Beck - The Disinformation

Beck's new album, The Information, has received a curious critical response. Mostly positive, the reviews consistently claim that no, seriously, this is the good one. Maybe the best since Odelay. Isn't this how reviews for new Rolling Stones albums typically read? Best since Some Girls? (And sometimes, less enthusiastically, best since Tattoo You!)

2002's Sea Change was greeted as a masterpiece in most quarters when it came out, and I'll admit that it was a striking simulation of what it would sound like if Alex Chilton sang in a lower register and recorded an entire album of songs like "Kangaroo" from Big Star's Third. But the album gave out as the end approached, and suffered from samey-sounding tunes, not a typical Beck problem.

Then there was last year's entry, the "return to form" Guero album. Most reviews for the album read as if no one had enjoyed a Beck album since Odelay. This was a return to the cut-up sound collage style, true. But what it also was was a return to the near-complete blankness of Beck's Odelay style, always a problem for him, whether he's singing spacy folk tunes or rapping over a Dust Brothers production. Whereas his deliberately obscure antecedents like Dylan and Elvis Costello always at least imply some kind of meaning or general feeling in their songs, however difficult it may be to parse out amongst the rhyming dictionary games, Beck is as blank as can be nearly all the time, even if a song has some central image or narrative that's easy to comprehend. The only people who earnestly thought that Beck believed himself to be a "Loser" in 1994 were the Mr. Jones's writing the umpteenth "Gen X" article for Time or Newsweek.

I enjoyed Guero enough to probably give it a dozen or so spins. The hookarama we expect from him at his best is definitely there. I like it almost as much as I liked Odelay, which is to say, not as much as Mellow Gold, where Beck most effectively cultivated his poet-of-the-junkyard persona. For all of his wordplay, he rarely gives up a memorable phrase, probably because I'm not compelled to think about his meaning, having become so accustomed to his lack of any. On these last few albums, is there a "Drive-by body pierce" in the bunch? Sure, the hispanics in his neighborhood called him "Guero," I get it. But what's the relevance of telling us this? (And would I know it if not for the advance press from rock magazines?)

I can't help but compare Odelay and Guero unfavorably to the Beastie Boys' Dust-Brothers-produced masterpiece, Paul's Boutique. Paul's Boutique is a flashy tour-de-force, but it also has a clear message above the endless references and dense sample collage. The Beasties love New York. The Beasties love hip-hop. The Beasties love the larger culture that feeds their hip-hop. Paul's Boutique creates a kind of secret history of pop culture, where Superfly, Highway 61 Revisited, James at 16, and Galileo co-habitate. Maybe it's unfair to compare Beck's work to one of the best hip-hop albums of all time, but the Beasties, perhaps as much for their aesthetic as their color, have always stood apart from hip-hop as much as they stood in it, and Beck cultivated a similar alt-rock identified audience. And I can't claim to hear any such thematic consistency from Beck. He wants to have a party in the same sandbox, but he's not sure what he'll talk to you about when you come.

I'm annoyed by the gimmicks associated with the The Information. The do-it-yourself artwork, and the DVD of videos that I will never watch - they make for a nice hook in any lazy review or press piece on the new record, talking about how the process of creation was different for this album. Given that, you would think this record would sound substantially different. The truth is, it sounds to me pretty much like the last one. And I like it fine, but like nearly every Beck record before it, I find it blank, lacking in the content we expect from some suggestion of meaning. It's like my response to The New Pornographers - love the band, the melodies, and the hooks, don't have a blasted idea what Carl Newman or Neko Case are singing about and don't get a sense that Newman cares whether we do. Spin, curiously, has run a review that basically says this album finally reconciles the different sides of Beck on one album, which is almost exactly what Rob Sheffield said about Guero in Rolling Stone last year.

So the question with Beck, I think, is not the latest genre hop, or how much he balances the styles he's previously explored. The question is whether he cares enough to share of himself in any way that we can connect cerebrally or emotionally, and the answer, most of the time, is not much.