Periodically I come across Beck and I think “Oh yeah I really love this guy’s stuff.” Idiomatically he straddles so many genres, anti-folk, electronica/dance, hip-hop, and several types of rock, and he does it with seeming ease. The songs have this strange coherence where the seemingly dispirit elements that make them up fit together in a way that is so perfect, in a way I never thought that they could be, like turntables and acoustic guitar, harmonic and programmed drums.
It wasn’t until last week that I saw the music video’s for many of his songs that I really like. I was pleasantly surprised to find that they too had the same internal coherence. They have that “je ne sais quoi” that the Spike Jones directed videos of Fat Lip, The Beastie Boys have. They have a visual playfulness (that is mirrored in the music), coherence, narrative and internal logic that seem incongruous given the fact that I couldn’t tell you what any of Beck’s songs are actually about. They often seem to play on some vaguely familiar style of art, film, or television, but do it in a way that seems original and fresh.
Here are a few, but the Universal Group You Tube page has a bunch more (they have embedding disabled).
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