Smile is not merely a great unfinished album, but a living work of art that is all at once expansive, indeterminate, and resolutely pop.

In the early 1960s, The Beach Boys rose from the suburbs of Hawthorne, California to become emissaries of a post-war American dream that fused middle-class aspiration and mobility with images of youth. Led by dream master Brian Wilson, their music gave voice to a Southern California mythos and compelled an audience across the nation and beyond to live out their own versions of the fantasy. By 1966, the encroaching counterculture added new...