He’s been a loser. He’s gone through sea changes. He’s gotten his haircut by the devil. Beck (nee Beck Hansen, nee Bek David Campbell), like Madonna, Cher, and other great one-name artists, has crafted a career as a master pop-music shape-shifter.
Last month, he re-emerged with a track that took a far-out mariachi horn line and pumped it up with a booming, buttery beat. Then he had the great idea to call the song “Wow” — which is very much the reaction you’ll have when contemplating the new video.
As Slate notes, the clip “showcases a series of surreal surprises, intermixing footage of horse-straddling cowboys, floating children, blooming roses (with eyes), and other compellingly weird images.” Oh, and his kids: Cosimo and Tuesday Hansen.
While the video is more than enough fantastical eye-candy to keep you delighted this Wednesday, the song also warrants a closer listen for the lyrics. Early in his career, Beck was drawn to fairly surrealistic word-scapes — even in the song that launched his career way back in 1993, “Loser.” That funk-folk song opened by announcing to the world:
In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey
Butane in my veins so I’m out to cut the junkie
With the plastic eyeballs, spray paint the vegetables
Dog food stalls with the beefcake pantyhose
Kill the headlights and put it in neutral
Stock car flamin’ with a loser and the cruise control
Baby’s in Reno with the vitamin D
Trippy, no? Before long, however, Beck was exploring more traditional song and lyrical structures, culminating, in many ways, with the Grammy-winning 2014 album, Morning Phase. That record moved methodically through 13 sweet and soulful songs, and presented Beck as a clear-eyed, curious chronicler of the Modern Human Condition.
So what better, Beck-ier way to follow that up than returning to his strange roots and blowing eyes and minds with a video that plays like a dreamy hallucination and words that present a surrealist portrait of our pixelated new world.
It’s your life
Falling like a hot knife
Call your wife; secular times, these times
My demon’s on the cell phone
To your demons, nothing’s even right or wrong
It’s irrelevant, elephant in the room goes boom
Standing on the lawn doin’ jiu jitsu
Girl in a bikini with the Lamborghini shih-tzu
Yep. That’s life. Can you feel him now?
