Word: becking
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Whites, who appear to be leftovers from McMurtry's Pulitzer-prizewinning novel, Lonesome Dove, are no less crude. The local Beck clan is ruled by an ancient maniac named White Sut, who keeps a sow bear on a chain and beats the animal daily with a fence post. One day the bear breaks the chain, pulls off White Sut's head, and leaves it in the middle of the main road. This is widely regarded as a good joke. So is a courtroom altercation (12 dead, including the judge) in which Zeke tries earnestly to kill another lowbrow Beck...
With Odelay, his second CD on a major label, Beck proves he has more than one good song in him--in fact, he has a whole musical outlook. Odelay deftly mixes folky acoustic-guitar riffs with atmospheric lyrics and hip-hop samples and beats. One song, the hard-driving Devils Haircut, attacks America's culture of physical vanity as suffocating and inescapable; another, the smooth Where It's At, pays tribute to rap's roots by praising its resourceful spirit...
...Beck says the low-tech nature of rap and folk is what initially attracted him. All rappers need, to paraphrase Where It's At, are two turntables and a microphone; all folk singers need is a guitar. "I always wanted to play music as a kid, play guitar, but it just seemed impossible to me," says Beck. "You turn on the radio, and they'd be playing, what, Huey Lewis or some superproduced '80s music. That music--it was so professional--there didn't seem any way to be able to do that...
Mixing rap and folk, however, seemed doable, even natural. After all, Beck's family was artistically eclectic: his father was a bluegrass musician; his mother, who raised him in Los Angeles, played the occasional gig as a singer; and his maternal grandfather, Al Hansen, was a pioneering multimedia artist and colleague of Andy Warhol's. As a teenager, Beck traveled to New York City and got caught up in the music scene; later he hooked up with hip-hop producer Karl Stephenson and cut Loser. The song became an unexpected hit, he was signed by Geffen records...
...funky rock band 311, the pop-ska band No Doubt, the ska-punk band Sublime. "Some of the stuff that's big for us lately seems less rock and has more of a beat influence," says Lisa Worden, music director for kroq, an alternative-rock station in Los Angeles. "Beck stays away from the typical rock sound." Odelay isn't a flawless album--Beck isn't as soulful as some of the hip-hop stars he emulates; No Diggity, the simmering single from Dr. Dre and Blackstreet, has more soul than anything on Odelay. But perhaps his hip-hop awkwardness...