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Roger McGuinn @ the Huntington IMAC, Long Island, NY - April 4, 2008
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Seven Mary Three
InterMedia Arts Center 2/2/08
Huntington, NY
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Beck
What a strange time the mid-nineties were. Pop music remained in the hands of the under twenty-five crowd, but the usual sentiments were all twisted and askew. For decades, love songs dominated the marketplace, until a backlash developed. While baby boomers tried to maintain control of a culture that they had outgrown, the younger generation grappled with the pieces that were laying about, and tried to create something of their own. It was a time when creativity became an act of will rather than a statement of purpose. Confusion and uncertainty abounded, and these attitudes were incorporated into the music. ‘Grunge’ reigned supreme, filled with dire chord progressions that supported dark lyrics expressing powerlessness. In music, self-loathing became as common a sentiment as love, and they were expressed with a sincerity that lacked any trace of irony. As a style, grunge emphasized a perspective that was depressing, morbid even. In their defense, most bands labeled as ‘grunge’ attempted to be sincere at a time when real sincerity was at a premium, but this sentiment ultimately struck me as an artless reaction to a post-ironic world. Then again, maybe I was a step out of sync with the times. Maybe it was a ‘post’-post-ironic world, making all of these emotional outpourings a statement on the relevance of self-worth, but that’s a bit complicated to consider, especially since we’re talking about pop music.
Beck was different. He was a tousle-haired, baby-faced songwriter who figured out a way to tap into tradition and invent something new from it. Rather than attempting to start from scratch, he was smart enough to use the blues as his base. With a history that pre-dates the twentieth century, the blues is both the most traditional of art forms and the most malleable. You can mess with the formula, but there is one rule that cannot be ignored; the blues demands honesty from the performer. There is no room for pretense. It is foolhardy to imagine that such a revered art form could withstand such severe manipulation, but Beck pulled it off because he was honest with himself. By incorporating his own ideas of cut-and-paste art onto the blues, he created a hybrid that was both reverent and modern. He created music like a kid with a Colorforms set, sticking things wherever he wanted. The blues provided the backdrop, but his placement of the bits and pieces were inspired and amusing, and usually artful.
On “Loser”, Beck takes the mid-nineties mindset of self-loathing and stands it on its head. He sings “I‘m a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me?” as if it’s an optimistic thought. This is no generational anthem, but it does incorporate many of the touchstones with which this generation identified itself. Remnants of cheap pop culture and trashed-out lyricism are pasted onto a blues riff that could have been written by John Lee Hooker or Blind Willie Johnson. Imagine “Boogie Chill’un” or “Motherless Children” being adapted to sell cars or soda, but without the sickening disappointment of art being manipulated for commerce. Using scraps of punk, folk, rap and rock, he creates a collage that does an even better job of capturing the mood of his generation than the grunge bands, because it is created from the very ingredients that caused all of the confusion in the first place. Steeped in the blues, “Loser” is a mess that manages to translate, and Beck’s genius lies in retaining the integrity of the basic form while running it through the wringer.
 
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