As beck is cavorting throughout ‘Hollywood Freaks’ he proudly boasts, “We drop lobotomy beats” in other words his beats are stupid, pejoratively speaking. That the album was almost called ‘I Can Smell The VD in the Club Tonight’, which is actually a line from ‘Milk and Honey’, is not helping. This does not inspire confidence in it’s sincerity. Beck himself described this album as, “a party record with dumb songs and dumb sounds and dumb lyrics”. You don’t get lines like, “brief encounters in Mercedes Benz, wearing hepatitis contact lens, bed and breakfast and away weekends with sports illustrated moms”, very often after all. Surely there is ample evidence that Midnight Vultures is just Beck taking a piss, or based on the obnoxiously erotic and seedy lyrics,being masturbatory. So where, in the year 2019, do we land on the matter? Others insist that the care and intricacy of production, his ferociously committed performances and loving enthusiasm negates any semblance of derision or exploitation. Beck is cynically screwing with these genres at best and outright making fun of them at worst, so the argument goes. Arguments are based around the notion that the cacophony of mismatched genre compositions are too surreal and outlandish to be taken with any seriousness or sincerity. Many insist that rather than a loving, albeit deranged, homage to the genres that inspire it, it is buffoonish parody, barely elevated from the likes of Weird Al. Why then is Midnight Vultures so divisive? Why do some love its chromatic bondage approach to pop funk while publications like Q listed it in the 50 worst albums of all time (burn all your copies of Q)? The debate mainly centers around if Beck was actually serious in his pursuits in making the album. ‘Get Real Paid’ is an abstract art house dance hall epic that transitions into beautifully experimental electronica and still manages to fit an afro futuristic chorus from Beck in the middle. ‘Mixed Business’ is a straight up B-52s homage with its gangly pop guitar and day light disco rhythm. Dr Dre style G funk beats are interlaced with gratuitous psych pop amidst Beck existing somewhere between seductive crooning and bad acid trip in ‘Hollywood Freaks’. Exalting banjo tangents are drowned in Beck’s hysterical falsetto in ‘Sexx Laws’. All of this seems ridiculous, and this is gloriously the case. In it Beck took his core sphere of disaffected grunge rock, country jamboree, and west coast hip hop, and injected it with- soaked it with, even- an iridescent burst of neon tinged funk/soul/electronica. That’s a shame, because Midnight Vultures is a blast. Wildly vibrant, deliriously preformed, bizarrely composed, Beck’s 7th studio album released in 1999 was just too strange for some at the time. Beck’s best or worst album, depending on who you ask. The only through line among his albums was a genuine appreciation and talented extrapolation of their inspirations.Īnd then there was Midnight Vultures. Nor does it explain 2002’s Sea Change, which signaled a melancholic version of Beck a decade before it would become the norm. ![]() However, that doesn’t really account for the late 90s Mutations, which saw a sharp turn to acoustic jam sessions. Our current decade has Beck in a more mature and relaxed form, content with his status and place in the music biosphere. Much of the 2000s found Beck dealing with very much on trend and stylized alt rock/pop. The 90s saw Beck’s first five or so albums experimenting with indie hip hop/rock country in outsized, proudly awkward combinations. You can try certainly, separating his work based on which decade it resides. You can take similar approaches to Kanye, Dylan, Daft Punk, the list goes on. Bjork, for example, can be divided into her early human condition phase, her mid years abstract existential conceptual works, and her later day focus on the meaning of love and heartbreak. ![]() This is also a generally just a very fun thing to do. ![]() Terms like ‘eras’ or ‘periods’ are tossed around as means of helping navigate vast discographies. Tristan Young often the case when an artist’s career reaches a length that can be measured in decades we start to compartmentalize their work.
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