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4.26.05

Death and the Fax Machine: Beck’s Guero

By Mark Grueter

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“Armageddon will be a full on nuclear war between Brookstone and The Sharper Image.” – Beck, the Hiro Ballroom of New York’s Maritime Hotel, April 19th, 2005

Recently, scores of badly written and poorly imagined articles have materialized on the subject of Beck Hansen. Every couple years, Beck releases a new album and our music critics, eager to meet deadlines, invoke time-tested sound bites and clichés to demonstrate a supposed awareness of the artist’s work. “Eclectic,” “ironic,” “pastiche,” and “postmodern,” are four words any assumed expert can safely get away with to describe Beck’s music.

Is Beck returning to his Odelay roots? (One of the Big questions asked in your standard review). Because the Dust Brothers produced Beck’s new album Guero, there’s nothing wrong with critics making comparisons to the other Beck/Dust Brothers creation, 1996’s Odelay. Unfortunately, the occasion paved the way for many pseudo-discoveries. For instance, several tone deaf and indolent reviews - no doubt mimicking one another - claim Guero’s opening song “E-Pro” sounds just like “Devil’s Haircut” from Odelay. While others say “E-Pro” sounds just like “Novocaine” from Odelay. So…which is it? Surely it cannot be both, as “Devil’s Haircut” and “Novocaine” do not sound alike. It leads to the inevitable conclusion: “E-Pro,” a uniquely weird tune cluttered with a chorus of “na na/na na nas” and co-written by the Beastie Boys, sounds like neither Odelay track.

In fact, after listening to this album for almost a month now, I feel safe writing that Guero does not sound anymore like Odelay than it does Mutations, just as it does not sound any more like Midnite Vultures as it does Sea Change. What is notable is that Guero, in many ways, brings together many of the complexities which superficially differentiate all the other albums.

The lack of time and thought put into a timed review often leads to mischaracterization. Proving yet again that it ought to stick to hilarious parodies, The Onion (in it’s A.V. club) thinks Beck, at the end of the song “Que Onda Guero” is “making fun of easy targets” when we hear the names of Michael Bolton and Yanni shouted out in the backdrop. The poor reviewer in question, Keith Phipps, is confused. If he bothered to conduct a little research on Beck’s bio, he would’ve known Beck grew up in a Latino neighborhood in East L.A. and was one of the only white kids at his school. The song “Que Onda Guero” (roughly “where are you going, white boy?”) portrays the atmosphere in which Beck was teased - as a goofy-looking, guitar playing minority walking down the street. In between the Bolton and Yanni references, we also hear the words “James Joyce” (conveniently ignored by Phipps) uttered. The originator of Ulysses must be another one of Beck’s easy targets…or not.

We also hear a Latino man asking, “What’s up Guero? Have you been working out? Been doing push-ups?” And these jeers are accompanied by random references to “mullets” and a “ceramics class” – all of which make clear what the song is actually about. But Phipps is desperate to earn his paycheck somehow, while covering up for the fact that he does not know what he’s talking about, as again shown in his trenchant conclusion of Guero: “It sounds okay, sometimes even better than okay, but it doesn’t stir much passion, unlike even the most irony-entrenched Beck albums of the past.” Thanks for the tip, Kev.

A better question might have been: is Beck still bitter from those experiences? The song doesn’t feel as though he is, and certainly Beck has long embraced Latino culture – his many Spanish lyrics are not employed with any impish intent. “Que Onda Guero” is an impressionistic stroll through the very neighborhood he grew up in. “See the vegetable man in the vegetable van with a horn that’s honking like a mariachi band,” Beck raps to get things started. Upbeat, layered music bounces along while Beck observes things like, “TJ cowboys…sleeping in the sidewalk with a burger king crown” and “Guatemalan soccer ball instant replays.”

In fact, it’s the only track on Guero where both the music and lyrics carry an authentically fun and playful rhythm. Just about every other song stresses death and/or despair as its motivating theme. In track 3, “Girl,” Beck first seduces, then kills an unsuspecting female. He spots her, “walking crooked down the beach/she spits on the sand where the bones are bleaching,” and thinks, “I know I’m gonna steal her eye/she doesn’t even know what’s wrong/and I know I’m gonna make her die/take her where her soul belongs.”

But these harrowing lyrics are couched behind endlessly catchy, swinging pop music, and also interspersed with a dramatic chorus refrain, “My (something) Girl!” It’s the one song non-Beck-fans will like because of it’s feel-good, ear candy pose. Another quibble though: many reviewers simply assume Beck sings “My Summer Girl!” in the chorus despite the lyrics on the sleeve which read only, “my…girl” - leaving the line open for interpretation. The missed lyric sounds more like “sonar” or “sun-eyed” to me and the truth is almost certainly more mysterious - since the word was deliberately deleted out - than the reviewers would have it.

After “Girl,” the album only becomes darker. Beck repeatedly hits upon his now familiar themes of emptiness, not being able to pay rent (success has evidently done nothing to vanquish this fear), romantic obsessions (“I prayed/heaven today/would bring it’s hammer down on me/and pound you/out of my head/I can’t think with you in it”). But mostly it is the concept of death which defines Guero: “sharks smell the blood that I’m bleeding,” “crows are pulling at my clothes,” “two white horses in a line/carrying me to my burying ground” - and that’s a fairly random sampling.

None of this, of course, is entirely new for Beck (who long ago sang, “I know, I know, it’s the positive people running from their time, looking for some feeling”) - just one more foot deeper in the grave. But with previous albums (save Sea Change) there was a clearer attempt to mix offbeat humor in with the grimness: “I was sitting at home cooking up a steak/Satan came down dressed like a snake/well he called my name as I turned up the flame and then I realized I was out of mayonnaise…Yeah, don’t go throwing no coupons on my grave/don’t go carving no happy face on tombstone,” declares Beck on 1994’s Stereopathetic Soulmanure.

Even “Hell Yes,” the only techno/hip-hop song, eschews the overt satire of its cousins on 1999’s Midnite Vultures (most obviously “Hollywood Freaks” which begins, “Hot milk/mmm…tweak my nipple/champagne and ripple/shamans go cripple/my sales go triple”) and leaves us with not only random, but a seemingly stainless collection of images: “Looking for my place on assembly lines/fake prizes risin’/out of the bombholes.” But there is a sort of understated, brilliance to this funk track, more easily appreciated after several listenings. It effortlessly encapsulates almost everything he was attempting on Midnite Vultures. “Duck don’t look now company missiles/power is raunchy/rent-a-cops are watching” or my favorite, “perfunctory idols rewriting their bibles…lives in white out/turn the lights out/fax machine anthems/get your damn hands up!”

Legend has it Beck used to bust up an answering machine onstage, immediately after singing a song about, well, an answering machine. I wonder if the fax machine has now replaced the answering one in Beck’s milieu? Beck is preoccupied, not only with death, but with machines of all sorts, gadgets, robots and computers. Each album features multiple experiments with makeshift instruments and obscure technologies.

However, the “mature” Beck is, in most senses, now committed to more traditional song crafting. The psychedelic primal screaming and musical junkyard cacophony of earlier albums (elements that were appealing partly because of their un-musicality) have been almost entirely purged. This is understandable. However, his continued obsessions with death, depression and damnation are not as easily comprehensible. The candid, lonely music of Sea Change was written after Beck found out his years-long girlfriend had been cheating on him. Fine. But Beck is married now, with a kid. Shouldn’t he finally be happy, you might ask? (Especially if it’s true he has become an adherent of the positivist cult Scientology. His wife has, for certain; the book is still out on Beck himself, but Scientology seems like the sort of “religion” which demands both partners participate. How else could Kelly Preston, for instance, be able to stay with the insufferable John Travolta?). Well, either way, I’m glad he is not "happy." It’s nice to see that ostensible contentment has not made Beck complacent, or any less interesting or hungry than he was during his drug-influenced, poverty-stricken youth.

Overall, how does Guero rate within the oeuvre? For me, as with most good things in life, it depends on timing and mood. One day I might prefer Mellow Gold, the next Mutations, so it’s premature, if not entirely the wrong question to even ask. However, at this moment, it strikes me as Beck’s most compelling and gripping work to date.

(Standout tracks include the aforementioned “Que Onda Guero,” “Girl” and “Hell Yes.” Other notables: the magnificently bleak “Farewell Ride,” the breakup song, “Broken Drum,” (chilling, played live) and the hypnotic “Rental Car,” which is perhaps the grandest of the whole lot).

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Mark Grueter is a writer living in New York City. He also blogs at Snarkmith and can be contacted at grueter@methree.net.

© 2005 Me Three