Smucker’s mix of unabashed fanboy enthusiasm with razor-sharp analysis makes him the perfect teller of this story.
~Marc Ribot, guitarist
Having spent a lifetime digging into everything the Beach Boys have recorded, Smucker knows it to be fun fun fun, great art, and a barometer of our class, race, and gender politics since World War II.
~Robert Christgau, author of Is It Still Good to Ya? Fifty Years of Rock Criticism, 1967-2017
Smucker perfectly captures the world the Beach Boys made. This is the band in full career ricochet, summing up and summoning a whole way of life.
~Eric Lott, author of Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism
Tom Smucker pointed me in the right direction for what became my life’s journey.
~David Leaf, writer, director, and producer of Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of "Smile"
Why the Beach Boys Matter provides an excellent introduction to the band that might have evolved, Smucker suggests, into the Beatles…We were ready to abandon the Beach Boys. Now, with Smucker's book, we can reconnect to them.
~New York Journal of Books
Smucker's book on Why The Beach Boys Matter tells us exactly that, and quite evocatively.
~Critics At Large
It's a pretty tall order to tell the Beach Boys' oft-confusing, decades-long history in a 176-page, 5" x 7" book, but Tom Smucker does an admirable job in <i>Why the Beach Boys Matter</i>.
~Comics Worth Reading
Smucker is a long-time fan of the Beach Boys, and his passionate defense of their importance is carefully thought out…Why The Beach Boys Matter packs a lot of content into a short volume. Smucker does an excellent job summarizing the Beach Boys' long career, examining their influences and their place in American pop culture.
~Mark My Words
Rather than land on a single thesis in answer to the book’s title, Smucker gives the reader myriad starting points for determining why the Beach Boys matter...While the rhizomatic nature of the book’s short, chronologically nonlinear chapters may frustrate some academic readers, others will find that the structure is a perfect metaphor for the answer to the problem posed by the book’s title. There is a multiplicity of reasons for the importance of the Beach Boys, musically and historically, and to say otherwise for the sake of a central thesis would be to attempt to insert an intellectual square into an intellectual circle...the arguments...[are] just right.
~Journal of Popular Culture
