Word: becking
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Whence cometh BECK? An interesting insight to the singer's idiosyncrasies--the inadvisable suits, the inexplicable videos, the impenetrable lyrics--is hanging on the walls of New York City's Thread Waxing Space gallery in an exhibition called "Playing with Matches." Beck's grandfather Al Hansen was a member of Fluxus, a loosely knit group of conceptual artists who engaged in happenings, mostly in the '60s, but who still work today. At the launch of the exhibition in Santa Monica, Calif., in May and in New York City last week, Beck's brother Channing Hansen performed Elegy for the Fluxus...
That's one reason people listen to hip-hop: they want that fire, that passion. And right now, to paraphrase hip-hop folkie Beck, rap is where it's at. In 1995 rap albums accounted for just 6.7% of all music sales; through the first half of this year that figure has risen to 10.3%. By contrast, over the same period, rock's market share fell, from 33.5% to 28%. In their new book It's Not Only Rock & Roll: Popular Music in the Lives of Adolescents (Hampton Press), Peter G. Christenson and Donald F. Roberts declare that today...
...part of American culture. "The hip-hop industry, in general, is stronger than it's ever been, in terms of units sold, in terms of the number of releases," says Turner. "Rap has proved itself to be the rock 'n' roll of the '90s." And today's hot rockers--Beck, Korn, even, to a certain extent, Alanis Morissette--often draw on hip-hop rhythms and attitude...
...boasts seemed to send up each genre's excesses. But the Beasties' new CD comes across not as a send-up but as a limp imitation of more interesting performers. The album's buzzing, beeping, video-game-like sound is an exhausted ripoff of hip-hop folk star Beck. A few songs work, like the sci-fi rap number Intergalactic. But for the most part, listening to this album is a tedious, dispiriting task not unlike sorting a backlog of junk e-mail...
Like all families, 20th century popular music is a product of its own past, complete with eccentric uncles, country cousins and prodigal sons and daughters--different from one another, but still kin. Somewhere in the noisy postmodern collages of Beck one can find echoes of Irving Berlin. Though Chuck Berry may roll over when he hears it, devil-rocker Marilyn Manson counts among his musical offspring. Whether he likes it or not, Puff Daddy's pop hip-hop is a direct descendant of Hammer's Las Vegas-style rap. The Spice Girls may not be the apex of musical evolution...