The Playlists, Vol. 3: My Book of Beck
Sometime between 2016 and 2018 I saw U2 in New Orleans. It was a great show, but what put the whole night on top for me was seeing Beck…
The Playlists, Vol. 3: My Book of Beck
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
Sometime between 2016 and 2018 I saw U2 in New Orleans. It was a great show, but what put the whole night on top for me was seeing Beck open for U2. Beck had been on my radar for some time by then, but he was mostly a background figure. His band jammed through their entire set that night, and since then I’ve been a fan.
Until about a two weeks ago I had exactly one Beck playlist in iTunes: The Best of Beck:
After listening to it again, I realized I wanted to wrap my head around Beck’s musical diversity, so I toured through Beck’s discography as available on iTunes. It is incomplete, but it does include most of his studio albums and a number of singles and EPs. Then I listened through Beck’s discography a second time, trying to create new playlists that sorted out his music by genre.
To some degree, sorting Beck’s music by genre is an impossible task. For example, his first big single, “Loser,” consists of a blues lick played on a slide acoustic guitar over a rock rhythm with rap and sung vocals. What I just described sounds like a Frankenstein’s monster of a song, but it hangs together. Many, many of his songs are like this, with his 1996 album Odelay possibly being his best work in this direction.
But after listening through a few times, I felt like I could still identify musical origins of sorts for him, which is folk and the blues. His early work is often described as “anti-folk,” which given the history of the genre makes sense, but anti-folk of the 80s and 90s isn’t too different from Bob Dylan of 1962–1964. I grew up listening to people wonder who would be the next Bob Dylan. It’s a ridiculous question, really, but after listening, I felt like Beck was cut from the same cloth as Dylan with his wittily-written, highly original early folk and blues:
Beck moves from here into his own version of alternative rock which, as described above, is generally a hybrid of rock, folk, rap, and blues:
Bob Dylan’s musical project is I believe representing and preserving American musical forms that predate the 1960s. He did of course move forward into rock and country, but he also moved backwards again into folk and the great American songbook. I don’t think Beck has a similar musical commitment or project. I think he has a number of musical moods, however, one of which includes dance music:
But similar to Bob Dylan, Beck stays close to Black American musical forms that also include rhythm and blues, rap, and funk — the latter two completely unlike Dylan. Beck is from a younger generation:
My favorite playlist, though? Depends upon my mood, but currently I think I would follow his whiplash from his first dance album to the sad and beautiful Sea Change. I represent this mood in Beck’s music with a playlist titled Acoustic Chill and Country, gathering up Beck’s few country tunes at the end:
That first playlist, The Best of Beck, is the place to start if you’re new to Beck’s music. But once you’ve found your feet, I think you’ll find the rest of them interesting and worth your time. Beck isn’t the next Bob Dylan — no one can be that — but I think at one point he stood in as Dylan for his generation.
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