With his latest album, The Information, Beck is trying to pull off a daredevil stunt - to bring vulnerability into the most macho musical genre on the block. He tells Kevin Courtney how he's trying to put the soul back into hip-hop
BECK Hansen is wearing a big, beatific grin, like someone in the throes of religious rapture. His gaze is slightly vacant beneath the stetson. Is he filled with the joys of Scientology, that weird Hollywood cult of which he is one of showbiz's less-vocal practitioners?
Actually, the reason for Beck's happy-happy joy-joy face is the imminent release of a new album (The Information) and the prospect of his band opening for Radiohead at Marlay Park later in the evening. His live show features on-stage puppets, each one a tiny wooden replica of a band member; afterwards, the giant screens will capture the puppets trashing Radiohead's dressing-room - guaranteed to raise a smile.
But there's another reason for Beck's beaming visage: his undiminished devotion to the cult of pop music, and its endless, transcendent possibilities. Thirteen years after Loser, his teen slacker anthem, Beck is still filled with childlike wonder at the sheer fun of it all.
"I still feel like I'm starting out, y'know," says the 36-year-old singer, songwriter, rapper, multi-instrumentalist and all-round accomplished entertainer. "I'm still trying to figure out what I'm doing. Not all of it works, though."
When he first burst onto the scene, Beck came across like a fresh-faced kid just out of high school. Today he's a husband (of Marissa Ribisi, sister of actor Giovanni) and father (of a son, Cosimo) but still looks like a skinny kid who's dropped out of school to join a rock'n'roll band. He's mixed rock, rap, grunge and soul; he's blended blues and electro; he's even tried to parody Prince; but Beck is happy to report that he has never lost his enquiring musical mind.
"Sure, yeah, definitely, I think more so, now. I think maybe it's because of the time we're living in now, there's just so much more music and ideas and information. I try really hard to simplify what I do, because it can get complicated very easily. I make my records backwards - y'know, I make a big mess and then sort of organise it at the end - and then put a title on the top."
The Information shows that Beck can still process the world's ever-growing mass of external stimuli and distil it into cool, challenging sounds. It also sees him delving deeper into hip-hop territory than is really considered safe for a white boy whose initials aren't M and M. He's already proven he can rap, and he's certainly got rhythm, but with The Information Beck is trying to pull off a daredevil stunt: bring vulnerability into the most macho musical genre on the block, and put some soul back into a music form that's morphed into a morally bankrupt corporate monster.
"Because you have this genre, hip-hop, which started out with so many possibilities, it was such an open-ended genre of music, but it's become so codified, and also homogenised, I guess, because there's a certain way you have to do it. And to me as an outsider, it seems like there's very narrow definitions of what hip-hop is, and there's so much emphasis placed on being credible in the hip-hop world and in the eyes of the people who make hip-hop, that I feel like I want to go in the opposite direction with it. I want to use it as a place where I can throw ideas that wouldn't work in a traditional song form."
The Information was recorded with Nigel Godrich, long-time producer of Radiohead, another band who spend much of their time trying to deal with the sensory overload of the modern world. Even the song titles - Elevator Music, Nausea, Dark Star, No Complaints, We Dance Alone - could be the titles of 'Head tunes. But while Thom Yorke & co stick to a resolutely bleak template, Beck takes an altogether more playful view, embracing the confusion with a shrug and a smile. During the sessions, Godrich encouraged Beck to rap more quietly, to bring his voice down almost to a whisper. This was tantamount to heresy in a genre defined by loud, aggressive, boastful raps, but the result is a more intimate, almost feminine alternative to the usual gangsta posturing.
"I think that was the intention, with tracks like Dark Star and We Dance Alone," Beck says. "There's a kind of built-in masculinity to a lot of hip-hop, and trying to make it okay to have some vulnerability within that genre, it's really fascinating to me."
Beck's career, which began with him playing local bars and parties in LA and busking in New York, has been one of interesting if not always successful plot twists. After his second album, Odelay, spawned such hits as Devil's Haircut, The New Pollution and Where It's At, he took a left-turn with Mutations, an album of dark alt.Americana, tropicalia and voodoo blues.
On his 1999 Midnite Vultures, Beck took what many thought was a wrong turn, creating a mad, cluttered Prince pastiche in such songs as Sexx Laws and Debra. It still became his best-selling album, and it turned out that Beck wasn't crazy after all - he was simply five years ahead of OutKast's Speakerboxx/The Love Below.
Sea Change (2002) and Guero (2005) confirmed Beck as one of pop's most versatile, adaptable and inventive performers, but he is under no illusions that the new album will be automatically accepted by his own fans, let alone the hip-hop community.
"You're always taking a risk, that's always a given at anytime. You have no idea if you're making the biggest piece of crap in the world or if people are gonna love it. There's just no way to tell. It's always a surprise if somebody likes it. I never expect anything, y'know, and nothing's ever a given. But as far as the hip-hop world, I don't even know if I'm known in that world, or that I register. I've met a few rappers; they always think I'm from England. But I don't commune with the hip-hop world.
"I don't know, maybe there was a time around Odelay where I thought I might be able to find a place in that world. But I don't know if I ever could."
If Cell Phone's Dead, the first single off the album, is anything to go by, then The Information can't fail to please. But there's something else contained in the CD case that's sure to make you smile like a little child: stickers. In an innovation to rival PiL's Metal Box and Led Zep III's turning wheel, The Information comes with a set of stickers with which buyers can design their own CD cover.
"It all started with my son," Beck explains. "A year ago, he discovered stickers. Suddenly there were stickers all over the house. When you stood in one place long enough, you'd end up with four or five stickers all over your leg. You'd look down and see a unicorn, a spaceship and a horse on your leg."
Beck reasonably assumed that adult record buyers would be equally fascinated by stickers, but when he brought the idea to his designers, things turned out not to be so childishly simple. We can do all sorts of things with MP3s, videos and graphics, but it seems that creating a sheet of stickers to go in a CD sleeve is a major technological headache. Nevertheless, after nine months of brainstorming, Beck's idea finally came to fruition.
"I like the idea of empowering an audience. I like the idea that we're all participating in this together, that we're not passive, and here's my product and you consume it. When there's an opportunity to break that cycle, I think that's healthy.
"The artwork is in the hands of the person making it, we're giving them all the elements, and what they make of it is theirs. I like the idea that nobody who owns it will have the exact same cover."
The Information is released on September 29th. The single, Cell Phone's Dead, is out on October 6th
