Zach Schonfeld at Stereogum, with the best piece I’ve read this week on Sly Stone and Brian Wilson:

Here’s a thought exercise: Try to imagine what your record collection would look like if Sly Stone had never lived.

OK, now try the same exercise, but with Brian Wilson.

On Stone:

It is frankly impossible to imagine the last 55 years of popular music without Sly And The Family Stone’s hazy alien-funk grooves, radical production techniques, racially integrated band, and remarkable songcraft, both the optimistic pre-1970 we-gotta-live-together anthems and the strung-out post-1970 narcotic grooves.

On Wilson:

He was just a guy who believed that pop music could bring you closer to God, that a pop song could be labored over as artfully and meticulously as Beethoven labored over his Fifth Symphony, and who arguably lost his mind in pursuit of these ideals. He also, crucially, wrote some of the most astoundingly beautiful melodies of the 20th century — songs like “God Only Knows” and “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Good Vibrations” and “Surf’s Up,” songs that people play for their newborns to introduce them to the concept of music.

On their shared DNA:

Sly Stone and Brian Wilson were two genuine visionaries who gave us so much, suffered so much, and both retreated from the outside world for long stretches of time, burrowing inside themselves, as their music became raw material for entire genres and subgenres and sub-sub-genres. […]

I don’t mean to belabor the point: Brian Wilson and Sly Stone were two vastly different artists with vastly different bodies of work. They were not the same. But they were both shy, wounded souls, both icons who emerged from mid-century California, both haunted by a kind of darkness their listeners did not always understand, and I can’t stop thinking about how they both embodied the burdens of pop success relatively early on and wound up withdrawing from the world.

Schonfeld’s piece is a portrait of two very different men whose music defined—and possibly defeated—them. A truly beautiful bit of writing and remembrance.