In yesterday’s inaugural entry into the Encyclopedia of American Celebrity Project (or EnAmCel, as we like to say as of yesterday), I mused on the physical luminescence of Jessica "A is for" Alba.
Today we deal with "B is for" Beck (Hansen), perhaps the pop music world’s reigning genius, certainly the world’s hippest Scientologist, and arguably the most influential re-imaginer of himself in puppet form since Phil Collins in Land of Confusion.
Much has been said about Beck, and the vast majority of it has been vastly positive. He is, after all, not only a genius but a fabulously successful and profitable genius. Perhaps the most interesting things that have been said about Beck, however, were said not in praise but with bemused contempt, by Flaming Lips’ frontman Wayne Coyne to Esquire journalist Tom Junod. The action takes place in this passage from Junod’s 2003 article:
The Flaming Lips Battle the Self-Importance of Rock Stars in General, and of Beck Hansen in Particular
THE FLAMING LIPS are not rock stars. They have never been rock stars. Although they have made ten albums and record for Warner Bros., they have had one radio hit in their entire twenty years of existence, and that was ten years ago. It has been their fate–either their claim to fame or their compensation for obscurity–to be known as the favorite band of certain celebrities. … Wayne, Steven, Michael, and Kliph talk about the celebrities … because they have a lot of downtime in which to do it, and on this tour they have a lot of downtime because of Beck.
Beck is a rock star. They didn’t think he would be when he called them and asked if they would open for him on his Sea Change tour and then back him during his own set. They thought that Beck would be kind of cool. They thought, specifically, that he would be, well, like them. It is one of Beck’s talents to make people think that he is just like them. One day, Wayne saw a funky old beat-up Chevy pulling up to the arena and heard the security guards all crow, “Here comes Beck!” because they thought Beck was the kind of guy who goes tooling around L.A. in a funky old beat-up Chevy. But Beck is not that kind of guy. According to the Flaming Lips, Beck is the kind of guy who takes a limo and then worries about people knowing that he takes a limo. Beck is the kind of guy who worries that he is losing his hair. Beck is the kind of guy who worries about his hotel room and walks out if he doesn’t like the color of the walls. Beck is the kind of guy who worries about his food and makes his crew wait around in a restaurant while he sends back his meal two or three times. Beck is the kind of guy who eventually hires his own chef or has someone in his retinue hire his own chef, because Beck is the kind of guy who leaves a lot to his retinue and winds up being a rather passive participant in his own life. More to the point, Beck is the kind of guy who makes people wait, and now, as the Flaming Lips stand onstage in Santa Barbara and wait for Beck to show up for sound check, Wayne wonders aloud if Beck is late because Beck is waiting for someone to “put on his pants for him,” and then cries, to the darkened theater, “Put on your own pants, Beck!”
“A lot of people ask me what song I wish I had written,” Wayne says as the Lips wait for Beck. “C’mon, that’s easy–Happy Birthday.’ That’s a useful little song, isn’t it? You start singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and things start happening. People start smiling, they start singing along. Well, that’s what rock ‘n’ roll is, if it’s done right. It’s useful. You do it right, and people generally have a pretty good time. They go to the concert, they talk to their friends, they drink beer, and hopefully they go home and have sex. That’s what rock ‘n’ roll is about; that’s what it’s always been about–that’s the deal. But a guy like Beck, he doesn’t know that because, you know, he’s Beck. He thinks it’s about him. He thinks that when he’s walking down the hallway before the show, the people out there are thinking about him walking down the hallway, because he’s the artist. And I’m like, ‘Beck, I hate to break this to you, but for most of those people, you’re the entertainment. They’re not thinking of you. They’re thinking of whether they’re going to have sex tonight. So entertain them and help them have sex.’ And so, at the beginning of this tour, Beck wanted the shows to be very serious. He’s a serious artist, he’s come out with a serious album, he wants to do a serious show. And I’m like, ‘Beck, what are you, Elvis Costello? People like Elvis, but secretly they think he’s boring. You’re Beck. You do that funny little hipster dance. People love the hipster dance. If you don’t do the hipster dance, people are going to be disappointed. So do the hipster dance.’ And Beck’s like, ‘But I want these shows to be serious.’ And I’m like, ‘Beck, I go out there and pour fake blood all over myself while singing “Happy Birthday.” The least you can do is dance.’“
In a few minutes, Beck shows up for sound check. He is very small and very pink. He looks not childlike, like fans at a Flaming Lips show, but nearly childish, and the disjunction between his appearance and his status as rock star gives him the appearance of a tiny boy-prince of medieval times now occupying the throne of the slain king. With the Flaming Lips, he sings the lovely, somber, and serious “The Golden Age,” from his lovely, somber, and serious album Sea Change. Then Wayne suggests they rehearse “Imagine” for the KROQ Christmas concert that, in three nights, will be the last performance the Flaming Lips and Beck do together.
“‘Imagine’?” Beck says.
“Well, the concert’s on December 8,” Wayne says. “That’s the anniversary of John Lennon’s murder.”
“Oh, okay,” Beck says. “But do we have to do ‘Imagine’?”
Later, Wayne will say, “Beck doesn’t like doing the obvious, so he doesn’t want to do ‘Imagine.’ He wants to do some John Lennon song nobody’s ever heard of. But it’s the day John Lennon died. If you’re going to sing a John Lennon song, you have to sing ‘Imagine.’ Sure, it’s obvious–but so is rock ‘n’ roll.” Right now, however, what he says is simply: “Let’s give it a try.”
So Beck sings “Imagine” to an empty house, and it sounds lovely–as serious as any serious artist could want. And that night, Wayne sings “Happy Birthday” while pouring fake blood over his head, and Juliette Lewis dances around dressed as a wombat or something. And Beck does his funny little hipster dance while Wayne lies on the floor in his bloody off-white suit and shines a spotlight on him. And somebody in the crowd goes home and has sex. And everybody is happy.
This is exactly Beck, "very small and very pink … a tiny boy-prince of medieval times now occupying the throne of the slain king." But Beck is also, and this is where it gets really interesting, still a genius, and in trying to cut down to size a genius by pointing out that he thinks that the world revolves around him, as Coyne and Junod are conspiring to do, you both catch something essential about a certain kind of genius and completely miss the point of how often deep self-absorption and creative liberation are entwined. If he had as much empathy for his listeners as Coyne does, Beck would still be extraordinarily talented but he wouldn’t be Beck. If had the sense of rootedness that Coyne seems to have and that most of us aspire to have, he wouldn’t be able to glide as effortlessly between sounds and moods and personae as he does. He exists in his own, wispy and surreal cave of shadows, watching a world that’s slightly altered from the world that the rest of us see and then giving back to us through his music a tranformation that’s familiar and strange and compelling (unheimlich, as the Germans say).
Coyne is still right about him, of course, and nothing that anyone else has ever said about Beck deflates him as ruthlessly as Coyne’s offhand "You do that funny little hipster dance. People love the hipster dance. If you don’t do the hipster dance, people are going to be disappointed. So do the hipster dance."
Beck dances, and indeed Beck seems to exist, in quotation marks.
We can’t really like him because he’s too unknowable, because he doesn’t transverse the same slice of the space-time continuum as we do, but it doesn’t matter. We can still be moved by him and be grateful for his visitations from the fifth dimension.
