The Summer I Surrendered to Wilson Phillips

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer Iraq invaded Kuwait, and I didn’t know what I was doing in Seattle. We had just moved to the United States, because of my father’s job, and I was lonesome and friendless, in a weird purgatory state: while my dad spent long days at work, I was stuck in our rental house with my mom, who meant well but was growing increasingly impatient with me. And who could blame her? I was fourteen, and sullen as all hell.

Mostly, I spent my days sprawled on the beige shag carpet in the living room, watching MTV. American popular music was nearing a cusp in the summer of 1990. We were about a year away from the release of Nirvana’s “Nevermind” and the subsequent explosion of grunge into the mainstream, and a bit further still from white America’s full embrace of hip-hop, with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, and the Notorious B.I.G.’s emergence, toward the mid-nineteen-nineties, as commercial forces to be reckoned with. In the meantime, the handful of songs that ran on heavy rotation on MTV, even when they were rock- or rap-adjacent, were still essentially pop hits, buffed to a synthetic and soulless sheen: Billy Idol’s “Cradle of Love,” Roxette’s “It Must Have Been Love,” MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.”

When I’d begun to form my own musical taste a couple of years before, in middle school, I had found myself gravitating to alienated-youngster evergreens such as the Velvet Underground, the Cure, and the Smiths. I loved the Doors and Jim Morrison, too, drawn like many, many teens before me to the late front man’s Byronic vibe. While travelling through Paris with my parents, earlier that summer, I had even made them take me to Père Lachaise, where I strained to feel the Lizard King’s presence as I stood at his grave, shoulder to shoulder with a lank-haired German tourist throwing back a morning beer and a girl wearing braids and a woven headband. In other words, I considered myself a bit alternative, an outsider, not easily given over to the treacly and simple-minded seductions of the mainstream. What was music if not an expression of angst? What was it if not a form of resistance against the complacent status quo?

Initially, then, my attitude toward the hits that were constantly played on MTV was dismissive, even derisive. (To quote Morrissey: They said nothing to me about my life.) But context, as we know, is everything, and, just as a person undergoing a bad breakup begins to find special meaning in even the corniest and most cloying radio ballads, my liminal, solitary state began to open my heart and mind to MTV’s middle-of-the-road siren call, which, after all, I had nothing but time to heed.

The song that broke down my resistance was Wilson Phillips’s “Hold On.” Wilson Phillips was a trio of young women out of Los Angeles: Chynna Phillips, the daughter of the Mamas and the Papas’ John and Michelle Phillips, and Carnie and Wendy Wilson, the daughters of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. Nepo babies before the term was invented—I recall that “rock royalty” was the phrase most often used back then—the girls released “Hold On” as the first single off their self-titled début album, in early 1990, and, by summer, it was a megahit. (It would end up being ranked by Billboard as the top song of the year.)

As a burgeoning rock-bio hound, I was already somewhat familiar with the lore of the Beach Boys and of the Mamas and the Papas. Brian Wilson, I knew, had struggled with debilitating mental illness, taking to his bed for months on end; John Phillips’s gargantuan drug addiction, meanwhile, came near to shattering his and his family’s life. There was something I liked about having these dark tidbits in my arsenal—they made me feel tough and knowing. But the truth was, I was very, very soft: the scope and enormity of the things that could go wrong in life terrified me. Reading a copy of John Phillips’s 1986 autobiography, “Papa John,” which I had picked up at a used bookstore in Seattle, I became so alarmed by the tales of heroin use and casual child neglect that I threw the book in the recycling bin as soon as I finished it.