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Mutations

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I've recently set my phone to shuffle the entire Beck collection and while "Mutations" is not my favorite Beck album all the songs fit in seamlessly with the overall experience. He would follow that up with Sea Change, the Serious Album that many other people would consider his true masterpiece. He had become such a shorthand for “Smart But Accessible Alt-Culture Figure” that MillerCoors even shamelessly ripped off his whole steez for a beer campaign based around a slacker character named Dick.

It is less experimental than some of his work, which suits me because although I always admire his originality I prefer tunes to random noises. The gulf between those two says a lot about Beck (and also about what some critics like to champion, but that’s a discussion for another day), but its also what makes him so hard to pin down.It is blues-influenced and he sings moving lyrics about heart ache and the sadness of life, themes which fit his voice perfectly. Beck appeared on Saturday Night Live in promotion of Mutations, performing "Tropicalia" and "Nobody's Fault but My Own". The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

But after hearing Mutations, Geffen pulled rank and insisted on releasing the album, marketing it as a detour for hardcore Beck fans while he stayed hard at work on the “real” follow-up to Odelay. It is a question that has vexed philosophers, by which I mean people who perhaps overthink popular music, for 25 years now: Who is the real Beck? The low end seems to be the added component, lending significant weight to an already excellent recording. Why should we think that writing songs about being horny and wanting to dance are any less valid than songs about watching your relationship fall apart? Or maybe Beck is telling you who he is every time he hits the microphone, and if he contradicts himself each time, if he’s telling you that he’s the heartbroken kid and also the goofy dad and also the sex freak and also the guy worried about the end of the world and also the guy who just wants to make you dance, then that’s how we know we can believe him.It is kind of fatalistic and yet somehow makes you feel that you can survive the dark times, almost as if you are observing them from the outside. The original plan was that Bong Load Records, the tiny Los Angeles label that first released Beck’s breakout “Loser” would also release Mutations. Beck and his crack live band cut a song a day for 14 days, for an off-the-cuff feel that Godrich would soak in his trademark antiseptic, Kubrikian sheen. It is also possible that “real Beck” is yet another guise this chameleon of a performer decided to put on, in the process making us question if “real” really means anything at all. It was a startling turn at the time, the effortlessly cool guy from “Where It’s At” asking aloud, “Pointing a finger, throw the book at you/ And who would want to dance with you?

After the tour for Odelay wound down, Beck recruited Nigel Godrich for his major work after helming Radiohead’s OK Computer, the other huge era-defining alt-rock album of the late ’90s. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. Mutations is filled with dozens of tiny little Beckisms, choices only he would make, be it contrasting a wheezing harmonica with sci-fi synth wiggles on “Cold Brains,” undercutting the Beatles-like reverie of “We Live Again” with dread-inducing negative space or spicing his Brazilian-music homage “Tropicalia” with post-modern lyrics about isolation and a noisy sound collage.Mutations would prove that Beck could do sincerity, or at least Sincerity, just fine thank you very much, and the woozy, operatic country rock he summons here in many ways feels like a blueprint that Mike Mogis and Conor Oberst would follow with Bright Eyes, where the slowly unraveling ballad “Static,” tucked all the way at the end of the album, feels like Beck’s big budget answer to the delicate balladry Cat Power and Elliott Smith were getting up to, declaring “it’s a perfect day to lock yourself inside” as the guitar solo shrugs and the keyboard lines evaporates.

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