Lyric Reality, With A Smile

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Talking to folk/rock/hip-hop performer Beck is like walking behind the food cart on an airplane. You just have to get in line and wait till it gets where it's going. Beck answers in digressive monologues that so completely exhaust a question that, by the end, you almost forget what the question was. Ask him about the comparisons his music has drawn to Bob Dylan's, and he replies, "I never really identified with him as a person... His art and music, they're undeniable, but... I'm probably more influenced by Leonard Cohen and Ramblin' Jack Elliott and other folk people than Dylan. I guess to me he is so realized in himself, he's a cul-de-sac... He did what he did and achieved what he did so fully...there's no real point to retread it..."

Beck, in interviews and in his music, is an explorer. On each CD he poses musical questions and sets out to answer them. Not definitively, but interestingly. His last CD, Mutations, was a meditation on blues and folk that grew in power with each listen. His new CD, Midnite Vultures (Geffen), is a series of witty experiments with rock, hip-hop and even soul. "Soul has a tradition of manliness to it, but it also has this emotional core that can be raw and open and vulnerable," says Beck. "In rock and alternative rock, if you're emotional, you're emotional in an angry sort of way, and if you're manly, you're flexing and strutting. I like the fact that in soul you can have these two things coexist."

Hybridization is all the rage, but Beck says that, to his ears, a lot of it seems "old hat." On Midnite, Beck's hats are all new--he mixes rap with rock, but he does so in a way that's unique. Midnite's songs explode in burbles of electronic noise and brassy horn-section blasts; the lyrics alternate between absurdist imagery and street jokiness. Beck isn't afraid to fail, and he sometimes does. But while other rock-hoppers adhere to a "keep it real" doctrine, Beck feels free to invent his own playful lyrical reality: "I wanna get with you/ Only you/ And your sister/ I think her name's Debra," he sings in the soul-ballad Debra. This is smart music with a smile.

--By Christopher John Farley