Beck

Like those lucky Cavern dwellers who caught the Beatles when they were still Liverpudlians or those twelve people that wandered in off the street to hear the Ramones blitz through their first sets at CBGB’s, I can lay some small claim to being there when something big happened. I saw Beck open for The Toughskins, a short-lived country big band featuring several friends of mine, at the long defunct legendary LA dive, Raji’s. There were fewer than a dozen people in the audience (the Toughskins outnumbered their fans at this point) and nobody gave a crap about this scraggly slacker pretending he was the illegitimate offspring of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. Of course, nobody had any idea what was about to happen – least of all Beck himself.

At about this time (1993), Beck (Beck Hansen, for the record) sat down in the kitchen of his friend Carl Stephenson (later to become Forest for the Trees), and recorded a song called Loser. A bizarre but catchy mélange of hip-hop, blues, and strange samples, Loser featured Beck mumbling strange stream-of-consciousness lyrics and summing up the slacker ethos of the time by singing “I’m a loser baby, so why don’t you kill me.” The single found its way onto LA flagship public radio station KCRW, where it was soon played to death, and then picked up by other college stations across the country. A couple of months later, Beck had a dozen record companies beating on his door. Less a case of playing hard to get than just wanting everybody to go away, Beck’s reluctance to sign made the deals get sweeter and sweeter. Finally, he signed with Geffen, with an apparent provision that allowed him to release some of his more off-the-wall stuff on minor local labels. He went into the studio and recorded songs for his major label debut, Mellow Gold.

And, frankly, that should’ve been the end of it. Mellow Gold, despite the inclusion of Loser, is a pretty pedestrian affair and, though it briefly charted, it did not really make much of a splash. This was about the time I was in Japan, and I couldn’t believe that anybody had even heard of him over there, never mind had become a rabid fan, ready to swim the mighty Pacific in order to bear his children. Then his second major release, Odelay, came out, and all hell broke loose. Odelay gleefully delivered on the promise of Loser by cramming hip-hop and country and funk and blues and banjo and lounge and early analogue synthesis and any and everything else into a blender and liquefying it into delicious post-post-modern sonic goo. An extreme example of the supposed short attention span of Generation MTV (an early po-mo stylistic jumble experiment of his was called MTV Makes Me Wanna Smoke Crack), Beck combines influences and fashions so quickly and so fluidly that a new, hybrid culture emerges from the grooves of this phenomenal album. It is the sound of the global gumbo, the internet made audible, the compression of the entire 20th century into a few funky minutes. When Spin magazine caught up to him on his tour bus and told him that Odelay had been voted Album of the Year, he shrugged and replied, “of course, what was the competition?”

One of the most amazing things about Beck is that he’s as popular as he is. His music is exhilaratingly experimental, his persona is anything but polished, and he lurches around on stage using dance moves that died twenty years ago, and yet people eat him up. I’m all for it, mind you, but it’s an odd phenomenon. It’s sort of like the ultimate revenge of the nerds, and it’s nice to finally have a real dork for a pop star.

After the success of Odelay, Geffen pushed out the more acoustic and mellow Mutations album, apparently without Beck’s blessing (it was originally slated to go out on a small, local label, like One Foot in the Grave and Stereopathic Soulmanure had). The album is very restrained and quite pleasant, but nothing like the cultural smorgasbord of Odelay. Then Midnight Vultures hit, returning to the familiar sonic slicing and dicing of his most popular album. This track is as good an example as anything from that album, and showcases his hilarious and peculiar lyrical style

in which what he says almost makes sense, but not quite. This track also breaks into a wonderful counterpoint section halfway through in which several vocal lines are effortlessly woven together to great effect.

Beck also has an incredible falsetto, which he showcases on the last track on this album. A hilarious ode to a cashier at JC Penney, Debra features some of the sweetest soul to ever drip from a honky, and regularly brings the house down.

Just about the time he was getting pigeonholed again, he released Sea Change, an album with remarkable airiness and restraint. The songs are all stripped down to their bare essentials and given a slo-mo production treatment that makes the music sound like it’s moving through honey. Subtle and polished, Sea Change is a wonderful album, although it can take a little while to get your ears around it if you’re expecting the blenderized, ironic, over-ornamented pop tarts he made his name on. But Sea Change came from a different place. Inspired by the break-up of a nine-year relationship, Beck stripped all pretense, gimmickry, and flash out of the music, and was left with a handful of gorgeous, sometimes flinchingly honest songs that, together, chart an arc from heartbreak to hope. Is it the beginning of a new Beck, a more mature and sincere artist, or is it just another costume to try on in public? Only time, and his next release will tell.

For all his wonderful qualities, I do have one minor gripe with Beck, and I wouldn’t even mention it if he hadn’t done it twice. Unlike records, CDs are invisible when they’re playing, and that, coupled with their impressive length, makes them the ideal format for burying hidden tracks. Like almost every popular music convention, the Beatles started that idea by sticking Her Majesty on after a minute of silence at the end of Abbey Road and not (originally) listing it on the album. But the vinyl album is limited to 20 minutes or so a side, so a track isn’t going to stay that hidden for that long. However, on a CD, you can stick 15 minutes of silence on the end of your last track and then sneak in a bonus cut. Many people have done this (it even shows up on Nirvana’s Nevermind album) and, I must say, it’s gotten really old. Because what inevitably happens is that you put a few discs in the CD player, hit random, and then suddenly notice at some point that there’s no more music. Many minutes go by before some incredibly awful sound comes out of your speakers (by law, hidden CD tracks have to be really bad). Plus, when you first stick your shiny new CD into the player, you think “oh, cool, it’s 75 minutes long!” little realizing that there’s actually 25 minutes of silence at the (almost) end. And, like I say, I wouldn’t even mention it, but Beck did it on both Odelay and Midnight Vultures. Lame, dude, really really lame.