Music Lessons 6— Beck — Midnight Vultures [1999]

Navigating our lives can be a cryptic maze of highs and lows, loves and losses, victories and defeats. Romantic connections are one of the primary drives for our species and we often look to music for comfort, familiarity, and whenever we can find it, wisdom. Artists are peculiar thinkers who tend to approach life from a unique angle, and in 1999, the world was gifted with the creative ruminations on unbridled sexuality from the reputed musical wild-card, Beck (who really doesn’t come off like a Scientologist).

Perhaps in response to his ’98 release Mutations, whose tone was uncharacteristically somber and pensive and took audiences off guard with its more mannered, traditional approach to songwriting, Midnight Vultures was conversely composed as a barrage of sounds so vibrant they nearly cascade upon you like the rotating colors of a kaleidoscope.

The very concept of “Midnight Vultures” to me implies the idea of animals hovering above something they may never get, and if/when they do, it would be perceived as something that’s grotesque by those on the outside.

The cover art makes it pretty obvious (in a double-take sort of way) doesn’t it? Some mannequin-looking guy, or maybe someone in a rubber mask, has his hands down like he’s playing a keyboard, meanwhile glittery “music” is coming from his crotch–only to find the crotch of some faceless female dancer. Beck himself is usually included on the covers of his albums, so I wonder if that’s an image of his mouth poking through some kind of Batman-like mask.

(Now… Beck also has Mellow Gold, Mutations, Modern Guilt, and Morning Phase in his discography. What’s with the albums that start with “M,” Beck?)

I feel it’s a bit on the cynical side to compare the unfavorable animal vulture to the concept of male sexual desire. Both things come from Mother Nature–and neither are for the squeamish. And a vulture cannot help but be what it is.

This album is all about the male libido and the silly places it can take our minds. “Animals” are a common theme indicating that our lust can cause us to become less of a man and more beast-like.

The music video for ‘Sexx Laws’ has Jack Black and co. bonding through some weird group therapy session–before a parade of testosterone-inspired imagery bursts through the walls and disrupts their entire night’s progress. Now there’s machinery humping other machinery. And other… things also humping other things.

At the point in the lyrics “At the halfway home / I’m a full grown man,” a mechanical mannequin spins inhumanly around at the waist as the camera pans up to reveal the other half of the man’s body to be an animal’s head. And, as though the singer is declaring his life’s purpose: “I wanna defy the logic of all sex laws.”

‘Nicotine and Gravy’ slows things down with low-hanging percussions and a bassier feel than anywhere else on the record. The samples and synths are Beck at his most esoteric. Those sluggish, depressed and spiraling sonics in the bridge enforces that idea of just not caring about how “I think I’m going crazy / things don’t even phase me.”

“Her left eye is lazy / she looks so Israeli” is not some racially-charged comment. Beck’s saying that men can sometimes get themselves into a certain mood where her lazy eye ‘doesn’t even phase them.’ The notion of her ‘looking so Israeli’ is completely out of nowhere and it’s supposed to be–as if this guy is so off balance that he thinks that her Israeli qualities are something he’s been looking for, missing his whole life, as if he’s ever even thought about it before this horny moment…

… In other words, the fact that ‘she looks so Israeli’ is just as random as his sudden lust for this girl he’s never met, never even seen before.

(I just thought I’d clear that up. The true meaning is difficult to decipher and when race gets involved, it can be easier for people’s minds to ‘race’ and start taking meaning that wasn’t implied, seeing things that aren’t there. I doubt it was even necessary for me to come to Beck’s defense. But here it is.)

Sonically, Midnight Vultures is one of Beck’s most consistent and one of the most “Beck” Beck albums to date. I feel like there are moments in his catalog when he lets his personality shine through maybe a little more than other times, in a way revealing what kind of a person he is through the sound of his music.

For context, the whole album The Information is like an electronic, hip-hop version of this side of Beck. The stand-alone song ‘Gimme’ is like a softened, synthetic version of this side of Beck. Songs like ‘Where it’s At,’ ‘Tropicallia,’ ‘Timebomb,’ ‘Ghettochip Malfunction (Hell Yes),’ and most recently the wonderful song ‘Colours,’ seem to be Beck at his most frenetic, light-hearted, and bizarre self.

Midnight Vultures is like an entire album of Beck at his most quirky and unpredictable.

There’s almost an ‘electronic-ska’ vibe permeating this record–a sound which Beck’s quirkiness lends itself well to. Horns and piano/keyboards are more prominent along with the usual synthetic elements and the backbone of a traditional four-piece band. (However, I would say that the most uniquely-utilized instrument on this whole record is the loose notion of “silliness,” if you can call that an instrument).

My favorite track and possibly the closest thing to a ‘rock song’ is the radio-friendly ‘Pressure Zone.’ A metallically pounding riff opens into a groovy beat with echoey synthetics sprinkled in now and then. The chorus is lyrically brief but I love how it trails into those soaring, Earthbound synths.

The wonderful single ‘Mixed Bizness’ has more of those funky horns but the synthetics trip out deeper into psychedelia near the end. The music video shows women dancing on the beach with fish for heads while Beck sings with his head poking out of the sand: a statement about how we become half of a man, more animalistic, when we look at women only for their animal side–the sexual purpose–and not as full people.

Or perhaps it’s conveying how women also have an animal side–I suppose it can go both ways.

‘Milk & Honey’ is a high point–like you’re in a rocket ship bouncing around all these prismatic, floating, extra-dimensional objects to the sound of Beck masterminding the synthetics and Johnny Marr of The Smiths on guitar. This track is all over the place. When you think of those shifting, multi-faceted songs, behemoths like ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ Jane’s Addiction’s ‘Three Days,’ or Greenday’s ‘Jesus of Suburbia’ come to mind. At about 5:20, ‘Milk and Honey’ is a bit of a heftier song but really only manages to be so dynamic because of its rampant kineticism. It begins with a traditional verse/chorus structure, then moves into a groovy chant and you gotta love the ironic desperation in the lines “she’s alright, on my computer / she’s alright, selling me watches,” then the composition finally deflates into a dejected rendition of the eponymous chant which conveys a sense of emptiness and lack of fulfillment.

‘Get Real Paid’ is like phasing through your computer screen and falling through a musical bombardment of all those ads you see on the internet. So many sparkling electronics swirling around your head while an artificial female voice drones on about the things that make the most money and attention. Eventually the electronic filter is dropped and Beck’s natural voice chimes in with “I wanna know if I’m worth your time,” like a moment of sincerity cutting through a constant storm of organizations, products, ideas, and people selling themselves as something they’re not. This moment is, however, a jarring sonic protuberance that interrupts the groovy flow the synthetics had been generating up to this point, but I suppose these unwanted tonal shifts that wind up betraying the genre are the risks of sticking too closely to ‘alternative’ conventions–which this album is very rarely guilty of so I give it a pass.

‘Hollywood Freaks’ does good work taking the music further away from the alternative rock or even the grunge genres with Beck rapping through most of the vocals against a beat-centric flow. There are some smooth, groovy moments and even some pleasingly glistening effects happening here, but overall the mindset going into this song I fear was a bit too irreverent for the final product to amount to too much for my sensibilities.

Thematically this seems to be about hopping back and forth across that thin line between freedom and depravity in terms of people from a certain world (the title makes it obvious enough).

The late track “Beautiful Way” seriously calms things down by stripping away virtually all the modern digital effects and giving it an unusually natural vocal performance with no discernable filter. Even the towering horns have been replaced here with a single, emotive harmonica. With a slower structure and an overall sweetness, this feels like an uncommonly honest moment amongst a tracklist of jokes. This is one of the better ones. “Such a beautiful way to break my heart” is a double-edged sentiment, evoking ideas of feeling damaged though resigned, of finding fulfillment from a beauty you never even expected to find.

‘Peaches & Cream’ starts out promising enough but I find the vocal performance to be a bit abrasive and the whole track remains too unsurprising throughout. This song, along with ‘Broken Train,’ which is also vocally-uninteresting and suffers from a stagnant composition, are probably the most disposable two on the record. Although, I do remember my Stevie having singled out “Broken Train” as one she liked. But I could never figure out why she chose that one amongst so many better songs…

I do remember Stevie being impressed that I knew all about the song ‘Debra’ before the movie Baby Driver came out. I guess it gave me some kind of goofy “hipster cred” to be so aware of the song as to know that the vocals were supposed to be like a silly take on Prince (just give it a listen and Prince’s influence shall be hard to unhear).

Along with synths and silliness, the next most prominent ingredient you’ll find here is sarcasm. You would surely find Midnight Vultures appearing on a list of ‘most sarcastic albums of all time.’ Just about every song was written from a critically humorous, often self-denigrating angle. I would call this humor ‘dry’ if it wasn’t so pervasive and overwhelming.

Perhaps Beck’s omnipresent sense of humor is not any more apparent than in this final track. ‘Debra’ itself is even an ironic title because the overzealous, overamorous speaker in this song is actually addressing a girl named “Jenny” the whole time, and he only thinks her sister’s name is ‘Debra.’ And you simply have no choice but to admire how the cheesy but fully legitimized “porno music” instrumentation somehow builds to an unexpected grandiosity that is truly captivating.

Near the end, I like the way Beck calls back to the lyrics “I got a little bit of sympathy for you girl. Cause I’m a full-grown man. And I’m not afraid ta, afraid ta…. ta…..”

But if you asked me, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what, if anything, this “full-grown-man” has to complain about. It’s not like he grew up to find out that his entire family had been lying to him, betrayed him, sold him out for their benefit, and then he grew up unprepared for the world with a lack of nurturing. And then eventually the greatest love in his life eventually did the same thing, lied to him the whole time and betrayed him, and then broke up with him by knocking him over the skull with a blunt wooden object, leaving him with an injury that affected him for the rest of his life, and meanwhile, simultaneously dealing with this pain, also enduring the fact that society has turned him into some kind of pariah where he’s judged and harassed by his community every day. In addition, the rest of his life is plagued by some kind of mad scientist performing the Ludovico Technique on him every day like in some kind of ‘A Clock Work Orange’ world. And the specific, unique bodily scars in his broken body seem to coincide perfectly with the kind of psychological trauma he’s experiencing, and the physical toll it takes on his body, so all the harassment and emotional torture he goes on to experience also feels like physical torture as well.

I guess we could all agree that then this “full-grown man” would have a good reason “ta cry.”