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Van Dyke Parks: Discover America

John Mendelsohn, Rolling Stone, 3 August 1972

VAN DYKE PARKS' first album, Song Cycle, released in 1968, was a dizzyingly eclexoteric work that had the critics alternately gushing, "The emergence of a super-genius!" and hissing, "Insufferable pretentiousness!" and so dumbfounded the thirty or so civilians who bought it (probably under the mistaken impression that Van Dyke Parks was a Flemish psychedelic group) that no distinct lay impression ever became visible.

Total word count of piece: 771

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