Beck - Modern Guilt

I've heard that, like Guero, the music remains mostly playful while his lyrics get darker and darker. Some of the Information (and certainly Sea Change) attempted to merge sound and lyric and actually create a mood...but it seems as if Beck's afraid to piss off his fan base and tries to have it both ways.

I'm still picking it up tomorrow, though, as he's always been one of my favorite artists. I have to say, I haven't loved one of his albums since Sea Change...and I'm a little bummed that we'll never get a full on party album like Midnight Vultures again.

The fact that he's ashamed of Midnight Vultures illustrates how much isn't really one of us anymore. Beck used to be like Steve Martin the stand up comedian. Now he's like Steve Martin the novelist.

Beck five years from now won't be the Beck from five years ago. He's transformed quite a bit, not for worse though. The new album is dark and moody, but not in the same vein as Sea Change (a masterpiece, in my opinion). It's also not like Midnight Vultures (also a masterpiece. Hey, I like Beck). It's a bit low-fi and dirty but doesn't stray too far from his beginnings. And, of course, the signature Beck lyrics are still present. I like it. None of the songs are super catchy like his previous work but the entire album as a whole is a solid piece of work.

Who's the other artist he's collaborating with?

Danger Mouse

Eh, I'll check out the one good single that hits Alt-Rock stations, then.

Danger Mouse has never blown me away, aside for Demon Days with Gorillaz. But he does a good job on this one, knowing not to outshine Beck or change his sound. It's not The Danger Mouse Show. Only the song "Gamma Ray" sounds like a Danger Mouse track.

Ouch! That cynicism cuts like a knife!

Take that, Beck!

But seriously, I tried listening to Odelay recently, and I could hardly get through it. My love affair with Beck has ended. There were good times, and I'll always listen to certain Mutations tracks with love, but I'm no longer a fan.

Yeah, I know what you mean. It's very rare that Beck's songs sound heartfelt these days, and it's become more apparent that he's always been more of a craftsman, not as much of an artist (with some exceptions, like parts of Sea Change and Odelay). His songs can be playful, but there's not a lot of depth there, which is especially funny since he once had a reputation as some sort of neo-Dylan, lyrically.

His albums typically sound good on a first listen then lose their appeal pretty quickly for me.

I actually think his older stuff (Mellow Gold, One Foot in the Grave, parts of Odelay) did a better job of expressing depth then a lot of his more recent attempts. Guero is filled with gloomy lyrics, but ultimately the music fails to grab you other then as a catchy little radio jingle.

I think the best thing the guy could do is go back to his roots, stop getting the top producers and fancy studio trickery and do it himself with an eight track old school. But that'll never happen.

To me, he never topped Mellow Gold. But I'm sure I'm in the minority there.

And that's why I'd argue that "glib" Beck is the best Beck. With the exception of "Sea Change", "heartfelt" Beck is like a kiddie pool: it can appear deep, but it's actually quite shallow. Thus, in my humble opinion, Beck's at his best when the horn sections blaring and he's throwing out ridonkulous lyrics like "I think we're going crazy/ Her left eye is lazy/ She looks so Israeli/ Nicotine and gravy..."

I've always said that the strangest thing about that line is that somehow it makes sense (to me)...and that's the case with all of Beck's more successful odd lyrics. I think that's where the Dylan comparisons come in.

Beck isn't deep? C'mon! It's like we have a bunch of Micah Robinson's in here. I think what's most baffling is the Sea Change love, which is an OK record, but so one-note. It's probably the first Beck album I didn't feel the need to listen to all that much, as it felt so direct.

Odelay!, to me, says so much more than Sea Change ever does, and demands a lot more from its audience. On the one hand, it's certainly a fun and inventive album. But I really didn't think of it as a masterpiece until I started to unravel the lyrics. I think it's an incredibly deep reflection on a number of things -- the most well-known being all the death that surrounded him before he made the record, but also everything it has to say about the culture in which it was created.

I think he's too often dismissed -- especially with that album -- as some sort of mad chemist. But I've always seen a method to his madness.

I agree on all points, actually. I kind of admire Sea Change for its directness, but it's very repetitive.

I think he pulls it off sometimes ("Jack-Ass," for sure, "Derelict," a few others), but so much of the wordplay seems designed purely for sound, not meaning. I don't think that's necessarily bad, but it's a strike against him in the lyrical genius column. Dylan's wordplay usually means something on a line-for-line basis at least. "Devil's Haircut" doesn't hold up in the same way.

I used to agree, but the more I've listened to his recent output, the more I re-evaluate his old stuff. They're still impressive on a technical level, but they just leave me cold, emotionally.

Isn't it called Scientology?

I've had a lot of friends bring up the fact that Beck is a Scientologist to me as if they expected me to return all of his albums upon hearing the news. Should they stop watching Roman Polanski films because he raped a girl? Should we trash Chaplin movies because he slept with young women? It's weird, but as bug-nuts crazy Scientology is, does it really deserve to be made fun of as much as any other religion?

OK, maybe it does, but I'd rather judge an artist on artistic merits rather then personal ones.

It's good point, and I won't stop watching Tom Cruise because he's crazier than Beck. Even if following Scientology makes you, at very least, a moron. I see both personal and professional lives as separate as I can, but I couldn't help myself with Flarrz quote.

I liked his early efforts, but DaveB hammered the same problem I have with the guy: no lasting power whatsoever and his last albums barely grabs my attention.

Well, I'm not ready to dismiss "Devil's Haircut" because Dylan's wordplay was stronger. If anything, I think the Dylan comparisons are misguided, and not really grounds for criticism. Yes, Dylan is a better lyricist. Moving on ... Lyrically, I think "Devil's Haircut" sort of paints the picture for what's to come -- lyrically and instrumentally, it portrays the culture in which the artists lives and from which he will borrow. I'm going off "something I read at sometime" so I don't have a link and don't even recall where I read, but Beck described "Devil's Haircut" as the Stagger Lee figure coming back to life in 1996 and examining the culture. On the one hand, there's really no way to tell this from the song, so I hesitate to lean too much on it, but it certainly puts the lyrics in a more proper context. Beck's taking this oft-borrowed blues figure and sticking him right at the opening of his album, an album full of "borrowing," I suppose.

To further defend the song's lyrics (and a lot of the writing on the album, I suppose), I think he's certainly indebted to his grandfather. I think this defense gets trotted out a lot, even for his later work. Considering Odelay! is very much about Al Hansen, though, I don't feel too conflicted about using it here -- his death (and the deaths of many others) lurks throughout this album, and I don't think it's surprising that the tenets of his movement do as well.

Now we're just talking about preference, so there's not much to discuss. I will say I agree, as far as the later work goes. Listening to The Information, for example, is an odd experience. There's nothing I can pinpoint as being weak, but it's not as demanding or rewarding as Odelay!, or a few other albums of his. I can certainly understand feeling cold to that album.

And you're supposed to get that from this???
Maybe I'm thick, but I'd find it hard to believe that anyone could ever know that it's a Stagger Lee character in the 90's without Beck saying so. And if he needs to explain it, the lyrics don't work.

He wrote the song with Stagger Lee as the character, the viewer expressing these thoughts. It's not essential to know that to understand the song -- what's important is what we're seeing, the culture that he's writing about. I mentioned it because I think it's a nice detail, but it's not essential to understanding the song.

The Wikipedia page (yeah, yeah) for Devil's Haircut has the quote:

"I don't know if I ever HAD any youthful purity, but I can understand that you might be tempted to make commercial shit and compromise to do it. I try not to compromise on anything. I think we associate becoming an adult with compromise. Maybe that's what the devil is. In 'Devils Haircut' that was the scenario. I imagined Stagger Lee... I thought, what if this guy showed up now in 1996... I thought of using him as a Rumplestiltskin figure, this Lazarus figure to comment on where we've ended up as people. What would he make of materialism and greed and ideals of beauty and perfection? His reaction would be, 'Whoa, this is disturbing shit.'"

To boil it down, the point of the song is not "This is Stagger Lee!" but "Whoa, this is disturbing shit." And yes, I do see that from those lyrics.

What? You need to instantly know what the song is about by reading the lyrics or the song is a failure? So much for depth and complexity...

This sentiment reminds me of that Radiohead In Rainbows thread where everyone was bitching about the lyrics being "too simple" and "light" as if they all knew exactly what they were about.

I've heard that song hundreds of times, I used to be obsessed with Odelay. I'm intimately familiar with all the lyrics. Even after flyarz said Beck's interpretation of the song, I had to go back and look because I had no idea what he's talking about. And looking at the lyrics now, line by line, on the whole, listening to them in the song, I don't see it. So yeah, that's a failure.

EDIT: I just feel his lyrics are much better on a sonic level than a...literary level? (sorry, I couldn't think of the right adjective). Yeah, it does all evoke a certain mood, but does that make them masterful? I don't think so. Just my opinion. Of course, maybe I'm biased, because they aren't the kind of lyrics I prefer.

I just have a problem judging any art by comparing what the author intended to do (or the inspiration) and the outcome. Talk to Woody Allen and he'll tell you that he feels like he screwed up almost every one of his films because he intended them to be about one thing and they ended up being something else (or critics and analysts deemed it so). Doesn't make them bad works of art.

Honestly, when I listen to Devil's Haircut, I picture a really hot, hazy, gloomy day in LA. I think Beck captures the languid insanity of modern city life better than anybody. If my interpretation isn't the same as his inspiration, does it make it an inferior song? I don't think so, but that's just me.

I agree on this. Intentionality is a minor factor, at best, especially when it comes to something potentially impressionistic like many rock lyrics.

My problem is that Beck uses a lot of lazy images to make that vague impression and doesn't really do much to tie them together. Dead ends, dropping temperatures (which calls into question the idea of a hot day, actually), lepers, decapitated heads, guns, and eyeball gouging in the first verse, the sexual imagery that every two-bit songwriter eventually associates with a debauched city like L.A. in the second, allusions to standard rock song tropes in the third. Other songwriters have gotten across the same sort of atmospherics, but actually bothered to imbue the lyrics with more than cliches and gaudy imagery.

Then, a chorus that doesn't add any kind of evocative imagery to the mix, because "devil's haircut" doesn't carry any sort of stable meaning. It might lead to an interesting question or two ("why is this devil's haircut only in his mind and not manifested in reality on his or on someone else's head?"), but the nonsensical, disjoined nature of the rest of the lyrics strongly suggest that these are just more words for the sake of words - it's a chorus, after all. You need to sing something over it.

I think you can use this sort of cut-up technique pretty well in pop songwriting. Bowie's made a career of it, after all. In fact, that may be my problem. Bowie's version of it involves layering bizarre, juxtaposed phrases over a consistent musical base. There's struggle there between order and disorder. With Beck, so much of his better music is pastiche-based to begin with, that it's just a bunch of disassociated parts interacting (and when his music is less pastiche-based, as on Sea Change or even on Guero, it's just kind of boring, as flyarz mentioned). There's no struggle there. I'm just hypothesizing on my own taste here, incidentally. I'm not sure if that's exactly why I lost the taste for Beck over the years.

I was a pretty dedicated Beck fan from Mellow Gold onward until Guero. But ever since the initial buzz of Guero faded, I've felt increasingly disconnected from what he's doing. Actually, I first started to worry "what the shit is happening?" back when the novelty of Midnite Vultures seemed worn thin, but have ultimately been able to enjoy it as the "party album" he intended it to be. The album prior, Mutations, though, I love unconditionally (as I still do Mellow Gold and Odelay, for the most part). Sea Change has some beautiful, even transcendental moments in some areas - along with a lot of flat spots elsewhere, unfortunately.

Beck can be immensely creative sonically and I love his fearless nature, but his overuse of nonsensical wordplay in so many of his songs doesn't allow them much longevity. I appreciate the playfulness and humor, but it'd be nice to hear some purpose in more of his words*. Just a couple of things that Bob Dylan usually employs that Beck often doesn't - meaningful lyrics and an overall sense of focus. Drop me a little more food for thought I can detect in that simmering stew of intermingling flavors.

As for Modern Guilt, I do think it delivers a bit of what I've seen described as "a return to form" judged next to his past two albums. I've only given it a couple of listens up to now, so I need to give it an opportunity to grow on me for a while. If it's still on my iPod in a couple of months, it'll at least have surpassed Guero and The Information in replay value for me.


*Sly Stone balanced these and spun it all into gold time and again back in the day. And he was usually blasted out of his skull from what I understand. Do drugs work better than Scientology? You decide.