The New Yorker - USA (2019-12-02)

38 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019

TO BURNTHROUGH WHEREYO U ARE NOT YET

Those who take on risk are not those

Who bear it. The sign said to profit

As they do, trade around the one

Particular. Let them credit what you hunt,

Let future perform. Results are for your

Children anyway; returns can be long

To notice, and when wrong, will right

Unless the drawdown is steep, or of your own

Doing. If only to have known then the now:

The thesis did not revert, never worked;

You did not move

Except to the already—

And as the prodigy breaks from the pack,

Disrupts into the new for just one more

the buildings where Beck was living.
Surely, I said, all of this had to have
been frightening for him. He shrugged.
“It was just the world I knew,” he said.
Beck recalled a time, as a teen-ager,
when he attempted to cut through
MacArthur Park. He was accosted on
all sides by what he thought were zom-
bies. “It was ‘Night of the Living Crack-
head,’” he said. Things were no less
treacherous elsewhere in the area. “The
one store that was nearby was the
7-Eleven, but you didn’t go down there,
because there would be fourteen-year-
olds with steel pipes.”
He is not precious about the old
places, but each time we turned the
corner on some new, gentrified pocket
he appeared briefly befuddled. At the
corner of Sixth Street and South La
Brea Avenue, we came upon one of
those expansive new microbreweries
that suffocate some part of the soul.
His eyes grew wide. “What the hell is
that?” he said. “Look at that thing! That
does not belong here.”
We pulled up outside the home
where his family lived when he was
born: a pinkish, two-story rooming
house with a pair of rickety-looking
front porches and an iron fence looped
shut by several feet of thick chain. “We
lived right there in the front room.
There were probably ten other people
living here,” he said. We drove a few
more blocks. “I’m taking you to an area
that’s ungentrifiable,” he said. When
Beck was older, his mother qualified
for Section 8 public housing. Most of
the homes on his old block had either
been torn down or were boarded up
and awaiting demolition. Then we
found it: a squat, yellowing bungalow
with a broken vacuum cleaner out front.
Some roof tiles were missing. “Wow,”
he said, shifting the car into park. “It’s
the last one standing.” We watched a
man come out and walk down the side-
walk. “I guarantee you, in another year
and a half, this will be gone.”
The area is one of the most densely
populated parts of Los Angeles, and
its sheer saturation is evident in Beck’s
early lyrics. He tried to learn Spanish
when he was younger, but he was
clowned on so relentlessly in school
that he stopped. “They’d just be cry-
ing, in hysterics,” he said. “‘Oh, my God,
who is this güero?’ So I just shut up.”

In 2005, he titled an album “Guero”—

Chicano slang for a fair-skinned or

light-haired person—and on “Qué

Onda Guero” (or, roughly, “What’s up,

white boy?”) he evoked his old neigh-

borhood over a loping beat co-pro-

duced by the Dust Brothers: “Sleeping

on the sidewalk with a Burger King

crown/Never wake them up, más cer-

veza/Till the rooster crows, vatos ver-

gallos,” he sings. The image is neither

nonsense nor metaphor. “In the morn-

ing, I would be stepping over eight guys

who were sleeping on the sidewalk,” he

recalled. “And some of them would

have on Burger King crowns.”

There are still vestiges of the old

streets: barbershops, all-night diners,

botanicas. “All the shop signs were

hand-painted,” he said. “It was almost

like folk art. There would be a paint-

ing of a toilet-paper roll. And each store

would be at least three things, like: used

furniture, dry cleaning, and taxes.”

Beck stopped attending school when

it grew too dangerous. “I was a little bit

of a target,” he said. He became a fast

runner, and learned how to be invisi-

ble. “They opened this performing-arts

high school downtown, and I applied

to get in, and they didn’t accept me.”

He paused. “I don’t want to glorify what

I did. I think school is really important,

and the school where I was probably

had amazing teachers.” By then, Beck’s

family was living in a three-hundred-

and-fifty-square-foot, two-room apart-

ment. “I slept under the dining-room

table,” he said. “My brother slept on

the couch.”

He started taking the bus down-

town each day, to the Central Library.

There was an entire room of musical

scores, so he taught himself how to read

music, sometimes practicing on a piano

in the foyer of his apartment building.

His tastes were shaped by the city: the

ranchera music of his neighborhood,

the punk and New Wave he heard on

the radio, the hip-hop he encountered

on the street. He recalled taking a city

bus that went from South Central up

Vermont Avenue toward Los Feliz. “I

would wait for the bus right here,” he

said, pointing toward the corner of

Eighth Street and Vermont. “I would

get on, and it would be Grandmaster

Flash, or whatever the cool rap thing

of the moment was, playing on a boom

box on the back of the bus.”

He became interested in American

vernacular music, particularly country

blues, the acoustic songs recorded by

indigent Southern musicians, between

about 1929 and 1935. “One Foot in the

Grave,” Beck’s fourth album, features