36 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019
playfulness and humor. Beck’s music
operates in a similar way. It forces a
person to consider that, sometimes,
two things are true at the same time.
The world is grim and hilarious; the
future is bright and unthinkable; you
are sad, but you are dancing; you are
home, but it is not the same.
Critics tend to take Beck’s darker,
singer-songwriter records more seri-
ously, but he has found that capturing
true joy is often more difficult. “Wow,”
a song from his thirteenth album, “Col-
ors,” is built around a howling synthe-
sizer melody that recalls the Italian
composer Ennio Morricone. “Wow!”
Beck sings, dragging out the word. “It’s,
like, right now.” The production is op-
ulent; the sentiment is dopey. During
the first chorus, Beck utters the phrase
“Oh, wow!” He sounds so genuinely
dazzled that I regularly find myself
thinking of this when I need to be re-
minded of pleasure. “It’s like how peo-
ple talk about comedy being harder to
pull off than drama,” he told me. “How
do you make something levitate?”
B
eck has spent twenty-six years
making music that is complex in
form but scrappy in spirit. His work
is as likely to be featured in the cred-
its of “The Lego Movie 2” (“Super
Cool,” a collaboration with the pop
star Robyn and the comedy trio the
Lonely Island) as it is to appear on an
album of songs inspired by the Al-
fonso Cuarón film “Roma” (“Taran-
tula,” an echoing and apprehensive
electro-dirge). Though his earliest al-
bums are often described as dilapi-
dated assemblages, he has precise ideas
about craft and structure. At times, he
has leaned more deeply into funk and
R. & B., refining his falsetto and doing
the splits onstage. “I want to defy/The
logic of all sex laws,” he sang on the
single “Sexx Laws.” (The line was in-
spired by a verse in “Don’t U Know,”
an Ol’ Dirty Bastard song.) Like the
R. & B. singer Ginuwine, Beck has
an uncanny knack for writing lyrics
that totter between farcical and titil-
lating. “I’ll feed you fruit that don’t
exist,” he sang on “Nicotine & Gravy.”
There were hints of Beck’s scope
and ambition on “Mellow Gold,” his
first album for a major label, released
in 1994. The single “Loser,” which
reached No. 10 on the Billboard charts,
sounded like a refracted, postmodern
version of Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean
Homesick Blues.” Beck had the same
scavenging instinct as Dylan, but he
was mining from several more de-
cades; besides blues, country, gospel,
and folk, he incorporated elements of
hip-hop, disco, punk, and electronic
music. It’s odd to think that Beck’s
first few albums preceded the rise of
file sharing, because they so adroitly
reflect the thrill and terror of having
everything all at once. He is still the
musical figure who best anticipated
and reflects the reigning aesthetic of
our time: abundance.
Beck is five feet eight, slender, and
handsome, with delicate features. His
eyes are a soft turquoise, and have a
deep, searching quality. In conversa-
tion, he is funny, kind, and curious. He
was born on July 8, 1970, as Bek David
Campbell. He and his brother later
took their mother’s maiden name, Han-
sen, and Beck added the “c” to his first
name, with the hope that it might help
people pronounce it properly. “I still
got Brock, Breck, Beak,” he said. “I re-
member leaving a meeting with some
record executives, and one said, ‘Very
nice to meet you, Bic.’”
His father, David Campbell, is a
Los Angeles-based arranger and com-
poser, who started his career playing
viola on Carole King’s “Tapestry” and
has since worked for the Rolling Stones,
Garth Brooks, Metallica, and Adele.
He has also arranged the orchestral
parts on most of Beck’s records. As a
kid, Beck wasn’t entirely aware of what
his father did. “He never talked about
it,” he said. “Ten or fifteen years ago, I
bought a CD of ‘Tapestry,’ and I was
reading the credits and saw that my
dad was on there. So I was, like, ‘“Tap-
estry,” huh?’ It was just another session
to him.” Campbell was born in To-
ronto but moved to L.A. in the early
seventies, shortly after joining the
Church of Scientology.
In February, Beck filed for divorce
from the actress Marissa Ribisi, whom
he married in 2004. They have two
children. He described the experience
as heartbreaking. Ribisi’s family is also
active in the Church of Scientology,
and the question of Beck’s religious
affiliation has preoccupied the music
press for years; it is cited in nearly every
article written about him. “I’ve so de-
voted myself to music that it’s kind of
my main thing, and religion hasn’t been
a central part of my life,” he told me.
“There’s a misconception that I’m a
Scientologist. There was a period of
time, maybe in the early two-thousands,
where my family recommended I get
some counselling. But, beyond that, it
hasn’t been something I’ve actively
pursued.”
Though Beck and Ribisi’s marriage
is ending, “Hyperspace” doesn’t resem-
ble “Sea Change,” which he wrote in
the wake of another arduous breakup.
Some of its best songs are buoyant, al-
most ecstatic. “It’s not really a work of
it,” he said of the record’s relationship
to his personal life. In general, he is less
likely these days to pull material from
his own experience. “When I try to
shoehorn my life into a song, it gets re-
ally ham-fisted,” he said.
Beck’s mother, Bibbe Hansen, is a
performance artist and an actress. Her
father, Al Hansen, was a prominent
member of Fluxus, a community of in-
terdisciplinary artists interested in the
sublimity of the creative process. In 1945,
Hansen joined the military as a para-
trooper; the next year, while stationed
in Germany, he pushed a piano off the
roof of a building. The piano drop is
sometimes referred to as one of the first
“happenings”—fleeting, multimedia art
performances enacted outside of any
institutional context.
“My grandpa was a third-genera-
tion New Yorker, and tough as shit,”
Beck said. “Once, when I was rough-
housing with my best friend, we
knocked into one of his really big, im-
portant collages. It was a kite-shaped
piece, done on wood, and the bottom
broke off on my friend’s toe.” His
grandfather might have enjoyed that,
I told him. “He probably would have,”
Beck said. “He was a barroom brawler.
