When Beck sang the praises of “two turn-tables and a microphone” on his break-through “Odelay” album in 1996, he was affirming what most kids of his gener-ation already knew: Rap was the new rock ‘n’ roll, the soundtrack for youth stretch-ing from the housing projects of the Bronx to the suburbs of Orange County.
Beck knew he wasn’t the hippest kid on the block back then; his music, then and now, sounds like the work of someone standing outside of it all, a witty com-mentator and an astute appropriator of the sounds around him. He isn’t leading the revolution so much as playing with it. Though not a particularly proficient rapper, he has taken hip-hop’s cut-and-paste production values and fashioned something personal out of them.
If the ’90s were a decade of channel-surfing synthesis in rock, Beck could’ve been its poster child, an artist who stirs together seemingly incompatible ingredients from a vast array of genres – a pedal steel guitar, turntable scratching and a synthesizer humming like a vacuum cleaner – and makes these mutant concoctions go down as smoothly as one of James Bond’s well-shaken martinis.
On his recent album, “Midnite Vultures,” Beck tries to process contemporary rhythm and blues in much the same way, a trickier proposition all around. R&B is the best-selling music in America (last year selling 175 million albums, whereas rock moved 121 million and hip-hop 87 million). While young white hipsters hold hip-hoppers in high esteem, they dismiss the overwrought, overproduced, factory-line feel of much best-selling R&B. Yet on “Vultures,” Beck dives into R&B’s world of excess with an acolyte’s zeal, complete with falsetto vocals, bump-and-grin grooves and menage a trois dominated lyrics. But, of course, he gives it all an otherworldly twist; “Vultures” at times suggests what an early heavy-breathing Prince album might sound like if it were remixed by German computer geeks Kraftwerk.
Though dazzling in its sonic adventurousness and subversive pop appeal, “Midnite Vultures” also has set in motion a Beck backlash, with critics in publications ranging from Vibe to Request decrying the singer’s over-the-top brand of R&B as insincere, a “parody” verging on black-face exploitation. Before arriving in Chicago for this week’s concert, Beck responded in one of his first interviews since the album’s release last fall.
Tribune: Not many white guys from the alternative-rock camp take the modern, commercial edge of R&B seriously. They view it as too processed, too synthesized. To them, the vocalists all try so hard they end up sounding empty. The lyrics are so over-the-top, they’re laugh-out-loud funny sometimes. What’s your take on it?
Beck: I had that reaction too. I came up hearing and playing Son House and Blind Willie Johnson, music that was just so true and timeless, and to hear what that music evolved into just really upset me. Then I started to put away some of my preconceived aesthetic judgments and listen to the music for what it was, and I started to be able to pick things out that I liked about it. It took six, seven years, but I really feel I understand why it is the way it is. There is a tendency for people in the rock world to really be into some R&B and soul that is 20, 30 years old, but we ignore the contemporary version of it. But 20 years from now, a lot of people are going to realize that a lot of this stuff is pretty good.
Tribune: What appeals to you about it?
Beck: There’s something genuine in the singing and the lyrics. A lot of the singing and lyrics are preprogrammed in the rock world. If you’re a guy you’re supposed to sing with an underbite, a churning, pained, tortured vocal. And if you’re a woman, you’re all breathy and supposed to sing with a lot of ornamentation. A lot of R&B songs are about real things that matter in life. I found an interesting juxtaposition in the music between the really slick production and the colloquialism, the lingo, the trashiness in the lyrics, and I enjoyed how a song could be so incredibly heart-felt in its brazen sensuality, and yet totally secure with itself.
Tribune: But some critics and fans are questioning whether you’re being sincere in singing an over-the-top falsetto ballad like “Debra” or “Peaches & Cream.” You’re being accused of parodying it, rather than feeling it.
Beck: To me that’s just people and their preconceived idea that I’m a young white guy so it has to be about parody and irony. Go buy a Jodeci record and listen to the lyrics, my friend. My stuff sounds like Leonard Cohen compared to that. I’m taking some of the humor from it, because that’s how I live my life, that’s how I perceive it. People are making assumptions and judgments about my motives without having listened to a Silk song or even R. Kelly. When I wrote “Debra,” I’d been listening to these slow jams over and over on radio, and those are way more silly and funny than “Debra.” Is R. Kelly being ironic when he sings . . . (Beck sings the chorus from a recent ultra-explicit Kelly song about the nightcap to a night of wining and dining)?
Tribune: I’ve interviewed him enough to know the answer: Heck no.
Beck: Well, I’m not being ironic either. When I’m on stage and I’m singing these songs, I’m not thinking, “That line was really funny.” I’m thinking, “I can pour my heart and soul into this.” There is something about our requirement and our demand for sincerity and our American belief in what is sincere and insincere, and I wanted to play with that idea on this album. Because I hear so many songs on the radio that are preaching their love and trying to reach for something poignant and universal, and they sound trite and banal and are almost insulting to me, pulling all the appropriate heartstrings. That to me is heartless music. So if I can play with some of those ideas, maybe (others) can rehabilitate (their) music and come up with something that is, in fact, poignant. It’s harder to sing a song that is maybe a little bit silly and still make it poignant. It’s not quite irony. I think I’ve moved on from the purely ironic, years ago. I’m interested in something a little stranger, that place where what is genuine, and what isn’t, isn’t clear. What touches you and what makes an impact? What strikes a chord with you?
Tribune: It seems that you knew this record was going to push some buttons, that you wanted that extreme reaction.
Beck: We’re inundated by a universe of Britney Spears and Puff Daddy. That kind of music is taking over, like it or not. So if you’re going to make any kind of commentary or if you’re in a position where you’re going to bear witness to that and raise questions about what is real art and what is trash, and play within that, then you’re going to have to step into some of it. You’re going to have to go be it.
