William Dart takes a personal look at the music of Beck, tracking his career from his life as a sampling magpie to being the new soul brother of Pharrell Williams in the recent album Hyperspace.
Beck Hansen Photo: Supplied
At the end of last year, NPR tried to draw Beck out on the sound of his latest album, Hyperspace. Along the way, the obliging singer explained just what it was that gave each of his 14 albums its unique character.
He gave explanations that ranged from describing them as individual plantings in the garden of his whole output to seeing them as a series of auteur movies, complete in themselves, with their own life and cast of characters.
There are real-life characters on Hyperspace. In particular, the very hip Pharrell Williams, a man acknowledged by Beck as the master minimalist who pulled him out of his maximalist tendencies and let things be more simple.
As in the few seconds of the album’s opening track, ‘Hyperlife’.
Beck wasn’t always quite as laid-back as this. There was a time when he was one of music’s most lovable and unpredictable magpies.
What harmless fun we had back in the 90s, trying to find out just where the music on his Odelay album had come from.
At the time, during my first listen to the song ‘Readymade’, I was thrown off-kilter by a jolt of the familiar during an instrumental break [starting at 1:20 into the track].
Puzzling over the origins of these quaint few bars, I found myself not really focusing on Beck’s vocals when they returned. I should have. He was singing about pulling himself up, back and down, stuck together like a readymade. A cryptic clue perhaps to the song’s interpolations.
And the answer is, to those wondering where these naggingly familiar snippets were taken from, is Laurindo Almeida and the Boss Nova All Stars playing Jobim’s ‘Desafinado’.
Beck has always been a bit of an elusive character. I must admit to waxing and waning with his music, not always being totally convinced by the electronic overlays and trickeries that have earned him such cred in some quarters.
But there were exceptions. One being his 2002 album Sea Change which was more direct in its musical language, and considerably lighter in terms of samplings.
When the song ‘Lost Cause’ comes up, wrapped in a sort of electronic gossamer, it catches the ear because the actual songwriting itself is so strong.
In 2014, the same year as his much honoured Morning Phase album [feature in New Horizons here], Beck released a rather eccentric, and very personal disc titled Song Reader.
Unusually for rock ventures, the printed music came first in a published folio of individual songs, complete with period covers. It's a collection that might have nestled very nicely amongst the music in my grandparents’ old piano stool.
Beck worked at these numbers with other performers for two years before an album appeared in 2014. And what resulted was a display of extremely ambitious songcraft, as Beck placed himself behind the pen of some pretty distinguished names.
For a taste of Kurt Weill, for instance, you needed to go no further than Jack Black singing Beck’s ‘We all wear cloaks’.
When I featured Beck’s Song Reader album back in 2014, I found myself disappointed that too many of its numbers didn’t quite measure up to some of revered classics mentioned by name in Beck’s admirably argued booklet essay.
While some singers didn’t have enough substance and musical character allotted to them, there were some beautiful, finely drawn instrumentals given to Gabriel Kahane and Marc Ribot, whose guitar ably navigated the strange, shifting harmonies of ‘The Last Polka’
I keep returning to one particular song on Song Reader, perhaps the result of the five years that the music world has just spent remembering the Great War.
Beck’s ‘America, Here’s my Boy’, is a deeply ironic reflection on the jingoistic ballads of that conflict. And while Swamp Dogg’s 72-year-old voice adds its own brand of poignancy, I can’t help but imagine how Otis Redding might have delivered it, had he not perished in his Beechcraft H18 on that stormy night of the 10th December, 1967.
If, in the jukebox of one’s dreams, one is permitted to imagine Otis Redding wrapping his velvet cords around that song, one could equally fantasise it being given a dash of hip hop jive by Pharrell Williams.
Williams may have been a surprising major collaborator on Beck’s new Hyperspace album, but their partnership goes back a few years to the time when Williams gave his fans one of his catchiest and slickest hits for the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack, ‘Happy’.
The chemistry between Pharrell Williams and Beck almost oozes out of the seven Hyperspace tracks that they’ve worked on together.
Like the ballad ‘Chemical’.
It’s not difficult to hear Pharrell Williams setting up the hooks in their shared ballad — and maybe there’s also the slightest hint of the string of ‘Happy’ chords. Yet in the midst of this streamlined soul, smoothly perpetrated, it’s reassuring to hear the strum of Beck’s acoustic guitar.
And, after the sort of faultless gleam that comes from having a raft of producers, including of course Williams and Beck themselves, it reassuring to sign off suspended in the wonderful world of a cappella.
Music Details
'Song title' (Composer) – Performers
Album title
(Label)
'Pain In My Heart' (Toussaint) – Otis Redding
The Otis Redding Story
(Atco)
'The Glory of Love' (Goodman) – Otis Redding
Pure Southern Soul
(Atco)
'Wave' (Beck) – Beck
Morning Phase
(Capitol)
'Dreams' (Beck) – Beck
Colors
(Capitol)
'Hyperlife' (Beck, Williams) – Beck
Hyperspace
(Capitol)
'Readymade' (Beck) – Beck
Odelay
(DGC)
'Desafinado' (Jobim) – Laurindo Almeida & The Bossa…
Ultra-Lounge, Vol. 9: Cha-Cha-Cha
(Capitol)
'Lost Cause' (Beck) – Beck
Sea Change
(Geffen)
'We All Wear Cloaks' (Beck) – Beck, feat. Jack Black
Song Reader
(Capitol)
'The Last Polka' (Beck) – Beck, feat. Marc Ribot
Song Reader
(Capitol)
'America, Here's My Boy' (Beck) – Beck, feat. Swamp Dogg
Song Reader
(Capitol)
'Happy' (Williams et al) – Pharrell Williams
Despicable Me 2 Soundtrack
(Black Lot)
'It's A Chemical Reaction,' (Porter) – Cyd Charisse
Silk Stockings
(CBS)
'Chemical' (Beck, Williams) – Beck
Hyperspace
(Capitol)
