Moonwalking In L.A.
Spin
December 1999
pp.122-130
Chris Norris
In the four years since his folk-hop opus “Odelay,” Beck’s world has turned upside down. Teens and meatheads have taken over, slacking has given way to cell phones, and everyone seems liposuctioned and sleek. But as he pimp rolls and funk trolls, Beck makes one thing perfectly clear: he’s still a Hollywood freak
There’s a destination, a little up the road, past the Church of Scientology and the House of Pies. The Los Angeles neighborhood of Beck Hansen’s youth isn’t particularly where it’s at. In fact it’s mostly y defined by y where it’s not neither downtown nor Koreatown neither South Central nor Hollywood Sort of MacArthurpark, vaguely Pico-Union, the Latino area is patrolled in the summer by white, ambulance-van ice-cream trucks-“the ghetto-style’ Beck says-their approach announced by a tinkly melody instead of sirens. The streets arc° lined with shoestring family businesses that double and even quadruple up. “One place was a furniture, accounting, bakery, bike-repair, and video store,” Beck recalls, “Another was a butcher/toy shop.”
While he was living here, 12-year-old Beck-who looked just like the current model, only shorter-hadn’t yet discovered Mississippi John Hurt or Pussy Galore. He did, however, rock the easy-listening. “We’d play Muzak stations,” he recalls, “cause they were pop songs but they were all instrumental, so it was like karaoke. Me and my friend Mike, we didn’t know the lyrics, so we’d make up our own.”
Around this tune, in 1982, Beck began to notice something on his ride to school. On the public bus, he recalls, “there’d be some kids in the back who got on way down on Vermont in South Central. And they’d have their boombox blasting [Grandmaster Flash’s] ‘The Message.’ Then, coming up through Wilshire, some white girls would get on, Then, you get up to Hollywood and some freaks would get on. And soon everybody on the bus would be singing the lines, doing the moves. It was great.”
You might say these experiences were formative,
ON A BREEZY SUMMER AFTERNOON. THE SKINNY, BLOND, 29-YEAR-OLD ROCK star pilots his black Lincoln Town Car through East L.A., en route to pick up his newly completed album, Midnite Vultures. The record is a giddy pimp-roll through boulevard funk, sci-fi hip-hop, and late-century R&B; it even features a straight-up, K-Ci & JoJo-style slow jam, awesomely titled “Debra.” “R&B’s definitely a big element,” Beck says. “It’s been part of my listening for a long time, so I’m digging into that.” And throwing in banjos, Moogs, Kraftwerk, ’60s TV soul-the nowrecognizable ecosystem of a high-watt Beck affront. After 1998’s quieter, “unofficial” Mutations, the beat-jacking, genre-mixing, universal folksinger is back.
Right now, though, he looks ready for a nap. “It feels weird speaking normal language,” Beck says, far-away eyes peering over the wheel. “For months, my only conversations have been in the studio. Like, ‘Okay, tinkle zap goes over on 47, splitback. and do a return with the vex.’ And everyone knows exactly what you’re saying.”
Unlike his ’96 opus Odelay, a hone-studio collaboration with producer dun the Dust Brothers, Beck spade this record with a core band-keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning, Jr., bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen, and two computer programmers. The record is fun and driving, but with more of a polished sheen than Odelay’s patchwork style ‘Cite team labored for more than a year, with Beck producing. “We tried to get Kenny C,” Beck says, seriously; they succeeded in getting ox-Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr and techno-folkie Beth Orton. “Beck would present us with a new sung„ I, orally every clay,” Manning says. “I’ve never worker( so hard in my life.”
Even sleep-deprived, Beck is still natty with thrift-store chic: straw cowboy hat covering bushy hair, clip-on shades over gold-rimmed glasses, scraggly sideburns, ,and a thrift store shirt that says MUCHO ACAPULCO MACHO. We drive through the comfortably bohemian Los Feliz district. “Everything’s going upscale around here,” Beck says, scanning the manicured lawns and homes. “Except for Glenn Danzig’s house.” The horror-rocker lives in a quaintly sepulchral hacienda with a large pile of bricks out front. “He’s had that stack of bricks there for about eight years now,” Beck says. “I think it’s a statement.”
When we arrive at Bernie Grundman Mastering-the Hollywood end zone to Mic haul Jackson’s Thriller and N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton-Beck is remarkably casual about retrieving the results of 14 months’ labor. “Hey,” he says amiably as he walks up to the counter. “Ya got my album?” He looks like he should be fetching coffee for somebody. The twentyish clerk smiles eagerly and pushes a plastic bag containing master discs toward him. Beck looks down at another one Iabeled BOTANICA MARGARITA. “Can I have this one instead?”
In the studio garage, Beck opens the Lincoln’s trunk and exposes the cartridges of his CD player. “Let’s give it the, ol’ Sunset test” Beck says, inserting his album -As we pull out into the late-afternoon light of Sunset Boulevard, the rousing intro of the first single, “Sexxlaws,” kicks in. With full horn section and manic tambourine, this Hullabaloo-style soul revue is all go-go hoots and zoom-lens action -an exuberant update to the block-rocking psychedelia of Odelay. Then, out flow lyrics that could only have come from the person who put the phrase “devil’s haircut” into the national lexicon. “Can’t you hear those calvary drums / Hijacking your equilibrium 1 Midnight snacks in the mausoleum t Where the, pixilated doctors moan,..” As we continue to roll past tanning salons and fetish-wear stores, the imagery starts to seem less and less surreal.
“See, Hollywood’s all about what’s going on behind the storefront,” Beck says, after turning onto Hollywood Boulevard. “In the back of that lighting store or that carpet place.” As we pass the Petwash, Beck reveals one of Midnite Vultures” touchstones. “About a year ago, I started seeing these ads in the paper for ‘Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation,'” he says. ‘First it was a little ad. The next week, it was twice as big. And after a month, it was a full page-it just took over. Something in that triggered a bunch of associations and projections. Like, what kind of activities do you have to engage in to get to the point where you need to bring a laser into the equation? The new album exists in that realm.”
Throughout it, Beck adapts the money-flashing. sex-you-up overkill of much of today’s rap and R&B to hysterical ends. On the low-riding I Link cruise “Nicotine & Gravy,” Beck croons, “I’ll feed ya fruit that don’t exist / I’ll leave graffiti where you’ve never been kissed.” On “Get Real Paid,” he updates ’80s girl rappers L”Trimm with the chant “We like the boys with the bulletproof vests / We like the girls with the cellophane chests.” Tile record brims with cokeheads, gym bunnies, and liposuctioned, siliconed absurdity. It’s part silly satire, part cryptic critique, with unease frequently poking through. The creeping shuffle of “Out of Kontrol” begins, “The snipers are passed out in the bushes again / I’m glad I got my suit dry-cleaned before the riots started.” I tell Beck it all scents very L.A., full of Hollywood sleaze, image mania, and Bel-Air power.
“I think it’s more the period,” he says. “This point in time seems more poweroriented. Power workout, power diet, power body parts, power relationships, power steering, Power Rangers. People are scrubbed and clean, well toned and manicured. I recently saw The: Lost American Virgin, one of those early-’80s coming-of-age movies. And the actors, they look like kids you grew up with! Today’s teen movies. I didn’t know anybody who looked like that. ‘Die standards now are, so unbelievably high.”
We drive on through darkening streets. As the bizarre glottal warble of Beck the soulman croons, “I know you really want it / ‘Cause your daddy’s always ()It it,” Beck the motorist points out his favorite road in L.A.: Normal Street. “Let’s take a ride down Normal,” Inn says.
We make a right.
“There,” he says. “I feel better already.”
IN FIVE YEARS. BECK HAS CONE FROM ONE-HIT WUNDERKIND TO GRAMMY-winning visionary. With 1994’s “Laser,” he schlepped upon the perfect ” Hs blend tit rap, blues, and ironic sound bite. His debut aIbum, Mellow Gold, revealed a perfectly lisped musical intelligence: comically lyrical, naturally genre-splicing, with a deadly sense of popcraft. With Odelay, Beck introduced a new sound and disposition to modern rock: dense, colorful, witty, and danceable- lit, became Significant his style and phraseology winning fans well outside the “Gex-X” mosh pit.
“Beck is what Bob Dylan was ages ago,” New York Times Magazine editorial director Gerald Marzorati wrote in ’97. “He’s the singer/songwriter you could do a term paper on. You could write that Beck’s approach to music evinces a comprehension of bricolage and the impossibility of aesthetic originality in a postmodern moment of information overload.”
Or you could just do the Freak. Which makes Beck more relevant now than ever.
While his songs are smart and often profound, Beck’s outsized hooks and buggedout style are as infectious as your little sister’s favorite Britney Spears tune-a valuable quality in a moment unkind to subtlety, understatement, and artists over 25. In today’s fragmenting pop world, Beck has the potential to turn the heads of beach, beastie, and backstreet boys. And he can turn them without being stupid, an increasingly difficult proposition. “Beck transcends any demographic because he constantly reinvents himself and takes risks,” says MTV senior vice president Tom Calderone. “Beck is his own category.”
Unlike many of his current MTV colleagues, Beck did not graduate from the New Mickey Mouse Club. His bohemian pedigree is well documented: son of a bluegrass musician and Andy Warhol scenester; grandson of ’60s Fluxus artist Al Hansen; raised in late-’70s L.A. with little money and lots of freedom. No smirking comp-lit major he, Beck dropped out of school in ninth grade, a struggling folksinger. When he wasn’t husking or leafblowing for the Man, he used to jam with his friend Steve Hanft’s punk-metal act, Loser. Their live show featured a coffin out of which 19-year-old Beck would emerge playing screamin’ metal guitar leads.
Otherwise, Hanft says, “Beck was just living in this shed behind someone’s house, recording his weird surrealist folk songs on a four-track.” He lived on watermelon, wore found clothes, and, though he loved Prince and George Jones, told people, “I only listen to Slayer.” Hanft and Beck had plans to make a heavy-metal aerobics video when one of Beck’s home-taping sessions (“Loser”) got him nominated national spokesman for the young and directionless.
But while Beck understandably fled the “slacker” mantle-“I’ve never had the time or money to slack,” he said then-this bio actually describes the ultimate slacker: opting out of the career track, working lame jobs to nurture his art, squirming with success when it came. This is a far cry from the youth culture of today’s teen entrepreneurs. “I did an interview on the radio a little while ago,” Beck says, “and the kids calling were asking, At what point in your career did this happen?’ or `How did you make this connection?’ All very career-oriented questions, one after another. And I kept asking, ‘How old are you?’ ‘Fifteen.’ I’m not saying that everyone’s like this, but it was really … surprising.”
Beck’s early professional years were definitely not micromanaged. His haphazard first tour was launched with local freaks making up his band, their concerts seemingly designed to offend. “I remember we played [the music-industry conference] South by Southwest,” Beck says. “I was playing to a tape machine and the band started doing free-jazz shit over it, and I was screaming into this cheap mic. I broke a bunch of stuff and started humping the bass player and knocked my mic over and hit this poor girl in the head. I remember watching the room just clear out.
“Afterward, this hippie guy came backstage, saying, `Man, that was the best fucking thing I’ve ever seen!’ and then he handed me a Masons medallion.” It was Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers. A while later, Haynes recorded the obvious “Loser” homage “Pepper”- the Butthole Surfers’ sole Top 40 hit.
Now, Beck is still grappling with the fruits of his pop moves. He’s stayed with the same girlfriend for eight years (a costume designer named Leigh Limon he met in the early ’90s punk scene), but Beck has definitely moved out of his old rented shack. He briefly flirted with life in L.A.’s tonier western districts (Los Angeles Times’ “Hot Property” section, May 3,1998: “Pop star Beck Hansen, known simply as Beck, has purchased a Pasadena home for just under $13 million, sources say”). But he has since moved back east, settling near the faded, folksier Silver Lake region that helped make him. “I live in the older L.A.,” Beck says. “That’s the one with a personality, the real L.A.”
Few places are as redolent of that vintage L.A. charm as a good old downtown car wash. He drives up to the Hollymont, a weathered, aquamarine beaut (HOTWAX S150; POLISHWAX $3; NO CHECKS). Our attendant, Kermit, bends the rules a bit so Beck and I can sit in the backseat and play tunes while the driverless car rolls through the tunnel-a poor man’s Pirates of the Caribbean. “A carousel of leatherized strips,” Beck narrates, “slowly slathering the car with grime and sweat.”
As rotors buff the windows, Beck cues up keyboardist Manning’s “Sexxlaws” remix. “This is intense,” he warns. “Straight-up Bronski Beat.” Reverbed synths of an obvious ’82 vintage come chirping in. “Uh-oh,” says Beck, leaning forward with a grin. “Oh shit.” As the deep, thud-thud-thud of a Yaz drumbeat kicks in, Beck does a sedentary robot. Ultracorny ray-gun shots hit the downbeats. “I told him to go straight Speak & Spell,” he yells. “This is kickin’.” It is kickin’. Here in this raging indoor typhoon, I am temporarily convinced: the hype flavor for 2000 is definitively ’80s synth pop. I ask Beck for some fashion predictions.
“Personally, I think the next step is those mini girl backpacks for guys,” he says. “Also, I think, stonewashed in the next two years. Not as blotchy. It’ll have subtleties and nuances that weren’t really achieved with the first generation of stonewashed.”
The tacky glamour of haute stonewashed denim is very new-model Beck, and it runs throughout the tweaked ghetto-fabulousness of Midnite Vultures-especially in “Hlwd. Freaks,” in which Beck and crew chant, “Drivin’ my Merce-deeees / Prob’ly have my bay-beee / Shopping Old Nay-vyyyy.” But while such lines may prove irresistible to the pretty-fly-for-a-white-guy set, I wonder how they’ll go down with the black hip-hop community, which is often understandably sensitive about that kind of satire, unless it comes from Chris Rock. While any ubiquitous pop music is certainly ripe for ribbing, Beck’s wacked-out pimp moves still prove divisive.
After Beck’s Soul Train-ish performance of “The New Pollution” on the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, New Yorker cultural critic Milton Als wrote that Beck “seemed to be doing his-perhaps ‘ironic’-best to trash the culture that inspired his hip persona.” Als felt that Beck’s posing with dual cell phones and his “contrived, funky” dancing was based on an “assumption that it was okay to parody a certain fraction of black culture.” On the other hand, the R&B singers of Dru Hill thought Beck rocked. As Beck recalls, “They told me, ‘ We were sitting in a hotel watching the show, and all of a sudden you came on, and we fell off the couch! That was the shit!’ I think they got that I’m not trying to be legit. That it was homage mixed with a sense of humor and my own awkward expressiveness. I was genuinely possessed by the music.”
As for straight-up hip-hop MCs, Beck has the endorsement of underground rap eccentric: Kool Keith, with whom he recently collaborated. “Beck is really cool,” Keith says. “I could work on tracks with him all day. Lots of artists are, like, ‘Keith, why don’t you give me something like on Dr. Octagon. Can I get a lyric like you done in “Poppy Large”?’ With Beck, it’s like, ‘Fuck it, let’s just do this.’ We could do a song called ‘Shirts and Pants,’ and he’d go, ‘Keith, you write about the shirts. I’ll write About the Pants.’ “
Beck’s interactions with more formulaic rap artists were less fruitful. The Puff project, for instance. Having been tapped to provide some alternative rock flavor for Puffy’s recent album, Forever, Beck found himself in Boyz II Men’s studio, getting ready to freestyle for them over a loop of “Bennie and the Jets.” “They heard the track, they were grooving to it. their necks were moving, they were on it,” Beck says. “Then I started singing about, like, how expensive my hormones were. The necks froze. Sour looks crossed the faces. And they were gone, they were out.” He laughs. “And so was I”
TILE SUNSET VIEW FROM THE HOLLYWOOD HILLS IS SPECTACULAR enough to move even the most ironic hipster to awe. “Man, this is sonic…planet-formation vista.” Back says, softly. “I think I see a pterodactyl about to fly over that ridge.” The valley does look primeval in the late-evening light. Shafts of the orange sun cut through the low clouds and set oft the white letters of the Hollywood sign. If this were a photo, there’d be an inspirational saying in the corner.
“Whoa, didn’t really bring the hiking shoes,” Beck says, as his cool, ’70s-style, Japan-purchased jogging sneakers slide down the pebbly canyon wall. “Not prepared too the high chaparral….” As we come skidding and scuffling down the hill, a young girl and guy standing on the ground below watch as rock star and journalist engage in an ad-hoc extreme sport. “Hey there,” the woman says cordially. “Whooaa…,” says Beck, looking down for purchase. As he hits level earth, Beck offers a neighborly “Hi” and keeps walking. After we’re a few feet past, she stops, inhales sharply, and calls out, “I love your music!”
“Thank You,” Beck says.
“Fuckin’ love it, man. Just like Whooo!”
“Thanks,” he says again, stopping to smile back up the hill at her. “Original, unique, and just fuckin’ rad,” she says.
Her name is Danyel, and both she and her friend Greg are 22. Greg asks if Beck has something new coming out. “Oh yeah,” Beck says. “Two months.”
“Awesome!” Danyel says. “There’s just, like, nothing else out there.”
“I know, it’s pretty dead,” Beck says.
Danyel and Greg crack up at his frankness. “Right on!”
Beck’s not much for shit-talking today, but it’s pretty clear what he means by “dead”-unimaginative, uninspiring, presided over by Carson Daly. It’s disappointing that the world of rapping Caucasians he helped usher in has yielded such charmless, chart-topping dude-rock. “The new white B-boy prototype, the rap-rock people, they seem to be coming out of that really aggressive thing,” Beck says. “Well, L.L. Cool J was always aggressive; that’s a large component of what rap is, But he was always sexy, you know? I don’t see a lot of those bands possessing that.”
Beck does have respect for white-rap sensation Eminem, whose dysfunction jammy “My Name Is” could be considered a Kevlar-clad update to “Loser.” “When I heard him, I kinda felt like I don’t need to write rap songs now,” Beck says. “He’s more what certain people wanted from me, but I was always skating around it, trying to subvert the hip-hop elements with my own free-form poems and word associations and disconnectedness. My raps are like jalopies, and kids want a Burt Reynolds Trans Am.”
Even today, Beck signifies as more a cultural than commercial force. (Odelay took more than a year to go double platinum.) Occasionally, Beck comes up against a middle-of-the-road rock phenomenon that shows just how strange sampledelic-moonwalking-bricolage still sounds to the dorm crowd. When he opened for the Dave Matthews Band in ’97, the reception Beck got was revelatory. “I remember getting the sense from the audience that they really didn’t believe we were a real band,” Beck says. “There were a lot of people pointing at us and then looking inquisitively at one another. I don’t think it really registered that we were actually playing music.”
Who knows how many converts Beck made of the DM B army, or how many youngsters will find a space for Midnite Vultures between their Christina Aguilera and Kid Rock records. One of Beck’s word jalopies may find its place on Total Request Live, which would he wonderful. And not terribly unlikely, given his basic disposition. Beck may be aghast at today’s gleefully shallow boom culture, but he, also exudes a certain kind of self-preserving whimsy. Surrounded by rapping monks and backstreet wannabes, he’s still optimistic. “The beautiful thing would lie if one of them evolved into a Beach Boys,” Beck says of today’s boy hands. “1 think I would rather fantasize about them coming out with a masterpiece.”
Striding on a ridge high above one of the culture industry’s main nerve centers, Beck reflects on the simple things. “I would love to come out with something that doesn’t sound like anything that ever happened before,” he says. “But to do that you’d need to surrender all earthly pleasures and weaknesses. How can you not be seduced by an AC/DC guitar riff? Or a fat beat from a Gap Band song? These are musical hamburgers. These are pleasures we can’t deny ourselves.”
I tell him I agree. There’s still something transcendent about a big, dumb, totally retarded guitar riff. “Dumbness rocks.” Beck affirms. “Dumbness has impact. I’m not saying something that’s exploitive or gratuitous. I’m just talking about a chorus like, ‘Can you feel my bass drum’?’ That’s potent, you can’t even mess with that. There’s things embedded in that that you can’t communicate in any other way.”
Clearly Beck has made a study of the rock sciences. But his methodology is intuitive-part EPMD and part Rolling Stones, as idiosyncratic as Jack Kerouac’s Action Writing. “I put a beat together,” lie says. “‘Then a bass lit keyboard thing comes up. Then hopefully the lyrics flow right out.” And through this deceptively casual technique, Beck has achieved cutting-edge status in the pop world.
Call it aesthetic poise. a helpless, inscrutable knack for channeling the right sound, gesture, or backspin at the right moment. Whether Beck’s a messenger or a medium, an alt-rock Prince or an overhyped channel-surfer, he remains full of mystery. Is he a brilliant pop savant with killer melodic sense and an omnivorous grasp of pop music’s essential substance? Is he just a smart kid at the right place at the right tune’?’ Even his closest associates are often mystified.
“Sometimes I’d literally be saying to myself, ‘What the fuck is he, doing?’ “says Manning of recording with Beck. “Like, if he asked me, ‘Hey, what do you think I wouldn’t even know what to say. I’d just be a fly on the wall taking it all in.”
This seems like a wise role to assume.
LATE ONE AFTERNOON, BECK HAS A MOMENT. IT’S DUSK AT A BUCOLIC roadside rest stop, and he has just trotted back to the car to drop something off. But about 20 yards away, he silently, inexplicably goes off.
He breaks into a mad, Twyla Tharp shuck’n’jive right there on the grass. His head jerks left, then right- His arm flies out, his feet shuffle to the left. His left arm flails, he boogaloos off to the right. The mind scrambles for proper choreographic references. James Brown meets Cats? Alvin Ailey meets Devo?
Suddenly, the performance is over. Beck resumes his casual lope and walks on back-skinny legs in dusty blue jeans, eyes squinting in the setting sun. As for that wild moment of physical abandon, that spasm of caper and capriole, Beck is characteristically modest.
“Oh,” he says, adjusting his clunky digital watch, “I was getting chased by a wasp.”
Beck to the Future
Request
February 2000
pp. 24-27
Erik Himmelsbach
With his stunning and salacious new album, young Mr. Hansen builds a better sex machine.
Beck wakes up at 8 a.m., alone on the rock-star bus, wondering what the hell happened last night, and his band were in Santa Barbara to shake off the rust and warm up for the upcoming Coachella Music and Arts Festival, which Beck will headline. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the experience at the University of Santa Barbara’s Hub turned into a nightmare. The ceilings were painfully low in a head-banging sort of way, the power went out for an extended period, and worst of all, the Hub turned out to be a glorified food court. Beck and his posse found themselves soundchecking as students ate dinner. Later, during the show, they performed onstage calisthenics to amuse the crowd when the plug was momentarily pulled.
The caravan moved east, crossing the state of California in the dead of night before landing near the scene of today’s sonic experiment: Fresno State. The bus has been anchored at the Radisson Hotel parking lot for three hours, but our hero hasn’t stirred until now. Here he is, getting his bearings as he drags his tired ass across the parking lot toward the hotel in search of a comfortable place for a little more shut-eye. Located in the center of California’s sweltering Central Valley, Fresno is the heart of the raisin industry. It’s also a reasonable facsimile of Anytown, U.S.A., a midsized city that’s home to Fresno State.
Tonight the coeds are about to get the funk, courtesy of that wheat-haired white boy from the big city. Lord have mercy. Beck Hansen has indeed returned, not only to Fresno, but to his anointed role as the messiah of popular music, with the release of the funkified Midnite Vultures. It’s not a moment too soon for those who cannot live on “Nookie” alone. Remember: Way back in ’96, Odelay was a revolutionary collage of sound that sampled a veritable Rough Guide of musical history-classical, garage rock, samba, R&B-over phat hip-hop beats. In the process, Beck and his producers, the Dust Brothers, took a shovel and poured dirt on the grave of grunge, kicked at the sorry state of hip-hop, and added a little mischief to the decidedly unfun genre then known as alternative.
“I started doing songs using garage-rock elements and ’60s pop elements because they were such the antithesis of what people were sampling at the time, and music that you [wouldn’t] hear in the context of a hip-hop beat,” Beck explains, shortly after emerging from his slumber. “I thought it had a more melodic and feminine quality. Most of the things I heard before ’95 were more aggressive, and I wanted to step away from the rockist tendency in anything that was hip-hop related.”
At 28, Beck still is oddly cherubic, looking for all the world like a gangly kid as he gets sucked into the overstuffed chairs in the swingin’ Radisson lounge (“This furniture is for very large people,” he says, sinking.) But the hotel staff obviously is on rock-star alert. Perhaps it’s the duds that give him away: the Red Vine colored cords; brown, boatlike loafers with seriously wagging tongues; and the kind of racing-striped T-shirt Mom might have bought you in fifth grade. Or maybe it’s that giant bus parked outside.
Unsure how he wants to face this early part of the day, Beck plays with his wraparound shades, putting them on, taking them off, putting them on. Finally, he sets them down. But that’s about as quirky as he gets. When he opens his mouth, it’s clear the savant who once used his music as a pop-culture garbage disposal is far, far in the distance of Beck’s rearview mirror. Today’s Beck is a pro, a veteran of the industry machine for more than half a decade, with six wildly eclectic records under his belt. He’s practically a geezer compared to the one-hitters he’s about to face off against in the war for airplay on radio and MTV.
But Beck’s own perspective on his music is charmingly skewed. While fans and critics still can barely wipe the drool from their faces in canonizing Odelay for its subversive innovation, Beck is sheepish when I ask him to explain himself.
“Now it’s okay to be somewhat lightweight,” he says. “‘New Pollution’ was very fluffy to me at the time. I was almost embarrassed. At the time everything coming out was very aggressive and very testosterone-driven, except for Stereolab and a handful of other bands. I remember when we did ‘Jackass,’ I just thought, this is going to be way too wimpy for the people who listen to KROQ. We were doing that stuff at the height of Pearl Jam and Nirvana.”
Three years later, bands like Air have made it safe to be wistful, subtle, and kitschy. But for whom, beyond a small cadre of critics and audiophiles? Judging from the dominance of Korn and all they spawned, it’s a precious few. As Beck spent two years on the road with Odelay, the lunkheads wrapped their tattooed arms around America, smothering it with their aggro-cretin style of beer-can-smashed-to-the-head metal rap.
“The pendulum swung back pretty quick,” Beck says. “It just went wham. I have a friend who said alternative music is in the Warrant stage.” Sigh. You know what that means. Once again, Beck is asked to save the world.
The Universal Records subsidiary formerly known as Geffen can hardly wait. So hungry was the company for a massive unit-moving disc (when are those Elastica and Guns N’ Roses records coming out, anyway?), it jumped the gun by swiping last year’s Mutations away from Bong Load, the label for which it was intended-per Beck’s deal with Geffen to release “uncommercial” records with whatever label he pleases.
Having finally completed his Odelay odyssey, Beck booked L.A.’s Ocean Way Studios for a few weeks with his touring band and Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich to cut a series of tracks sans bells and whistles. It was a low-key affair, a more polished cousin of the lopsided folk contained on 1994’s One Foot In the Grave, which was released on the indie K Records. Geffen heard Mutations, wanted it, and put it out. Soon thereafter, the label was gobbled up in a corporate merger. Problem was, Beck had financed the recording himself and, subsequently, wasn’t paid by Geffen. That triggered a series of lawsuits, now settled. Beck claims they were mere formalities. “There weren’t any ruffled feathers,” he says.
With the legal issues behind them, all parties concerned are understandably ecstatic about Midnite Vultures. But it’s hardly the sequel to Odelay. Instead, it’s a party-all-the-time bootay shaker, full of funked-up grooves, nasty R&B, and salaciousness served with a smile for your sexual-healing pleasure. The album’s release date says 1999, but Beck admits he’s been carrying an R&B jones around with him for a while.
“I’ve been listening to this music heavily over the last five years,” he says. “I found myself slipping through the cracks musically in a lot of ways, but usually just thrown in with the alternative bands. Yet the more I listened to contemporary R&B stations and hip hop, I felt more interested in that kind of music. It’s just taken until ’99 for me to do a proper album that reflects this.
“This album is extremely overdue,” he adds. “It represents where we were in ’97. We’re playing catch-up.”
The basic objective of Midnite Vultures, Beck says, was to capture the vibe of his band’s high-voltage live performances. “If anything, it just represents an element in the live shows that has thus far been missing in the records,” he says. “We’ve developed a sound as a band, and so I felt like I wanted to have some songs that represented that, vehicles for us to create our live eruption.” Beck the Funk Soul Brother may surprise some, but not those who saw the Odelay tour. The silly, seductive slow jam “Debra” has been a show-stopper since ’96. Written with the Dust Brothers, it was originally recorded during the Odelay sessions, but it didn’t fit the feel of that record. It was re-recorded live in the studio with his band, and fits comfortably as Vultures’album-closing chill out.
Feeling certain that Vultures is Beck goofing on Prince and George Clinton, I hand him a copy of a rare slice of oversexed soul known only to denizens of the cut-out bins. The Best of Marvin Sease features all the “hits” of a pimped-out Southern R&B crooner, including “Candy Licker” and “I Ate You For My Breakfast.” Beck smiles as he stares at the cover, a photo of a jewelry-adorned Sease reclining in a peacock-colored jacket and fedora. “Oh, man, there’s a million guys like this,” he says. “‘I wanna lick you up and down,’ ‘I like the crotch on you.’ If you go to one of those shows, the women are crazy. They take it dead serious. There’s humor there, but it’s dead serious.” This is exactly what Beck was attempting with his own lyrics on Vultures.
“I wanted to make a sexy record,” he explains later in the day, gobbling a burrito while sitting on the grass outside the student union before the Fresno gig. As he chows and chats, hordes of students hover nearby, not actually communicating with their hero. They stand close enough to bask in his aura, yet far enough enough away to work an aloof cool, like they’re supposed to be there. One guy actually breaks through the imaginary wall. He looks nervous. “I hope I’m not really interrupting,” he says, interrupting. “I know it’s completely benign, but can I shake your hand?”
“Sure man, all right,” Beck responds politely. As the student walks away, Beck wrings out his freshly shaken hand. “Ow, a hard shake. That hurt. A little too firm.” He picks right back up where he left off. “It’s not sexy in the way Madonna makes a sexy record. All you need to do is read the lyrics and hear how I’m singing it and get the sense that it’s playful. It’s sexy, but it’s got other elements to it. It’s a little more tweaked.”
OK, now the big question: Why? Once again, Beck was partly inspired by a vacuum in the alternative-rock world. “Aside from the very masculine and aggro frustration with sexuality, there’s not a lot of playfulness,” he says. “There’s romance, but there’s no vocabulary and language in that kind of music. It’s been sort of taboo in the ’90s, except in the hip-hop and R&B world, where you can be as explicit as you want.”
This sense of adult playfulness makes Vultures an ideal soundtrack for partying away the 20th century. But it wasn’t originally going to be that way. Originally, Beck had a more trippy electronic vibe in mind, evident in the robotic love coos of “Get Real Paid.” Beck’s hyper-fey falsetto sounds like a send-up of Prince. But he had a different model in mind for this vocal: “I was trying to make it sound like the Teletubbies, if they went electro,” he says. I also thought the tune might have been a dig at Geffen (“We like to ride on executive planes/We like to sit around and get real paid”), but Beck claims it’s actually a goof on the Puff Daddies of the world. “The pervasive R&B entrepreneurial superstar star-maker man-male ’90s machine,” he explains in vintage Beckspeak.
Actually, Vultures shares more with the straightforward Mutations than Odelay, both melodically and in the more linear lyrics. Gone are the sample-heavy grooves, the eclectic stops and starts, the stream-of-consciousness prose, and the overt mimicry of hip hop. He explains that the old sound was hard to reproduce in concert, and he’s naturally grown more interested in a cohesive, stage-ready ensemble approach. “I always felt that Odelay and Mellow Gold, too-were pretty rag-tag and choppy. But I think that was the aesthetic I was going for at the time,” he says. “It was difficult to make them have an impact live. This time I wanted to build the songs like tanks, because we were going to be riding around on these songs for a year.”
Even though Beck still has a good foot in hip hop, even though he collaborated with Kool Keith (alas, nothing made the Vultures cut), and even though he’s allegedly worked with Snoop Dog, Beck doesn’t feel entirely comfortable in that scene. “I don’t think people in that world take where I’m coming from,” he says. “I never pretended to be an MC, I always had my own style. I threw many of the hip-hop rules out the window immediately. I didn’t even try to be real. There’s very stringent rules of how hip hop is made. It’s very protective, almost like the way the Germans make their beer. You can’t fuck with the formula at all.” But messing with the mix is what Beck is all about, ever since he wedded folk, Delta blues, and hip hop in “Loser” back in 1993.
Casual fans may not realize what a break that monster single was for Beck. After all, he used to be an acoustic solo artist in the tradition of Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie. “I have this One Foot in the Grave/Mutations folky side, which is where I come from musically. And then I have this other thing that just developed out of ‘Loser.’ And this side project thing that took over is what people mostly identify me with,” he says, sounding like a person whose career has been dictated by forces beyond his control. The schism initially was so great that when “Loser” was about to be released, the folks at Bong Load asked if their young artist wanted to use a pseudonym.
“It’s just two different animals, two sides of what I do,” he says. “People who listen to my music just have to reconcile the fact that once in a while they’re gonna get one of these acoustic guitar records.
“I kind of gave up on the idea that anybody would be interested in folk music, and then I started experimenting and having fun in the studio and letting go of my ideas about what I thought my music was about and just decided to not try to keep it pure and focused or anything. I just threw everything out the window and started over,” he says with a laugh. “The strange thing that happened is that, within a year or two after that, folk, bluegrass, and country became very hip. So it was kind of frustrating. I had a lot of years playing that music when nobody gave a shit at all.”
Beck has seen the future, and it rocks. He says he’d like to veer in a direction that sounds a lot like the wicked, whip-smart riffing of Vultures’ “Pressure Zone.” “Rock is really difficult for me,” he says. “I think the next album’s gonna have a lot more rock.” Somehow, I think he’ll manage. Beck’s career is already looking as cockeyed and unpredictable as Neil Young’s. Or Bob Dylan’s. And the way Beck’s going, he may yet share the longevity enjoyed by the old guard. Just to keep things interesting, Beck confides that his ultimate challenge could be years, even decades away. “I want to do records that just don’t sound like anything-no references, no nothing,” he says. “Just pure music. I think it’s going to take a while to get to that point, but I really want to go deeper and deeper.”
First things first. There’s still a gig that needs playing here in Fresno, the raisin capital of the world. But unlike the Spinal Tap absurdity of the previous night in Santa Barbara, Beck and his boys connect. The student union is packed. He tears the mother down, spinning, twirling, popping, and locking. Beck is making good use of time-tested rock star gestures geared for the cheap seats. His strut reminds me of another oversexed skinny white kid copping R&B in another era: Mick Jagger. It would seem that the hot rocks-the family jewels, as it were-have been passed.
The master of everything (and nothing at all)
Esquire
November 2002
v138 i5 p156(4)
Wil S. Hylton
You are something like nothing else. That has always been clear not least of all to yourself. When you look in the mirror, you see huge blue saucer eyes, empty and blinking on a wide-open face, a flat face almost without eyebrows. You see soft, downy cheeks and bulbous, crimson, just-punched lips. In the morning, at the black upright piano in your dining room, by the seven-foot windows overlooking L.A.’s inky Silver Lake reservoir, you hunch over the keys and blink, and your big lips smirk at the rising sun. You smirk because you have played all night. You have played the night into day. You have always been able to play away time. You are thirty-two years old now, but you could pass for half that.
You stand and stare out the window. You are alone in your jeans. Your skeleton shoulders and bony chest make a ghostly silhouette in the new light. Your waist is smaller than some men’s biceps. You are the size of a teenage girl without breasts. Your hair is an unruly knot of yellow (you call it a “Jewfro”), and your stump of a chin slides down your narrowing neck into the collar of your too-tight T-shirt. Your body cants forward, knobby knees akimbo. Your dangling arms are thin and crooked with too many elbows. Your hands are almost larger than your head. You have Frisbee palms and pipe-cleaner fingers that are gnarled from playing. Your skin is spotty and splotchy and red from no sleep. The music has come and gone.
The music has always traveled in unpredictable orbits around you. You play what you hear, not the other way around. You play because it’s there and because you can. Because in silence, you hear sound. Notes and lyrics tumble into your mind like memories. When they come, you open your head and receive them. You do not think about what the words mean. You just say what you see. What you see is true. What you see is somehow you. “Neptune’s lips taste like fermented wine / Perfumed blokes on the Ginza line / Running buck wild like a concubine / Whose mother never had held her hand / Brief encounters in Mercedes-Benz / Wearing hepatitis contact lens / Bed and breakfast getaway weekends / with Sports Illustrated moms.”
You wrote that. You have written some of everything. You have written country music and indie rock. You have done hip-hop and R&B. You have danced across stages in a cowboy hat and tassels, with your thin white arms and legs wriggling in breakdance. You have crooned love ballads and shouted punk anthems. You have no genre. You have gained a mastery of everything, yet you are the master of nothing. The last song on your last album, a soaring falsetto funk called “Debra,” could have been made by Prince if Prince had a sense of humor. Your sense of humor is evolving. It is important to you. It is elusive, though. You have been accused of being ironic. You have doubts about that. To you, the word ironic has wrong implications. It suggests that you are poking fun at other artists and genres. You are not. You are having fun. There is a difference.
When things began, you had less fun. That was your fault. You had an obsession with detail that dragged you toward the sell-serious. You were consumed by the first album, Mellow Gold. Every song had to be essential and distinct. You wanted desperately to show your range. You included an indie rock groove called “Blackhole,” but you also tossed ha a busted old blues sound on “Whiskeyclone, Hotel City” and an industrial-punk mix on “Sweet Sunshine.” You rapped on “Loser.” You flaunted your versatility like a gold tooth. You played the instruments, produced the album yourself, and recorded it in your friends’ houses. You were obsessed. The weight of the thing was oppressive.
But that was a decade ago, and things are different now. Now your career is reinforced by three Grammys, and the success brings out something playful in you. The last album was a show of that. It was a flex of your creative license. Because you had snatched up two Grammys with the 1996 album Odelay, another for the soft-channeling Mutations in 1998, and by 1999 critics had begun to swoon and write your future for you. They said your music was becoming more refined with each album, less experimental and inaccessible, more personal and intimate. They predicted that you were just one album away from the slow, delicate masterpiece that would define you. And hearing that, you wanted to smack somebody. You knew that you were going in no such linear direction. In fact, what you really wanted to do at the time, what struck you best personally and intimately at the moment, was the need to blow off some steam and get in the studio and just have fun. And so you did that instead of making another slow, delicate album. You made a funky album with horns mad cymbals and your voice in soprano, and you called the whole thing Midnite Vultures. The critics didn’t know what to make of that. Many of your fans didn’t, either. Nobody called that album intimate, but you knew that it was. It was all about abandoning the expectations of others. What could be more intimate than that?
And now, perhaps to throw them off again, you have returned to the slow, delicate sound of Mutations. But more so. This time, you have built on it. This time, it’s even softer and more pacific, almost a translucent sound. And the critics are calling it intimate again. You don’t protest. You smile. You understand. They missed it last time; they will miss it now.
You were raised to understand that critics miss the essential things. They missed your grandfather entirely, and his work was seminal. Look around you. Look at your house. His art is everywhere, collages of busty, nude women. The shapes are rough but evocative, made of things like Hershey’s candy-bar wrappers. Your grandfather was a fan of the Hershey company because it did not advertise much. He used its wrappers often in his collages. It was his trademark. His other trademark was pushing pianos off rooftops. He did that often, too. He called it performance art. He called it “Yoko Ono Piano Drop.” Yoko Ono was his friend. So was Lou Reed. So was Andy Warhol. Your grandfather found Warhol after the shooting. People at Warhol’s Factory embraced and understood your grandfather, but most other people didn’t. When he finally found a gallery that appreciated him, in Germany in the 1980s, he moved to Cologne and lived there until he died in 1995. But he left his mark behind on you. Your music is your collage. You have pasted together a spectrum of sounds.
His work on your walls is an homage, from your art to his. His collages are just about the only things on your walls. They are just about the only noticeable things in your home. Everything else is stark and scabby and impersonal. There is very little sign that anyone lives there, let alone someone like you. There is a plain olive-green sofa adrift on the hardwood floor of your living room, and there is an orange easy chair squatting alone nearby, with a small blue shag carpet in between. There is temporary shelving by the window, with books and records on it–books like the collected illustrations of George Grosz, and records like Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions. There is a big white refrigerator with a picture of a typewriter stuck to the front; leftover platters of vegetables are inside. There is a
breakfast nook and a worn tile bathroom with old-fashioned, semifunctional faucetry. There is very little stuff to show for your success.
You do not have a fancy stereo, and you do not use the stereo that you have. You play your Al Green and your Rolling Stones albums not on vinyl but on your Mac laptop, trickling through small plastic speakers. You are not concerned with high-fidelity sound. You are, in fact, unconcerned with it. This lack of concern is deliberate and thought-out. It is the result of a petit epiphany you experienced while waiting for a stage to be set a few years ago. The construction workers on the job were jamming to a small, shabby radio with shitty speakers, and you noticed that they did not mind or even notice the crackle and fuzz. Something crystallized for you in that. You realized that sound quality is a luxury that rarely surfaces in real life. You realized that in real life, music usually arrives through a filter of ambient noise. Maybe a faucet is running. Maybe you’re in the car, or on a busy street. Maybe the music is droning through the walls of your neighbor’s apartment. It doesn’t matter what kind of interference you get–just that there will be interference most of the time, something between your ears and the speakers to annul the precision of the recording. It was then that you came up with the Other Room Test. Before you can release a new album, you have to give it the ORT: play it on a boom box and listen from another room, letting the sound enter your ears sideways and distorted. Lately, you have been playing the new album that way. You like the new album that way. The new album sounds like the desert. It’s dry and dusty, and it crackles with the tension of emptiness. It has no name yet, but that will come. You are still waiting for the right words, the right picture to enter your mind. You are culling it, calling for it, but so far, no luck. You have considered Golden Years. That’s the name of a song on the album. But you have a thing about eponymous songs and albums. The thing is that you don’t like them. And so you’re stuck. The tour starts in a few weeks. You’ll need a name by then.
By then, you will have packed up your laptop (with all your music inside) and your instruments and your clothes and your copies of the new album, and you will have traveled to Seattle for the first show in your two-man acoustic tour. The clothes, especially, will be important. You are going to be a folk singer for a while. And so you will leave behind the sequined, urban cowboy getups and giant sunglasses that you wore during the funk-album period, and you will have flannel shirts and jeans with you instead. You will wear low-top Converse sneakers. You have many pairs of Converse sneakers now in many different colors. You have enough scarves to fill a duffel bag. You have T-shirts ,and bracelets and watches. You are ready fur the next thing. You are ready to travel. You are ready to leave the empty house and the collages of naked women, ready to walk away from the black upright piano and step outside unto the winding street of your evolving image. You are ready for the next sea change.