Does pop need geniuses?

A lot of people think Brian Wilson is one. And Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Phil Spector and Janis Joplin. But, asks Phil Johnson, does this dated concept of creativity make sense when applied to an industrial product such as pop?

The unprecedented appeal exerted by Brian Wilson's four – count 'em – concerts at the Royal Festival Hall, in London, next week represents a triumph of hope over experience, like expecting Geoff Hurst to be recalled for England's World Cup squad this summer, and then to score another hat trick in the final. No matter that Wilson, who turns 60 in June, probably hasn't written a great song for 35 years (since "Heroes and Villains" in 1967), or that he's been a spent force for seven times longer than he was a force at all; the one-time genius in the sandpit still commands our awe-struck respect, even love.

And deservedly so, for it's possible to argue that no one in pop, not even the Beatles, ever reached such delicious, intoxicating heights of melody and harmony as Brian Wilson did with the Beach Boys from 1962 to 1967. The problem – and the distance between hope and experience – lies instead with the whole notion of genius as applied to pop music. And in pop, geniuses have a habit of letting us down, badly.

Like the auteur theory in film, the idea of the genius in pop invites us to inscribe the personality of a sole creator into what might otherwise be considered a workaday industrial product. By tracing the creator's personal signature from one product to another, we are able to construct a distinctive authorial world, an oeuvre, which, like Hitchcock's in film or Wilson's in music, can then be subjected to a sustained bout of biographically-based criticism as we further inscribe the life into the art. That the key to Hitchcock must be Catholic guilt and repressed sexuality, or to Wilson that he was a fat kid with a jock for a brother and a maniac for a father, follows all too easily.

It's true the legend of Brian Wilson lends itself very handily to this reductio ad absurdum approach. The exquisite vulnerability of "In My Room" or the melancholic voyeurism of "Surfer Girl" and "California Girls" speak to us all too volubly of the shy boy who couldn't surf. That Wilson tells us in his autobiography that he wasn't particularly shy or inexperienced with girls – in fact, that he was a bit of a jock himself – doesn't fit the picture, but then geniuses are notoriously unreliable. The tragic father-figure stuff is more grist to the genius mill, especially as no sooner did Wilson lose his father, the abusive Murry (who, ironically, was Brian's only real rival as the Beach Boys' auteur), than he replaced him with a surrogate – Dr Eugene Landy, his therapist.

And where would pop genius narratives be without the drugs? Wilson's personality was so addictive that when, sometime in the Seventies, he swapped cocaine for coffee, he could get through a couple of conference-sized containers at one sitting. That he survived and is able to take the stage of a concert hall at all is remarkable enough, so whatever he does when he gets there will be a bonus. As Wilson has the best back catalogue in the business, his live shows are unlikely to prove a total disappointment.

But it's the genius thing that irks. Wilson may well have been (at least in his pomp) the genuine article, but what of the others? What have Phil Spector and Scott Walker been doing for the last 30 years? Hadn't John Lennon, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison already passed their prime when it was passed for them? Isn't even good old Tom Waits treading water? Only Bob Dylan remains anywhere near the top of his form, but we've still had to buy some shockers over the years. Of course, even geniuses are entitled to an off day or an off year, but an off three decades?

What the genius factor, at least as far as pop criticism goes, ends up demeaning or leaving unexplained is all those great records that were made by ordinary dumb mortals and which seem to contain the true essence of that disposable, industrial product, rock'n'roll. I'm thinking here of "Louie Louie" – whether by Richard Berry, the Kingsmen or the Kinks (and what price the genius of Ray Davies or Pete Townshend these days, eh?) – or "96 Tears" by ? and the Mysterions or just about anybody who could hold a guitar. Whole musical movements, such as rockabilly, rhythm and blues, punk or drum'n'bass – got by without any geniuses at all, and that's what makes them so damn fine: they're the zeitgeist, mainlined straight into the cultural vein. In this respect, it's what pop music says about society, and how it reflects changes in culture and technology, that is most interesting, not somebody's supposed psychopathy, or the musical equivalent of a bad Dickens novel.

To return to Brian Wilson, it was probably the interplay between pop as industrial product, as genre fluff, and his great talent – let's leave genius out of it for a while – for rising above it, that made the Beach Boys' best records so great. (There were a lot of dud ones, too, but that has somehow been excised from the story). Just as the western had its John Ford or Anthony Mann, directors capable of transforming genre clichés, so surf music had Wilson. That it also had Jan Berry, the "auteur" of Jan and Dean, a medical student with a "genius" IQ who pioneered the genre as early as 1958, is also largely forgotten, partly due to a car accident that incapacitated him in 1966.

What Brian Wilson did, following the inspiration of the Beatles, was to make pop aimed at teenagers grow up musically, but without losing its essential, teen-dream innocence. Once he had accomplished this, most notably with Pet Sounds, Wilson really had very little left to do. Having transcended the genre and escaped the commercial and cultural dictates that had helped to form him as a composer, all he had left was his "genius". And we know how unreliable that is.

Brian Wilson plays the Royal Festival Hall, London (020-7960 4242), Sunday to Wednesday. All concerts sold out; returns only