34 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019
PROFILES
ECSTASY AND RUIN
Beck’s aesthetic of abundance.BYAMANDA PETRUSICH
W
hen Beck was a child, his
mother would take him and
his brother to the Los An-
geles County Museum of Art and ask
them to choose a favorite and a least
favorite piece. “I remember thinking,
That’s a lot of pressure,” he said last
month, in the atrium of the museum’s
Ahmanson Building, a few weeks be-
fore the release of his new album, “Hy-
perspace.” He often picked Millard
Sheets’s “Angel’s Flight,” an American
oil painting from 1931, as his favorite.
It shows two dark-haired women on
a small balcony overlooking Bunker
Hill, in downtown L.A. “Bunker Hill
is the neighborhood in all the old noir
films,” Beck said. “It was very pictur-
esque, kind of seedy, post-Victorian.
Then the nineteen-sixties came, and
the city dynamited it—they just blew
the whole hill up.”
Much of the museum’s campus—a
cluster of buildings interspersed with
open-air courtyards—will be demol-
ished early next year, to make way for
a contiguous structure. Beck, who is
forty-nine, was feeling vaguely nostal-
gic about the place. He wanted to take
a few photographs of the interior (the
mid-century brass clock by the eleva-
tors, the pebbled concrete floors) be-
fore it disappeared. He paused before
a stretch of worn oak panelling. “Lately,
I’ve been taking a lot of photos of
things like this,” he said. “Saying good-
bye to stuff from the past. Making way
for the new.”
He pulled out his phone and showed
me a black-and-white photo, taken in
one of the museum’s courtyards, of his
brother, Channing, at the age of five
or six, grinning beatifically at the cam-
era, his head slightly cocked. “Look at
that little pose he’s doing!” Beck said.
He swiped to a photo of himself, at
age seven or eight, wearing a home-
made Superman cape, with a plastic
six-shooter slung low around his waist.
He held an Oscar the Grouch pup-
pet. “This pretty much sums it up,” he
said, laughing. “Superman sheriff with
a Muppet.”
Since 1993, when he released his
first album, “Golden Feelings,” on cas-
sette, Beck’s music has varied so deeply
in style and tone that it is difficult to
tether him to anything other than Los
Angeles, where he has lived for nearly
all of his life. He has made fourteen
albums and won seven Grammys, in-
cluding one for Album of the Year, in
2014, for “Morning Phase,” a collec-
tion of elegant, down-tempo folk songs.
It is tempting to divide his music into
a handful of categories—mournful folk,
bedraggled hip-hop, postmodern sound
collage, sexy electro-pop—but the ma-
jority of his records fall somewhere
in between: Superman sheriff with a
Muppet. He can narrate a seduction
at a J. C. Penney in a slinking, Prince-
like falsetto, as on “Debra,” from 1999’s
“Midnite Vultures” (“I pick you up late
at night after work/I said, lady, step
inside my Hyundai/I’m gonna take
you up to Glendale/Gonna take you
for a real good meal”), or sing a raw
and quietly devastating chorus, as on
“Guess I’m Doing Fine,” from 2002’s
“Sea Change” (“It’s only lies that I’m
living/It’s only tears that I’m cry-
ing/It’s only you that I’m losing/Guess
I’m doing fine”). Neither mode feels
more authentic, though his work does
sometimes require listeners to inter-
rogate their own ideas about what they
believe to be more profound: ecstasy
or ruin.
At LACMA, we visited “Sound Sto-
ries,” an exhibition by the artist and
composer Christian Marclay, who used
the millions of videos publicly shared
on Snapchat to build a series of au-
diovisual installations. Beck was fa-
miliar with Marclay’s work. “He’s in-
credible,” he said. “I remember seeing
him on TV. He had done this thingwhere he had chopped up vinyl rec-
ords and glued them all together.” Both
Beck and Marclay have relied heavily
on the recontextualization of samples,
and tend to question received norms
about how music should be made and
distributed. In 1985, Marclay released
“Record Without a Cover,” a single-
track experimental album that was sold
without packaging—any scratches or
dents that the record accumulated
became part of its sound. The piece
suggested that the way most of us had
come to consume music, by listening
to a fixed recording, was unnecessarily
limiting. In 2012, Beck released “Song
Reader,” a boxed set that included
twenty pieces of sheet music and more
than forty illustrations. “Song Reader”
uncoupled the idea of music from the
idea of recordings—songs could be
social, they could be pliable, they could
be temporary.
“The Organ,” one of Marclay’s in-
stallations, featured a small, spotlit syn-
thesizer in a dark room. Each key cued
a different sound and projected a se-
ries of vertical images on a screen. Beck
patiently tried to teach me how to play
Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” so that we
might duet. “You’re getting it,” he said,
though I was certainly not getting it.
We moved on to “Talk to Me/Sing to
Me,” a room with forty-two iPhones
suspended from the ceiling. Each phone
invited visitors to talk or sing and, in
response, receive a blast of video, culled
from Snapchat, that in some way mir-
rored the sound and pose they’d just
made. Beck launched into a low, echo-
ing version of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of
Fire.” “I just got a guy with his shirt
off, talking in Portuguese,” he said.
It is easy to become cynical about
the cacophony of modern living, par-
ticularly when you are being bathed
in human skronk—all the showboat-
ing and gasbaggery of social media.
Yet Marclay’s work is charming in its