Is Beck OK? Hearing his new album, Colors, I can’t tell. It’s lively; it
keeps bouncing and hitting peaks in unexpected places. Joy and melancholy are in
combat with each other incessantly: On the one hand is Beck’s effortless
ability to craft infectious pop melodies that — in a rare twist — have a
quality of freshness and originality to them. On the other is his flaneur-like
gift of seeking out unfamiliar musical spaces, almost to a fault. It falls into
place often, none more so than on the album opener, ‘Colors’ (the missing “U”
is infuriating). The euphoria of the chorus is checked almost immediately by
the agitated key shift it’s in rotation with. There’s lots of these uneasy moments
all over that give the seemingly straightforward structures a trademark edge, the
getting into of which isn’t the purpose here.
Instead, it’s a sincere feeling of concern for Beck. While
I’d always known of his existence — checking out the odd song here and there
and dismissing it out of a misplaced musical snobbery — I properly discovered Beck’s
music earlier this year, at some point in February, with the album Odelay. His ability to shift gears and
head off in unpredictable sonic directions was a revelatory experience. The
shape-shifting is sneaky, chameleon-like behaviour, no doubt, and he deserves a
slap for never giving the listener a moment of familiarity and comfort. (No, I’m
being facetious.) But it’s also what made his music exhilarating — no, liberating — for me, both from the point
of view of a new listener and as an artist. (Artist? No, I mean artiste.)
Hooked (lined and sinkered), I started to get into his
other works. What I found was an almost stubbornness, a resistance to conformity,
often for the sake of it. I found an artist who was infinitely restless — a theme
I visit often while writing about music — and endlessly seeking new delights in
new sounds. The form shifted — from experimental rap-rock to disco to alt-rock
to pop to acoustic, folksy ramblings — and the tools at his disposal were
replaced and rearranged with every release, but what stayed consistent was his
aesthetic impatience, the underlying twitch
that guides his art. Across like a shitload of albums, Beck has somehow
managed to redefine himself for himself each time.
(What I refer to here isn’t the avant-garde but a
hyper-experimentation within sounds that are recognised as somewhat
conventional, or at least conventional-adjacent; basically, a mangling of old tropes,
both an embrace and a defiant rejection of convention.)
To present day, where Colors has come out. Structurally, this record is more
self-contained than a lot of his more radical ventures, in that it prefers to roam
around within the wide-enough confines of disco, pop, funk, alt-rock, the occasional
rap bits, and what can best be described as Beck-rock. (At times, he even
sounds, here, like Daft Punk or Depeche Mode, but much, much, much better.)
But even with these supposed limitations — and without
discounting the fact that Colors does
boast the odd clunker or two, ‘No Distraction’ chief among those that reach a
kind of ska-reggae accessibility usually reserved for much less gifted artists
than Beck — it still wanders enough, throwing these bizarre curveballs (like
the percussive rapping on ‘I’m So Free’, followed by the chorus blitz, or the
push-pull interplay of ‘Wow’) by the dozens.
Which makes me wonder about Beck Hanson the individual
behind all the music and the weird dances. Mental health is no laughing matter
(well, it is, but laughing matters are very serious matters too; though that’s
a discussion best left for an undetermined date in the future). With Beck, the
fact that he’s pretty much impossible to read as an artist; he's an enigma, a mystery, a closed book; he's indecipherable — where I understand
little to no nothing about his motivations except to just be constantly outrageous
in whatever avatar he chooses to adopt — makes me fear for his sanity a little.
See, what really sets him apart is the versatility in
his art. He’s not sticking to any kind of tradition or discipline; he sounds
like someone who’s constantly looking for the next buzz, the next kick, the
next fix. It’s worked for over two decades, so there’s something to be said for
commitment.
But then, what happens when it stops giving him the
childlike happiness he quite clearly gets from his art. He’s been getting
increasingly defeatist, grumbly, cantankerous, withdrawn, as an artist in the
public eye (sort of).
Me being someone who knows a fair bit about existential
bitterness, about getting stuck creatively, about banging my head against a
wall over and over again with the expectation that the wall will crack, not my
own skull, I feel a kind of projected concern for Beck. This is a challenge
literally every given artist will face in her life, repeatedly if she’s
dedicated to her craft, and I can safely say it’s something that torments Beck
too. But he’s somehow found a way to crack that wall so consistently for so
long. But what happens when it stops working for him? Is it, as I worry, an ephemeral state? Or does there exist a state of permanent restlessness and reward and failure? Will he short-circuit?
As he sings on ‘Dear Life’ here, “Dear Life, I’m
holding / How long must I wait / Before the thrill is gone?” As he sang on ‘Modern
Guilt’ off Modern Guilt, “Don’t know
what I’ve done but I feel ashamed,” and then later: “Don’t know what I’ve done
but I feel afraid.” So I worry, but then the excitement of “what next” is as rewarding
for him (I hope) as it is for me.
