I was a little surprised, I have to admit, to look at the Riot Fest roster for this year and actually find it relatively intriguing. There’s a pretty solid mix of old classics from the ’90s like Beck and The Offspring along with precocious small-fry acts like HEALTH, The Lawrence Arms, The Hives, et. al. And, yeah, Fall out Boy and Newfound Glory are there, kind of like that obligatory kidney stone at the family reunion, or whatever.
It’s not as purely, or pretentiously, “punk,” that is, as I thought it would be, and the lineup surely offers a mind-blowingly eclectic overall whole.
The Beck installment would, a priori, be a no-brainer for any fan of ’90s alternative rock, which, I would imagine, would be anyone at Riot Fest save maybe for petulant emo scabs to come later. Beck’s achievements in music are completely undeniable — he’s probably the only songwriter I can think of off the top of my head to have his own critically-acclaimed radio hit within two different genres entirely (“Where it’s at”; “Tropicalia”).
Actually, this partly encompasses the problem I find, in general, with his live set, and particularly its recent reincarnations that feature a schizophrenic array of stuff from all his styles. It’s like a complete case of identity crisis.
Now, I know, Beck is pretty much built on identity crisis. Right away, with his breakthrough single “Loser”; he did the unthinkable — married a living-room-recorded acoustic guitar with a hip-hop beat for a radio rap song. His Woody Guthrie/Grandmaster Flash shtick has been his calling card all the way, and, indeed, it was always the broken hand we learned to lean on, as Iron and Wine said.
This jumbled approach to influence has undeniably served him well and catered to some fantastic music, but it just doesn’t in my opinion, transfer to the live setting. The situation would be robustly amended if he’d just pick an m.o. and go with it. This could manifest in a couple of ways. The most logical option, from a commercial standpoint, would be assuming the role of DJ, and letting turntables completely replace physical musical instruments on stage, which, within his performances, show their feeble scales all too clearly when stacked up against powerful digital machinery. I wouldn’t have a problem with him just acting like he was The Dust Brothers, in such a setting, and in the process giving us classics like “Where it’s at”; “Devil’s Haircut”; “The New Pollution”; “Derelict”; “Girl” (from Guero); “Strange Apparition” (from The Information); and of course “Loser.” He could even get more technical with the precocious electro stuff on The Information like “Motorcade”; this track, theoretically, even presenting the possibility of “jamming,” or extensive temporal noodling, of you prefer, within said genre.
And if he’s going to go rock, I wish he’d just go rock, through and through, and set up Fender stacks, a drummer, bassist, synth, and the whole kit and kaboodle. But the bet-hedging of trying to be Greg Allman and Kool Moe Dee in the same concert, while exciting in the studio for its compressed production, intriguing mixes and fresh genre-shifting, falls horribly flat in the concert setting, where sound has to cater to genre, adamantly, in order to thrive.
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