style – or what Said calls ‘bodily condition and aesthetic style’Footnote ¹⁸ – have fed off each other for centuries. This is natural enough, since there is a long-standing and perhaps unavoidable cultural bias that reads the artist through their work and vice versa. And, of course, in many cases this critical move makes for good copy: the story of Beethoven’s increasing deafness and shifting psychological state towards the end of his life has long given listeners a vivid context for interpretation, helping them to relate to and understand Beethoven’s late works in a way that treating them as purely abstract musical statements would not allow. It makes not only for good copy but also for good sense: impending death inevitably exercises a huge influence on artists’ creativity and, since one’s own death is often a source of unresolved tension and fear, leads in many cases to art in which irresolution, contradiction and dissonance are important qualities.

But despite in many ways being inevitable, seductive and to some degree sensible, this late-style critical yoking of life and art is also limiting in its creation of a hermeneutic circle where art can only ventriloquize its origins. I therefore honour but also go beyond the age/style link below. I take into account the profound influence that experiences such as loss of youth, illness and impending death can have on the production and reception of art, an influence that is especially pressing here given the ageing baby-boomer profiles of the musicians and fans concerned (see further below). But I also unyoke age and style at certain key moments, identifying late style as being in operation at different points in artists’ careers.

A second basic critical premiss is that late style has largely been applied in the realm of ‘high’ culture. This is evidenced in microcosm by the contents of Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles’s edited volume Late Style and its Discontents (see note 16), just as it is by the lengthy discussions of Beethoven and other composers given above. Popular music has proved less amenable to the concept of late style; at least, that is, in terms of the post-Second World War stream of modern popular-music genres that have fanned out from blues, rock and soul since the 1950s. (Jazz and older popular song traditions, of course, have their own storied relationships with lateness and ageing.) This can probably be attributed in part to modern popular music’s almost mythic status as a form organized around the tastes and habits of young people. This status can be seen across all sorts of cultural texts that emphasize the strong link between young people and pop music, from teen-focused films such as Rock Around the Clock (1956) to journalism such as Nik Cohn’s Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom and scholarly writing such as Andy Bennett’s Popular Music and Youth Culture. Footnote ¹⁹ Lyrics and imagery in songs such as the Who’s ‘My Generation’ (‘Hope I die before I get old’) and, appositely, the Beach Boys’ ‘When I Grow Up’ and ‘Wouldn’t It Be Nice’ are also typical in being written very much from the perspective of a young person looking forward to their life as an adult.

Of course, the march of time has problematized this almost default association of pop with young people. On the one hand, a huge array of musical scenes, styles and even movements, from acid house to K-pop to grime and beyond, have developed largely from the activities of young people. On the other hand, baby-boomer popular music quickly began to age in the cultural transition from countercultural rock and pop to a post-Beatles, post-Summer of Love 1970s. This ageing has continued apace in the decades since then, with the music going through revival after revival and heading deeper and deeper into ‘heritage’ status, still infused with youth in its themes and energy but grey with age and time. We can therefore see an emergent tension between young and old, or (to put it slightly more expressively) between time present and time passing, in later-stage modern popular music. This is the first context in which a popular-music late style emerges. But we can also see a version of this tension as being to some degree ‘baked in’ to modern pop from its very beginnings. A youth profile in terms of theme and listener has been offset from the start by nostalgia, myth and death fixations, where nostalgia and myth connote a kind of present absence and death an anticipated absence. This is seen in the Beach Boys’ ‘always already’ dreaming, always already delusional fantasies of high-school sun, sea and surf, just as it is in the so-called ‘teenage tragedy’ genre made famous by artists such as Mark Dinning and the Shangri-Las. The haunting nature of 1950s and 1960s American pop music that is embodied in these examples is perhaps captured most vividly by David Lynch’s ghostly reanimations of the form in shows and films such as Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet. Given all this, we can see modern pop as animated by unresolved contradiction and tension from the beginning. This is the second context through which we might understand popular music as embodying late style.

These links between popular music and various aspects of ageing and lateness remain somewhat underexplored in the scholarly literature. The ageing profile of baby-boomer modern pop has led some to focus on the relationship between pop music and age. Memoirs such as Phil Collins’s Not Dead Yet,Footnote ²⁰ albums such as Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind (1997) and documentaries like Scott Walker: 30 Century Man (2006) all thematize the notion of ageing pop stars. The death-focused reception of Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, which was released two days before his death and was based on topics such as illness, retrospection and death, is also noteworthy here. Scholarly texts have likewise interrogated ideas of ageing and popular music, as seen in books such as Ros Jennings and Abigail Gardner’s Rock On and Catherine Haworth and Lisa Colton’s Gender, Age and Musical Creativity. Footnote ²¹

While no one has yet applied the concept of late style to modern popular music in the general and idiomatic way I am attempting here, there are nonetheless interesting examples to note. These have also arisen from the ageing profile of modern pop. Chief among them is Willemien Froneman’s article ‘After Fame’, which provides ‘an ethnographic account of aging and musical creativity in the everyday life of the then 90-year-old South African accordionist Nico Carstens’.Footnote ²² Froneman’s approach is intriguing in the way in which it attempts to ‘re-enchant’ late style by seeing it not just as an aesthetic category but also as a kind of perspective that artists adopt at different points in their lives. Though her tying of this perspective to old age and disability – like her creative shift of emphasis from a critical appraisal of style to an ethnographic narration of encounters with the material world as a process of self-fashioning – means that her work points in different directions from my own, her fundamental gesture of imagining the frame of late style into both the lives and the works of popular musicians is taken up in the present article. Of less direct relevance here is writing by Richard Elliot on what he describes as the ‘late voice’ in popular music and by Nick Stevenson on Bowie’s supposed late style.Footnote ²³ Although they are both intrinsically interesting, neither of these texts engages deeply with late style in the sense meant here. Stevenson’s account of Bowie’s lateness is somewhat cursory, particularly when it comes to musical sound. Elliot’s focus on the ageing voice in popular music has something to say to my own account of ageing voices and audiences as signifying lateness in the context of the Beach Boys, but any broader sense of late style as an aesthetic category either related or tangential to the age of the artist or their relation to death is absent.

Despite these significant examples, as Andy Bennett and Jodie Taylor have pointed out, ‘The relationship between popular music and ageing continues to be a relatively thinly mapped field.’Footnote ²⁴ We can expand on this by adding that the relationship between popular music and late style also continues to be a thinly mapped field. The lack of attention paid to late style within the context of modern popular music represents a notable lacuna, given both its increasing age and the animating and unresolved contradictions mentioned above. Pop has always been ‘late’, according to this line of animating contradictions; at least, it has in its non-modernist, non-future-orientated forms. In cases where biographical and explicit thematic lateness accompanies its latent cultural lateness, pop’s closeness to late style is even more pronounced. This late-style pop is of course altered when compared with ‘high’ cultural examples. Adornian difficulty and intransigence is adapted here to a new register. But these alterations do not move the style beyond recognition. I argue instead that in music both by the Beach Boys and by other popular music acts, from Scott Walker to Sharon Jones and from David Bowie to Johnny Cash, we can see strong and varied strains of ‘late-style’ expression. Not only this, but the concept of late style can also help us to understand some of the ways in which Anglo-American popular music has aged and is ageing, thematizing its own age and lateness in both resolved and resistant ways that are unique to the form, given its youth profile and spirit.

2 Late style and TWGMTR

TWGMTR was a landmark album for the Beach Boys. Released in 2012 for the band’s fiftieth anniversary and constituting their first album of original material since 1992’s Summer in Paradise, it united all the surviving original members – Brian Wilson, Mike Love, Al Jardine and David Marks – for the first time since the early 1960s. It also added the long-time member Bruce Johnston and, below the line, Jeff Fosket, who has been a key figure in both of the Wilson and the Beach Boys touring groups going back to the 1980s, where he has supplied the falsetto and gossamer head voice so central to the Beach Boys vocal blend. In reaching no. 3 on the Billboard 200, the Beach Boys’ highest chart position for an original album in the US since 1965’s Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!), and in gaining what by then had been long elusive (at least partially) positive critical notices, TWGMTR served as something of a commercial and critical rebirth.Footnote ²⁵ And yet, it may well also be their last album proper: the long-standing conflict between Love and Wilson flared up again soon after the short 2012 anniversary tour in support of the album concluded; and – perhaps even more pressingly – all of the original members are now well into their seventies. As noted, the baby-boomer generation of musicians and fans that is embodied in the Beach Boys and their audience has reached a point where old age and death are now increasingly pressing concerns, and where cultural pressures to ‘age well’, to stay active, productive and consuming, collide with inevitably more complex and unresolved emotional reactions to growing old. All of this inflects my reading of the album as expressing late style: as these musicians and these fans deal with their own old age and inevitable death, it is natural that a sense of irresolution and uncertainty might come to the fore. This, I argue, lead to a kind of split across TWGMTR, where death-conscious irresolution pairs up awkwardly with death-repressing nostalgia. In order to flesh out this Adornian argument of intransigence I shall talk through both ‘sides’ of the album in much more detail now, starting with nostalgia before coming to irresolution, placing the album into the context of earlier Beach Boys music at a couple of key points as I go. I close the section by offering an alternative, non-Adornian reading of the album as a serene, organicist example of closure.

As is the case with earlier albums, the thematic frame and musical style of TWGMTR seem at first glance to be typical for the Beach Boys: they fit neatly into the nostalgia-infused world of ‘soaring vocal harmonies, infectious themes capturing the pristine innocence of an idealised era, and a danceable blend of classic rock ‘n’ roll with elements of doo-wop and jazz’ that Philip Lambert identifies as archetypal for the band.Footnote ²⁶ Beaches, oceans and summers run through the titles and lyrics, while sun-kissed, major-key vocal harmonies and driving pop-rock arrangements with unexpected touches characterize much of the style. This can be heard on tracks such as the doo-wop-inflected ‘Isn’t It Time?’, the AOR-flatness of ‘Beaches in Mind’ and the calypso-lilt of ‘The Private Life of Bill and Sue’. Meanwhile, a slick, shiny, photoshopped ‘adult contemporary’ sound, all gated drums, autotuned vocals and compressed and flattened winds and strings, dominates the album, creating a facsimile of youthful polish and sheen where earlier technological and musical limitations allowed the actually youthful 1960s Beach Boys music to evoke the real thing. This facsimile plays into the impression of death-repressing nostalgia mentioned above and explored further below. Wilson’s production in these respects borrows much from Joe Thomas, with whom he had earlier collaborated on albums like Imagination (1998), and who co-wrote many of the songs here and even served as studio partner to Wilson.

All of this creates something of a hollow feeling and evokes pastiche more than passion. The lyrical backward glances and reminiscences throughout the album, as for instance with the mention of ‘good vibrations’ in ‘Spring Vacation’ or the ‘just like yesterday’ of ‘Isn’t It Time?’, do not help in this regard. Neither do the music-stylistic echoes that resound across tracks 2–9 (and, as with lyrical backward glances, feature more enigmatically on the other tracks). For example, the slightly mournful 6/8 rock of ‘That’s Why God Made the Radio’ recalls superior tracks like 1964’s ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ in its gait and its sound. It also does this through typically unusual Wilsonian harmonic colour, with an upper chromatic mediant modulation in the verse and a lower chromatic mediant modulation in the chorus of ‘The Warmth of the Sun’, and a tritone modulation in the chorus of ‘That’s Why God Made the Radio’ (the latter heard also in the first ‘Dove nested’ passage of 1971’s ‘Surf’s Up’). And the soft-focus vocal ballad ‘Daybreak over the Ocean’ feels like a thinned-out version of 1988’s ‘Kokomo’, which itself was a thinned-out (though pleasing) facsimile combining many of the band’s most famous sonic signatures, from widely spread vocal choruses riding on top of chugging rhythms to beachy references to soft falsetto hooks to twisty and complex chord progressions.Footnote ²⁷

This is all somewhat to be expected: self-cannibalizing parody has been one of the hallmarks of post-1970s and post-Wilson Beach Boys, even if Wilson projects like Orange Crate Art (1995) and That Lucky Old Sun (2008) have featured much in the way of unusual or original material. Even an earlier song like ‘Do It Again’, released on 1969’s 20/20, is emblematic in both music (surf rock pastiche) and words (girls, beaches, recovery of past times) of the backward focus that has kept the band somewhat uniquely frozen in amber for decades.

But again, as with earlier Beach Boys music, there is much more than meets the eye on TWGMTR. This is most obvious in the wordless opening number, ‘Think About the Days’, and in the enigmatic three-song suite that rounds out the album. As we shall see in a moment, TWGMTR plays in these examples with nostalgia, self-reference and melancholy in ways that evoke earlier, similarly complex and downward-turning tracks like ‘I Went to Sleep’ (1969), ‘’Til I Die’ (1971), ‘Surf’s Up’ and ‘Still I Dream of It’ (1976). But there is also more to the seemingly conventional, backward-looking music of tracks 2–9, where the nostalgic pastiche is so barefaced and the contrast between the youthful sun of the ‘original’ 1960s music and the sundowning aspect of the ‘copies’ so exaggerated that they feel like eerie, empty simulations. The album in this sense features a push-and-pull between vacant, blankly smiling parody and melancholy, fragmented, even morbid (though always honeyed) explorations of death and ending. As Larry Starr has noted, the album is ‘simultaneously nostalgic and a commentary on nostalgia’.Footnote ²⁸ On the one hand, we have diverting throwbacks like ‘Isn’t It Time?’ and empty pastiche like ‘Beaches in Mind’. Tracks such as these, as noted, feel almost like simulations of Beach Boys music, old faces cosmetically altered to look eerily young. On the other hand, with the opening song and the suite we have unpredictable, fragmented and recursive forms; inconstant tempos; complex extended and altered chords and unusual inversions; fragile tonics, tonal pairing, tonal ambiguity and unexpected or distant modulations; and wistful and mournful lyrics.Footnote ²⁹

None of these elements is entirely novel in Wilson’s music. Earlier concept albums such as Smile were built on suite structures, for example, which were filled with fragments and marked throughout by both melancholy and joy. Harmonic and structural complexity, meanwhile, has run through Wilson’s work from the beginning; Daniel Harrison suggests in this respect that, ‘Even the least distinguished of the Beach Boys’ early up-tempo rock ‘n’ roll songs show traces of structural complexity at some level; Brian was simply too curious and experimental to leave convention alone.’Footnote ³⁰ Harrison’s discussion of modal mixture and chromatic modulation in the otherwise formulaic 1964 track ‘Don’t Back Down’ is a perfect illustration of this point.Footnote ³¹ Most apposite as a comparison here, however, is the already mentioned concept album That Lucky Old Sun, a song suite built around images and memories of Southern California. That Lucky Old Sun draws together wistful older material (‘Can’t Wait Too Long’, which in the live performances of the album was accompanied by a montage of old images of the three Wilson brothers, Carl, Dennis and Brian), brief spoken-word narratives (‘Venice Beach’ and ‘Room with a View’), retro ballads (‘Forever She’ll Be my Surfer Girl’) and emotionally complex backward glances (‘Southern California’, discussed below) to evoke richly coloured nostalgia filled with both longing for times past and a yearning attempt to relive those times through pastiche. And yet, perhaps because this was neither a Beach Boys project nor a self-consciously ‘final’ album, the pastiche is never quite as strong on That Lucky Old Sun as it is on TWGMTR. Similarly, the complexity and darkness of the melancholy is not as pronounced. As such, even though That Lucky Old Sun can be seen simultaneously as a revivalist and as a melancholy ‘late’ companion piece to TWGMTR, the latter album seems to me to be more apropos as an illustration of my thesis.

Having discussed the nostalgic, parodic side of the album, I shall now focus on the more obviously melancholic suite. The suite consists of three main songs, ‘From There to Back Again’, ‘Pacific Coast Highway’ and ‘Summer’s Gone’, as well as the aforementioned ‘Think About the Days’, whose melancholy piano and wordless chorus deploys the opening chord progression of ‘Pacific Coast Highway’, and the unusual 20-second coda of atmospheric wind and reverb-heavy guitar of the ninth track, ‘Strange World’, which prepares the ground for ‘From There to Back Again’. Each of the three main songs has its own mood, even as the suite as a whole feels continuous and interrelated. The lush sadness of ‘From There to Back Again’ (of which more in a moment) eases into the seemingly more content, serene valediction of ‘Pacific Coast Highway’. The straightforward diatonic triads of the latter, though, belie complex feeling. This is achieved in part via some gorgeously staged choral harmonies and a creative use of space and silence to frame distinct phrases as self-contained. But the greatest impact comes from the subtly powerful downward modulation of a tone (anticipated within the first verse across lines 1 and 2) and the decrease in tempo that lead into the culminating second verse, which is delivered with a sturdy smile by Wilson at the bottom of his late-stage range. These gestures turn us towards twilight thoughts in those closing lines, which are nevertheless belied in part by the smiling Wilson and by the bright, supertonic–tonic cadential choral close on the final word: ‘Driving down Pacific Coast, out on Highway One, The setting sun … Goodbye’. ‘Pacific Coast Highway’ is built on a contradiction: mournful words set and sung with a smile.

Then we have the elegiac closing track, ‘Summer’s Gone’. This song makes use of a looping chord sequence (in this case, the elaborated doo-wop of Imaj7, vi, IV6, V)Footnote ³² and a simple form of repeating verses with maudlin instrumental interludes (oboe here falling a little short of the comparable flutes), to hark back both in terms of broader rhetorical album function and emotional feel to the famous Pet Sounds closing track, ‘Caroline, No’ (1966). But where ‘Caroline, No’ felt like a lament for lost youth, ‘Summer’s Gone’ instead sounds like a funeral march terminating a psychological summer that in reality had long expired by 2012. ‘Summer’s Gone’ rounds things out in contemplative, longing mood; Kirk Curnutt described it as ‘a meditation on the group’s own lion-in-winter senescence’.Footnote ³³ The closing lines bear this out: ‘We laugh, we cry, We live then die, And dream about our yesterday.’

The opening track of the suite, ‘From There to Back Again’, is worth diving into in a little more detail in order to demonstrate some idiosyncrasies. The Table illustrates the music’s tricksy and unpredictable segmentations of structure, intricacies of tonality and other notable details, and illustrates both continuity and variety across the densely packed 3' 24'' of the track. Repetition can be seen in the distinctive extended chords (most notably, C♯maj9 and different minor-seventh chords) that run through many of the sections, as well as in the importance of what I have called the ‘third motif’ (usually consisting of two repeated notes separated by a third) across sections A–C. There is also continuity in the way in which different sections serve comparable structural functions within the song. For example, A, B and D can be seen as verses; C, E and G are transitional refrains; F is a kind of bridge; and H is a coda. And yet, at the same time, the fact that not one single section repeats; that conventional terms like ‘verse’ are used here only loosely; that the song traverses distant linear harmonic relationships (F♯ to C to C♯); and that an exponential amount of melodic detail is included (as reflected in the second column of the table, melody lines contain minimal repetition, with Jardine’s still expressive and even boyish tenor moving through various leaps, honeyed descents and emotive peaks), tells us that variety is the order of the day.

‘From There to Back Again’ in this sense has the feel of a through-composed song. Each break in the structure is marked by a shift in texture and arrangement, chord sequence or key. Rich extended and altered chords – articulated all the better by being voiced largely in steady crotchet beats on the piano, a tactic that echoes earlier Wilson compositions such as ‘Surf’s Up’ – create a dark, lush environment for the unspooling, plaintive melodies. These melodies, like earlier music by Wilson such as the chorus of 1966’s ‘Don’t Talk (Put your Head on my Shoulder)’, primarily sound out the extended notes of the chords, as for instance with the beginning D♯–B♯–G♯ over C♯maj9 of ‘From There to Back Again’. This technique anchors the song somewhat, given its density and variety, setting into relief the out-of-time lyrics that speak elusively of lost emotion and of pastness:

The melancholy, internal fragmentation and emotional complexity of the suite, as well as the doubled ambivalence expressed in the contradiction between the suite and the other tracks’ eerie, simulated sunniness, suggest something like Adornian lateness. TWGMTR can in this sense be seen as ‘late’ both for the way it creepily resurrects long-dead sunny rock music and for the way it cuts against the grain in critiquing and moving beyond the style. It is therefore untimely in two complementary senses, which invoke in turn two aspects of Adornian late style: fragmented, death-focused introspection and contradiction, echoing Beethoven’s jagged style in pieces like the Grosse Fuge; and the unmastered conventions of empty pastiche, echoing the vacant chirping of Beethoven movements like the op. 131 Presto mentioned above.

This sense of late style may not be obvious in the approachable context of the Beach Boys, but I would argue that such a reading makes sense given on the one hand the contradictions across the album and on the other the depth of the melancholy in the suite and the empty, naked pastiche in the other tracks. Both these features place the music in a curious position in relation to earlier Beach Boys music. That earlier music is referenced here in the context of decades of accrued personal and cultural memory and in the face of old age and potential death (for the musicians and audiences).

Ambivalence or duality of related kinds indeed run throughout the Beach Boys’ albums from the post-Pet Sounds era. This can be heard in the pop avant-garde Americana of 1967’s Smile and Smiley Smile (the latter discussed by Harrison as a key illustration of the Beach Boys’ ‘experimental’ music),Footnote ³⁴ as well as in the proto-late-style palimpsests of disappearance heard on albums such as 20/20, Sunflower (1970) and Surf’s Up (1971). I would indeed make the argument that the whole 1967–76 post-Pet Sounds and pre-15 Big Ones (1976) period of Wilson’s work with the Beach Boys can be seen in terms of this strain of Adornian late style. Songs like ‘’Til I Die’ refuse appearance and pop propriety as much as Wilson’s troubled personal behaviour at this time did, while other songs, such as the aforementioned ‘Do It Again’, look back with increasing desperation and blankness to past success.

It is true that even earlier Beach Boys music dimmed its brightness with pathos and therefore duality, with a weeping sadness underpinning sunnier albums such as All Summer Long (1964), Beach Boys Today! (1965) and Pet Sounds (1966). But for music to embody lateness there should be a kind of intransigence to the expression, as noted in the first section of this article, a kind of inflexible refusal to go along with conventional modes of pop smoothness and positivity. By those criteria, 1967–76 Beach Boys music – notably the tracks written by Wilson, though not exclusively, as can be heard for example in the overweening, oversweet nostalgia of Bruce Johnston’s ‘Disney Girls (1957)’ from Surf’s Up – and TWGMTR are unique in Wilson’s oeuvre in existing in a late-style frame. Something is not quite right in these examples: death hangs over proceedings, while buoyant pop expression struggles inside dead conventions or against darker emotions. Late style in this sense invokes an out-of-time and out-of-convention intransigence in speaking beyond when and where it should. That the Beach Boys can be seen to evince two periods of late-style expression, incidentally, only underlines the band’s fascinatingly erratic relationship with pop conventions as well as providing a particularly fascinating example with respect to the central questions of this study.

But that is not the whole story. Hearing TWGMTR as an Adornian mix of eerie simulations and melancholic reflections on death makes a great deal of sense. But it is also possible to hear the music in a different register, to hear the genre retreads as successful revivalism and to hear the more fragmented suite as in keeping with earlier melancholic, reflective music on albums like That Lucky Old Sun and Surf’s Up. Framing the album in this way turns it into a powerfully whole statement of closure on the Beach Boys’ long career, a summation that reconciles different tendencies within the band’s work in an unprecedented way.

Such wholeness and reconciliation are achieved through continuities of theme, narrative and musical material both within the album and across the band’s work. I have already alluded to the architecture that binds together ‘Think About the Days’ and ‘Pacific Coast Highway’, but there are other touches that give TWGMTR a fuller sense of integration. For example, the E♭ major of ‘Pacific Coast Highway’ emerges via a ii–V wordless vocal cadence out of the A♭7 (= G♯7) chord that ends ‘From There to Back Again’, while (as noted) the album’s lyrics look back to earlier times throughout almost every song. And we can identify a number of echoes and resonances between TWGMTR and Wilson and the Beach Boys’ career in a broader sense. The segmented, quasi-symphonic suite feel of TWGMTR harks back notably to That Lucky Old Sun and Smile, both of which albums (as noted) were built on a hybrid suite-song formal design, as well as to the messy but ambitious 1988 suite-track ‘Rio Grande’. I have made a number of references to common Wilson tonal strategies found again on TWGMTR, such as extended and altered chords, unprepared modulations and inversions, tonal ambiguity and fragile tonics. To these we can also add tonal pairing, one of the key Wilson harmonic tactics alongside inversions and extensions. (Harrison, again as noted, spends time exploring this aspect of Wilson’s harmonic language.) Examples here include ‘From There to Back Again’, which pairs C♯ major and C minor, and ‘Pacific Coast Highway’, which pairs E♭ major and D♭ major. This is just as 1964’s ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ paired E major and F♯ major, ‘Girls on the Beach’ paired E♭ major and E major and ‘I Get Around’ paired G major and A♭ major; 1970’s ‘This Whole World’ paired C major and B♭ major with sprinklings of A major and C♯ major; and ‘’Til I Die’ paired G♯ major and E minor/G major.

The emotional landscape of TWGMTR is also a familiar one in how it features sunny peaks alongside dark depths. The dusky mood of ‘Summer’s Gone’, for instance, restages (albeit in more polished terms) the grand tragedies of songs such as ‘’Til I Die’ as well as the intimate disclosures of something like ‘I Went to Sleep’, both of which sat alongside much brighter music on their respective albums (Surf’s Up and 20/20). Specific motifs on TWGMTR also hark back to earlier ones, most notably the elegiac submediant–tonic–submediant ‘third motif’ mentioned earlier, heard here over Imaj7–ii7 in ‘From There to Back Again’ and in 1977’s ‘The Night Was So Young’ (from Beach Boys Love You). Perhaps most appositely, the nostalgic longing of the TWGMTR suite recalls Wilson’s 2008 torch dream ‘Southern California’, from That Lucky Old Sun. That song’s hypnagogic memories of the Pacific Coast (‘Tried to slow down the motion, So it could move us again’), of singing harmonies and of waking up ‘in history’ align it closely with the similarly retrospective, late melancholy of TWGMTR. Just, indeed, as its many musical backward glances likewise do, including its borrowing of the distinctive modulation from Pet Sounds’ ‘Let’s Go Away for Awhile’ from a diatonic major to the major seventh chord a tone above, and the unprepared use of a parallel minor chord we hear in all sorts of songs, from ‘Surf’s Up’ to ‘Kokomo’.

All of these integrative touches suggest that a kind of wholeness is at play across much of TWGMTR and Wilson and the group’s earlier work. In that sense, when comparing the suite from TWGMTR with things like the suites of Smile and Lucky Old Sun, we might start to see it not so much as intransigent or contradictory but rather in an organicist spirit of serenity or reconciliation; to see it as a kind of apotheosis that harks back to earlier work in integrating different tendencies and in this way serving as a kind of downy artistic transition to death. Yes, there is darkness, blank simulations and emotional complexity here worthy of the Adornian late-style name, but it would misrepresent things to suggest that that is the only way to hear this album. TWGMTR can therefore be seen in some respects as an example of serene, senescent late-style popular music, just as in others its eerie aspects and darker thoughts are thrown into sharper relief.

3 The ageing of the new music: late style and popular music

What has all this told us about the relationship between late style and popular music? In embodying the primary strains of late style, the intransigent and the serene, TWGMTR provides a useful illustration of the way in which ‘late’ popular music can function as critique or crown on prior work,Footnote ³⁵ and of the way in which ageing popular music has to try to resolve the particular challenge of somehow addressing themes of death and dying in a form seemingly based on youth and living. With these observations in mind, we shall now broaden our scope to examine other examples of potential late style in popular music.

First, we may consider examples of serene or reconciled late style. Despite the association of pop and youth just mentioned, the fact that modern pop now stretches across at least five or six decades means that, inevitably, a lot of careers and/or lives have been brought to a close. These exits have sometimes been neat and even graceful. The Beatles’ Abbey Road (1969) is a useful case in point here, since the album was consciously constructed as an artistic goodbye letter (even if Let It Be, recorded before Abbey Road, was technically the final release from the band). The eight-song, quasi-symphonic medley on the second half of Abbey Road epitomizes the serene valedictory gesture that the album as a whole represents. This suite acts as a kind of synthesis of the different personalities in the band and their backstories. Liverpudlian scuttlebutt, ostentatious ballads, tubthumping singalongs, lysergic lullabies and serious rock are pressed into broader rhetorical service across the medley, acting as a kind of ceremonial summary of the band’s career. The medley then concludes with ‘The End’, a largely instrumental track that gives each band member a soloistic moment in the sun before finishing self-consciously with the famous line, ‘And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.’ The Abbey Road medley leans hard into legacy, summing up and sending the band off in grand fashion (though in typically cynical fashion the grandstanding effect of it all is undercut by the splicing in 14 seconds after ‘The End’ of a frivolous and unlisted 23-second final track, ‘Her Majesty’).

Johnny Cash is an even more germane example of reconciled late style. His final six original albums (two of which were released posthumously), known as the American Recordings series, were produced in old age and, in the case of the final four, increasing ill-health. These albums featured a distillation of expression and a quiet, often brooding focus on themes such as pain, death and loss, as in Cash’s famous covers of Nine Inch Nails’ ‘Hurt’ and Depeche Mode’s ‘Personal Jesus’. But they never veer into intransigence or discord. Despite evident personal pain, the musical passage to death here is steady and smooth. More broadly, popular music here proves easily up to the challenge of bearing the weight of age and death, its historical inclination to less obviously serious subjects (or, at least, tones) melting away as its musicians move into various late stages of life and musical style.

Even closer to the spirit of late-style integrative reconciliation and serenity would be the final albums of the soul singer Sharon Jones (Soul of a Woman, 2017) and the rock, blues and country singer Leon Russell (On a Distant Shore, 2017). Each was recorded in the final months of its musician’s life and both serve as celebrations of those musical lives. Jones’s album invokes gospel devotion on tracks like ‘Call on God’, using personal resolve and musical fortitude in the face of death to express a redoubled faith. Russell, meanwhile, summates his long career across his album, directly facing death in the lyrics but cataloguing and distilling different aspects of his musical life across a diverse set. As Jim Farber noted in The Guardian, the album that resulted ‘had a valedictory feel, as the songs ticked through the many styles Russell’s earlier catalogue contained […] The lyrics present music as an offering. Russell’s final [album] distilled his lost life into a gift that fans can keep.’Footnote ³⁶

Not all popular musicians have been artistically graceful or reconciled in the face of death or artistic closure. Many, in fact, have confronted and challenged death or obsolescence with artistic bitterness and resolve, making music which sits much closer to the intransigent model of late style than it does to the serene one. Bowie’s aforementioned Blackstar is a key album in this respect, not only for its forcefulness in the face of death but also, as with TWGMTR, for its illustration nonetheless of how the intransigent and the serene can blur into one another.

Blackstar harks back to earlier experimental Bowie works, from Outside (1995) to Station to Station (1976), in its abrasive and unpolished sounds, gangly forms and unusual lyrical references. Various aspects push it more firmly into a late-style frame when compared with those earlier works. For example, its self-conscious stance in relation to Bowie’s career, at which it gestures through musical and, in the accompanying videos, visual references, from the Major Tom astronaut helmet of ‘Blackstar’ to the nod to the harmonica solo of ‘A New Career in a New Town’ (from 1977’s Low) in ‘I Can’t Give Everything Away’. The album’s proximity to and apparent consciousness of Bowie’s death is also notable here. Lyrics such as ‘Look up here, I’m in heaven’, from ‘Lazarus’, ‘The clinic called’ from ‘Sue (Or In a Season of Crime)’, and ‘Something happened on the day he died’ from ‘Blackstar’, a track with a seemingly heavily autobiographical video and a title that also refers to cancerous lesions (Bowie died of cancer), seem to signify Bowie’s life and death – as do the skeleton in the ‘Blackstar’ astronaut helmet and the corpse-evoking head bandage and buttons-for-eyes that Bowie wears in the ‘Lazarus’ and ‘Blackstar’ videos.

Blackstar’s music similarly moves in unusual ways, in this case connecting with ‘late’ misshapes in figures like Beethoven. Unorthodox shapes and sounds fill Blackstar, whether it is the detonated drum ‘n’ bass of ‘Sue (Or In a Season of Crime)’ (that in itself harks back to his Earthling period) or the Nadsat trap of ‘Girl Loves Me’. The grand ten-minute A–B–A¹ structure and jumble of late-like sounds and references of the title track are worth describing in more detail. Nervy, crackling hi-hat, opaque lyrics and chromatic tonality bleed into open-eyed, mid-paced, warmly scored but dark-shaded reflection in the middle section. This then twists back to a reprise of the opening, but with musical DNA (chiefly the pacing and pulsing) from the middle absorbed and integrated. Christopher Doll gives a useful précis of all this, describing the main sections (which he calls ‘two songs in one’) and pointing both to the musical complexities and to the lyrical enigmas of the track:

These various sounds and shapes from Blackstar merge with the death themes and imagery already described to create an eerie impression of a present absence, of an absence suffusing the body and voice of someone still living (echoing the eerie simulations of TWGMTR). Bowie coils and curls his legacy through weird symbols and expressively pregnant sounds on the album in such a way as to evoke late foreboding and unrest. Popular music ages in this example in more unresolved, ambivalent ways than it does in Cash, Jones and Russell.

The lateness of Blackstar is therefore more intransigent than serene. But Bowie was not immune to such late serenity. Bowie’s 2013 comeback album, The Next Day, featured a similarly self-conscious playing with signifiers from across his career – notably with its occlusion of the cover of Heroes (1977) on its own cover, with the referential visual imagery of a video like ‘The Stars (Are Out Tonight)’ and with mentions of Berlin (a city heavily associated with Bowie) in the lyrics of ‘Where Are We Now?’ This looking back works more in the serene mould than the intransigent one given the elegiac and graceful tone of much of the music. But as Stevenson notes, The Next Day heavily features themes of desperation, death and dread.Footnote ³⁸ It is not solely serene. Blackstar might be seen in similarly conflicted terms – parts of the album suggest celebration and even exhilaration, filled as they are with creative vitality and wit. Blackstar hews closer to intransigence than serenity with its eldritch expressions, dark themes and periodic impenetrability. But it is not void of such serenity, just as The Next Day was not void of intransigence. Such blurring of serenity and intransigence, as we saw with the Beach Boys and as we can see in other cases (for example with the mix of death-conscious, foreboding lyrics and leathery voice on the one hand and the devotional, poised music on the other of Leonard Cohen’s final album, You Want It Darker (2016)), is not uncommon in late-style popular music.

If Bowie’s Blackstar presents a clear example of death-conscious work that acts as abrasive protest while also glinting here and there with celebration and serenity, many other albums have ploughed a similar funereal furrow without shading their dark with any significant light. It is perhaps unsurprising that many of these ‘late’ albums closely preceded suicide or disappearance: to wit, the 1980 album Closer by Joy Division (whose lead singer Ian Curtis committed suicide shortly before release), the Manic Street Preachers’ 1994 The Holy Bible (which closely followed the disappearance of the guitarist and lyricist Richey Edwards) and Nick Drake’s 1972 Pink Moon (the last release before Drake’s suicide in 1974). Closer deals directly and harshly with themes of bleakness and pain in jagged post-punk sounds and forms on songs such as ‘Atrocity Exhibition’. The Holy Bible couches claustrophobic lyrics about anorexia (‘4st 7lb’) and capital punishment (‘Archives of Pain’) in powerful, driving hard rock. And Pink Moon paints a stark portrait in short, inward-turning tracks such as ‘Parasite’. The darkness with which each of these albums seems to contend with ending and death, and the contradictions between pop accessibility and confrontational or difficult style that result, pushes them towards intransigent lateness. I would also argue that, as with Blackstar, it is not just the closeness to personal tragedy that creates an impression of lateness around them: their stylistic awkwardness and tonal contradictions are vitally important in this respect too.

Coming back to my earlier point of unyoking style from age to some degree, we can finally look to other artists for examples of late-style intransigence that in fact do not arise in any way out of impending death or ending. The latter period of Scott Walker’s career can be seen as a long and vivid example of this. Emerging in the 1960s in the pop group the Walker Brothers, Walker’s work evolved rapidly and deeply from that point. It moved through baroque pop on late-1960s and 1970s solo albums, via experiments with abstraction, complexity and noise on albums such as the re-formed Walker Brothers’ Nite Flights (1979) and his own Climate of Hunter (1984) to extremities of disjuncture, sparseness and abrasion on solo albums and scores such as Tilt (1995), The Drift (2006), And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And What Shall Go to the Ball? (2007) and Childhood of a Leader (2015). A track like the droning and crackling ‘The Electrician’, from Nite Flights, was a clear portent of what was to come in Walker’s later music, where the claustrophobic 5/4 guitar snarls of ‘Cossacks Are’ and the string cascades and literal meat-thrashing of the Mussolini love song ‘Clara’, both from The Drift, were typical. Though the period of Walker’s career which I have been describing goes back many decades, when viewed in the context of his broader oeuvre it makes sense to describe the difficult later-era work as a large-scale instance of late-style music, as a case in which an artist has struggled against his legacy in producing music that kicks against expectation and form in obstinate and intense ways.

Having now covered a wide range of examples and varieties of late-style popular music, we can identify a number of overarching themes. First, although late style and ageing or death are often closely linked, they are not mutually dependent; late-style popular music here mirrors other forms of late-style music. Secondly, as popular music has aged and/or faced endings of one kind or another, its musicians have explored different modes of response. In some cases, they have resisted or interrogated death in pushing style and tone beyond conventional expectations. In others, they have arrived at more reconciled, serene statements of artistic valediction. In still others, these two modes have blurred together, intransigence and serenity acting in counterpoint across different registers. Such blurring might be expected: the commercial imperatives of popular music mean that even in albums like Blackstar the pull towards accessibility and wholeness proves difficult to resist. Indeed, across all of these examples, even the more intransigent ones, the commercial dimensions and norms of popular music inflect late-style grandeur with lightness and relative listenability. And this brings us to a final overarching point: popular music’s perennially latent lateness. In constructing an impossible, disappearing now, young love or feeling that will both last forever and never exist, pop music deals in an emotional register that is always either out of time or contradictorily caught in time. This unsettling, knotty relationship to time, visible most notably here in the weirdness of the sunny young love of the septuagenarian Beach Boys but present across all our examples, becomes ever more so in the case of ageing or ending popular musicians, whose efforts to incorporate themes of lateness into their work have to contend both with this unresolved knot or tension and with the broader commercial tension just alluded to. As we have seen, though, and as is still relatively underappreciated, these tensions have provided fertile ground for musicians making late-style work that often looks both beyond and behind at the same time.