Visionary Guilt

From Filter-Mag.com...

It’s two days after his 38th birthday when I tell Beck I’ve noticed his new album, Modern Guilt, touches heavily on grim, dystopian themes. His reply: “Welcome to modern America.” Neither of us is in the States—he’s in Portugal, I’m in Saudi Arabia—but it’s clear what he’s driving at, especially when he appends the statement with the kind of low, slow giggle that comes naturally to Southern Californians.

It seems Beck Hansen knows he is out of place among the rest of today’s rock acts; the guylinered, neo-disco bands that run amok on the channel about which he penned his first single, “MTV Makes Me Want to Smoke Crack,” but this fact has nothing to do with his age. Even in 1994, when the Los Angeles-born multi-instrumentalist released Mellow Gold, his first of now eight records, there was something different about him; an alien charm that’s difficult to explain but easy to recognize. It’s in his notoriously oblique, literate lyrics—sometimes rapped, sometimes sung—and the way he never really cleaned up his off-kilter sounds and haircut, years after his grungy ’90s contemporaries started shaving and faded away. He is timeless, and so are his tastes, which prefer music that predates both MTV and crack. “Both Danger Mouse and I just have an appreciation for those old, dirty-sounding records,” Beck croaks out in his famous, beachy drawl, name-checking the super-producer with whom he collaborated on Guilt. “That’s just what I like.” It’s a simple sentiment from a simple genius making records in an increasingly difficult world, and it’s the first thing he’s said today without pausing to think about it first.

Modern Guilt has a lot of talk about tidal waves and hurricanes. Do you sense apocalypse?
I don’t think so, really. That stuff is more about using words that would be good for rock songs—“Rock me like a hurricane,” y’know? Those are just really good rock metaphors. “Gentle rain” wouldn’t have the impact of hurricane. “Summer mist” wouldn’t do it, either. Those are the dominion of New Age artists. If I’m writing rock and roll music, I need to use words for rock songs.

As this is your shortest album to date (less than 34 minutes), was the recording process quick?
Not at all, no. There were very, very long hours. We kept having the threat of Danger Mouse leaving to go on tour with Gnarls Barkley. And there ended up being about two or three times over the course of recording where he would have to leave, and I would be left finishing stuff off and hoping he’d like it when he returned. Ultimately, it was a pretty smooth process, but it was just time intensive—not a lot of sleep. We were trying to make a deadline and we worked for about 10 weeks straight. It was crazy hours, but the trade-off was that certain momentum you get from focusing your energy so completely over a period of time; you get into this certain place. The feeling of recording and writing becomes more rubberized—everything you do just bends into the right thing. I think with any kind of work or discipline there’s a place you reach where everything just works and you keep going until you drop. That’s where we were.

Talk a little about the choice to use such dirty instrumentation on Guilt.
Danger Mouse’s beats are dirty, my guitars are dirty; my amp was the dirtiest amp I could get. That was all intentional. I don’t want my guitars to have that clean, clear tone of new guitars. Part of it’s probably us trying to counteract the sterility of recording on computers and using Pro Tools. It’s something I equate with what in Japan they call wabi-sabi. We don’t really have an equivalent term in the West, but it’s this appreciation for things that are beautifully decayed or falling apart. Whereas maybe in the West we have the urge to put a coat of paint over something old to clean it up and make it nice, the Japanese are into enjoying the beauty of paint peeling and colors running and patina, and the feeling of time having passed. I started to become really interested in that aspect of Japanese culture in the early ’90s. I started getting into appreciating something that’s just there without feeling the urge to have to change it or put your mark on it.

Do you make a concerted effort to change your sound with each new record?
Actually, ever since Sea Change, I’ve been making an effort to have some thread of continuity in the albums. I’ve really tried to have something—a feeling or a sound—that carries through each new record. I have other stuff that I’ve recorded in the last three or four years that I haven’t released, because it’s radically different from anything else. I’m trying to get away from everything being so different from each other. I’m trying to create some semblance of a body of songs that work together; that’s a very conscious thing. That said, it’s very hard for me to discipline myself to do that. And I know there are fans who really liked that about me—my changes. Also, I think a lot of times I liked to mix it up because I would get cold feet. I didn’t want to make everything sound like one thing, because what if that one thing failed miserably? Diversity takes the pressure off.

So commercial success crosses your mind even at this point in your career?
I don’t really consider commercial success, but I do try and make sure the music’s not something that’s going to make me cringe in 10 years. I want something that I’ll be able to make a connection with when I’m older. You can make music for the moment—and if I were doing that I think my music would sound very different—but I try to strike a balance. Certain artists can’t do that. For instance, Strawberry Alarm Clock was a great ’60s band that existed at the time of The Beatles, but only one of those groups made something that works today. I want to be like the one that still works.

Do you find it hard to listen to some of your old recordings?
Yeah, it’s hard to hear some of it. A few things I just can’t believe; I listen to myself and I just think, “What a twerp!” It’s one of those things where, when I was doing it, in my mind it sounded so deep, like Chuck D or Johnny Cash or Lou Reed, these people I revere. And now, I can’t believe people listened to it. That’s a hard thing about interviews for me: I’m confronted with what I’ve done, which I don’t like. If I start to look at it too closely, it makes me not want to do it because I see the deficiencies. I don’t see what other people see. Maybe Bob Dylan or James Brown could love every single thing they’ve ever done, but only artists of that caliber can do that, and there’s only a few of them out there. I’m somebody who works really, really hard on what I do until it’s decent.