Beck

Cut and paste? Perhaps in the computer age it's more fitting to say copy and paste? That sounds wrong, too cold... Better to say it's a game, a collage of the kind children used to make, a cartoon blender gone haywire that, having suddenly gained consciousness, amuses itself by scrambling what someone had just put back together. Yes, perhaps these are the definitions that best suit "Mellow Gold", Beck's debut for a major label, released in early 1994.

And what a debut! An album crammed with everything - quotations, variations, upendings of canons once thought settled - and, precisely because of this, rich in roots. Blues, folk, hip-hop, Indian music, rock, indie-rock, rap, you name it: Beck Hansen handles these languages with impressive maturity, pulling something new out of the hat every time, something never heard before, a surprise. Even more astonishing is the fact that, although he'd been recording since the tender age of eighteen - around when he cut most of the songs on this record - Beck was only twenty-one, and played virtually everything himself, with a helping hand in composing a few tracks from his ultra-independent hip-hop friend Karl Stephenson.

Besides scattered singles, Beck had already put out two albums/compilations of his numerous home recordings, both released in 1993 and both becoming underground hits. When the single "Loser" started getting airplay, it was still 1993, and it was a revelation: many were struck by the song's strange mix of styles combined with its immediate FM-radio impact. Impossible to forget the anti-"We Are The Champions" (Queen) chorus, with its Spanglish anthem for the losers of the world: "Soy un pierdedor, I'm a loser baby so why don't you kill me?" Impossible not to be hooked by an obsessive sampled acoustic blues riff, propped up by a lazy bass/drums rhythm, over which sits a decidedly surreal rapped vocal.

But that's only the beginning. Throughout the record, the lyrics form a hymn to the pride of defeat, to a wrecked life and the daily squalor of urban landscapes left to rot, among quarreling neighbors, beer-fueled benders and dreams of escape, or to the loneliness of souls lost in the emptiness of the great plains, "trying hard not to think." The Beatles' "suburban skies" of "Penny Lane" have now become sunsets in "pale garbage-colored skies," where "a gigantic dildo crushes the sun." Beck's humanity works jobs like dishwasher or stockroom flunky, but, starting precisely from defeat, takes it all philosophically - indeed goes so far as to boast about it, throwing his loser status in the world's face, brandishing above all the irony of someone with nothing left to lose, save for the odd flicker of rebellion. He laughs at what goes on around him, at those who fret over nothing, and celebrates life's small everyday joys, like the ones offered by the old couch at home.

It's easy to risk slipping into resignation, wallowing in failure, but in a world that insists you be a winner, it's better to be a confirmed loser than to believe yourself a winner and discover too late you've been played for a fool. All of this could be the work of a less egocentric, less rock-star-ish J. Mascis, but more poetic (and his musical influence is indeed present). Or it could be the philosophy of a rock version of Homer Simpson - not by chance, that cartoon character became a celebrity in those very years, still a spontaneous and sincere "successful loser" before turning, in his later years, into just another champion of bourgeois, family-values sentimentality (Beck himself would guest on an episode of "The Simpsons"). "Trying is the first step towards failure" could easily be a quote from "Mellow Gold". One shouldn't assume, though, that this "loser pride" is necessarily useful to the establishment - that would be too easy a protest to make; a loser who's aware of being one, especially of the traps life sets for him, is more dangerous to power than one who doesn't know it, and who is therefore easily manipulated with a thousand illusions. On this album Beck demystifies whatever can be demystified, spreads cynicism (Devo are another influence), and pours out awareness of the wretched state of a generation with no reference points and no heroes.

Musically too, Western kids straddling the turn of the Eighties found themselves "caught in the middle": infants in the '70s, too young for the golden age of punk and new wave, misfits in the trendy discos and disgusted by mainstream chart music, in the second half of the '80s they found in indie-label rock and hardcore an outlet that would grow and grow until it exploded. It's no coincidence that generation was dubbed "Generation X," and Beck, who at the time of "Mellow Gold" fully belonged to it, would go on to become one of its foremost chroniclers.

If that's the underlying philosophy of the lyrics, the music, as mentioned, is a concentrate/summary of the previous thirty years: blues, the starting point for many of the compositions, is twisted and torn into a thousand pieces with noise inserts, Dylan-esque folk excursions, modern Indo-mantras, psychedelia, backward tape with ridiculous hidden messages, or sections of the songs themselves stuffed with every kind of delirium - yet it's all incredibly easy to grasp and as direct as a chart hit. Against a backdrop of sickly clouds inflamed by a toxic sunset, the "last man after nuclear war," as the liner notes call it - the menacing biomechanical monster on the cover, made of scrap machine parts and animal skulls and bones - is the perfect symbol of the decomposed and recomposed, exploded and repacked, disassembled and reassembled music that awaits us. If others had already been mixing rap and metal, or disco and Latin rhythms, Beck blows right past them in the race for the most inventive mix, the most original puzzle assembled from the greatest number of pieces. Not two but three or four wildly different, distant genres crammed into a single song - as far as it's possible to go. An uncontainable urge to play and mix everything comes bursting through. The demystification mentioned above also runs, above all, through the wrecking of the fathers' music, with no respect for genre boundaries and even less for "you can't do that." Beck manages to do everything because he doesn't give a damn about anything: "I pay no mind." It's hard not to realize, on first listen, that you're in front of a landmark record, destined to change a great many things.

The "official" critics welcomed the record with bewilderment, but, as often happens in these pivotal years of rock, arrived late to the next big thing: instantly a cult artist, whose emblematic song up to that point had a wholly self-explanatory title, "MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack," earned himself, on his own, a horde of fans hungry for novelty at the height of rock's rebirth. Success came fueled by surreal videos and deranged live shows, halfway between certain epileptic Talking Heads-style performances and the psychotic cabaret of the Residents. Generation X had a new antihero.

Once again Geffen called it right, confirming itself, alongside the independent labels, as one of the truly forward-thinking companies and one of the symbols of those dazed years.

The rough but astonishingly self-assured craftsmanship of this skinny, shy young man, who pieced together a series of home recordings and musical "pranks" (irony and playfulness are indeed the album's common thread), sounds different with every new song, offering an extraordinary demonstration of how, when you have musical ideas to spare, there are no obstacles, no barriers between genres, and no production headaches to worry about. If anything, one of the album's strengths is precisely its lack of a coherent production, being the fruit, as noted, of simple home recordings that he only handed over to the label for final touches once everything was already done - the fruit of total expressive freedom, coupled with a great desire to play with music without setting limits or genre boundaries. This gives it a freshness other records lack, stripping away that veneer of "constructed-ness" that can hover even over the finest examples of composition and lyrical invention. Everything seems to spring up spontaneously, naturally, as if from a wellspring - the artist's mind - uncontaminated and free from the anxieties of "how things ought to be." If there's such a thing as transgender in music, "Mellow Gold" is its symbol.

Starting from the blues/folk/hip-hop/rap of "Loser", already discussed, we plunge into the urban-folk of "Pay No Mind (Snoozer)", which is like a lo-fi '90s Dylan", complete with harmonica, who, not giving a damn about anyone or anything, no longer sings of peace but, with nihilistic urban disillusionment, of overflowing toilets and telling rock singers to go to hell. Barely has the mild sense of disorientation passed when another acoustic strum arrives, sketching out a Stones-ish riff for the following "Fuckin' With My Head", with lo-fi inserts and delirious nasal moaning.

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27/10/2006