Beck Odelay
Album: #54 Odelay – Beck
“Got a devil’s haircut, in my mind”
Surrealism is the art of subconscious. It is taking those psychic impulses and letting them out to play. Post-Modernism is the art of de-construction. Odelay is André Breton playing a kazoo, over Don DeLillo attacking a guitar, Bertolt Brecht playing 12-bars on a turntable, Pynchon and Wallace watching in top-hats, while Nadja dances to sitar-jazz-hop.
Beck
Odelay, released in 1996, is everything about the ‘90s that no one thought was cool except critics at the time. Free-Association lyrics make their way down narrow alleys of the absurd among three-penny turntable operas and the most wonderful assortment of samples. Beck sings deadpan seriousness over often hilarious, unsettling musical vignettes. And sometimes he raps, spitting some mad-surdist, mad-lib Freudian jams.
Beck defines the cool from the shadows of the weird and absurd. His intentions may not be clear, but his expression is so entirely of him, that you’re immediate thought isn’t, “This trip-hop, jazz, screamo combo makes no sense,” but rather “Yeah, that sounds like Beck.”
This album is obsessed with 30 different intricate subjects that never put any effort at meeting. They’re Beck’s consciousness written in musical formats, from high-handed jazz to thick, sexy rock like “Devil’s Haircut,” to laidback “Where It’s At,” all dripped in some salacious, sizzlin’ irony that only the ‘90s could justify.
Beck sings deadpan seriousness over often hilarious, unsettling musical vignettes. And sometimes he raps, spitting some mad-surdist, mad-lib Freudian jams
Beck sings deadpan seriousness over often hilarious, unsettling musical vignettes. And sometimes he raps, spitting some mad-surdist, mad-lib Freudian jams.
It’s a wonderful sauce of Beck, and I aspire toward that kind of transcendental weirdness. “Devil’s Haircut” is about…something? But the music video is Beck as Jon Voight from Midnight Cowboy. The list of references running through the trigonometric oddballness of Beck’s lens is dizzying, electrifying, and terrifying.
The best part about the album is that I don’t even know what Beck is actually trying to do. For all I know, he’s like Flaubert and just trying to describe a certain shade of yellow. Or maybe he’s just having fun and doing it because he likes this shit.
Of all my aspirations, I find my devotion to the almighty weird to be the most honest. You can fault Beck for plenty, but being himself is not one. This music, for all its intentional emotional distance, affectation, and phonetic play, is purely of Beck.
So I approach life as Camus and Beefheart and Zappa and Beck: as a weirdo made of multitudes.
Beck contains multitudes, wound on the loop of a guitar string that’s way too tight, and probably about to snap. And that’s exactly how I prefer it.
Until she’s got a carburetor tied to the moon.
