Word: becking
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...Beck" is a magic word. Beck, beck bananna-nanna pho pheck; Beck. The Pied Piper of post-grunge white boys everywhere, Beck Hansen leads us away from the dying city of Rock playing a tune of satire and pastiche. On Midnite Vultures, he eviscerates hip-hop, R&B and even Kraftwerk of their souls, piling the resultant carrion into a tower of intoxicating formal juxtaposition, and finally infuses these styles with his own pink-pants voice. Who would need anything more...
...Beck of 1994 would. Beck's first album, Mellow Gold, was seeped in the highly personal and visceral world of grunge: perhaps the linchpin line of "Loser" was "chokin' on the splinters." The album captured a miserable white-trash vibe within a sample- and distortion-laden sound that reeked of personal "Beercan" experience. It was a slightly grating album that was heavy on engineering but still naive--or at least straightforward. With Odelay and now Midnite Vultures, Beck has left these Mountain Dew-soaked roots for something more rarefied and cosmopolitan. Even his voice seems to have gotten higher. Grooviness...
Talking to folk/rock/hip-hop performer Beck is like walking behind the food cart on an airplane. You just have to get in line and wait till it gets where it's going. Beck answers in digressive monologues that so completely exhaust a question that, by the end, you almost forget what the question was. Ask him about the comparisons his music has drawn to Bob Dylan's, and he replies, "I never really identified with him as a person... His art and music, they're undeniable, but... I'm probably more influenced by Leonard Cohen and Ramblin' Jack Elliott and other...
...Beck, in interviews and in his music, is an explorer. On each CD he poses musical questions and sets out to answer them. Not definitively, but interestingly. His last CD, Mutations, was a meditation on blues and folk that grew in power with each listen. His new CD, Midnite Vultures (Geffen), is a series of witty experiments with rock, hip-hop and even soul. "Soul has a tradition of manliness to it, but it also has this emotional core that can be raw and open and vulnerable," says Beck. "In rock and alternative rock, if you're emotional...
Hybridization is all the rage, but Beck says that, to his ears, a lot of it seems "old hat." On Midnite, Beck's hats are all new--he mixes rap with rock, but he does so in a way that's unique. Midnite's songs explode in burbles of electronic noise and brassy horn-section blasts; the lyrics alternate between absurdist imagery and street jokiness. Beck isn't afraid to fail, and he sometimes does. But while other rock-hoppers adhere to a "keep it real" doctrine, Beck feels free to invent his own playful lyrical reality: "I wanna...