It seems that, for So Cal alt-pop star Beck, there were strong trade winds blowing him home following his “sea change” [1]. 2005 brought Guero, an immediately more auspicious development from the unconscionably down and somber Sea Change. The lead single was called “Girl”; and, over cheery chords and a funky, delicious beat from The Dust Brothers, related anecdotes about a new beau of his. And this stuff made it onto satellite radio pretty rampantly — I remember, at very least, “Missing” and “Earthquake Weather” making regular appearances on the speakers in the Whole Foods I was working in from 2007 to 2010. Really, listening again to Guero, you get the sense that pretty much any of these tunes could have gotten regular play, from the funky pop attitude and grainy guitar sound mastery of “E-Pro”; to the bouncy, light but strangely eerie “Black Tambourine” to the gloriously purposeful and emotionally rich closeur, “Emergency Exit.”
All this, and strangely, I don’t really hear these songs in public very much anymore, nor do I hear many people talking about Guero and The Information, two Beck albums of the 2000s decade which each earned a four-star rating in Rolling Stone. This is, of course, in stark contrast to ’90s alternative rock, which is generally treated as holy scripture these days, and precipitatory of umpteen adoring, extolling Facebook pages.
Well, I have a harebrained theory on why the material on these two Beck albums remains so undervalued: maybe we were afraid to really acknowledge Beck’s claim to the epithet “King of Pop,” a level of dominance of mainstream music enjoyed, of course, by Michael Jackson in the 1980s, and any number of “slacker” acts in the ’90s, whether it was Sugar Ray, Third Eye Blind, or, sure, even Beck himself, at times. I mean, sure, “Girl” was like the typical summery, fun anthem, so it’s easy to write it off as disposable pop. This would though sell it short in terms of its gritty, rhythmically slap-happy production, courtesy of The Dust Brothers, all of the funky, glitchy sounds feeding into a radio-ready soundscape that truly blends genres and boils down to something hummable and enjoyable, not unlike, of course, Beck’s effort Odelay, from 1996.
Now, in order for Guero to have catapulted Beck to the pinnacle of mainstream music, in 2005, it would have to reason that it’s a better album than Odelay, since Odelay, for all its fringe genre-muffing and bizarre, white-boy appeal, probably failed to do this, in completion. I’d like to argue that Guero is possibly a better album than Odelay, and that, along with “Girl”; the rest of the album consistently lathers up enough emotional authenticity, originality, and, of course, dizzying genre dynamic, to cement it as a classic and as a decade-defining achievement in pop music. “Black Tambourine”; which I mention before, along with “Go it Alone”; are key tracks in terms of infusing the album with a bouncy, funky energy. The emotion really emanates, though, on “Broken Drum”; “Farewell Ride” and the closeur, “Emergency Exit”; all of these tracks feeling like conciliatory statements in self-affirmation, too urgent and important in the mind of the artist to possess any entropy or convolution.
Much was made, I think erroneously, in the blogosphere about Beck’s efforts as a “rapper” on The Information. Unlike Guero, this album does open with Beck passing himself off on the mic as an “emcee,” per se, and is followed by four or five other “rap” songs, later on the LP. Still, I like to compare The Information and Guero as I find them to be a good yin and yang to each other, sort of like Kid A/Amnesiac or maybe Third Eye Blind’s first two albums. The Information, to its credit, came out only a year and a half after Guero, but in no way seems like anything even remotely resembling a Guero rehash, or the exposure of throwaway tracks from the Guero sessions. (Along these lines, as much as I love “Broken Drum”; it’s not impossible to see it materializing on Sea Change, what with its deliberate, brooding emotion and acoustic rock style interface.) “Soldier Jane” is a sort of soft, concise pop song I had been championing around its release, to little fanfare, only to see indie rockers Lotus Plaza pretty much completely rip off its chord progression and melody for their albeit enjoyable track “Eveningness.” The singles from The Information (which “Soldier Jane” should have been), “Strange Apparition” and “Nausea”; don’t really do too much to solidify the album’s artistic stature, in my opinion: but the two rap songs out of the first three tracks grant the album a playful, Dionysian vibe, to perfectly complement the eerie production and instrumentation and ominous lyrical themes. The title track is a pure, rhythmic rendering of the apocalypse, “Motorcade” is brilliant IDM, “We Dance Alone” is more dark, dreamy hip-hop like only Beck can do, and “Movie Theme” is simply like something from a dream, itself — a gorgeous, lilting pop song containing no chorus but rather eight little mini-stanzas of fluctuating metaphor and lazy, blissed-out come-ons. Which album has the greater potential for radio? We’ve got to first admit that Beck was the premiere pop musician in the world in the 2000s and let the music speak for itself. Whatever force is presently pigeonholing him into a novelty act, or “slacker” act, that is, must be annihilated with a set of absorptive listens to these fantastic, eclectic and unique LP’s.
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[1] This references Beck’s 2002 album, Sea Change, an incredibly mournful, lugubrious breakup album, whose title makes light of a line from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”; which is something about “when a young sailor suffers a sea change,” or thereabouts.
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