least pretending not to give a shit about
anything) was cool. I’ll cop to some
nostalgia for the vibe.
For Beck, though, this was not so
much affect as reality. The chorus of
“Loser”—“I’m a loser, baby, so why don’t
you kill me?”—seemed slyly defeatist, a
rallying cry for the slacker Zeitgeist, and
it briefly turned Beck into a Gen X
pinup. But the characterization was fun-
damentally off. Beck had a different van-
tage—coming of age as a güero in a
largely Latino, low-income neighbor-
hood, in the recesses of a corrupt and
violent city—compared with that of
most of his peers. Even “Loser” begins
with disconnection: “In the time of
chimpanzees, I was a monkey,” he spits.
Beck’s early lyrics were seen as a ran-
dom, ironic reflection of the MTV aes-
thetic—the jump cuts, the onslaught of
arbitrary images. In truth, he fretted over
them, as a poet might fuss with a line.
“At the time, I thought that I just hadn’t
done it well enough,” he said. “That I
had failed. People used to call me this
pop-culture junk surfer. I liked vision-
ary language that had a lot of really con-
densed imagery, where words could spark
these almost gemlike refractions. I
thought most song lyrics were really
throwaway and generic. I wanted to try
and populate my lyrics with really alive,
original, surprising language. Journalists
would be, like, ‘Well, you know, your lyr-
ics don’t really mean anything. You’re
just playing with a bunch of random
words you’ve thrown together.’ And I’d
be, like, Ah, man. I used to torture my-
self over those words. You know, how
do I fit this image that I have in my
mind into one line? How do I evoke this
whole world in five words?”O
ne afternoon, Beck invited me to
the Capitol Records Building, in
Hollywood, a white, thirteen-story
circular tower designed to look like re-
cords piled on a turntable spindle. We
met in Studio B. “Most of the strings
for my records were done in here,” he
said, gesturing around the room. He
tends to edit the orchestral parts of his
songs spontaneously. “It’s a lot of sim-
plifying,” he said. “‘Oh, that chord’s too
thick. That melody sounds like a bad
soundtrack.’” He finds working with
his father to be simple and enjoyable.
“There’s no ceremony to it at all,” he said.
“It’s ‘Hey, can you do this?’ ‘Yeah, O.K.’”One of Beck’s engineers, David
Greenbaum, had brought a heap of hard
drives. Greenbaum estimated that they
contained hundreds of hours of unre-
leased material. “It’s kind of endless,”
Beck said. He and Greenbaum cued up
some mixes: alternate tracks from “Hy-
perspace,” even more songs inspired by
“Roma,” old demos, a series of heavy, spi-
ralling, Kraftwerk-esque songs for an un-
finished record that he had thought of
titling “Rococo.” The breadth of the ma-
terial was dizzying. His vocal range alone
is difficult to pin down: a falsetto, a
clipped rap. One deep, clear, ringing note.
“There’s nobody like him,” Green-
baum told me later. “No one else goes
to the lengths that he does.” He de-
scribed Beck’s process in the studio as
exhaustive. “He’ll try a gazillion differ-
ent versions and approaches, just to see
if he can beat what he’s already got. I
find it admirable that, no matter how
far down the road he goes, if he’s not
making it better, he will happily return
to the original idea in its original state.”
Campbell, Beck’s father, said that
sometimes a piece will transform en-
tirely between the recording of the string
arrangements and the release of the
song. “The things I worked on will be
in there, but in a new way,” he said. “It’s
always, ‘Wow! This is a whole differ-
ent song.’ It’s so refreshing.”
As a teen-ager, Beck loved film, es-
pecially the humor and audacity of the
European auteurs: “Fellini, Godard,
Truffaut, Antonioni, Buñuel,” he said.
“‘Odelay’ is me trying to Fellini the
neighborhood where I grew up.” His
favorite directors incubate an almost
hallucinogenic feeling, twisting the mun-
dane parts of an ordinary day into what
Beck described as a series of “wild, vi-
sionary, poetic moments.”
“I didn’t understand those films at all,”
he said. “I’d be, like, ‘What is happening? ’
But, at the same time, I knew something
really incredible was happening.”
Beck’s music is typically classified
as pop—in the past decade, especially,
he has drifted more toward the sorts
of hulking anthems that are discern-
ible over the din of the beer tent at
giant outdoor festivals—but it can just
as easily be slotted into the avant-garde
canon, alongside work by other artists
who stack distinct images in chimeri-
“It’ll never be ready in time.” cal ways. When I texted him a short