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 think about their notorious final hit. But alas, in the closing moments of the end credits, there it was: “Kokomo.” Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take ya, etc.
“Kokomo” topped the Billboard chart in the summer of 1988, earning the group its first No. 1 single since “Good Vibrations” 20 years earlier. At the time, it represented one of the most surprising comebacks in pop music history, and it remains one of the Beach Boys’ most-streamed songs.
But “Kokomo” has a toxic aura. Bad vibrations, if you will. Orthodox opinion among serious fans of the group is that “Kokomo” is an abomination, a tropical punch bowl full of schmaltz, recorded by a band that was deep into its county-fair afterlife and did not include Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ creative mastermind.
The band was floundering commercially when lead vocalist Mike Love was asked to contribute a song to “Cocktail,” the Tom Cruise bartending movie. He teamed with producer Terry Melcher — who was (fun fact) the son of Doris Day and (less fun fact) the original target of the Charles Manson murders — to adapt an unfinished song by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas.
Phillips’ “Kokomo” is a folk-pop reverie about a nonexistent island in the Florida Keys where he “used to go to get away from it all” with a love that never made it back to mainland: “At least we gave it a try, down in Kokomo.”
Love added the jumbotron chorus, in which he lists travel destinations. Bermuda, Bahama(s), Key Largo, Montego, and so on. He also changed it to the present tense, so the song is less a dreamy reflection than a checklist of things people enjoy about Caribbean vacations: cocktails, steel drums, sunbathing, moonlit nights.
This lifestyle is only accessible if you can afford to “get here fast and then take it slow,” as the locals pantomime their cultural traditions for subsistence wages while serving umbrella drinks to yuppies at all-inclusives. This is no worse than the conspicuous consumption flaunted in a lot of today’s pop music, but it’s still pretty gross.
Musically, however, “Kokomo” annoyed me less than expected. Carl Wilson’s vocal on the main hook is lovelier than I remembered. It is textbook yacht rock: production that somehow sounds pastel, nonspecific “world music” textures, a blazing sax solo. It’s the kind of kitsch that in certain contexts is always cool.
But “Kokomo” feels too burdened with history for that kind of reappraisal. It represents the final vindication of Love — Brian’s cousin and creative foil and by general consensus the villain of the Beach Boys story.
The band in its early years could have been mistaken for a rock group whose job was “beach,” but they happened to be led by a surf-pop Mozart. Brian Wilson famously suffered a mental breakdown in the late ‘60s while trying to complete his masterpiece, “Smile,” after which Love assumed control and turned the band into a touring nostalgia act. (Long story short.)
Thus the Beach Boys’ legacy became a Brian/Mike binary: the craftsman versus the showman, the vulnerable genius versus the crass opportunist, the tragic victim versus the litigious jerk. Sympathy for Brian means antipathy toward “Kokomo.”
Still, “Kokomo” ended up being the perfect Beach Boys song for the 1980s. The band that helped create the countercultural California myth returned to sell America something new and probably inevitable: youthful idealism curdling into middle-aged decadence, purchased by years of assimilation into the boomer mainstream.
Apart from its appearance over the credits, the documentary (directed by Frank Marshall) doesn’t mention the song. Since “Kokomo” itself has receded into the past, a lot of younger Beach Boys fans probably do not 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 consume in the tropical sun.