An article over at Slate on Smile, the Beach Boys’ legendary missing album, argues that its power lies in never having been “officially” released:

Smile, as it exists now in a half-realized state, is really the first interactive rock ‘n’ roll artwork, graciously allowing the listener to finish the songs, to order them according to personal taste, and to invent an overarching concept that might have unified and made sense of Parks’ cavalcade of trippy images. Maybe we can’t bask in the album’s holistic brilliance the way we can with Pet Sounds or Sgt. Pepper, but what we have now is fantastically protean and fluid, and we can use our imaginations to perfect it ourselves, which may actually be more fun.

Another reason why the Net-hastened “death of the album” (or the TV fall season, or the summer blockbuster, ad nauseum) is not such a bad thing. Give me fantastically protean fluid over static packaged product anyday.