Beck
Beck David Hansen (born Bek David Campbell; July 8, 1970), known mononymously as Beck, is an American musician, singer, songwriter, and record producer. He rose to fame in the early 1990s with his experimental and lo-fi style, and became known for creating musical collages of wide-ranging genres. He has musically encompassed folk, funk, soul, hip hop, electronic, alternative rock, country, and psychedelia. He has released 14 studio albums (three of which were released on indie labels), as well as several non-album singles and a book of sheet music.
This article is about the American musician. For other uses, see Beck (disambiguation).
Beck
- Musician
- singer
- songwriter
- record producer
1988–present
2
- David Campbell (father)
- Bibbe Hansen (mother)
- Vocals
- guitar
- bass guitar
- keyboards
- DGC
- Interscope
- Bong Load
- Fonograf
- Capitol
- K
- Sonic Enemy
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Beck gravitated towards hip hop and folk in his teens and began to perform locally at coffeehouses and clubs. He moved to New York City in 1989 and became involved in the city's anti-folk movement. Returning to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, he cut his breakthrough single "Loser", which became a worldwide hit in 1994, and released his first major album, Mellow Gold, the same year. Odelay, released in 1996, topped critic polls and won several awards. He released the country-influenced, twangy Mutations in 1998, and the funk-infused Midnite Vultures in 1999. The soft-acoustic Sea Change in 2002 showcased a more serious Beck, and 2005's Guero returned to Odelay's sample-based production. The Information in 2006 was inspired by electro-funk, hip hop, and psychedelia; 2008's Modern Guilt was inspired by '60s pop music; and 2014's folk-infused Morning Phase won Album of the Year at the 57th Grammy Awards. His 2017 album, Colors, won awards for Best Alternative Album and Best Engineered Album at the 61st Annual Grammy Awards. His fourteenth studio album, Hyperspace, was released on November 22, 2019. In 2022, Beck was nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
With a pop art collage of musical styles, oblique and ironic lyrics, and postmodern arrangements incorporating samples, drum machines, live instrumentation and sound effects, Beck has been hailed by critics and the public throughout his musical career as being among the most idiosyncratically creative musicians of 1990s and 2000s alternative rock. Two of Beck's most popular and acclaimed recordings are Odelay and Sea Change, both of which were ranked on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Beck is a four-time platinum artist; he has collaborated with several artists and has made several contributions to soundtracks.
Early life[edit]
Beck was born Bek David Campbell[1] in Los Angeles on July 8, 1970,[2] the son of American visual artist Bibbe Hansen and Canadian arranger, composer, and conductor David Campbell.[3] Bibbe Hansen grew up amid Andy Warhol's The Factory art scene of the 1960s in New York City and was a Warhol superstar.[3] She moved to California at age 17 and met David Campbell there.[4] Beck's maternal grandfather, artist Al Hansen was of Norwegian descent[5][6] and was a pioneer in the avant-garde Fluxus movement.[3] Beck's maternal grandmother was Jewish; he has said that he considers himself Jewish because he was "raised celebrating Jewish holidays".[7]
Beck was born in a rooming house near downtown Los Angeles. As a child he lived in a declining neighborhood near Hollywood Boulevard.[8] He remembers "By the time we left there, they were ripping out miles of houses en masse and building low-rent, giant apartment blocks."[4] The working-class family struggled financially, moving to Hoover and Ninth Street, a neighborhood populated primarily by Koreans and Salvadorian refugees.[4] He was sent for a time to live with his paternal grandparents in Kansas; he later remarked that he thought "they were kind of concerned" about his "weird" home life.[9] Since his paternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister, Beck grew up influenced by church music and hymns.[9] He also spent time in Europe with his maternal grandfather.[3]
After his parents separated when he was 10,[4] Beck stayed with his mother and brother Channing in Los Angeles, where he was influenced by the city's diverse musical offerings—everything from hip hop to Latin music and his mother's art scene—all of which would later reappear in his work.[10] Beck obtained his first guitar at 16 and became a street musician, often playing Lead Belly covers at Lafayette Park.[11] During his teens, Beck discovered the music of Sonic Youth, Pussy Galore, and X, but remained uninterested in most music outside the folk genre until many years into his career.[3][4] The first contemporary music that made a direct connection with Beck was hip hop, which he first heard on Grandmaster Flash records in the early 1980s.[4] Growing up in a predominantly Latin district, he found himself the only white child at his school, and quickly learned how to breakdance.[4] When he was 17, Beck grew fascinated after hearing a Mississippi John Hurt record at a friend's house,[12] and spent hours in his room trying to emulate Hurt's finger-picking techniques.[9] Shortly thereafter Beck explored blues and folk music further, discovering Woody Guthrie and Blind Willie Johnson.[12]
Feeling like "a total outcast", Beck dropped out of school after junior high.[12] He later said that although he felt school was important, he felt unsafe there.[8] When he applied to the new performing arts high school downtown, he was rejected.[13] His brother took him to post-Beat jazz places in Echo Park and Silver Lake. He hung out at Los Angeles City College perusing records, books, and old sheet music in the college's library. He used a fake ID to sit in on classes there, and he also befriended a literature instructor and his poet wife.[13] He worked at a string of menial jobs, including loading trucks and operating a leaf blower.[12]
Career[edit]
Early performances and first releases (1988–1993)[edit]
Beck began as a folk musician, switching between country blues, Delta blues, and more traditional rural folk music in his teenage years.[4] He began performing on city buses, often covering Mississippi John Hurt alongside original, sometimes improvisational compositions.[9] "I'd get on the bus and start playing Mississippi John Hurt with totally improvised lyrics. Some drunk would start yelling at me, calling me Axl Rose. So I'd start singing about Axl Rose and the levee and bus passes and strychnine, mixing the whole thing up", he later recalled.[9] He was also in a band called Youthless that hosted Dadaist-inspired freeform events at city coffee shops.[4] "We had Radio Shack mics and this homemade speaker and we'd draft people in the audience to recite comic books or do a beatbox thing, or we'd tie the whole audience up in masking tape," Beck recalled.[4]
In 1989, Beck caught a bus to New York City with little more than $8.00 and a guitar.[9] He spent the summer attempting to find a job and a place to live with little success.[9] Beck eventually began to frequent Manhattan's Lower East Side and stumbled upon the tail end of the East Village's anti-folk scene's first wave.[3] Beck became involved in a loose posse of acoustic musicians—including Cindy Lee Berryhill, Kirk Kelly, Paleface, and Lach headed by Roger Manning—whose raggedness and eccentricity placed them well outside the acoustic mainstream.[12][14] "The whole mission was to destroy all the clichés and make up some new ones," said Beck of his New York years. "Everybody knew each other. You could go up onstage and say anything, and you wouldn't feel weird or feel any pressure."[14] Inspired by that freedom and by the local spoken-word performers, Beck began to write free-associative, surrealistic songs about pizza, MTV, and working at McDonald's, turning mundane thoughts into songs.[14] Beck was roommates with Paleface, sleeping on his couch and attending open mic nights together.[15] Daunted by the prospect of another homeless New York winter, Beck returned to his home of Los Angeles in early 1991.[12][16] "I was tired of being cold, tired of getting beat up," he later remarked. "It was hard to be in New York with no money, no place ... I kinda used up all the friends I had. Everyone on the scene got sick of me."[9]
Back in Los Angeles, Beck began to work at a video store in the Silver Lake neighborhood, "doing things like alphabetizing the pornography section".[9] He began performing in arthouse clubs and coffeehouses such as Al's Bar and Raji's.[3][9][12] In order to keep indifferent audiences engaged in his music, Beck would play in a spontaneous, joking manner.[17] "I'd be banging away on a Son House tune and the whole audience would be talking. So maybe out of desperation or boredom, or the audience's boredom, I'd make up these ridiculous songs just to see if people were listening," he later remarked.[18] Virtually an unknown to the public and an enigma to those who met him, Beck would hop onstage between acts in local clubs and play "strange folk songs", accompanied by "what could best be described as performance art" while sometimes wearing a Star Wars stormtrooper mask.[12] Beck met someone who offered to help record demos in his living room, and he began to pass cassette tapes around.[12]
Eventually, Beck gained key boosters in Margaret Mittleman, the West Coast's director of talent acquisitions for BMG Music Publishing, and the partners behind independent record label Bong Load Custom Records: Tom Rothrock, Rob Schnapf, and Brad Lambert.[3] Schnapf saw Beck perform at Jabberjaw and felt he would suit their small venture.[12] Beck expressed a loose interest in hip hop and Rothrock introduced him to Carl Stephenson, a record producer for Rap-A-Lot Records.[12][19] In 1992, Beck visited Stephenson's home to collaborate with him. The result—the slide-sampling hip hop track "Loser"—was a one-off experiment that Beck set aside, going back to his folk songs, making his home tapes such as Golden Feelings, and releasing several independent singles.[12]
Mellow Gold, and independent albums (1993–1994)[edit]
By 1993, Beck was living in a rat-infested shed near a Los Angeles alleyway with little money.[9] Bong Load issued "Loser" as a single in March 1993 on 12" vinyl with only 500 copies pressed.[20] Beck felt that "Loser" was mediocre, and only agreed to its release at Rothrock's insistence.[21] "Loser" unexpectedly received radio airplay, starting in Los Angeles, where college radio station KXLU was the first to play it,[22][20] and later on Santa Monica College radio station KCRW, where radio host Chris Douridas played the song on Morning Becomes Eclectic, the station's flagship music program. "I called the record label that day and asked to have Beck play live on the air", Douridas said. "He came in that Friday, rapped to a tape of 'Loser' and did his song 'MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack.'"[12] That night, Beck performed at the Los Angeles club Cafe Troy to a packed audience and talent scouts from major labels.[12] The song then spread to Seattle through KNDD The End, and KROQ-FM began playing the song on an almost hourly basis.[20] As Bong Load struggled to press more copies of "Loser", Beck was beset with offers to sign with major labels.[23] During the bidding war in November, Beck spent several days in Olympia, Washington, recording material with Calvin Johnson of Beat Happening, which would later see release the following year on Johnson's K Records as One Foot in the Grave.[24]
A fierce bidding war ensued, with Geffen Records A&R director Mark Kates signing Beck in December 1993 amid intense competition from Warner Bros. and Capitol.[12][24] Beck's non-exclusive contract with Geffen allowed him an unusual amount of creative freedom, with Beck remaining free to release material through such small, independent labels as Flipside, which issued the sprawling, 25-track collection of pre-"Loser" recordings titled Stereopathetic Soulmanure on February 22 the following year.[12][24] By the time Beck released his first album for Geffen, the low-budget, genre-blending Mellow Gold on March 1,[12] "Loser" was already in the top 40 and its video in MTV's Buzz Bin.[8] "Loser" quickly ascended the charts in the U.S., reaching a peak of number ten on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and topping the Modern Rock Tracks chart.[25] The song also charted in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and throughout Europe. Beck's newfound position of attention led to his characterization as the "King of Slackers", as the media dubbed him the center of the new so-called "slacker" movement.[26] Critics, feeling it the essential follow-up to Radiohead's "Creep",[24] found vacantness in the lyrics of "Loser" strongly associated with Generation X, although Beck himself strongly contested his position as the face of the "slacker" generation: "Slacker my ass. I mean, I never had any slack. I was working a $4-an-hour job trying to stay alive. That slacker stuff is for people who have the time to be depressed about everything."[9]
Backlash and Odelay (1994–1997)[edit]
Feeling as though he was "constantly trying to prove myself",[8] Beck suffered a backlash, with skeptics denouncing him as a self-indulgent fake and the latest marketing opportunity.[27] In the summer of 1994, Beck was struggling and many of his fellow musicians thought he had lost his way.[4] Combined with Loser's wildly popular music video and the world tour, Beck reacted believing the attention could not last, resulting in a status as a "one-hit wonder". At other concerts, crowds were treated to twenty minutes of reggae or Miles Davis or jazz-punk iterations of "Loser".[13] At one-day festivals in California, he surrounded himself with an artnoise combo. The drummer set fire to his cymbals; the lead guitarist "played" his guitar with the strings faced towards his body; and Beck changed the words to "Loser" so that nobody could sing along.[4] "I can't tell you how many times I was looking at faces that were looking back at me with complete bewilderment—or just pointing and shaking their heads and laughing—while performing during that period," he later recalled.[28] Despite this, Beck gained the respect of his peers, such as Tom Petty and Johnny Cash, and created an entire wave of bands determined to recapture the Mellow Gold sound.[29] Feeling his previous releases were just collections of demos recorded over the course of several years, Beck desired to enter the studio and record an album in a continuous linear fashion, which became Odelay.[28]
Beck blends country, blues, rap, jazz and rock on Odelay, the result of a year and half of feverish "cutting, pasting, layering, dubbing, and, of course, sampling".[11] Each day, the musicians started from scratch,[30] often working on songs for 16 hours straight.[11] Odelay's conception lies in an unfinished studio album Beck first embarked on following the success of "Loser", chronicling the difficult time he experienced: "There was a cycle of everyone dying around me," he recalled later.[29] He was constantly recording, and eventually put together an album of somber, orchestrated folk tunes; one that, perhaps, "could have been a commercial blockbuster along with similarly themed work by Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails and Nirvana".[29] Instead, Beck plucked one song from it—the Odelay album closer "Ramshackle"—and shelved the rest ("Brother" and "Feather In Your Cap" were, however, later released as B-sides).[4][29] Beck was introduced to the Dust Brothers, producers of the Beastie Boys' album Paul's Boutique, whose cut-and-paste, sample-heavy production suited Beck's vision of a more fun, accessible album. After a record executive explained that Odelay would be a "huge mistake", he spent many months thinking "that I'd blown it forever".[13]
Odelay was released on June 18, 1996, to commercial success and critical acclaim. The record produced several hit singles including "Where It's At", "Devils Haircut", and "The New Pollution",[31] and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Album of the Year in 1997, winning a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album as well as a Grammy Award for Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for "Where It's At". During one busy week in January 1997, he landed his Grammy nominations, appeared on Saturday Night Live and Howard Stern, and did a last-minute trot on The Rosie O'Donnell Show. The combined buzz gave Odelay a second wind, leading to an expanded fan base and additional exposure[18] Beck enjoyed but, like several executives at Geffen, was bewildered by the success of Odelay. He would often get recognized in public, which made him feel strange. "It's just weird. It doesn't feel right. It doesn't feel natural to me. I don't think I was made for that. I was never good at that," he later told Pitchfork.[28] Odelay sold two million copies and put "one-hit wonder" criticisms to rest. During this time, he contributed the song "Deadweight" to the soundtrack of the film A Life Less Ordinary (1997).[32]
Musical style[edit]
Beck's musical style has been considered alternative[130] and indie.[131] He has played many of the instruments in his music himself.[132] Beck has also done some remixes for fellow artists, notably David Bowie and Björk. He has been known to synthesize several musical elements together in his music, including folk, psychedelia, electronic, country, Latin music, hip hop, funk, soul, blues, noise music, jazz, art pop and many types of rock.[133][134] Because of this unconventional approach, Beck has been described as a postmodern musician.[135] He has also taken music from Los Angeles as a reference point in his songs.[133]
Pitchfork Media applauded Midnite Vultures, saying, "Beck wonderfully blends Prince, Talking Heads, Paul's Boutique, 'Shake Your Bon-Bon', and Mathlete on Midnite Vultures, his most consistent and playful album yet." The review commented that his mix of "goofy piety and ambiguous intent" helped the album.[136] A Beck song called "Harry Partch", a tribute to the composer of the same name and his "corporeal" music, employs Partch's 43-tone scale.[137]
Art career[edit]
During 1998, Beck's art collaborations with his grandfather Al Hansen were featured in an exhibition titled "Beck & Al Hansen: Playing With Matches", which showcased solo and collaborative collage, assemblage, drawing and poetry works.[138] The show toured from the Santa Monica Museum of Art to galleries in New York City and Winnipeg, Manitoba. Beck chose Winnipeg due to a family connection, as his grandfather gave their famility stability through his work as a street car conductor in Winnipeg.[139] A catalog of the show was published by Plug in Editions/Smart Art Press.[140]
Personal life[edit]
Beck's nine-year relationship with designer Leigh Limon and their breakup is said to have inspired his 2002 album, Sea Change.[141] He wrote most of the songs for the album in one week after the breakup.[142] In April 2004, shortly before the birth of their son, Beck married actress Marissa Ribisi, the twin sister of actor Giovanni Ribisi.[143][144] Their daughter was born in 2007.[58] Beck filed for divorce from Ribisi on February 15, 2019.[145] Their divorce was finalized on September 3, 2021.[146]
Beck has described himself as both Jewish[7] and a Scientologist, but no longer identifies as the latter.[147][148] Through his parents, he has been involved in Scientology for most of his life; his ex-wife, Marissa, is also a second-generation Scientologist.[149] He publicly acknowledged his affiliation for the first time in a New York Times Magazine interview on March 6, 2005.[38][10] Further confirmation came in an interview with the Sunday Tribune in June 2005, where he stated, "Yeah, I'm a Scientologist. My father has been a Scientologist for about 35 years, so I grew up in and around it." Despite this, Beck disavowed previous reports of his being a Scientologist in a November 2019 interview with the Sydney Morning Herald and said, "I think there's a misconception that I'm a Scientologist. I'm not a Scientologist. I don't have any connection or affiliation with it."[148] He added that "I was raised celebrating Jewish holidays, and I consider myself Jewish."[150]
Beck's mother is former Andy Warhol The Factory collaborator, artist/writer/performer Bibbe Hansen.[151][152] His siblings are fiber artist Channing Hansen (born in 1972 in Los Angeles)[153] and poet Rain Whittaker.[154][151]
Beck sustained a spinal injury while filming the music video for 2005's "E-Pro". The incident was severe enough to curtail his touring schedule for a few years, but he has recovered.[69][155]
Appearances in media[edit]
The 1986 punk rock musical film Population: 1, starred Tomata du Plenty of The Screamers and featured a young Beck in a small non-speaking role.[156] Beck also appears in Southlander (2001), an American independent film by Steve Hanft and Ross Harris.[157]
Beck has performed on Saturday Night Live seven times. During his 2006 performance in the Hugh Laurie episode, Beck was accompanied by the puppets that had been used onstage during his world tour. He has made two cameo appearances as himself on Saturday Night Live: one in a sketch about medicinal marijuana, and one in a VH1 Behind the Music parody that featured "Fat Albert & the Junkyard Gang".[158] Beck performed a guest voice as himself on Matt Groening's animated show Futurama, in the episode "Bendin' in the Wind".[159] He performed in episode 10 of the fourth season of The Larry Sanders Show, in which the producer character Artie (Rip Torn) referred to him as a "hillbilly from outer space".[160] He also made a very brief voice appearance in the 1998 cartoon feature film The Rugrats Movie,[161] and guest-starred as himself in a 1997 episode of Space Ghost Coast to Coast titled "Edelweiss".[162]
On January 22, 2010, Beck appeared on the last episode of The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien as a backup guitarist for a Will Ferrell-led rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird" alongside ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons, Ben Harper, and O'Brien himself on guitar.[163][164] On March 1, 2014, Beck was the musical guest on a Saturday Night Live episode hosted by Jim Parsons. Beck also appeared as himself, in the 2017 film The Circle, giving a musical performance of the song "Dreams".