page_title: Brian Wilson is a genius
section_title: Aftermath and Wilson's withdrawal
hierarchical_section_title: Brian Wilson is a genius / Aftermath and Wilson's withdrawal
caption_attribution_description: English: c. 1970 press photo of the Beach Boys
context_page_description: "Brian Wilson is a genius" is a tagline referencing the Beach Boys' leader Brian Wilson. It was created by the Beatles' former press officer Derek Taylor in 1966, who was then employed as the Beach Boys' publicist, although there are earlier documented expressions of the statement. Taylor frequently called Wilson "genius" as part of a campaign he initiated to rebrand the group and legitimize Wilson as a serious artist on par with the Beatles and Bob Dylan. The resultant hype bore a number of unintended consequences for the band's reputation and internal dynamic, and has been credited as a contributing factor to Wilson's professional and psychological decline.
  Taylor's promotion coincided with the Pet Sounds album, the "Good Vibrations" single, and the Smile album. During this period, Wilson sought the approval of the 1960s counterculture. To this end, Taylor wrote columns for various American and British publications, where he compared Wilson to classical figures such as Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart. By the end of 1966, an NME reader's poll placed Wilson as the fourth-ranked "World Music Personality"—about 1,000 votes ahead of Bob Dylan and 500 behind John Lennon.
context_section_description: Wilson later said that he had run out of ideas by 1967 "in a conventional sense" and was "about ready to die". He also expressed a  dissatisfaction with being branded a genius: "Once you've been labeled as a genius, you have to continue it or your name becomes mud. I am a victim of the recording industry." Parks echoed that Taylor's line "forced Brian Wilson to have to continuously prove that he's a genius". Love said that Wilson turned to drugs as a way to expand his creative conceptions and deliver on the comparisons he had received with the Beatles and Mozart.
  On December 14, 1967, Jann Wenner printed an influential article in Rolling Stone that denounced the "genius" label, which he called a "promotional shuck" and a "pointless" attempt to compare Wilson with the Beatles. He wrote: "Wilson believed [that he was a genius] and felt obligated to make good of it. It left Wilson in a bind ... which meant that a year elapsed between Pet Sounds and their latest release, Smiley Smile." As a result of the article, many rock fans excluded the group from "serious consideration". In a September 1968 piece for Jazz & Pop, Gene Sculatti wrote that a rock controversy involving Wilson brew among "the academic 'rock as art' critic-intellectuals, the AM-tuned teenies, and all the rest of us in between. ... the California sextet is simultaneously hailed as genius incarnate and derided as the archetypical pop music copouts".
  Wilson's bandmates resented that he was singled out as a "genius". Mike Love reflected that while Brian deserved the recognition, the press was a frustration to everyone in the group. He said that Carl was especially bothered by the misconception that the members were "nameless music components in Brian's music machine". Brian's then-wife Marilyn intimated that Brian decided to reduce his involvement with the band "because he thought that they all hated him".  From 1968 onward, his songwriting output declined substantially, but the public narrative of "Brian-as-leader" continued.  He became increasingly known for his reclusiveness and would not attract the level of press attention he achieved in the 1960s until a new marketing campaign, "Brian's Back!", was devised in 1976.
  By the 1970s, both fans and detractors began to view Wilson as a burned-out acid casualty. Some of the characterizations advanced by industry insiders included "genius musician but an amateur human being", "washed-up", "bloated", "another sad fucking case", and "a loser". In 1971, Carl commented that the Jules Siegel writings "and a lot of that stuff that went around before really turned [Brian] off." He explained that most of it was "grossly inaccurate" and characterized Brian as "a very highly evolved person" who is "very sensitive at the same time, which can be confusing," adding that Brian does not cooperate with the press "at all".
  In 1975, NME published an extended three-part piece by journalist Nick Kent, "The Last Beach Movie", which depicted Wilson as an overeating, fey eccentric. According to music historian Luis Sanchez: "The article followed the bombast of Siegel's 'Genius with a capital G' line to some bizarre ends. ... the reader is left with the image of an insufferable man out of touch with reality: the leader of The Beach Boys reduced to a caricature, tormented by his own genius." Biographer Peter Ames Carlin wrote that Wilson's "public suffering" effectively "transformed him from a musical figure into a cultural one".
  In 1978, David Leaf's biography The Beach Boys and the California Myth was published. While the "Goodbye Surfing, Hello God" article originated all the main reference points of the Wilson/Smile mythology, Sanchez references Leaf's book as the first work that "put the 'Brian Wilson is a genius' trope into perspective", especially by emphasizing a "dynamic of good guys and bad guys." Quoted in the book, music journalist Ben Edmonds cited Taylor's "'Brian Wilson Is a Genius' hype" as "one of those things that has come back to haunt Brian like a curse. ... the whole playing on the Brian Wilson mythology, whether it be 
caption: The Beach Boys, July 1967.
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