Beck Hansen

Beck Hansen quickly became the poster child of Generation X, a Bob Dylan for the hip-hop generation who repeats the master’s trick: mumbling lyrics against the establishment while storytelling in youth slang and using metaphors cryptic enough that anyone can read into them whatever they wish. Beck was born in Los Angeles but honed his skills in New York’s “anti-folk” scene, playing blues and folk in Greenwich Village venues. In 1991, he returned to his native Los Angeles armed with beatbox and tape loops, performing his ballads accompanied by more modern sounds. The clever MTV Makes Me Want To Smoke Crack, which borrowed the jargon of fourteen-year-olds, created a prototype that would inspire all that followed, but it was Loser, fusing folk and industrial cultures, that became a college novelty favorite. Steve Threw Up followed in the same vein. Beck’s prehistoric works also include the cassette Golden Feelings on Sonic Enemy (Sept. 1993), the 10" A Western Harvest Field By Moonlight (Fingerpaint, Jan. 1994), and the cassette Stereopathetic Soulmanure (Flipside, 1994), which compile experiments from the previous five years. Riding the success of Loser, the album Mellow Gold (DGC, Mar. 1994) broke the charts, instantly making Beck a hero among the young. What is striking about Truckdrivin' Neighbors Downstairs and Beercan is Beck’s constant metamorphosis, heir to the acid-folk of the Holy Modal Rounders updated for the rap era. Knowledgeable of the classics (in Fuckin With My Head one can hear The Who’s Magic Bus played as if by ZZ Top) and capable of acrobatic excursions (the catatonic raga-blues of Blackhole), Beck is a master at “deconstructing” rock music, letting it float in a limbo between folk (Pay No Mind and Nightmare Hippy Girl, inspired by early Dylan) and industrial music (Sweet Sunshine and Motherfucker, two snarls ā la Nine Inch Nails), spicing it with indecipherable lyrics written in teenage slang. His are not songs; they are pieces of music in decomposition. One Foot In The Grave (K Records, 1995 – Geffen, 2009), recorded before Beck became a star, is a minor-key work with a few friends, meant as both a tribute to his roots and an early act of catharsis. The songs are mostly improvised in the studio, strummed on guitar with the eccentric, solitary flair: the abulic tone of I Get Lonesome recalls Syd Barrett, while Asshole is a tale worthy of Jonathan Richman (though never so anemic), Painted Eyelids channels Neil Young’s Harvest, and Hollow Log evokes pastoral Pink Floyd. Eclecticism, which had partly fueled his success, reemerges only in the hypnotic harmonies of Forcefield and Beefheart-style distorted blues of Ziplock Bag.

Beck Hansen arrived at his third outing, Odelay (DGC, 1996), with a more varied and mature style, also thanks to the production by the Dust Brothers. This is indeed the album where his talent truly shines. His previous albums were monochromatic, likely influenced by the need to assert a personality in an oversaturated singer-songwriter market. This time, Beck could afford to explore every track, to try every string of his creative instrument. The rap minstrel of Loser reprises his disenchanted sermon in Hotwax (complete with blues harmonica), and with more grit, in Novacane. Another minstrel, the folk one, relaxes in the ballad Jack-Ass, the Sheryl Crow-style shuffle of Lord Only Knows, and in the long concluding acoustic folk dream of Ramshackle.
The production is clear and brilliant. The songs, under Beck’s melodies, are elegant collages of “found” sounds. New Pollution parodies the pop tunes of the hippie era but pierces them with a jazz trumpet solo, followed by a soul organ solo. Where It's All meticulously deconstructs and reconstructs funk and hip-hop stereotypes. Beck also shows a restorer’s touch, as seen in the 1960s garage-rock arrangement of Devil's Haircut (syncopated loud beat ā la drum'n'bass, ecstatic hippie-style refrain, loud dissonant guitar riff ā la Breeders), the George Harrison-style raga profusions of Derelict, and the country-rock parody of Sissyneck. The original genres are naturally stripped of their identity and filled with the harmonic wanderings that are Beck’s trademark. This is the album with which Beck Hansen solidifies his charisma as the most representative singer-songwriter of the 1990s, when the scrappy style of rap meets the lofty style of the folk ballad.

Needing to release an album for contractual reasons, Beck decided to assemble a collection of songs that had been sitting in the drawer for years. Mutations (DGC, 1998) is therefore a B-side Beck, though masterfully arranged by producer Nigel Godrich (almost orchestral, reminiscent of Van Dyke Parks). Cold Brains revisits the Neil Young of Harvest, this time surrounded by a carousel of psychedelic effects. Beck sings the nursery rhyme Lazy Flies in the dreamy tone of Syd Barrett, amid a riot of piano, viola, cello, sitar, tambourines, and so on. The delicate folk melodies of We Live Again and Dead Melodies resurrect the era of the Kinks and Donovan.
The eclectic style and heterodox approach are reminiscent of the best Julian Cope and Smog, but what saves the album are the arrangements. When those are lacking, only minor episodes remain, like the country-rock of Canceled Check and Bottle Of Blues, or the cocktail-lounge rhythm and blues of O Maria and Sing It Again, two pale imitations of Tom Waits. The idea of the single Tropicalia is somewhat underwhelming.

(Clicka qua per la versione Italiana)

Without the Dust Brothers, Beck Hansen is a far less creative arranger. Midnite Vultures (Geffen, 1999) is an album of old-fashioned soul music, with no samples and some orchestra. Odelay (DGC, 1996) was the quintessential 1990s, whereas Vultures is 1970s revivalism. The core of the album is soul music, and soul music that is sung with a sensual, decadent falsetto in Debra and Peaches And Cream (although both sound like parodies, the former massively enveloped in guitar, keyboards, strings and choirs, the latter played like Captain Beefheart's Magic Band would). The sense of revival gets even stronger with the upbeat rave-up of Sexx Laws, horns-heavy and misled into a country & western coda. But the album is, above all, a meeting point, a very busy intersection where one can spot the shadows and the echoes of Kraftwerk (Get Real Paid), Sly Stone and B52's (Mixed Bizness), lazy country harmonies (Beautiful Way), Merseybeat (Pressure Zone), etc. Funk and rap are only the cherries on the pie. The pie is made of a different substance, one that does not belong to this planet.
The new Beck is a galactic comet that picks up and spreads cosmic debris. The demented funk singalong Nicotine & Gravy and the spastic acid-rock ballad Broken Train, overflow with sonic effets. The outcome of Beck's metamorphosis is still amorphous, but occasionally one can get a glimpse of the future to come: Milk & Honey coins a genre of futuristic hard-rock ballad, shaken by brutal riffs and syncopated drumming, pierced by electronic noises and zombie-fied by an android mechanized beat.
Beck is an illusion, the illusion of a modern-day Todd Rundgren penning post-modern ditties with the They Might Be Giants as a backing band. The truth is that he mostly sounds like the Ween playing material written by professional songwriters of the old Brill Building, or a mediocre bourgeois songwriter with intellectual pretenses (think John Lennon), or a black crooner for the discos (think a cross between Barry White, Marvin Gaye and Prince), or an easy-listening ripoff of black music (think Steely Dan), or the Rolling Stones' Exile On Main Street played at half the speed. One could claim all of these and more. Well, this is Beck's forte: his art of appropriation is a veritable "remixing" of popular styles. And so it is possible that the least original of his albums is also his most personal.

As well executed as it is, this is nonetheless a transitional work, and an ego-boosting one.

Sea Change (DGC, 2002) marks a new beginning for Beck, this time in the vein of West Coast's country-rock of the 1970s. After inventing folk music for the age of hip-hop, Beck had lost a sense of his mission in life. Many of these songs, like the ones on the previous two albums, are fairly predictable (End of the Day, Already Dead, Lost Cause, Guess I'm Doing Fine) but elsewhere Beck uses elegant arrangements (especially the strings arrangements by his father, David Campbell) to enhance the emotion hidden in the lyrics and to downplay the simplicity of his delivery (Lost Cause, Sunday Sun, The Golden Age, Paper Tiger, Lonesome Tears). A newly-found passion for "atmosphere" (Little One, Round the Bend, Side of the Road) completes the two-pronged attack to his own traditional style. In the end, this sounds like a return to Mutations but drained of the casual enthusiasm of youth.

After the mediocre Sea Change, Beck decided to return to his roots with Guero (Geffen, 2005), except that his fusion of folk and hip-hop music is now outdated (and rappers are doing it better than folksingers). A lot of this album is pure dejavu (Earthquake Weather, Emergency Exit, etc etc). And when it is not a mere photocopy of his former selves, it hardly works: his multiple takes on funk music in Que Onda Guero, Hell Yeah and Girl sound amateurish and indecisive, not original. The vibrant E-Pro is a welcome change of pace, as is the tribal Black Tambourine, but better songs can be found on dozens of albums that came out in the same month.

Guerolito (Interscope, 2006) is an album of remixes.

While most of The Information (2007), three years in the making, is disposable, the good moments are indeed good: Think I'm in Love and Cell Phone's Dead are pop tunes that twist and morph, and that quote all sorts of musical styles (including his own hip-hop past) while pinned to a depressing sociopolitical concept. The ten-minute three-movement suite The Horrible Fanfare/Landslide/Exoskeleton is, instead, relatively uneventful: blending and mixing random ideas does not equate with being eclectic and creative, although its self-referential nature might qualify it as a manual on how to write a Beck song. The album does not sound like the work of an inspired artist but like the routine of an experienced practitioner who has a lot of intelligent comments to make but, perhaps, has never truly been a musician. The producer, Nigel Godrich, is probably responsible for the most exciting turns of the album.

Modern Guilt (DGC, 2008) employed producer Danger Mouse to veer towards a poppier sound (Orphans, Modern Guilt). A couple of songs (Chemtrails and Replica) displayed creative combinations of sounds, but mostly this sounded like a failed artist looking for a way to survive in an ever more competitive record industry.

After a long hiatus due to a spinal injury, Morning Phase (Capitol, 2014) mainly showed Beck's skills as a producer. The songs are worth very little: decent folk-rock revival harking back to the "West-Coast sound" (i.e., relaxed and country-ish sound) of the California singer-songwriters and bands of the 1970s, such as Eagles and latter-day Byrds. In fact, one is reminded of David Crosby (in the mildly psychedelic Morning) and Roger McGuinn (in the catchier and faster Heart Is A Drum). He has become a fan of stereotypical classics such as Simon & Garfunkel's Sound of Silence (Turn Away) and Neil Young's Harvest (Country Down). The elegant chamber arrangements do stand out, but the songs are terribly trivial, substandard, obsolete, dejavu. The one moment that stands out (that doesn't fall into ridiculous irrelevance) is the way the music manages to be simultaneously catatonic and symphonic in Wave.

Colors (Capitol, 2017), a collaboration with producer Greg Kurstin, was his most mainstream album yet, the album of a copycat trying to climb the sales charts with imitations of other people's hits. The album in fact collects the previous singles Dreams (2015), produced by Greg Kurstin (producer of pop stars such as Adele, Lily Allen, Sia, Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry), Wow (2016) and Up All Night (2016), all of them infamous cases of shameless pop. The album continues in that vein (a general dejavu of George Michael-era dance-pop) with the slightly better Colors, energized by clapping and Peruvian ocarina. His 1980s fixation reaches a comic climax with No Distraction, that mimics the Police's Message in a Bottle. The songs to save are the two that don't fit in the pattern of the others. The charging power-pop of I’m So Free is reminiscent of the Smithereens with big guitars stealing the show before it slides into girl-group sounds of the Sixties. Dear Life is a mellow ditty that George Harrison could have sung on the Beatles' White Album.