Long Pauses

Tag: Music: Beck

  • Missing

    Missing

    File this one away under “Too Much Information.” I just spent the last two hours in my basement, listening to Beck’s Guero, reading a book called Fables of Fact: The New Journalism as New Fiction, and shaking my ass. I stopped dancing the day I stopped smoking pot, which was quite a while ago. Like, in the early-90s. Not that that thing I would do while standing next to 500 other people at a Widespread Panic show could properly be called “dancing.” It was more of close your eyes, shake your head, and rock on both knees kind of thing. But you get my point.

    So, tonight I spent two hours reading . . . while dancing . . . kind of. Which is a pretty odd thing to find oneself doing, I can promise you. And quite unexpected. Which says something for the ass-shakingness of Guero. There are some nice Sea Change-like melodies here, but this album is all about the beats. So much so, in fact, that it feels like the Dust Brothers are due for a co-credit or something. Anyway, “Missing” won Song of the Moment honors in a close race with “Black Tambourine” and “Hell Yes,” both of which, it must be said, are even more ass-shaking than “Missing” but not quite as perfect. All three sound even better in multi-channel.

  • Watching Music

    Maybe this is just a tangent from the cinephilia in a digital age post . . .

    I picked up two really interesting DVDs this week, Peter Gabriel’s Play and the deluxe edition of Beck’s Guero. Play is a comprehensive collection of Gabriel’s music videos, spanning all the way back to a clip for “Modern Love” from the first album. There are more than twenty videos in all, and, with only a few exceptions, all feature new multi-channel mixes from Daniel Lanois. Some are fairly subtle; others (“Shaking the Tree,” for example) are complete reimaginings of the songs.

    The deluxe Guero includes (if I recall correctly) four different mixes: stereo and 5.1 channel mixes, playable on all DVD players, and stereo and 5.1 high bit-rate mixes, playable only on DVD-Audio players. The standard DVD mixes are accompanied by abstract clips from video artist D-Fuse; the DVD-Audio mixes include still photos.

    Watching Play, I was struck by the consistency and determination with which Gabriel has pursued his career as a multi-media artist. He seems to have approached the making of each video as a genuine collaboration with visual artists, an attempt find something new in his music and in the video medium. Not every one of them is successful, of course, but all are interesting. Guero is something even more abstract. The videos are (as far as I can tell after one quick glance) free of narrative and in a kind of associative dialogue with the songs.

    Both discs are harbingers of things to come, though. I hope so, at least. We seem to be marching at a dizzying clip toward the fusion of media, and discs like Play and Guero offer us a taste of the media-gumbo that is likely to emerge. It’s fun to imagine what effect this might have on our visual literacy. Peter Gabriel brings artists like Robert LePage into our homes, and D-Fuse gives us art house abstraction. I need to think on this some more . . .

    Those multi-channel mixes are mind-blowers, by the way. Especially the DVD-Audio mix of Guero. I had no idea my home theater could sound like that.

  • Already Dead

    Already Dead

    Further (anecdotal) evidence that the record companies are pointing their fingers in the wrong direction: Sea Change is the first Beck album I have purchased, and I never would have done so had I not first listened to it via a file-sharing service. (By the way, Tom Petty also has a beef or two with the major labels.) Sea Change is a fantastic disc — right now it’s running a close second to Beth Orton’s Daybreaker for my Best of 2002. Beck has simplified both his songwriting and production, creating some odd mix of Graham Parsons and ELO. At the moment “Already Dead” is my favorite track, but there really isn’t a weak spot here.