Two of music history’s most celebrated genuine geniuses died within the span of a couple of days recently. One had been out of the public eye for so long that many probably thought he’d already passed.
Sly Stone, the reclusive funk godfather whose music elevated the consciousness of many and Brian Wilson, who turned pop songwriting into a legitimate artform, died on June 9 and June 11, respectively.
It seems almost improbable now to think that Wilson was only 23 when he wrote, produced and recorded the monumental Pet Sounds album with his band, the Beach Boys and Stone was a spry 26 when he put his masterpiece Stand on wax.
Those albums featured such timeless classics as “God Only Knows” and “Everyday People”; songs that seem incredibly inventive to this day yet seem as though they’ve always been a part of our cultural fabric. Compare those great songs to Cardi B.’s “WAP,” which sucked a great deal of air out of the marketplace of ideas’ airspace when released, largely due to its vulgarity. A different time it was, indeed.
The departures of these two giants of American music seem to signal the end of an era, a time when popular music was driven by fierce originality and a restlessness that defied convention.
Both Stone and Wilson were innovators and pursued their craft relentlessly, despite mounting pressures from the music industry and immense mental struggles that often, sadly, seem to accompany genius.
With Stone and his Family Stone band to flesh out his vision, the pop charts had a kaleidoscopic fusion of many different types of music that spoke to unity, love and social change during a tumultuous time in our history. Songs like “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” and “I Want to Take You Higher” didn’t just captivate and soar (thanks in no small part to Stone’s vocals and Larry Graham’s fat basslines), and make you want to dance, but made the listener think, as well.
And in Wilson, pop music had its first serious auteur: a man who could sing, play several instruments and use the recording studio to its fully, heretofore unrealized, potential, yet, most importantly, understood the power of good songwriting, and used his skill at composing melodies and lyrics to crack open new dimensions in emotional conveyance.
The instinct for music fans is to mourn the passing of these legends, and rightfully so. It is also worth remembering that both men were not always embraced as the true geniuses they are thought of today.
Stone’s multiracial, multi-gender band was too radical for the mainstream in the early days, and Wilson’s deviation from the Beach Boys’ early surf-obsessed pop songs was thought of as a wild departure for many fans. Genius, history teaches us, is often easy to overlook in its infancy.
In our current cultural moment—dominated by algorithms, playlists and a 24-hour content churn—there’s a real temptation to believe that artists of the caliber of a Sly Stone or Brian Wilson no longer exist. But genius doesn’t vanish; it simply hides in new corners. Somewhere right now, a young musician is making beautiful, but unheard, music in a bedroom studio. It might sound strange to the ears of someone who is taught by pop culture that “WAP” is good.
Someone is defying the limits of genre in a DIY venue, or a house show, or someone is experimenting with harmonies on a beat-up piano that no one’s listened to in years. The problem isn’t that genius is gone—it’s that our mechanisms for noticing it have dulled.
Public indifference, fueled by digital distraction and a culture addicted to the familiar, may blind us to the next Sly Stone or Brian Wilson. But history reminds us: genius often blooms unnoticed, and when the moment is right, it breaks through. The challenge is for listeners, critics and communities to stay curious—to remain open to the strange and the sublime, even when it comes from unexpected places. Don’t let the algorithms tell you what is cool or quality music, just because it’s dressed up a certain way.
Stone and Wilson’s legacy isn’t just in the music they made. It’s in the permission they gave to future artists to be weird, to be bold, to chase beauty no matter the cost. That kind of genius never truly dies. It waits, it works, and eventually, it finds a way to be heard.
