Beck No strings
HUCK: So... The Information. Is there a central theme to your new album?
BECK: Oh... I dunno... it’s a bit all over. I mean, to me it just captures a bit of the atmosphere of the moment... of the last three years that I've been writing these songs. The desire, sort of, for relief or escape but at the same time a sort of sense of things impending... a faint, distant dread. Paranoia in the air, all these things colouring life.
HUCK: Do you mean generally or just for yourself?
BECK: I’m just talking about walking down the street where I live. The climate, y’know. All the intangibles that just go in the music.
HUCK: You live in Los Angeles. So you feel that the atmosphere in LA at the moment is one of impending doom?
BECK: No, I just think it’s in the air... that there’s a bit of that in the air. ‘Cos we’re constantly... Code Orange today. Today it’s Code Yellow or whatever. In America they’re constantly telling us what our threat level is and all the things that are going to happen to us. I don’t know how it is over in Europe as much, but in America there’s a lot of fear-mongering.
HUCK: Famously, your lyrics are routinely described as ‘oblique’. Do you feel the lyrics on The Information are more easily understandable than in your previous work?
BECK: Um... yeah... I mean they’re... I have songs that are more simplistic and direct. I don’t write songs... I don’t write anything that doesn’t mean something to me. And that kind of dismissal... I mean, I don’t know anybody who tells me that. It just seems lazy to me. ‘Cos if you do that you’re dismissing two-thirds of literature out there. Literature, poetry could be characterised as oblique. But, in fact, it uses language in a way that isn’t conversational. It’s a different... it’s transmitting reality or a viewpoint or a concept in a wider sphere. That’s what I’m influenced by. I came up reading The Beats and French symbolists and all that, so... y’know. And then hip hop... hip hop doesn’t always say what it means but it means what it says. And it can use language and words to convey an atmosphere, a concept or these aggregations of meanings that... um... y’know... taken out of context don’t mean anything literally. But together they convey a sense of where the person’s coming from. What the person’s attitude is. The temperature of the room. What the... the... angle of the lighting is. These are the things you can’t articulate in, “Baby, I miss you.” It takes something a little more sophisticated. We’re limited by language, but, as a lyricist, you try to use it in a way that isn’t clichéd and tired and say something new with it. And I try hard. If I can.
HUCK: Your critical standing is somewhat complex. On the one hand, your albums have all got good reviews and you’re well respected. On the other, journalists accuse you of writing nonsense rhymes and then Midnite Vultures...
BECK: [Interrupting]What are these nonsense rhymes?
HUCK: Um, off the top of my head... [pause]… “Heads are hanging from the garbageman trees / Mouthwash jukebox gasoline.”
BECK: That describes the scene to me. I dunno, there’s no standard way to write something... sometimes you can’t describe something. You could say ‘the dirty trees’ but that’s not as interesting. You could say, “The trees are half-dead and covered in pollution and have old shoes and trash thrown in ‘em, like the trees on the street where I grew up,” but I just call ‘em ‘garbageman trees’. It’s lyrical license."
HUCK: And what does ‘devil's haircut’ mean?
BECK: [Sounding bored] It’s a metaphor for the evils of vanity... Er, and it's the kind of phrasing you hear in an old blues song. These old Delta blues songs I’d listen to endlessly as a teenager. Just a phrase that came up out of the air and I wrote a song about it... maybe about... I dunno... some of the malaise that culture can lull you into.
HUCK: So are there any songs on The Information that you feel will give the listener a way into your take on the ‘faint, distant dread’ of the last three years?
BECK: ‘Dark Star’, ‘Elevator Music’. A lot of these songs sum up something for me. Trying to achieve some kind of emotional quality in these hip hop songs, these songs with beats. Trying to put some kind of bridge between a record like Sea Change and Odelay... and something new, maybe. Maybe just a new hybrid... a new... y’know. And some of these songs plug into that.
HUCK: One subject that I know you must get sick of being asked about is...
BECK: Scientology [interrupts]. Yeah, because everybody prefaces it the same way. I have no problem talking about it. It’s something I grew up around. My father’s been a scientologist since the mid-sixties. It’s just been a kind of thing in my life for years - a thing that’s just been positive and... y’know... I’ve seen it help him and my friends, and it’s something that I’ve drawn on.
HUCK: Is there a simple way to explain Scientology to we laypeople?
BECK: Yeah, it’s just a set of ideas and works that are just practically applicable, y’know? There’s areas that deal with education, there’s areas that deal with various aspects of addressing problems in society like drug rehabilitation... extensive drug and programmes for prisons, to help prisoners get on track. Just a lot of humanitarian efforts, y’know? A lot of aspects. It covers a lot of territory. It’s really a resource.
HUCK: But what about the public view of Scientology as a mixture of fascination and suspicion? Famous Scientologists behave like it’s a secret society, like the Freemasons, or those crazy monks in The Da Vinci Code.
BECK: No, it’s not. It’s wide open. Whenever I’ve been the door’s open and there’s people eating lunch there. There’s hotels you can stay in. There’s an old hotel in Hollywood where they have a centre and you can do courses there. There’s nothing closed about it. That’s the truth of it. Their perception is from something they read third- or fourth-hand. It’s not the reality of it.
HUCK: As a teen, you dropped out of high school and embarked on a hobo period, travelling, busking, doing shitty jobs to get by and, legend has it, spending one rock-bottom phase living in a garden shed. Can you tell us about that period of your life?
BECK: It’s like any life experience – it’s just formative, y’know? I feel like I got to experience some of the freedom of the world, and some of the brutality. Some of the coldness and... misery. But also, being able to go into a strange place and find friends and people who are empathetic. There’s pockets of creativity and places where you can put down roots and do something interesting.
HUCK: But you were raised in LA and your parents were creative, bohemian people with plenty of contacts. It would’ve seemed easier to just stay at home and fast-track your way to creative contentment and success. Was it about putting yourself through some hardship in order to gain greater life experience?
BECK: Not really. My family lived in the barrio in LA. It was fairly rough, and I was just working menial jobs. I was working in a factory down in Watts. Went to the city college for a while. I just didn't have any prospects. It was either travel or work at the video store.
HUCK: Where and what were the key experiences of that time?
BECK: I mostly went to New York. There was a period when I went to Seattle for a while, and I spent a summer in San Francisco. New York was the biggest thing for me. That’s where I started playing music and performing. I fell into a small scene of songwriters.
HUCK: The anti-folk scene?
BECK: Exactly.
HUCK: But you also visited your grandfather, Fluxus artist Al Hansen, in Germany.
BECK: Yeah. My grandfather lived in a little flat above a bicycle factory and... he found this group of Italian kids who he’d taken under his wing and they let me sleep on their floor. I hadn’t seen him in years. I was broke and he was broke, but he got drunk one night with this Italian art dealer who ended up stiffing him and not paying him, but they were getting sentimental about children and he talked my granddad into sending me a plane ticket. He found me living in some wretched rooming house in the east side of New York, and the next thing I knew I was out there and stayed there for a while. He had a little basement art gallery called The Ultimate Gallery, which was kind of a meeting-place for artists and happenings and things.
HUCK: Did you ever fit in there?
BECK: I was like his weird cowboy grandson, playing Hank Williams songs while they were smoking hash and making art.
Special thanks to The Stool Pigeon, www.thestoolpigeon.com. Beck’s new album, The Information
This story originally appeared in Huck #003.
Subscribe to HUCK for five issues for only £15 (UK) / £25 (Europe) / £40 (Rest of the World).
