Beck: Classic Or Dud

Ludo

Question A: Place Lenny Kravitz and Beck in order of popularity.

A: Lenny Kravitz, Beck

Question B: Why, then, is Lenny Kravitz more popular than Beck, considering that both are derivative of a particular time of music that can be placed, and both have a style that can be traced to two artists/genres (Kravitz::Beatles and Hendrix as Beck::James Brown and Stax)

A: Kravitz manages to attain broad cross-generational popularity, as those who like his influences tend to like him as well. On the other hand, those who like Beck's influences tend not to like Beck. Critical appreciation of Brown and Stax is driven more by the notion of "authenticity". Kravitz' sound was driven out by Punk, whereas James Brown and Stax never went away. The death of rock is always hailed, the death of soul never. Additionally, imagine a girl requesting a Beck video on TRL. What does she say? "I want Beck's devil's haircut, cuz' its so weird and funny." Beck traffics (for the general, not critical audience) in weirdness, and his ability to merge weirdness (not surrealism, just weirdness) with 60s Stax grooves. Kravitz, when he is requested, is "hot" and "rocks! Whooo!".

Conclusion: Popularity of Kravitz comes from the need of the older generation to have something to cling to in the new. Popularity of Beck is repackaging of what has been done before.

A (part 2): Kravitz is infinitely more stylish than Beck, who has become a slave to the form -- wears suits, dances with feet and not rest of body. Kravitz carries self as rock-star, with guitar slung low, mirrored sunglasses, etc. Beck, despite all pretensions is still too self-conscious.

Question C: Consider Beck by himself, and why is he more popular than Jon Spencer, whose style can be traced to two artist/genres (rockabilly/roots rock)?

A: Spencer is less eclectic than Beck, and more self conscious. Go figure.

Anyhow, Beck is neither classic nor dud. Can't you think of more vile, love'em hate'em artists these days, mon cheri? Beck just exists. Some of his songs are good. "Loser" is good, though sometimes not necessarily in the sense that, say, Dusty Springfield is good if you get my drift. "Jackass" is good. "Devil's Haircut" is adequate. Some of his songs are bad. He's really sort of in the middle, isn't he?

He's not an offensive personality, at least.

peace, Ludo

I figure I'd enjoy his stage show, a nice dose of showmanship methinks and he's got a cool looking bassist and Roger Manning on keys.

Some good tracks but on the whole not classic and so not comparable to Prince.

Well both are midgets, so you can compare them. ;)

I think he's kinda cute'n'cuddly.

I don't think Beck is very good at interviews. When ever I see him on the tv being interviewed, it looks like the most awkward experience for interviewer & him. They aren't much fun to read, either.

Beck & Bjork seem to get the most awful descriptions in their writing. "Man(or woman)-child-fetus-space-pixie-cowboy-enigma" This sort of characterization has actually sort of petered off circa Mutations, for Beck. Bjork's still sadly stuck.

He used to be my favorite artist, now I'm not so sure. He hasn't put out an album in far too long. I want to know what he'll try to do. I get the feeling he's just given up. In the meantime, news about him makes me feel weird. Dating Wynona Ryder and becoming a Scientologist.

That said, I didn't listen to his stuff for about a year. I picked it up again about a week ago. The only album that left me with the feeling it used to was "Odelay".

As for Adam and Ben Williams, they need to get their heads on straight. How can judge Beck's character? You haven't even met him. Do you read Q magazine and say, "Hmm, his personality looks one diemensional. And as for Ben Williams, Beck is not even a Scientologist. If your going to make a lame judgement at least get your story straight.

It pisses me off to no end when people associate Beck with irony. Why is it so hard to believe that a young white male might have genuine fondness for James Brown/Henry Mancini/Hank Williams? Why do ppl assume that Beck's bizarre lyrics and, err, interesting wardrobe represent a will to mock the genres he's using, and not just a will to bring his own personality to the fore in the music he loves? Why do ppl assume that just because *they're* cynical and jaded, everyone else must be, too?

I saw Beck on the Midnite Vultures tour. It was wild. It was funky. It was fun. It had every characteristic that a good Funk concert should have, and of course it's miles away from James Brown, but so what? Beck isn't JB, but he can emphasise with Brown's music and bring his own party to it. And yeah, he has a sense of humor, but so do Outkast. So did Sly Stone and Afrika Bambaata and Prince. Were they being "ironic", too?

So, yeah, I find Beck to be a classic. In a biography of his that I've read he says something to the effect that he considers his music to be a big house, and every genre is a different room that's invariably warm and inviting- that's what I love about the man, his enormous capability to embrace every genre you could care to think of and adapt it to his own personality.

Who has Beck influenced?

Most Quirk Pop in general reminds me of Beck- someone's already mentioned The Beta Band. I'd add Cake and The Eels to that list.

I don't think Beck is very good at interviews. When ever I see him on the tv being interviewed, it looks like the most awkward experience for interviewer & him

Taking sides: Beck being interviewed by Thurston Moore vs. Beck being interviewed by Space Ghost. I love both to bits.

And as for Ben Williams, Beck is not even a Scientologist. If your going to make a lame judgement at least get your story straight.

Actually, Beck has expressed an interest in scientology lately. But Prince's a Jehova's Witness, so whadyagonnado...

Generally speaking I'd call that evidence for the prosecution.

so there...

Nardwaur: Beck why should people care about you and not your haircut?
Beck: Fuck off (hangs up)
One of the reasons I heart E more then Beck.

Funny you should say that...

Well, you lost me right there.

Actually, Beck has expressed an interest in scientology lately.<<

Actually, no he hasn't. And he's been more honest about his relationship to Scientology than any one of the 95,000 asinine gossip threads I've read about this.

Wasn't that bit on Odelay?

I don't believe a thing that comes out of his mouth. His music seems to originate in his pinky finger and his big toe. Then he has the nerve to make an ernest, dark album. And we're supposed to dig it?

Cotton candy with hipster flavoring. Irony to the point of nothingness.

Sorry, wrong. That is Beck. You can say the same thing about the first three Beatles albums, although the comparison ends there.

Who has Beck influenced?

Well, me for one. And Radiohead and everyone who has heard his stuff and realizes that there are no boundries to music and that adding a good melody to the sound of breaking glass is a good thing.

Odelay still completely rocks me, I’m still blown away by the great sampling, great keys and breaks and just weird wtf stuff like that random metal tapping solo during “lord only knows”.

see Odelay really doesnt grab me at all - all the wackiness sounds a bit forced. kinda suspect I was only pretending to like it at the time. Mellow Gold is still all time though: weird, funny AND haunting.

I love when "Hi-5" does the throwback to "Novocane" and cuts out. "Turn that shit off, man! What's wrong with you? Get the other record." The unreleased tracks on the Deluxe version are great! "Inferno" is so fun.

Also I love "Mellow Gold" as an album title. I always thought it was a joke-spooner of Jello Mold.

Yeah wiki repeats what I understood the title to be in reference to:

The final title used, Mellow Gold, was named after a potent strain of California marijuana.

I’m with baader on Odelay, sounds forced and calculated. Maybe it is the dust bros collab

what's that one thread? songs that sound like Oh Sweet Nothin

I want 10,000 albums that sound like One Foot in the Grave, the best thing Beck ever did

A lot of OTM here

Yeah I agree with a lot of these takes. Straightforward, AA-friendly mellow rock and folk is just not what I want from Beck even though he does it solidly well. Also One Foot In the Grave had a pretty significant impact on my subsequent musical taste, as it helped get me into both The Carter Family and Skip James

Mellow Gold has some of my favorite lyrics ever on it.

Acid casualty with a repossessed car
Vietnam vet playin air guitar

I decided beck started out as an excellent lyricist who just got worse over time. I sing stuff off one foot in the grave all the time. It’s all so simple and honest.

Softly you would sing
Swinging in your swing
It wasn’t night it wasn’t day

i'm so curious about sea change just bc of the cover and title! i've def heard divisive opinions

Don’t bother unless you need a soporific

The covers band I sat in with recently did Nobody's Fault But My Own, and the song kind of grew on me.

Still haven't really been grabbed by Mutations as a whole though

"oh maria" is the keeper from Mutations for me. What a great organ sound, nice drumming too.

yeah, Mutations has a lot of good chord progressions and arrangements. also, his lyrics are still cryptic enough to get by on

To this day I don't know what separates Mutations (I like) and Sea Change (I don't) -- humor?

that, and an actual pulse

Quite enjoyed Sea Change at the time, as it came out right at a time when I was feeling sorry for myself after a breakup. A lot of it is pastiche (Gainsbourg, Dylan, Nick Drake, Hank Williams) but still enjoyable. Completely tuned out after that though

Sea Change is really good

Oh Alfred I would 100% say mutations is better due to a lack of boring lyrics

Mutations doesn't have its heart on its sleeve, there's still an element of surrealism and distance kept over from his earlier songs.

that's it

Sea Change rules, insanity in this thread

Though the real slept on Beck record (and his last "great" album to date imo) is The Information which nobody ever talks about...

counterpoint: as a Beck fan since the original 1994 trifecta, Sea Change is terrible.

now Guero, that's a better post-2000 record that hasn't been mentioned yet in this revive iirc! also his super cool online experiments, those whole-album covers, etc

"Not unlike Prince, he seems to have a formidable & tantalizing vault – he’s always referencing unreleased genre exercises, collabs, scrapped albums, finished albums that were shelved, etc. "

I know a guy who did some engineering for Beck in the late 00's. He described every session as basically a different genre exercise. Mostly in the styles you would expect from Beck. He would record several ideas in whatever genre they set up for and then the next session they would set up for a completely different style of music. I don't think any of the stuff he worked on was released.

tbrr Sea Change is up there in my top ten most-disappointed-by-an-artist-I-was-into moments, surely we have a thread for that somewhere?

(xp kinda)

those early Sea Change-era shows though were amazing. i used to have several bootlegs from those shows - think it was him solo with smokey hormel occasionally.

I think I last saw him in 2003? in Portland OR, full band, the show was moved from the big venue to a smaller one b/c of low ticket sales

they opened with "Novocane" and I was ecstatic, there was a downer acoustic Sea Change set but the rest was great

I know a guy who did some engineering for Beck in the late 00's. He described every session as basically a different genre exercise. Mostly in the styles you would expect from Beck. He would record several ideas in whatever genre they set up for and then the next session they would set up for a completely different style of music. I don't think any of the stuff he worked on was released.

Hopefully they survive. Beck thought a lot of his unreleased stuff was likely destroyed in the Universal fire. His management walked that back with no real details.

those early Sea Change-era shows though were amazing. i used to have several bootlegs from those shows - think it was him solo with smokey hormel occasionally.

YES. That was my first time seeing him and it was amazing. The covers alone were stunning: it varied per show but they included "Sunday Morning" (VU), "Love" (John Lennon), some Hank Williams (senior of course), I think some Big Star ("Kanga Roo" and maybe Chris Bell's "I Am the Cosmos" which he still does), maybe even Nick Drake, definitely some folk covers...all of it weaved seamlessly with the Sea Change material which IIRC didn't have an official title yet.

that sounds amazing. anyone else heard his Philip Glass tribute/cover thing?

xp i just randomly checked one show from that tour and he performed the following covers one night:

prince - raspberry beret
digital underground - the humpty dance
rolling stones - no expectations
r. kelly - bump 'n grind
nelly - hot in here
velvet underground - sunday morning

37 song set to boot!

damn "No Expectations"!! I gotta look for some of those ROIOs

I <3 Smokey, got to talk to him at the 1996 Odelay show here in town that I have documented elsewhere on ILX, insane sellout blowout madness. My girlfriend lost her shoe, and it was the same weekend as the record show where Mr. Beck almost bought a copy of the Pink Panther OST from me, but it wasn't minty enough for him.

It's getting hot in here
Aphids ate up all my clothes

I listened to Guero for the first time a couple of months ago and it's actually a pretty fun and efficient record. There was a sweet BoC remix of Broken Drum at the time too.
The last great stuff he did was the run of singles he released on in the early 2010s - sad spacey synthetic jams. Internet tells me it was supposed to be part of an album called Roccoco, which he ultimately scrapped.

diff btw Mutations and Sea Change is too much Nigel Godrich all over the latter

Having immersed myself in early Beck as a teen-obsessive, owning Loser and Beercan CD singles, the effect of listening to Mutations at the moment of its release was a unique exercise. I recall feeling a strain to enjoy what I was listening to, a series of mid-tempo great-sounding songs that triggered no delight, no mystification. "Tropicalia" was the outlier on the album-- its tempo exceeded 100 bpm unlike the rest-- but even then it felt too pastel pastiche, no difficulty, no risk. It was only the bonus track ("Diamond Bollocks") that hinted at a possible exciting future, and I found myself looking forward to Midnite Vultures for that reason alone

Then Midnite Vultures came out and I was non-plussed. It's interesting to hear tracks from it pop up in playlists in present day, because it always sounds fun and great to my ears now, but at the time, idk. I'd heard Miss Kitten "Frank Sinatra" that year and was on the cusp of full-tilt electroclash enthusiasm. Midnite Vultures was so tidy-sounding in comparison, maybe that was it. It felt too safe, or something.

I think I bought Sea Change when it came out, but it seemed to me to be more of a "David Campbell showcase" than anything else. David's arrangements on it are career-high inventiveness, he went full Jean-Claude Vannier and hit all the targets. I don't think it's fair to saddle Nigel Godrich with the responsibility for how well those albums turned out. I said upthread that these three albums have "normal qualities" instead of "abnormal qualities" and that's kind of what they are. They're "good albums", they just don't touch the same synapses that earlier Beck albums touched

Modern Guilt might actually be my favourite Beck record: it's a compact ten songs, and sits directly in the middle of his depressive-acoustic to whimsical-rhythmic spectrum.

― Halfway there but for you

i actually love modern guilt a lot myself, i was big into my indie landfill phase in '08-'09 listening to shit like rubik, i still love that stuff but it's a million miles away from where i am now

he does have a shit-ton of weird shit, most of the albums focus on, like, songs and stuff, but he'll do these weird one-offs, like he had that record club project where he's doing a full cover of yanni's "life at the acropolis" with some sonic youth folks... i've never heard the original, i should probably listen to it sometimes. because beck's cover is this weird prog-noise thing. or, like... he made a 10 minute tribute to harry partch in response to an obscure twitter beef fiery furnaces had with radiohead. or "nyc 73-78", this 20 minute philip glass remix that's fucking excellent. or whatever the fuck "gimme (extended version)" is.

Yeah the harry partch thing is the one off that I like the most

YESS I was trying to remember if I imagined that Harry Partch thing, it was so good

I owned five guayaberas because of Beck.

― braaam.flac (flamboyant goon tie included), Monday, March 11, 2024 12:14 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

How come there isn't a thread where ilxors disclose the most embarrassing shit their fandom of an artist or band has compelled them to purchase?

i purchased one foot in the grave (a great album!) on vinyl

Don’t go carvin’ no happy face on my tombstone

I looked good in those guayaberas. I lived in a small town it was the 90s all my friends were wearing Gap

because they loved the Swing Kings?

owning guayaberas because of Beck = not particularly embarrassing, of course. rather i was thinking i have done 100x worse

I mean, those swing commercials delighted us all at the time, khakis for every teen

nothing wrong with a guayaberas IMO

please mentally remove the plural that was a copypaste mistake

re: beck, I also liked his cover of Skip Spence's Oar.