Sunday, 29 October 2006
Beck is a riddle wrapped inside an enigma, wrapped inside a devil’s haircut, packed into obtuse metaphors that say nothing, anything and everything.
At the end of “Brazil”, Robert De Niro’s character, Harry Tuttle disappears. Tuttle is caught inside a windstorm, absorbed, and eaten by stray paper. First a floating invoice sticks to his legs, then another, then submerged under the paper, the paper is torn apart and.. there’s nothing under there. And that’s how I see Beck. Underneath it all, is there anything there?
Despite my love of Beck, I find something about Beck hard to approach, almost academic. As if Beck was an imitation of a human being, an assorted collection of cool hip cultural references and borrowings masquerading for a personality. Even his more low-key records – the largely exasperated and maudlin “Mutations” and “Sea Change” – seem almost exercises in creating Art For The Sad. As if all of this thing called music, art, emotion, was a project, an affectation. That deep inside the artist Beck, Beck the person was hiding. And no artist tells the truth more than when he wears a mask. Or does he?
In “The Information” – his third album in a year - Beck steps out of his stylistic prison and just does what he wants to do. Unlike other albums, the wilfully eclectic “OdeLay”, the Prince-1984-clone “Midnite Vultures”, and the tijuana tinged “Guero”, Beck lets it hang loose, and sets himself free. “Think I’m In Love” bristles with an honesty not alwayts seen in his music – think I’m in love, but it makes me kinda nerous to say so, he sings/drawls in his monotone. The tone is kept throughout the album – Beck as somehow revealing more of himself than ever before.
Sometimes the greatest singers in the world are liars. Actors. Whitney Houston there, her lip trembling for the umpteenth version of “I Will Always Love You”, Mary J Blige’s hysterical overblown vomiting of “One”, - they’re liars. Sometimes, in fact, almost all the time, what we mean, what we really believe, is nothing more a steady tone, a calm voice, a whisper in your ear. And it’s here, with Beck’s attempts at soulful that is limited by his range, that he becomes more sincere than a brazillion Whitneys. (How many is a Brazillion anyway?).
Versimilitude is the tone of “The Information”. There’s little extraneous information here, no wasted words. The sleeve is uncharactistically minimal, a grid and a name . It’s as if Beck wants to cut the crap, strip it down, and teach us how to face the music. Aside from a minor discursion with the ‘final’ track , a meandering ten minute Flaming-Lips style spookfest called “The Horrible Fanfare”, The Information barely puts a foot wrong. Very possibly his best album yet. Only registered users can write comments.
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