Was 'Kokomo' really so terrible?
The Beach Boys' widely loathed late-'80s hit is both better and worse than I remembered
This is a longer version of a column that originally appeared here.
I sighed with relief as the curtain fell on “The Beach Boys,” the new Disney+ documentary about the famed California band. We’d reached the end without having to consider their notorious final hit. But alas, in the closing moments of the end credits, there it was: “Kokomo.” Aruba, Jamaica, etc.
“Kokomo” topped the Billboard singles chart in 1988, exactly two decades after the Beach Boys’ previous No. 1 hit, the psych-pop masterpiece “Good Vibrations.” When “Kokomo” came out, I was about six years old, and it would be many years before I understood the group as anything other than “the band from ‘Full House’ whose job is beach,” let alone grasped the contextual separation between “Kokomo” and, say, “California Girls.”
But the eventual journey from innocence to rock snobbery contains an obligatory Beach Boys phase. The young, invariably male fan grasps the true, hiding-in-plain-sight mastery of everything the group did in the ‘60s, Brian Wilson’s tormented genius, the evaporated dreams of the counterculture and so on. That indoctrination requires a fan to hate “Kokomo,” a tropical punchbowl full of syrupy schmaltz recorded in the late 1980s by a Frankenstein version of the band that long ago had faded into decadent senescence and, significantly, did not include Wilson, who had written and produced the band’s best-known music. (Accounts differ as to why he did not participate in “Kokomo,” but it is generally thought that Wilson’s therapist/then-manager Eugene Landy, later revealed as a manipulative shark, forbade Wilson from participating unless Landy could get a songwriting credit.)
“Kokomo” has always been an easy target because of what it symbolizes, both culturally and within the Beach Boys’ biography. It represents the vindication of Mike Love — the Wilson brothers’ cousin, the Beach Boys’ lead vocalist and Brian’s creative foil, and a notorious dickhead/MAGA dirtbag whose reputation as an all-around loathsome figure has only curdled with time.
Going back as far as the mid-’60s, the friction between Love’s pop leanings and Brian’s more avant-garde interests helped animate the band’s beloved catalog of indelible, uncommonly sophisticated radio staples. After Brian suffered a mental breakdown and abandoned work on his magnum opus — “Smile,” his 1968 follow-up to the revered “Pet Sounds” — the story goes that Mike wrestled away creative and legal control of the group and gradually turned the Beach Boys into something like the David Gilmour version of Pink Floyd, only sadder.
The band recorded a series of decreasingly popular albums throughout the 1970s — a part of their discography that has acquired a certain lost-treasure aura, but in reality is a thoroughly mixed bag. Meanwhile, they helped popularize the oldies-tour business model, cashing in on nostalgia for their early hits at every opportunity — which, given the strength of that material, is hard to begrudge them for. Brian drifted in and out of the band for decades and never fully re-engaged. During those years, a Brian-versus-Mike dichotomy became easy shorthand for how the band was perceived as a legacy institution: the craftsmanship of the studio versus the showbiz slickness of the never-ending tour, the vulnerable genius versus the crass opportunist, the bleeding-heart liberal versus the Reaganite capitalist, the tragic victim versus the litigious prick. One’s opinion on “Kokomo” became a proxy stance on the perpetual conflict between the two best-known Beach Boys. Loving Brian meant hating “Kokomo,” and hating “Kokomo” meant loving Brian. Thus, any canonical reference to “Kokomo” becomes another twist of the knife in Brian’s back. It helps that “Kokomo,” like Love, is really easy to hate.
Heroes and villains, indeed.
As with any narrative binary, the facts don’t completely support this interpretation, but they come close enough. Wilson, who didn’t recognize “Kokomo” as a Beach Boys song the first time he heard it on the radio, later raved about it in his memoir. Love, who famously sued Wilson in the early 1990s for songwriting royalties, actually HAD been screwed out of money — thanks to original Beach Boys manager Murry Wilson, father of Brian and his siblings — that he probably deserved. This doesn’t make Love less of an asshole; his infamous Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction speech from 1988, a few months before “Kokomo” was released, basically closes that book. He also concluded the band’s 50th anniversary tour in 2012 by throwing Wilson out of the band, then booked “his” version of the Beach Boys at fund-raisers for Donald Trump. So yeah: asshole. But how could the guy who wrote “Kokomo” not be?
Well, he didn’t, at least not by himself. The story behind this song is almost worth its own documentary. By the mid-’80s, the Beach Boys had been floundering commercially for years and were grinding away on the destitute county-fair circuit. Asked to record a song for the soundtrack to “Cocktail,” the Tom Cruise bartending movie, Love enlisted the producer Terry Melcher, a longtime Beach Boys associate who was (fun fact) the son of Doris Day and (less fun fact) the original target of the Manson murders. Former Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, who died three years earlier in a drowning accident, had befriended Charles Manson, then an aspiring songwriter, in the late 1960s, and temporarily sheltered the ex-con and his “family” at his house. Dennis introduced Manson to Melcher, who declined to sign him to a recording contract (although the Beach Boys did end up recording one of his songs). In retaliation, Manson sent his followers to Melcher’s house, which they did not realize he had recently rented to the director Roman Polanski and his wife, the actress Sharon Tate. The rest of that story is fairly well-known.
Love and Melcher (who had understandably kept a lower profile in the years since), adapted a demo that had been written by John Wilson, leader of the Mamas and the Papas — who, incidentally, was later accused of incest by his daughter — and Scott McKenzie, best known for his recording of Wilson’s hippie classic “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).” Their early version of “Kokomo” is a wistful folk-pop earworm about a make-believe island in the Florida Keys where the narrator and a companion “used to go to get away from it all.” It’s a charming, sad reflection on a love that never made it back to the mainland: “At least we gave it a try, down in Kokomo.”
Phillips’ “Kokomo” does two of the pop-music tricks I love the most, which is that it starts on a major chord (C) that drops to a major-seventh. Then later in the progression it drops a second major chord (F) down to a minor. This approach, effective yet obvious, would probably be too on-the-nose for a composer of Wilson’s pedigree, but the feeling it evokes is unmistakable — warm but mournful, a piercing sadness that the sepia glaze of nostalgia can never totally paper over.
Catch a glimpse of what exactly
Love adds the jumbo-tron chorus, in which he simply names a list of vaguely tropical destinations — “Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take you / To Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama,” and so on. He also updates Phillips’ verses to the present tense, so the song is no longer a reflection on the past but instead a checklist of things affluent people enjoy about vacation: sitting on the beach, tropical cocktails, moonlit nights, dancing to steel drums. This seemingly small tweak transforms the whole song from a simple yearning for bygone love into a catalog of bougie indulgence, privileged escapism and conspicuous consumption. Look, here’s everything you can do once you can afford to “get here fast and then take it slow.”
There is also a grotesque colonialist undercurrent that I never observed until now. After the first chorus, Love mumbles “Martinique, that Montserrat mystique,” which is a cool bar until you start thinking about how many of the locations he’s citing are still considered “territories” of various collapsed European empires, where surely the locals are forced to pantomime their cultural traditions for subsistence wages while serving umbrella drinks to rich idiots at all-inclusives.
I was able to ignore this until Love’s dismount from the second chorus: “Port au Prince, I wanna catch a glimpse.” Yikes! By the late 1980s, Haiti was trying to pick up the pieces of its three-decade impoverishment under the brutal Duvalier dynasty via a shaky pivot toward democracy, a situation very much exacerbated by the centuries of white-person fuckery preceding it. Perhaps the ongoing unrest explains why Love only wanted to “catch a glimpse” of Haiti’s capital instead of actually visiting it. Either way, having “Beach” in the band’s name shouldn’t require an advanced understanding Caribbean geopolitics, but yeesh.
If pastel was a sound
Lyrically, “Kokomo” seems unredeemable. Musically, the legacy feels a little more complicated. Hearing it unexpectedly at the end of the Beach Boys documentary, I was surprised how much it did not bother me. More so, I wondered why, if yacht rock has been cool (or “cool”) for almost 20 years, there hasn’t been any kind of “Kokomo” reappraisal, even though it has all the genre signifiers: the DayGlo production, the real drums that sound like fake drums, the nonspecific “world music” flourishes, the sax solo that literally sounds like it’s made of amphetamines. (The video shows Love playing this part, even though a session guy actually did it on the recording.) However unappealing the song’s many subtexts, the Carl Wilson falsetto closing out the chorus is a real wonder. If people love (or “love”) Steely Dan, Hall & Oates and Kenny Loggins, why not “Kokomo”? Its smoothness might be suffocating, but how can I shit on “Kokomo” if I love the 1975?
In a way, “Kokomo” is the perfect Beach Boys song for the 1980s. The band that created the California myth of the 1960s returned to sell America something new: the pleasure of cashing in after years of anti-establishment assimilation into the yuppie mainstream. Boomer rock icons with ‘80s pop hits was its own whole subgenre, but “Kokomo” might be the preeminent example. It’s not the symbolic Deadhead sticker in Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” — “Kokomo” is the Cadillac to whose bumper it is incongruously affixed.
Aside from its appearance over the credits, the documentary doesn’t mention the song at all, but it is interesting to observe that “Kokomo” now is a lot further away from today than it was from “Good Vibrations” two decades previously. So a lot of younger Beach Boys fans do not seem to understand why they’re supposed to dislike such an innocuous slice of ‘80s pop cheese. But even though cheese is pretty harmless, it’s one of the last things I’d want to eat in the tropical sun.