God Only Knows vs Just Like Heaven

Oh yeah, also the titles have to do with god and heaven but these concepts are just used euphemistically in the songs. That's the connection here.

wow, have to go with God Only Knows even thought I don't think I've ever skipped or turned the channel/station away from Just Like Heaven. These are 2 of my all time faves for sure.

God Only Knows is just like heaven tbh

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God Only Knows won, Just Like Heaven did not place.

so because of that going with "Just Like Heaven."

These show up in movies and trailers?

I'm listening to "Just Like Heaven" now, and I don't think I've ever heard it before... Which movies/trailers does it appear in?

"God Only Knows" I'm familiar with of course, though why IM thought it was the best song of the 20th century remains an eternal mystery to me.

never heard Just Like Heaven

IM = ILM

(xpost)

God Only Knows is one of the best songs ever made. That said I am a bit tired of it now having reached my peak Beach Boys obsession about a decade ago, and also things like that horrible BBC allstar travesty from earlier this year.

'Just Like Heaven'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-WHID4A7lM

"Just Like Heaven" is a decent Cure song though overestimated in their canon imo

I've hated "God Only Knows" since I was a kid and have only lately been able to divine any of what people think is praiseworthy in it, and even then, no thanks

those views are heterodox

Beach Boys leave me cold in general. I like "Just Like Heaven" on the basis of Dinosaur Jr.'s cover.

mods delete thread plz

God Only Knows vs Just Like Heaven

heaven only knows vs just like god

God Only Knows is a special little song, but confession: I hate the little orchestral hiccup it takes around the 1-minute mark. But the rest of it is sublime.

I always forget about that tango thing.

how strange

"just like heaven" pretty easily for me.

I mostly just love the "god only knows..." line in the Beach Boys song.

The CURE song is beautiful romantic whirlwind from start to finish.

"God Only Knows" is really good at seaming meaningful but I don't think it really has anything to say. Meandering druggy self-reflection positing as spiritual insight. "Just Like Heaven" is this wonderful cascade of emotions and messy teenage romance. I like the latter more mainly cos it feels real. The former has always felt like it's putting on a show.

i'm not much of a beach-boys fan, but i love god only knows. such a heart-wrenching love songs, because the lyrics are so straightforward and emotionally bare and vulnerable. a lot of times that type of lyric writing is terrible -- like reading from someone's unedited diary -- but when it works, like here (or in some neil young songs), it's brilliant.

"GOK" lyrics are pretty dark -- obsession, death, the frightening spectre of "what I'd be without you" (and maybe BW grew to manifest that to some extent).

I don't see a failed attempt to be "meaning". I see an eerie, compelling picture painted with remarkable economy.

The first line of this love song is "I may not always love you"! XP

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ totally

adam bruneau must be thinking about a different song. god only knows is incredibly direct... anything but meandering and "druggy" (not that those things are bad)

Neither is among my favorite songs by each artist.

P. good and accessible analysis of "God Only Knows" here: https://garyewer.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/classic-song-analysis-god-only-knows-wilsonasher/ I'm a little surprised that he doesn't say more about the orchestration, which is one of the song's most remarkable qualities to me: it is absolutely meticulous while being thoroughly idiosyncratic and non-standard.

Treeship OTM about the lyrics, although I think "euphemistically" is the wrong word in the first post.

"Just Like Heaven" is far from being my favourite Dinosaur Jr. song.

Neither is among my favorite songs by each artist.

― Moka, Sunday, 28 December 2014

I agree. I'm a huge fan of both bands and neither of these songs would make my top 30 for either band. But "God Only Knows" is probably the better song.

well I listen to "All Cats are Grey" 3.5x more than "JLH" but "JLH" is the higher artistic achievement

xps "idiomatically"?

"Just Like Heaven", no contest. I agree to some extent with Adam Bruneau, in that "God Only Knows" strikes me as lovely but ennervated, unfleshed, reflecting not the messy tangle of romance but rather a strangely idealized conception of it. It sound like a love song to an imaginary stuffed animal, chokingly sentimental but devoid of wit, sex and joyful fire. Moreover, there's no real trace of the supposedly beloved "you" to be found in the lyrics. Its all about "I", my feelings and my feelings about my feelings. In this it reminds me of Roky Erickson's "You Don't Love Me Yet". It's profoundly moving and rather sad, but not a little creepy in its hermetically sealed adoration. Also doesn't surprise me at all that Daniel E2 compared the lyrics to Neil Young, who trades in a similar sort of interior isolation.

"Just Like Heaven" is the complete opposite of this. It starts not with the narrator's voice, but the voice of his beloved, quoted. She's granted words, a laugh, arms that hold and lips that kiss. She has volition and desires of her own, is nearly as real and complex in the song as Robert's crashing emotions. Moreover, there's no sense of cloying idealization, either of the lover or love itself. For all its dreamlike ambiguity, "Just Like Heaven", paints a rather earthy portrait of infatuation. It effectively portrays the giddy angst of new love, the "dizzy" intoxication, a tide of high and low emotions sweeping the ground out from under one's feet. Here, love is not perfect, not forever. It simply is. Plus I like the music better. It moves me, spins me around inside, where "God Only Knows" only invites admiration.

I am not v. familiar with "God Only Knows" so will probably abstain from this poll, but I am somewhat familiar with the Cure (tho haven't heard KMx3) & "Just Like Heaven", along with "Lovesong", strikes me as a fortuitous case of a band's most popular work being their best.

The other Cure song I really dig is "A Night Like Tonight" but I don't know if that was a hit/was even released as a single/maybe released-as-a-single-in-the-UK-but-not-the-USA? -- It does have a saxophone solo though so I have to assume it was at least aiming for the charts

i like that he doesn't/can't show her how to do the trick, so she doesn't run away with him. this gets me more and more with time. god only knows is formidably pretty but i don't think it's actually a song you need to have been in a romantic relationship to write. have always heard the first two lines (and in context the chorus) as a hint of apocalypse (there may not always be stars), the favorite metaphor of adolescence. to me it is a contemplation of oblivion/transience, with a v 60s abstract+divine notion of Love held up as its justification. which is cool of course. hard to argue with. but just like heaven is a song about having boyfriends and girlfriends. finally, otm that "i may not always love you" is a gr8 opener but the rush of "showmeshowmeSHOWme" is almost what pop is for.

Good posts contenderizer and difficult listening hour and thanks to sund4r for the fascinating link to the formal analysis of God Only Knows.

I definitely agree with the notion that God Only Knows is far more adolescent/narcissistic than Just Like Heaven -- more about the singer railing against the ontological necessity of loss than anything specific about the beloved he is addressing -- but I wouldn't point to these things as criticisms. It has a kind of Holden Caulfield charm. The singer is being grandiose and arguably manipulative but in a transparent way that reveals the longing and insecurity underneath and lends his sentiment the kind of university one can only find in the concrete and situational. Or to put it another way, this song manages to encapuslate the best and worst of the sixties without adding anything superfluous to its "literal" content.

*universality (not university)

"God Only Knows" doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with "The Sixties," neither as they were lived, nor as they have been packaged and mummified. To sing it or think along with it is an admission of being totally dependent on another person (maybe there, maybe not) for your or my own sanity and stability. Such a choked-up admission might be relevant anytime anywhere.

Could make too much of the opening "I may not always love you", because the follow-up line turns it into relatively standard pop music love song stuff: "as long as there are stars above you". Baby I'm yours until the sun no longer shines, until the poets run out of rhymes...

It drops out of that trite cosmic stuff with "life would still go on believe me". Except I'd be a hollow shell and life wouldn't show me anything anymore. This is not necessarily romantic, it might just be realistic.

Of course what sends it over is setting the main line as a round. It's religious music that won't connect to the God that knows what I'd be without you.

Idk, I don't really see the earthiness and emotional complexity in "Just Like Heaven". It always seemed to me like something someone could write after sitting through a class on English Romantic poetry, more than it makes me think of any relationship I've been in. The fear of losing someone because you can't show them your one trick doesn't really strike me as that much more mature than the neediness and dependency of "God Only Knows".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOadV_CPT_k

I'm not sure I'd seek out either song specifically from these two acts that I like a lot, but the arrangement of "God Only Knows" is pretty novel and neat, while the arrangement of "Just Like Heaven" (a great pop song, obviously) is pretty generic. Chord progression, etc. Geir only knows.

The 60s were in part about young people taking themselves and their experiences very seriously, and god only knows is a song that wrings transcendence out of this banal, kind of deliberately overstated experience of dependency, as if the singer was the first person to feel these things. You could say that's just a function of youth -- for young people, everything is the first time -- but that just brings us back to the fact that the 60s was about the valorization of youth. I don 't think this denies the fact that the song is universally relatable but there is a way in which it is very of its moment too. The cool thing about it, as i said, is that it's about the 60s without being about the 60s.

xp to vic perry

I wouldn't say that "Just Like Heaven" is more intrinsically mature than "God Only Knows", just that it's appealingly seasoned with concrete detail, attuned to something outside the mirrored hallways of the self. Nor do I claim that "God Only Knows" is the lesser song because it's so entirely abstract, trapped in trembling angst. I previously compared it to Roky Erickson's "You Don't Love Me Yet", a song that ups the walled-off, dissociative creep factor considerably, but which overwhelms me with the brokenhearted joy that others, perhaps, find in "God Only Knows".

I'll always insist, in discussions such as this, that our basic emotional responses to good pop music precede and determine - and thus are in some a sense a good deal more "authentic" than - the justificatory constructs we arrive at in subsequent analysis. I like "Just Like Heaven" because I like it, because I cannot help feeling happy when it (the song) happens to me. I'm there when the keys kick in, an almost blinding streak of reflected light above the moody, blue-hued bed of drums, bass and guitar, and then that stratospheric final guitar, skipping and dancing across the shimmering synth glow, a wordlessly precise evocation of giddy, youthful infatuation. The lyrics, when they arrive, merely restate what the music's already told us, but flesh story with charming wit and detail. Smith's phrasing, splitting the difference between dreamy indolence and yelping melodrama, place us just as surely in the proper, ruefully lovestruck headspace.

"Just Like Heaven" works for me. "God Only Knows" doesn't, really. I only really perk up, emotionally, when the title arrives in the lyrics. That's the hook, and it catches me, but the rest seems rather emotionally opaque and distant, especially the elliptically arranged bridge and coda. For reference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX2MLsMrmCc

I disagree with the idea that God is being used euphemistically in "God Only Knows" and, Vic, with what you said about it being "religious music that won't connect to the God that knows what I'd be without you." It was the album that followed PS that Wilson once conceived as a "teenage symphony to God." When that BBC cover version came out recently, Wilson said, ""All of the artists did such a beautiful job...I can’t thank them enough. I’m just honored that 'God Only Knows' was chosen. [It's] a very special song. An extremely spiritual song and one of the best I’ve ever written."

I also don't see what there is to gain in considering the song in terms of *dependency*, as though there's some psychological pathology to it that should be categorized and criticized. I do relate it a little to desperation, but I remember the song really knocking me for a bit of a loop maybe for the first times when I happened to be a little desperate.

I was just writing when I saw the post directly above, tim. I'm not sure we disagree about the "God" part of the song, since I do agree with what you wrote and don't think it's incompatible with what I said earlier.

I endorse your 2nd paragraph too. Glad somebody else pointed it out. There's this undercurrent in the thread that maturity = "standing on your own" .... interestingly, this idea is rejected explicitly three songs in during "That's Not Me". And it's not me either.

I don't think Pet Sounds is about teenagers anyway, except for the opener (where the optimism proves retrospective....it doesn't all turn out to be 'nice' on the rest of the album). And Pet Sounds reputation grew as its audience got older.

Also: the 60s were unusual in that older people took young people seriously (made a very big deal about it, helped create a frankenstein monster of a generation that conveniently dropped the "youth" part under duress but is still the crown of creation if you ask them). Near as I can tell, young people have never ceased taking themselves seriously. We certainly did in the 80s, the one period I can speak from experience on being a teen and a 20-something.

Finally, this stuff about the Cure song --- very nice song, I didn't realize I'd known it all these years--- being more precise? What to do with "strange as angels dancing in the deepest oceans twisting in the water "? and "daylight licked me into shape" ? Doesn't exactly make the case for "concrete detail" or particularly good writing either. But there is a lot of good writing in this song too. I wouldn't pick on it normally, it all works as pop music, but then I'm not itching for a fight between the songs either.

I may not always love you
But long as there are stars above you
You never need to doubt it
I'll make you so sure about it

This seems like it's the internal dialog running through the head of someone who is about to say "Don't talk, put your head on my shoulder" (another old-school patriarchal sentiment from the same album). Or "Don't worry baby".

i like "god only knows" best in its place on pet sounds (the slow fadeout of "sloop john b" transitioning into the opening of GOK is probably my favorite moment on the album). i think picking on it as the most beautiful song ever (etc) kind of robs it of some of its magic, and there are plenty of moments on the album i'd rate just as highly.

It's a quandary, how do you celebrate stuff without just creating future resentments?

***

x-post The first stanza is conventional love song stuff, and it is not repeated, it's just a way into the song anyway. The "If you should ever leave me" anxiety/acceptance stanza where it gets real comes back a second time. And the helpless "God only knows" line gets the fullest possible emphasis.

"old-school patriarchal sentiment" Here at the New School we'd like to pat you on the head for successfully repeating perfectly received sentiments acceptable for Our Time.

"surfin' usa": just another excuse for manifest destiny

how do you celebrate stuff without just creating future resentments?

I think you just ignore whatever part of the cultural framing of the song becomes distasteful and sort of trust that the song can still mean whatever it means to you in the normal course of your life.

It's more of creating future resentments for others. A friend of mine had heard so much about Another Green World that he couldn't even hear it past the pre-hype. And I hadn't helped the situation by raving endlessly about it. Basically all I mean is that the presentation of a work of art as some kind of mountain you need to climb isn't doing it any favors.

I like Calvino's definition of a classic, that no matter what other people have said about it, if you get to know a real classic you find out something in addition to what everybody else had already said about it. Pretty tall order, but I like the way it evades the operations of canonization by suggesting that really good art can get through despite all the praise. It's also nicely subjective in that there will be something YOU care about rather than just what you have been told to care about by others.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Finally, this stuff about the Cure song...being more precise? What to do with "strange as angels dancing in the deepest oceans twisting in the water "? and "daylight licked me into shape" ? Doesn't exactly make the case for "concrete detail" or particularly good writing either. But there is a lot of good writing in this song too. I wouldn't pick on it normally, it all works as pop music, but then I'm not itching for a fight between the songs either.

― Vic Perry, Monday, December 29, 2014 10:46 AM (6 hours ago)

I was referring to the two, largely observational opening stanzas. While the lyrics aren't brilliant or even particularly rich in concrete detail, they're grounded in a world outside the narrator's feelings about feeling. One of the things I do like about the writing is that as the narrator rises from slumber, the lyrics lose their everyday immediacy, becoming more abstract and dreamlike.

And Pet Sounds reputation grew as its audience got older.

― Vic Perry, Monday, December 29, 2014 10:46 AM (6 hours ago)

This is mechanically true, but I have the (unfounded) sense that it's reputation grew not only because boomers held it dear, but because it spoke to a younger generation in thrall to the sentimentalization of human frailty.

I don't buy that it's particularly frail.

Subjective, I suppose. I hear it as delicate, anxious and uncertain. The musical analysis linked upthread suggests that the compositional choices reflect and amplify a sense of fragility ("not at ease", "insecurity", "tentative", etc). The vocal performance, arrangement and lyrics all work together in support of this.

Yeah, the writer uses the word "fragile," which is a less extreme characterization than "frail."

If John Coltrane recorded "God Only Knows," I would imagine people would be less inclined to talk about the chord progression being "delicate" because it wasn't rooting all the harmonies in the bass. Maybe you would say that's unfair, but I question what it is about the Beach Boys that invites that characterization.

I'm not saying it's not there (or that it wouldn't be there, indeed, for Coltrane), but for me, the fragility is the fragility of the human experience itself. Do I think that love is fragile? Of course. I don't believe there's anything sentimental in that.

I meant "frail" only as a rough synonym for "fragile", "prone to damage", etc. I did not intend any accusation, though "God Only Knows" isn't a favorite of mine. Nor am I convinced that the Beach Boys invite the characterization in any general sense. I wouldn't use it, for instance, to describe "I Get Around" or even "Good Vibrations".

Do I find "God Only Knows" sentimental? Yes, both as a value-neutral description and as a (very mild) pejorative. It's a bit treacly - for or to my tastes. I intend no comprehensive dismissal. My statement was less about the sentimentality of the song, though, than the tastes of the indie pop culture that embraced it.

For what it's worth, I agree that the fragility expressed by "God Only Knows" is universal. A similar quality of painfully delicate yearning is what makes "You Don't Love Me Yet" so profoundly resonant for me, though the songs share little else in common.

Beach Boys fucked up not keeping the acapella outro they used in one of the Pet Sounds boxset takes. Brings the song to another level.

What a weird comparison/thread.

Also, " unlike Baba O'Reilly or whatever". Your loss because it's an amazing fucking song.

Sorry if that sounded dismissive. I heard Baba O'Riley at a bar the other night and was surprised at how much i enjoyed it. In general though I dislike the Who, which must be an idiosyncrasy on my part because not many seem to agree.

I own most of The Cure, a good chunk of Beach Boys and none of The Who but I think "Baba O'Reilly" is a better song than either of these.

Don't cry, don't raise your eye, it's only a poll

I own most of The Cure, a good chunk of Beach Boys and none of The Who but I think "Baba O'Reilly" is a better song than either of these.

congrats

Sorry, didn't mean it to sound like a big statement. I like all these songs.

Treeship, I've still been wondering why you posted a big bit of Ulysses in the thread for funny quotes from musicians.

lol i don't remember doing that

I was probably drunk.

Sorry if my response earlier was dickish, it was more about me wanting to make a bad pun on song lyrics than any serious objection to what you wrote.

No it's totally okay, I wasn't offended at all.

Sorry, it wasn't you who posted bits of Ulysses, it was you who pointed it it was from Ulysses.

Funniest or most interesting quotes you can find from people in music

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Love both of these songs dearly, but I might like Big Star's "Thirteen" better than either one.

Pretty close. Thanks to everyone who voted... this was a fun discussion.

This thread, for me, exemplifies how interesting music discussion can be. I've listened to most of The Cure's and The Beach Boys' discography, by the way.

I was part of the "What a strange comparison" side. "Just Like Heaven" is such a simple song, simply recorded, with a pretty much no-frills production. Reading people dissect the lyrics also sounds strange to me, as Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me was probably when Robert Smith's songwriting and lyrics started to decay pretty quickly.

The opposite is most likely true for "God Only Knows". It's from arguably one of The Beach Boys' best albums. The production and detail to sound was one of those things that have been analysed to death; with so many subtle arrangements, sometimes buried in the mix. Just a YouTube search for it brings up a breakdown of the song.

Yeah, I'm being meta. For me, "God Only Knows" is the winner. The lyrics, personally, always held a deeper meaning to me than "Show me show me show me how you do that trick". I think I'm thinking of "Just Like Heaven" in the context of KMKMKM and that time in The Cure's existence, and that's kind of putting me off of it. But then again, I wasn't even born when "God Only Knows" was released so I don't have any preconceived notions about that time, just a detached, analytical, retrospective memory of it.

yeah, curiously great thread. ppl got weird (still intersting) with their subjective interpretations of the lyrics, but the discussion of the music itself was fantastic

Would like to see a dissection of Beach Boys "Hey Little Tomboy" but maybe there isn't much to say about it. Not a great song or anything, just very un-PC lyrics.

Haha that song is so bad. The album its from is such a low point in their catalog.