Robots Making Love:
Deep Inside Beck's Wax Orgy

By Jonathan Hastings
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January 14, 2000 | Page 1

When I saw Beck live during the summer of 1997 his precise but disjointed choreographed stage movements made him look as if he were a living puppet (à la the title character in this year's strangest film fantasy Being John Malkovich) being controlled by James Brown. On his new album, Midnite Vultures, Beck has become the puppeteer, and the puppets are the different personae he takes on during each of the eleven tracks. Perhaps Beck's greatest triumph on this album is that he not only makes these characters distinctive, but he lovingly builds them each a unique musical landscape out of the remains of his record collection: every song has its own sound-makes its own sets of references to other rock and soul records-that illuminates and comments on the tongue-in-cheek sexual role-playing that makes up the meat of the record. Because, oh yeah, this is Beck's "sex" album, and he does his damnedest to convince us that all his parts are in perfect working order (as they weren't in "Bottle of Blues", the only funny song on his last album, Mutations).

Before the beginning of the fourth track, "Get Real Paid", we hear effects that are meant to sound like two robots making love, but most of the sex that Beck describes throughout the album seems as if it's happening between robots. Despite some of the images in lyrics, Midnite Vultures isn't a very messy album. Emotionally it's as remote as Mutations, Beck's exercise in righteous cynicism. The problem with Beck making an album about sexuality is that-as is readily apparent from watching him live-Beck performs as if he's ironically distanced himself from his own body. In the first track, "Sexx Laws", Beck sings that he wants to "define the logic of our sex laws," and he spends the rest of the album pursuing this goal with the diligence of a grad student, with all his sources carefully laid out and annotated.

However, it's easier to talk about the different allusions Beck makes to his favorite R&B, soul, hip-hop, synth pop, and glam-rock records than it is to talk about what he does with all these references. This is in part because on most of Midnite Vultures Beck isn't doing much more than arranging these bits and pieces taken from his record collection into a supremely danceable party album. It's less an exploration of what Beck feels about his own sexuality than it is an exploration of his R&B collection, and the album's unacknowledged theme is that Beck's sexuality is inseparable from his R&B collection. It's as if Beck has made a hipper, less deeply felt, version of Bryan Ferry's The Bride Stripped Bare, and he's tried to cover the emptiness at the center of his album with a constant barrage of musical inventiveness. Unlike Mutations, Vultures is a hell of a lot of fun to listen to, but like the earlier album it never opens itself up the world outside of Beck's record collection. It's sealed off, and Beck has sealed himself off.

But Beck opens himself up fully during the last track. "Debra" not only redeems the entire album, because it might be the best song he's ever done, it seems to redeem his entire career: it brings him to the next level up as a pop artist. Beck sings the song-which describes the attempts of an average guy to actualize his banal sexual fantasy-with his newly discovered falsetto, and though this may make his singing here the most artificial on the album, paradoxically, it's also the most sincere. Beck uses the falsetto to suggest the heightened, overflowing emotions that reveal themselves in our sexual fantasies, and he uses it to convey the depth of this anonymous man's need for sexual fantasy, without ever condescending to or making fun this need. It's as funny as most of the other songs on the album, but it's the only song here that transcends its own cleverness. "Debra" is a triumphant ending to a mixed bag of an album, and if this song represents where Beck is now, I can't wait to see where he'll go next.

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Jonathan Hastings lives and writes in Burlington, Vermont.