What ‘s with Beck and the Lord Of Darkness?
On his Record Club page, Beck covers INXS’ Devil Inside’ of INXS. On ‘Stereopathetic Soulmanure,’ there is ‘Satan gave me a taco, in ‘One Foot In The Grave,’ ‘Sweet Satan,’ and of course ‘Odelay’ opens with ‘Devil’s Haircut.’ And now one more devil song to be added to a long list.
A list I could also complete with a demo, ‘Satan was way cool,’ a sort of remake of King Missile’s track ‘Jesus Was Way Cool,’ and two covers, Daniel Johnston’s ‘Devil town,’ and Skip James classic blues song ‘Devil Got My Woman. Well, that’s a lot of talking about the head demon.
I like Beck’s music, I like the universe he generates with his assemblages of music and his collages of words that don’t always make sense to us at first, but always makes sense in his world.
Nobody has his ability of word abstract composition, he has invented a new language, and with a small group of words he can generate a complete atmosphere, a small word in your mind:
‘Brief encounters in Mercedes Benz
Wearing hepatitis contact lens
Bed and breakfast getaway weekends
With Sports Illustrated moms’
This is not ordinary, this is genius.
Beck’s tirades used to be very funny, there is ‘the cocaine nose-job’, the ‘devil’s haircut in my mind’ and who can forget lines like ‘In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey’ or ‘Talking trash to the garbage around you.’ With Beck, words succeed words at the speed of light, and your brain cannot process them fast enough:
‘Love machines on the sympathy crutches
Discount orgies on the dropout buses
Hitching a ride with the bleeding noses
Come into town with the briefcase blues’
He plays with words, abuses them, and his songs are often an avalanche of images.
‘Temperature’s dropping at the rotten oasis
Stealing kisses from the leperous faces’
So what is the devil for Beck? Beck has said that the song Devil’s haircut has no meaning but I don’t believe this for a minute, you have to think about something to put this succession of words together, at least being in a certain state of mind. But he has also claimed that ‘Devil’s Haircut’ was ‘a really simplistic metaphor for the evil of vanity,’ a temptation to make ‘commercial shit and compromise to do it’.
The devil is then a sort of bargain you accept to make with yourself. So did Beck ever compromised? He has a successful career but he has changed, and even though I like his recent albums, the lyrics have lost some of their witty and facetious appeal. I don’t know if he has compromised his first move, or if he became just more mature, but there is a world of difference between Odelay and Sea change.
At the top of this, I have always had mixed feelings about the guy. Having seen him several times in concert, I have never witnessed any real communication with his public; he is very professional, but he seems aloof, disconnected, oblivious. I had never had any real desire to meet him, I just don’t have that need, and this is not how I feel for the majority of artists I like and love. I don’t think he truly wants to relate to his public anyway since he closed down his fans’ bulletin board on his web site, Beck.com, without any explanation in 2004.
And back in 2002, there was that story between him and the Flaming lips, with Wayne Coyne saying Beck was ‘just removed from everyday existence,’ did not ‘know how to be considerate towards other people,’ and ‘was a bit of a diva, kind of high maintenance.” I have never figured out if it was a publicity stunt or if there was some reality in all this.
Plus, there is this scientology thing that cannot be ignored. Beck grew up in Scientology, his father David Campbell being a scientologist. It seems that at the beginning of his career Beck kept everything related to all this (his father included) at a distance. Now he is working with him, Campbell even did the arrangements on Mutations and Sea change.
So how can we separate an artist from their art? Can this even be accomplished? Oh there’s nothing serious regarding Beck, aloofness is not a crime, nor having weird beliefs, but I don’t really buy the separation of art and artist. It’s something I have a hard time with, probably because music (or any art) you relate to is very emotional, very personal. And if art is a relationship between the artist and him/herself, how can you make this separation?
So I will always go to a Beck concert with this sure appreciation of his talent, but without this true communion I have with certain other artists. And all these songs about the devil could just be an admittance of his inability to relate.