Review Summary: I want to go and get away from it all.
Still Cruisin’ has the ignominy of being the Beach Boys record with the band’s nostalgia-whorish surprise #1 hit “Kokomo”. It’s the best song on the album. This is all you need to know about this album. Do not listen to this album.
Alright alright, I’ll elaborate.
After The Beach Boys’ self-titled 1985 album brought only the smallest of resurgences of interest in the band (despite its containing the band’s strongest material since at least
L.A. (Light Album), if not
Love You), the band’s temporary reunion essentially fractured. By this time Brian Wilson was fresh off his self-titled solo debut record and working on a follow-up, while brother Carl had lost whatever artistic control he had possessed on the ‘85 album and Mike Love was rapidly gaining a stranglehold of the creative reins. Anyone hoping this would merely be a passing fad saw their dreams crushed on November 5, 1988, when “Kokomo”, a bastardization of Caribbean music first written for and made popular by the Tom Cruise flop
Cocktail, hit the #1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100, the first Beach Boys song to do so since “Good Vibrations” in 1966. Of course, Capitol was quick to approach the band about doing a record to capitalize on the single’s success, and not one to possess a particularly strong worth ethic, Mike Love decided that an entire album of new material wasn’t really necessary at the end of the day. Using the excuse of “including songs that were used in movies”, piled in immediately after the seven new/recent tracks were the original recordings of Beach Boys classics “I Get Around”, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”, and “California Girls”. If that doesn’t send enough signs of this album’s remarkable laziness, read on.
Only three tracks were consciously recorded for
Still Cruisin’; the title track, “Somewhere Near Japan” (co-written by John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas), and Al Jardine’s “Island Girl”. Precisely one third of these are tolerable; “Somewhere Near Japan” has a tolerable medley and the trading-off of the vocals combined with the smooth production cover up the sketchy lyrical content (written about the events of Phillips’s daughter’s honeymoon, unnerving considering Phillips allegedly raped said daughter when she was 19). The title track is a blatant re-write of “Kokomo”, and “Island Girl” is as forgettable as it is culturally appropriative. Taking out those tracks, the aforementioned “Kokomo” and the three classics, we’re left with three tracks in varying states of disarray. “Make It Big” at least has a nice Carl Wilson vocal trying to balance the unbearably cheesy lyrics, but nothing can save “In My Car” or “Wipe Out”, the only two occasions where Brian Wilson appears on the record. The former is classic BW material from the Eugene Landy area; that is to say, it possesses dated, muddied synths with blatantly phoned-in vocals and Landy-penned lyrics that, try as they might, carry neither the flow nor the wordplay of the classic car rock lyrics produced by Roger Christian and Terry Melcher in the early 60’s. And then there’s the cover of “Wipe Out”, an ill-advised collaboration with the hip-hop group Fat Boys from two years previously. It’s perhaps the most egregious attempt by the band to maintain any sort of commercial relevance, and even if the Fat Boys seem to be having a blast at least, the Beach Boys are almost completely absent, relegated to occasional disinterested backing vocals and an appearance in what has to be a frontrunner for “worst music video of the MTV era”.
For lack of a superior analogy,
Still Cruisin’ may very well be the microwave dinner of Beach Boys’ albums. There’s just nothing here worth recommending; hell, there’s almost nothing worth talking about. Considering the shocking success of “Kokomo”, it’s difficult to even criticize Mike Love’s nudges towards an even more commercial sound, since they were perhaps more justified at that time than ever before. It’s just that by the end of the album’s thankfully short 33 minutes, you don’t feel insulted by the material so much as you are just left in utter disbelief at how much of your time was wasted listening to this potpourri of nostalgia, slick-yet-dated production and re-releases. And this isn’t even the farthest the band would slide as the 80’s turned into the 90’s; hell, John Stamos hadn’t even appeared in a music video yet. We can’t even consider it the nadir of the band’s catalog, just a precursor for even worse material to come. So why listen to this? If you’re dead-set on hearing some of the bad material that The Beach Boys have to offer, don’t just settle for second-worst.
