I think one important point to make is that Beach Boys' albums had long been obsessed with surfing, as metaphors or literally: I mean, this was a band whose albums were, in order, Surfin' Safari, Surfin' USA and Surfer Girl. Therefore, saying "Surf's up" is more than just an idle comment, especially since this was long after the band had fallen on hard times, were on the brink of collapse and the early "surfing" days seemed a long, long way away.
Of course, the song is far more transcendental than just a song about a band breaking up and it would belittle the song a lot to assume that. But I think that it plays an interesting part in the central theme of the song, which is that things will always end and that will cause other things to begin.
A lot of the lyrics are highly stylised and there's it's difficult to analyse them at the best of times (I'm not sure the first 3 lines really "mean" anything in the traditional sense), but there's a lot of lines that suggest this sense of there being a circle.
The major turning point arrives around "the laughs come hard in auld lang syne". Auld Lang Syne is famously a song about old aquaintances, ancient experience and remembering the past fondly. But Surf's Up subverts the idea by claiming that the past is cold and humourless. As the song goes on, this feeling gets stronger; "adieu or die" is obviously a statement of giving up or falling into this obsession with the past, and the much-reviled line "columnated ruins domino" is another example of this: columnated ruins refers to the ancient Graeco-Roman architecture that lies scattered around the mediterranean, and invoking a domino effect here puts it into the song's meaning; when one gets old, so do all the others, when one crumbles, so do all the others.
This section ends with the lines "grief heart hardened". The emotion of grief has a strong connotation of death, and so this ends the aging process that has existed for the first half of the song.
The next section changes tone completely: just look at the words used: "young", "spring"- here we have a sense of birth and growth, it's exactly the opposite of the death at the end of the last movement. The final movement of the song, the "children's song", is another symbol of youth, and movement. Claiming that the youth and renewal knows the way, rather than the old and dying ways, ends the song on a very optimistic note.
And so I think this song is very stylised and rather than referring to anything specific try and evoke the long cycle of life and death. However, this song's interesting placement at the end of a band's career- hell, the album it was on CAUSED the death of the The Beach Boys- marks this as an interesting piece in moving on.
Really, the final movement is probably one of the best pieces of music of all time, I really love it.
I think one important point to make is that Beach Boys' albums had long been obsessed with surfing, as metaphors or literally: I mean, this was a band whose albums were, in order, Surfin' Safari, Surfin' USA and Surfer Girl. Therefore, saying "Surf's up" is more than just an idle comment, especially since this was long after the band had fallen on hard times, were on the brink of collapse and the early "surfing" days seemed a long, long way away.
Of course, the song is far more transcendental than just a song about a band breaking up and it would belittle the song a lot to assume that. But I think that it plays an interesting part in the central theme of the song, which is that things will always end and that will cause other things to begin.
A lot of the lyrics are highly stylised and there's it's difficult to analyse them at the best of times (I'm not sure the first 3 lines really "mean" anything in the traditional sense), but there's a lot of lines that suggest this sense of there being a circle.
The major turning point arrives around "the laughs come hard in auld lang syne". Auld Lang Syne is famously a song about old aquaintances, ancient experience and remembering the past fondly. But Surf's Up subverts the idea by claiming that the past is cold and humourless. As the song goes on, this feeling gets stronger; "adieu or die" is obviously a statement of giving up or falling into this obsession with the past, and the much-reviled line "columnated ruins domino" is another example of this: columnated ruins refers to the ancient Graeco-Roman architecture that lies scattered around the mediterranean, and invoking a domino effect here puts it into the song's meaning; when one gets old, so do all the others, when one crumbles, so do all the others.
This section ends with the lines "grief heart hardened". The emotion of grief has a strong connotation of death, and so this ends the aging process that has existed for the first half of the song.
The next section changes tone completely: just look at the words used: "young", "spring"- here we have a sense of birth and growth, it's exactly the opposite of the death at the end of the last movement. The final movement of the song, the "children's song", is another symbol of youth, and movement. Claiming that the youth and renewal knows the way, rather than the old and dying ways, ends the song on a very optimistic note.
And so I think this song is very stylised and rather than referring to anything specific try and evoke the long cycle of life and death. However, this song's interesting placement at the end of a band's career- hell, the album it was on CAUSED the death of the The Beach Boys- marks this as an interesting piece in moving on.
Really, the final movement is probably one of the best pieces of music of all time, I really love it.