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Evacuated Heavens: Beck's Mutations
by David Sims
Of the assorted anti-heroes and self-effacing slackerati that rock produced in the nineties, Beck stood out from the crowd. Sure, he had the same anesthetized visage as that of Curt Cobain, Stephen Malkmus of Pavement, Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins, et. al.; and with lines like "I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me", he was the ultimate disaffected GenXer. But he also appeared to enjoy what he was doing, working his postmodern aesthetic with a wry sense of style. He fused disparate influences like the blues of Leadbelly and the lyrical sensibility of Dylan with pop, punk and hip-hop into an intelligent, if disjointed, musical montage.
Beck's latest release, Mutations, is less playful to say the least. The witty samples and soul grooves are gone, replaced by sedate acoustic sounds accented by exotic instruments and spooky analog synths that would be at home on an episode of Dr. Who. Apparitions of country music, folk, the Beatles, bossa nova and psychedelia plus lyrics that brood on the edge of despondence make Mutations as fun as channel surfing in a ghost town. Beck's postmodern bent seems to have taken him down some shadowy corridors. There was a time when he wore his sense of displacement with a stifled smirk. On this outing it comes with a blank stare.
Mutations will disappoint fans who were waiting for another Odelay. According to his label, Mutations was not supposed to be the follow up to his 1997 chartbuster, but was to be a low key interim piece with less interest in radio potential. As if to make that point clear, the only danceable tune on the album occupies the ubiquitous "hidden" track. (Not counting the latin stylings of "Tropicalia", which, while danceable, would be an anachronism on alternative radio. Now that I've said that, It'll probably be the single). As if to drive the point further home, that song is chopped up in jagged interludes that would have would-be slam dancers scratching their heads in mid-mosh.
The opening track, "Cold Brains," describes a detached solipsism that permeates the rest of the album:
Cold Brains, unmoved/Untouched, unglued/Alone at last
No thoughts, no mind/To rot behind/A trail of disasters
A final curse/Abandoned hearse/We ride disowned...
...A bird of song/Is heard no longer/In the evacuated
heavens/The drain is drawn/And drained and gone
And on and on/It doesn't matter
Even moments of levity on tracks like "Canceled Check" and "Tropicalia" come with the manic giggle of a man on the verge. Such bleakness stands in tension with the usually celebratory nature of rock. Though punk was a revolt, with its pretext of anarchy and confrontation, it was still revolt with revelry. One precedent for such a morbid and subjective slant as that of Mutations would be the post-punk 'gothic' bands like Bauhaus and the Cure. But where Robert Smith and the other darkly clad denizens of goth peddled their angst with bluntly nihilistic sentiments like "it doesn't matter if we all die", there is something strangely affirming about Mutations. Beck considers his absurd environment without getting lost in it. Like the bluesmen he grew up listening to, he finds in his songs a way out, a temporary redemption from the chaos. The virtue of the blues player, says critic Stanley Booth, is in his ability to accept and celebrate his condition. By putting his plight in the most immediate art form, he objectifies it and, for a moment, controls it. The best of the blues brings a community into this act by demonstrating a shared experience.
The shared experience of postmodernity is fragmentation and alienation, and Mutations reflects this while avoiding the shallowness and claustrophobia of goth rock.
But redemption of this sort is temporary at best, a reality universally understood by the country blues players. At the end of the day, for them, God was in His heaven and ultimate redemption was available, if not yet appropriated. In Beck's universe, with it's "evacuated heavens", there is no ultimate context for despairing, no fixed reference point or final appeal, just the hollow echoes of "impotent psalms" in a "new-fangled wasteland." "The more knowledge, the more grief" says the writer of Ecclesiastes, and Beck apparently knows much about our current times. On Mutations his mind affirms that life is a meaningless tragedy, and his soul asks for something more.
