I don't really want to pick up the Brian Wilson thread all over again but Kyle asked for it so here it is. This from the Village Voice in its review of the "Smile" album:

"Whatever it was supposed to achieve originally, right now SMiLE sounds like a beautifully modulated, funny, sometimes unintentional meditation on a failed United States and counterculture, and the lost paradise, real or imagined, of Southern California, and the collapse and reinvention of the male ego."

I kid you not.