Beck
THE CHANGING MAN
Beck continues to release challenging and different records. Aaron Richardson looks back from the hip hop grunge of `Loser ` to the melancholy of `Sea Change`.
Eleven years ago Nirvana had become so influential that everyone was looking out for the next Kurt Cobain, a process that meant dozens of grunge bands were signed up by record companies and hardly any of them were any good. So, when a single called `Loser` turned up, sung in a not particularly tuneful voice by someone who looked like a student stoner, people thought “This is the new Kurt Cobain.” Of course, it was nothing so uninteresting as that; instead Beck turned out to be the new Prince. Sort of...
Beck Hansen was born Bek David Campbell in downtown L.A., and altered the spelling of his first name and adopted his mother’s maiden name, Hansen when his parents divorced. Beck’s mother, Bibbe owns a restaurant with her second husband, artist Sean Carillo.
As a teenager, he became immersed in traditional blues and folk. When he was 18, he moved to New York where he became part of the city's late 80's "anti-folk" scene, playing at various small clubs around the East Village and Lower East Side. In the early 90's, he moved back to Los Angeles, and continued to write and perform music, sometimes alone and sometimes backed by various musician friends from the local music scene. He made a few home recordings, one of which was the single that initially garnered him attention: "Loser.” First recorded in 1991, "Loser" was originally released by Bongload Custom Recordings in 1993. An infectious slide guitar driven melody, the single's chorus of " I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me," became an unavoidable song that year and a perfect step forward out of the grunge mire.
Not that this was the first thing he released. Very early on, Beck had made two limited edition albums title `Western Harvest By Moonlight` and `Golden Feelings` and his first proper LP consisted of the best of these songs combined for the LP `Stereophonic Soulmanure` released on Flipside Records. There’s also `One Foot In The Grave`, released on K Records that established his fanbase with a stronger folk influence than his best- known later LPs. It was only then that he signed for Geffen and made his breakthrough.
Quite where Beck came from- in terms of musical influences- has remained vague. Possibly realising that the best artists keep a little mystery to themselves, his approachable no airs and graces personality seemed for a long time to hide behind flip comments and shrugs. As in his songs his language was so clever its quite possible he fooled journalists into thinking he was telling them more that he was. When once asked what he was doing while other kids were in high school he replied: ”I was working. Started playing music, working and listening to Mississippi John Hurt, and riding the bus to work. Not much.” What was he singing about then? “ Same stuff: filing cabinets, bus stops, cuff links.” Yet he has also taked about his love of words and if you read interviews he will often talk eloquently on all topics. We’d have to wait until much late to pick up any of his deeper thoughts. Perhaps the biggest clue to his early albums lyrical content is when he said: “I don't want to tell the story, I just want to give clues to it.”
`Loser` did give the idea of a freaky outsider kid with an inferioity complex whereas nothing could be further from the truth. Beck has turned out to be someone with an excellent feel for what will work, a writer with diverse cross genre influences and someone who, far from being a slacker works incredibly hard at his career. For a while people felt that `Loser` would be Beck’s only hit; the askew music of the accompanying album, `Mellow Gold` seeemed just a little too left field to really bring success. The song did become something of a millstone too. A few years later Beck described it as “sort of a one-street town, or one street of a town. You don't want to go up and down the same street all the time. That song was not intended to go where it did. When I was doing that song I had no idea what "slacker" was. It was like a talking blues. It didn't have anything to do with what was going on in popular music.”
Of course in the early/mid 90s slacker culture was all the rage, perhaps best personified by the unintentionally hilarious `Reality Bites which painted such an unrealistic picture of what the majority of teenagers and twenety somethings were really like, it stands as a wonderfully pretentious period piece. Beck was seen almost as a spokesperson for that generation but he said; “ I have a lot of problems with slacker, the term, the idea, the myth, the madness. The mystery, the mindlessness, ultimately, the mirage. This supposed apathy . . . I don't know, isn't being a slacker kind of a middle-class thing? It seems like you have to have money to be able to, you know, not do anything. I've never been able to relate to apathy. I've always been doing stuff, been in action, making music or working just to get by.” In fact, far from being disaffected he said “I'm affected by things. This boredom just doesn't exist. It never did. When I was young I had to create my own amusements. I think a lot of what I'm trying to do musically is draw upon the refuse and make something interesting out of it. It's not out of a desire to be kitschy or retro or anything like that. If that's the impression I give, then I haven't figured out how to do it right. I'm still learning like anybody else. There are things going on below the surface other than just a bunch of glib references to '70s and '80s waste culture.” Perhaps `Loser` appealed after the shiny 1980s; the decade of winning, loadsamoney, those red braces and people buying into the ethic of getting to the top whoever you stood on to get there?
`Mellow Gold` is far more lo –fi than later records and has a delightful rough enthusiasm about it; there are moments when it sounds as if he’s hollering into the microphone too loudly but nobody cares. It sounds at once like an LP someone made in their garage yet at the same time is far too good to have such origins. There are quite a variety of songs; `Pay No Mind` and "Nitemare Hippy Girl" are simple acoustic numbers, whilst `Steal My Body Home` displays Eastern influenced drone-rock influences. `Truckdrivin Neighbours Downstairs` and `Sweet Sunshine` are even more lo-fi than `Loser` while `Beercan` is a riot with Beck opting for high-pitched vocals. `Fuckin With My Head` is another hip-hop/folk fusion track that gives clues as to his future direction plus you get the demented `Mutherfucker`, which has the heaviest riff Beck's ever laid down and a distorted paranoid chant
Lyrically, `Mellow Gold` was parly influenced by the singer’s own experiences in California. He said in 1996; “All these things came out of the landscape, like horrible fumes, something acidic and rancid that you breathe in. Like the smog - you don't want to breathe it, but you can't help it 'cause it's there. You have no choice. And it takes over your whole being. But a lot about making a record is an unconscious thing. Just something that you do. You can't meditate on walking or certain human habits. You concentrate too much on the way you walk and you'll start walking pretty weird.”
Beck toured extensively over the next year and a half, most notably appearing on the main stage at the 1995 Lollapalooza tour. He returned to the studio in January 1995, and emerged with a vengeance in the summer of 1996 with `Odelay`, a stunning collection of songs that took his earlier experimentation with sounds and song forms to new heights. `Odelay` was met with praise from the critical community, earning album of the year kudos from Rolling Stone, Spin, and the Village Voice, among many others. The album also won him two Grammy Awards that year, for Best Alternative performance and Best Male Vocal Performance. Also, at the time of the album's release Beck started a gruelling tour schedule that kept him on the road with a full band, DJ, and horn section for two years along the way gaining him a reputation as a formidable live performer renowned for freaky dancing and jumping about! There were also a trio of hit singles from the LP; `Where It’s At`, `Devil’s Haircut` and `The New Pollution`. Comparisons to Prince in the 80s and Bowie in the 70s were legion.
`Odelay` is certainly a great record that still sound sharp eight years on with hip-hop, folk, funk, and blues seamlessly mixed together. Productied by the Dust Brothers - revered mixmasters who guided the Beastie Boys, it is an LP that seems to draw fads from each decade. In fact, the album is just so slick that it could be perceived as an ironic pastiche, cleverly devised to impress rock critics and sell records to gullible consumers. There’s a trick round every corner, be it the rockabilly guitar break in "Lord Only Knows" or the snatch of robotic vocals after the first chorus of "Where It's At". In general, there are probably more samples and production tricks going on here than on `Mellow Gold`. This is probably due to the fact Beck took on a huge team of cohorts to assist with the album and all songs were co-written affairs (perhaps with the Dust Brothers). The opening quartet of songs define the album. The riff-heavy `Devils Haircut` and the sax-y `The New Pollution` were the great singles and `Hotwax continues in the post-modern hip-hop vein with an amusing outro about "the rhythms of the universe". `Lord Only Knows` begins with a sampled scream before unexpectedly delivering an up-tempo steel guitar break. `Where It's At` was described by one reviewer as “probably the most ironic and post-modern Beck has ever got”
As the LP progresses, the sheer amount of twists and turns starts to pull fewer suprises, but only because the standard is so impressively high. Talking about some of the lyrics on `Odelay`, Beck has said Southern California was an influence: “There's some about Southern California, which is sort of a dead-end place. It's like the bottom of the hill; everything just sort of slides into it. This whole area is kind of transparent. It doesn't really have any history, and what history it does have gets eaten up, dug up, and turned into something else. There's cool things happening below the surface. It can be in a Chinese mall in Monterey Park that looks totally generic, but then there's a gambling den and weird movie theaters where you can buy a bean-curd popsicle or some crazy lizard.” By the way, the unusal title apparenntly dervies from Chicano slang - orale! “It's sort of an exclamation of "all right, things are all right" said Beck, “ I'll say, "What's up?" to my friend, Andy, and he'll go, "Odelay!" The thing on the cover; the source of considerable speculation is actually some sort of dog!
By the time `Odelay` was gleaning worldwide acclaim interviewers were trying to discover how he did it. In 1996 he said: “Usually the music inspires the lyrics. The lyrics just sort of fall off like a bunch of crumbs from the melody. That's all I want them to be - crumbs. I don't want to work any kind of fabricated message. Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else. It's more like blowing your nose, you know. It's not really an elevated thing.” tious. Describing the hip hop and folk infleunces he said: “Well, it's all music that comes from nonprofessional areas. With hip-hop, you didn't need a studio, you just needed some turntables and some kind of recording thing. You could do it in your living room. That's the spirit of hip-hop. And folk wasn't about recording studios and all that. I guess they're both nonelitist forms of music.”
Beck’s third major label release, 1998’s `Mutations` was not a commercial success, nor was it meant to be. It was his first foray into using a live band in the studio and it had an acoustic, lo-fi, and sometimes tropical-influenced sound that was certainly a stark contrast to the complexity of `Odelay`. Produced by Nigel Godrich, best known for his work with Radiohead, the record included the Brazilian-flavoured `Tropicalia` and the sitar drone of `Nobody’s Fault But My Own` and was recorded in Los Angeles over a two-week period in the spring of 1998. The sound harkened back to the folk of `One Foot in the Grave`. In fact, `Mutations` was originally intended for release on Bongload records, the independent label that released the 12" of "Loser,” in 1993. But DGC/Geffen's enthusiasm for the project got them involved, and it was ultimately released by the label. Nowadays the LP is also seen as a dry run for `Sea Change`.
Also in 98, Beck helped put together an art installation that paired his own work with that of his late grandfather, Fluxus pioneer Al Hansen. "Beck and Al Hansen: Playing With Matches" made its debut at the Santa Monica Museum of Art in August 1998 and has since made its way to various museums and galleries around the world.
If comparisons to Prince had been made before, then his next record `Midnite Vultures`, released in 1999, made them even more relevant. Most of its songs are slick funk numbers with Beck adopting various silly, high-pitched voices in true Prince style. Many of the lyrics are also imilar in tone to the Purple one’s prime though it could be that his tongue is mostly in his cheek! "I'm mixing business with leather"; "I think we're going crazy, her left eye is lazy"; "I'm a full-grown man, but I'm not afraid to cry"; "I met you at JC Penney's, I read your name-tag, it said Jenny"; "I said 'lady, step inside my Hyundai'"; the whole LPs is like this throwing out clever or interesting lines every bit the equal of any rapper you might mention. `Debra` is the funniest song Beck has ever done as he plays the watery sax lines from Bowie's `Win` over which he sings some of his wittiest lyrics in falsetto voice. Of course, just one of the brilliant features about the song is that Debra is not even the person the protagonist is singing to but her sister. "I want to get with you, and your sister, I think her name's Debra" goes the wholly fantastic chorus. The first single from this album was `Sexx Laws` with its Sly and the Family Stone brass and banjo outro and a lyrical call to “redefine the logic of our sex laws”. `Nicotine & Gravy` and `Mixed Bizness` are just as good, full of busy sounds while `Hollywood Freaks` is possibly the sleaziest song on the album and also the one that most indulges in his long-running parody of hip-hop. The LP won a Grammy and he toured it in style throwing himself about the stage with abandon.
One noticeable aspect of `Midnite Vultures` is that Beck actually does some singing on it. In an interview at the time he said; “I don't think I ever tried on the other records. I made no attempt to make the vocals a real performance. And that's one of the things that always really bothered me about my records. The vocals were usually tracked at three in the morning as everybody was going home, you know. So this time I made sure that I had people around when I tracked the vocals so that there would be an audience to perform for. I'd have members of my band hanging around endlessly for weeks just to have some other energy around when I was recording the vocals.”
In the States, Beck did come under some critical fire for his appropriation of black music; in particular the magazine `New Yorker` accused him of making fun of it. “That just seems like such a sad argument,” he responded “Anything that evolves, evolves out of different worlds colliding. I come from such a stew of cultures. But to me it's not a self-conscious thing and it's not appropriation, it's just natural to me. I think I'm just incredibly naive. I'm just doing what I feel inside. I mean, if what he's saying is right, then I'm just incredibly naive because I have no ill intentions. I'm just trying to express something. Someone like Wanda Coleman was a mentor to me when I was younger. She took me in when I was about 13 or 14. She took me under her wing and I spent a lot of time over at her house. So my use of hip-hop doesn't feel contrived to me. And if it were contrived, I think I would have been shut down a long time ago. I don't even really feel like I need to defend myself because it's just kind of ridiculous. I mean, if you just saw me perform, you would get it. It's not about appropriation, it's about soul.” He alos gave a pertinent example of things working the other way; “A very close friend of our family is an African-American gentleman who is an opera singer who performs with the Los Angeles Opera. Should he not be allowed to sing opera? Should he not be allowed to sing Verdi? One of the reasons I'm a musician is because music isn't divisive. It's a medium where you don't have to abide by divisions.”
In the next few years he seemed to follow this mantra himself. Anyone expecting his next LP to follow the cross genre root was in for a surprise. Released in 2002, `Sea Change` was melancholy and slow; no funk or soul, no clever lyrics, no fun or sly winks. This was serious. It’s been called one of “the most beautifully depressing albums” and to anyone happy with everything it may be hard work, making the likes of Morrissey sound positively chirpy. Born out of the heartache of Beck’s nine year long relationship with his girlfriend ending it contains soul-bearing, straightforward lyrics. Here he is talking directly in a way he never had before. “These days I barely get by / I don’t even try” [“The Golden Age”] and “It’s only lies that I’m living / It’s only tears that I’m crying / It’s only you that I’m losing / Guess I’m doing fine” [“Guess I’m Doing Fine”]. The lyrics are brutally honest and the music on the album is as equally straightforward with none of the bells and whistles you would expect from a Beck LP. The focus is on Beck’s voice and his acoustic strumming. However, upon careful listening, one is able to hear the subtle organ, bass, and drums in the background. The other instruments are so secondary that it seems as though only Beck is sitting in front of you with his acoustic guitar and he is pouring his heart out while lush, yet chilling, string arrangements courtesy of Beck’s father, David Campbell sometimes wash over the whole thing. The most ambitious track, `Paper Tiger`, has a strings vs. guitar duel while `Lost Cause` must be the most conventional song Beck has yet released. The direct lines, downbeats and Beck’s pure and honest voice gives listeners an earnest exploration of loss, confusion and yearning.
`Sea Change` was recorded with a full band including longtime guitarist Smokey Hormel, keyboard player Roger Manning and drummer Joey Waronker. “Sea Change” uses synths, glockenspiels, pianos, clavinets and an array of instruments to create a dreamy sound on each track. Nigel Godrich produced and the result is stunning at each turn. The string arrangement on “Paper Tiger` is captivating, `Sunday Sun` blends a bamboo saxophone, megamouth, tape recorder, beatbox drums and banjos with acoustic slide guitars and drums, creating an adventurous jungle of music. The wurlitzer, synth, slide guitar and upright bass on `Lonesome Tears` set the stage as Beck asks “How could this love/Ever turning/Never turn its eye on me” while the orchestration threatens to pour out of the speakers.
Taken as a whole, `Sea Change` is an absorbing record, steeped in melancholy yet never dull. It certainly won over the critics and was included in both `Rolling Stone’s and `Q` Magazine’s list of 50 Best Albums of 2002, ranked third on `Spin’s` list of 2002’s Albums of the Year and nominated for an Emmy for Best Alternative Music Album. Every chord is perfectly in place, every achingly sad lyric is quietly affecting and each strum of his acoustic guitar makes up a tight, musical masterpiece that was often referred to as Beck’s `Blood on the Tracks`.
Despite the personal feelings he pours out on the LP, interviews from its release found him unwilling to talk in depth about the actual details. What is known is that he split from his fiancée Leigh Limon in 2000 after discovering an email sent to her from another musician, believed to be a member of an LA band. “Its not really a pain, its more a longing” he did say in one interview, “The art allows me to transmute the pain into longing. Music should be carthartic.” When asked by another interviewer about the details Beck replied; “I’m not gonna talk about that. I wanted the songwriting to be direct.” He did say though about the overall theme of the record; “I don’t think it ‘s hopeless. If you hear it and think it’s hopeless, it’s coming from you. It’s not coming from a place of self pity; it’s just coming from direct emotion.”
Despite the nature of his new songs, Beck still went on tour, accompanying The Flaming Lips and is due to deliver a new record very soon, that will apparently be in the vein of `Odelay`. Most recently though he covered another great heartache song `Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime` on the soundtrack to the film `Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind` so maybe the blues haven’t totally gone away.
Whatever he does next, it will almost certainly be interesting, unexpected and very good indeed.