That old, weird Beck
In defense of unpredictable, unpolished art
Back in the summer I turned 19, I had a job working on a ski hill in the Berkshires, where the Jiminy Peak resort turned one of its hillsides into an alpine slide for the few warm months of the year. My job: Stand at the top of the hill and make sure visitors didn’t decapitate themselves coming off the ski lift.
Maybe I’m making it sound too exciting. It wasn’t.
Most of the time was spent sitting there waiting for people to show up, and during many of those evenings, I shared hilltop duties with another young guy whose taste in music didn’t much overlap with mine. His idea of a good time was surviving a Pantera concert.
“F-ing hostile, dude!”
Indeed.
But that also was the summer of Beck’s “Odelay.”
This was a cassette tape I practically burned out playing over and over and over again in the car stereo on my way to work.
Rarely has an album grabbed hold of my daily life the way that one did. And wouldn’t you know it, my hilltop companion was a Beck fan, too. Except one caveat: Although he could quote this or that line from “Mellow Gold,” he didn’t much care for the new songs that I found so exciting and brilliant.
And he wasn’t just a fan of Beck’s breakthrough hit, “Loser.” This guy was into the deep cuts, too — “Soulsucking Jerk,” “Truckdriving Neighbors Downstairs” and of course, “Motherfuker.”
No argument from me about the joys of “Mellow Gold.” I, for one, learned to play “Nightmare Hippy Girl” on the guitar because, frankly, it was easy to learn and irresistibly fun to sing along to. (“Tofu the size of Texas, dude!” my hilltop companion would shout when the mood struck him.) But how could you not think “Odelay” was the better album?
To paraphrase his argument — and mind you, this was 20 years ago, and my memory these day is a city full of morgues — there was a rawness and a weirdness about “Mellow Gold” that lessened a bit on “Odelay.”
That latter album was produced by the Dust Brothers, and I still wrestle with the feeling that it was as much a Dust Brothers album as a Beck album.
But I still think it’s a perfect album. And if there is any problem with it, could the problem is its perfection?
Skip ahead to 2014, and Beck ends his recording drought by releasing “Morning Phase,” six years after his previous studio album, “Modern Guilt.”
It’s been 10 years since I took an active notice in what Beck was doing, that being his throwback album “Guero” (surprise, also produced by the Dust Brothers).
The songs from “Morning Phase” that I heard on the radio were pleasant but hardly enough to make me want to go out and give it a thorough listen. I mean, does the world really need another Nick Drake album?
But I took note that the album was receiving good press, including a glowing review from The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones, who basically calls it perfect.
“A triumph, possibly because he’s never made a record so focussed. … The album speaks powerfully and directly, without gimmicks or puns, and it maintains a near-total gentleness. After listening to ‘Morning Phase’ almost fifty times, I can’t find a single thing wrong with it.”
I don’t always agree with Frere-Jones’ reviews, but I will say that he changed how I thought about the White Stripes when he made the argument that Jack White was undercutting his talent by taking a lo-fi, ramshackle approach to recording and keeping an awful drummer as his sidekick (sorry, Meg).
Herein lies a paradox that I’d argue also applies to Beck: The White Stripes would have sounded better with better production and a better drummer but also wouldn’t have been The White Stripes. So how much can we ask of the artist that he polish off his act? Beck has had one of the most diverse careers of any modern rock musician, but should we exalt more mature, deliberate work like “Morning Phase” over something as unpredictable as “Mellow Gold” or even “Stereopathetic Soulmanure”?
I, for one, would like to go on record as being a big “Stereopathetic Soulmanure” fan.
The simple joy of that album struck me on a solo road trip I took about a year ago to visit my grandfather back in the Berkshires. I had a rental car, and on the way I decided to play through all my iPhone’s Beck albums, some of which I hadn’t listen to in years.
It was jarring listening to this music out of the context of my youth in the ’90s. Certain moments that I had then thought musically exhilarating now sounded stale.
“Sea Change” in particular had lost its luster.
That album had been heralded as a new direction for Beck, his breakup album, filled with heartfelt songs of loss, filled with something Beck had mostly avoided before: sincerity. But I couldn’t help thinking now that its reputation far exceeded the quality of the work itself.
With the exception of the pleasantly languid “Guess I’m Doing Fine” and “End of the Day,” I ended up skipping past most of the songs on that album when they came up on shuffle.
Funny, I was expecting instead to skip most of the stuff on “Stereopathic Soulmanure,” but those were the tracks that I started eagerly anticipating with every new song. I’ve never thought of it as much of an album, just a string of avant-garde performance pieces connected by bizarre, primitive recordings that sounded like the ones I made in my living room at 5 years old.
But what a thrill!
To follow the muted, folky “Rowboat” (which Johnny Cash later covered) with the runaway freight train of “Thunder Peel” is to dare listeners to get on board for the ride.
“It’s a cold ass fashion when she stole my passion. It’s an everlasting, it’s a ghettoblasting. On the wonderwheel I let my thunder peel, I made an effort to get just what I deserve”
That decoding of the lyrics comes from this lyrics site, but most lyrics on the album are open to deciphering, as well as interpretation.
Even throwaway ditties like “Cut 1/2 Blues” and “No Money No Honey” have a rollicking quality that simply makes for fun listening. And they could never exist on any other album.
You could make the case that those early albums — “Stereopathetic Soulmanure,” “Mellow Gold” and “One Foot in the Grave” were all released in 1994 — make up a unified artistic statement, not just one of experimentation but also one of myth creation.
Beck is the guy who once took off his boot and threw it on the ground in response to a question from Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore during an interview on MTV.
He’s the guy who’s first words on the world stage were, “In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey.”
(He was also known to take that first hit song and change its chorus during live shows to “I’m a softie, baby, why don’t you squeeze me.”)
And he’s the guy who quipped in a B-side to “Loser” that “MTV makes me wanna smoke crack.”
At heart, he’s was and still is a folkie from Los Angeles, raised by musicians and ever restless as a full grown man playing with the form (and not afraid to cry). His early music has been described as “slacker folk” by publications from Tiny Mix Tapes to Rolling Stone, but in hindsight, it’s more like Dadaist folk.
Beck was the Salvador Dali of alternative rock.
My personal favorite example comes from “Hotwax” on the “Odelay” album.
“Silver foxes looking for romance in the chainsmoke Kansas flashdance asspants.”
While that image percolates in your brain, let’s consider “Morning Phase.”
I finally got around to listening to it recently, and after a few times through, I agree with Frere-Jones that it’s a perfectly focused album. Imagine if “Morning Phase” had come out in 2002 instead of “Sea Change,” an album that was similar in tone but less expertly assembled.
The latest album rewards repeat listens. Let yourself delve into its textures, and the melodies start to seep into your brain. I even found myself singing along to songs that I still found a bit unfamiliar. Can’t say a bad thing about it.
And yet…
You can’t deny that this is a different Beck. It’s not the old, weird Beck. And no, I wouldn’t expect Beck to still be that old, weird version of himself, but his audience must grapple with this challenge: To appreciate the old Beck and to appreciate this polished version takes two different mindsets. It’s hard to even think of “Morning Phase” in the same light as “Odelay.” It is almost as if they were created by two people.
A side note:
If there is a bridge between the two Becks, it is “Mutations,” which came four years before “Sea Change” and retained much of his earlier work’s surrealism while flexing his songwriting muscle.
“Nobody’s Fault but My Own” foreshadows his work on “Morning Phase,” while the lyrics of a song like “Lazy Flies” could have fit on any of the earlier albums.
“A hideous game vanishes in thin air
The vanity of slaves, who wants to be there
To sweep the debris, to harness dead-horses
To ride in the sun, a life of confessions
Written in the dust”
Beck bridged the two sides of his career again in 2009 when he reissued “One Foot in the Grave” with 16 additional tracks.
I stumbled onto the reissue recently while searching for music to listen to on Amazon Prime. “Grave” is a lesser album but a fan favorite and, by design, more focused than “Soulmanure.” It’s also more consciously folky but no less adventurous, as Beck and his buddies play around with the form in a narrower slice of the musical spectrum (with a couple exceptions).
But what struck me most listening to the original album and the added songs was how imperfect the tracks are. The guitar tuning is a bit off. The lyrics sometimes sound off-the-cuff. The singing is choppy at times. The production is a bit muddy, with vocal parts overlapping in awkward ways. It sounds like it was done in one take and then spliced together on a 1980s IBM.
And it makes for marvelous listening.
The reissue’s extras sound more like “Soulmanure” outtakes, while “Woe on Me” is more straightforward folk of the “Mutations” vein. And “Teenage Wastebasket” could be a prequel or sequel to “Nightmare Hippy Girl.”
“She is a teenage wastebasket
Paddling up the river in a casket
Trying to experience everything at least once
Life is a commercial for being fucked up”
Even a silly song like “Mattress” feels like a surrealist revelation: “Your love, your kindness, your body on the mattress.”
My point isn’t that it’s great music. But it’s exciting music. Rock music should never be safe. It should make you feel a bit uncomfortable. And it probably should never be fully polished. It should be a bit imperfect, like everything could fall apart at any moment but somehow it all holds together.
That’s something “Morning Phase” lacks. No surprise, given Beck is 45 now and probably would sound foolish trying to produced another “Mellow Gold,” which was recorded when he was about half that age.
I’ll conclude with a quick plug for one of my favorite Beck albums, “Midnight Vultures.”
It has been called Beck’s Sex Album, and that appraisal isn’t far off the mark. But I like it both for being unrepentantly zany and for holding together surprisingly well as an album. Gone is the the lo-fi sensibility of “One Foot in the Grave.” In its place Beck isn’t trying to recreate the patchwork genius of “Odelay,” nor is he doubling down on the more mature direction of “Mutations.”
He’s putting on a new costume, one that fits him imperfectly. It’s a performance that still manages to mesmerize.
