Beck
Midnite Vultures
»
Beck
Midnite Vultures
Geffen, 1999
RiYL: Beastie Boys, Parliament, Prince, Roxanne Shante |
The guy is basically a category of his own anyway. And, well, he should be. What other artists have remained both artistically and commercially successful from the decade's beginning to its impending end? Maybe the Beastie Boys? Beck has truly defined our times, this pastiche decade that will be remembered for shamelessly mixing and matching other eras' styles. Think about it. There's '60s clothes. There's '70s clothes. There's '80s clothes. But what will we wear on '90s Night? (Could it really have been only 10 years since Will Smith was bitching about the polyester shirt with the butterfly collar? Wonder how many of those he's got now).
I'm digressing. The point is, musically at least, Beck is the '90s. And here we are at the decade's end, and what is he doing? Taking Prince's advice, for one thing. Midnite Vultures, Beck's fifth album, turns his mix-and-match madness into a pre-Millennial party.
Midnite Vultures isn't so much a step forward from his ground-breaking 1996 album, Odelay, as it is a step sideways -- kind of like the Beatles going from the psychedelia of Sgt. Pepper's to the rootsier, yet more experimental White Album. This time, Beck dumps most of the country blues, folk and '60s pop of Odelay for smooth Philly soul, James Brown funk and '70s power pop.
The results are great, and the move is a perfect one for Beck, who probably has as much in common with Prince as he does with Leadbelly anyway. On the album's best song, "Peaches And Cream," Beck adopts a Prince-like falsetto over a acid-tinged guitar riff and combines it with a slow and heavy groove that makes you want to fuck. Among other things, Beck tells us, "We're on the good ship Menáge á trois." Odelay this isn't.
The album's first song, "Sexx Laws," takes all the influences mentioned above and brews them into booty-shaking groove, as Beck announces, "I want to defy / the logic of all sex laws."
What's this? Beck, our favorite post-modern poet, he of such slabs of ironic detachment as "I'm a loser baby / so why don't you kill me?" utters a line that would spring from the lips of John Travolta's character in "Saturday Night Fever?" Is this some kind of joke? Has all that Odelay money gone to his head? Is this a parody? Is he serious? Or is it, as at least one critic has charged, a new form of minstrelsy -- that is, a white man affecting the mannerisms of a black man to mock black culture?
The answers are: yes, probably not, kind of, yes and no fucking way. Is Midnite Vultures parody? In some respects, yes. You can't take seriously a song like "Debra," a slo-jam R&B number on which Beck does a dazzling falsetto and promises the object of his affection, a J.C. Penny's clerk named Jenny, that he's going to take her "up to Glendale, for a real good meal."
But we're in a new age, where lampooning is thinly disguised homage. Take "Austin Powers." How many times do you think Mike Myers watched "Dr. No" or "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" growing up to get it so dead-on right? Same thing with Midnite Vultures. You get the idea that Beck was bobbing his head to "Funky Cold Medina" with the rest of us. Take the G-funk piano loops and loping bass of "Hollywood Freaks." Sure it would have sounded right at home on The Chronic. But let who among us hasn't dreamed of being a gangsta rapper for even a split second while watching the "Dre Day" video throw the first stone. I'm sure Beck thought to himself, "how cool would it be to do a G-funk song?" That certainly does not mean the album is making fun of black culture.
Sure "Debra" makes you laugh. And Beck nails genre forays on "Hollywood Freaks" and "Peaches And Cream" so well it makes you giddy. But this album's not a joke. It's too damn good.
Enough of that, though -- back to the music. There's nary a bad song on Midnite Vultures, which is amazing given all the different styles Beck attempts. "Get Real Paid" beeps and bops like the bastard child of the Talking Heads and Kraftwerk, while "Milk & Honey" soars like a Bachman-Turner Overdrive song (So this is what it would have sounded like if Big Star would have gotten a fat record contract and made a disco album).
"Broken Train," another of the album's many jewels, compresses all of the Stones' Aftermath into one song that shimmies with xylophone, harmonica, grungy guitar and funky rhythm. And with lines like "I'm glad I got my suit dry-cleaned / Before the riots started," Beck's lyrics border on genuine social commentary.
That might be the one element that pushes this album ahead of Odelay. Sure, a lot of it is funny, and a lot of it is about sex. (Beck boasts he's going to "feed you fruit that don't exist" and "leave graffiti where you've never been kissed" at one point.) But there seems to be a point to it all, more so than on Odelay. In the middle of the aforementioned G-funk of "Hollywood Freaks," Beck raps "Jockin' my Mercedes / Probably have my baby / Shop at Old Navy / He wish he was a lady." Maybe he's using the G-funk as a vehicle to point out the ridiculousness of a culture where teenage motherhood is a status symbol, and consumerism is making us rotten to the core. "Broken Train" could be a metaphor for our fucked-up society in general.
Maybe I'm reading too much into this. But I've got to think a guy that can make music this brilliant has got some meaning behind those surrealist lyrics. Or maybe that's just the mark of a truly great album. In a sprawling mess that's part party album, part joke, part social commentary, you see some shady reflection of yourself -- something that makes you think. Under those criteria, Midnite Vultures most definitely qualifies.
PATRICK KASTNER | Affectionately known as Cousin Patty (yes, it's a "Throw Momma From The Train" reference), Patrick Kastner is a designer for the Columbus Post-Dispatch.