COOL AS FUCK!!! (Dazed & Confused, Mai 1997)


Dazed & Confused: You're currently quite some flavour of the month. Do you feel a little like the host of a party you had no intention of holding?

Beck Hansen: I dunno; all the attention's weird. I'm just doing the same thing I was doing two years ago, and two years ago I was very uncool. Nobody wanted to have anything to do with me. So I just focus on what I'm doing. I expect that kind of patronage to fluctuate y'know? I would expect it to come and go. It's nice when it's here, but when it's gone I'll still be working…

D & C: Your grandfather was involved in the Fluxus movement, home of Yoko Ono amongst others. Do you think you've somehow inherited their need to mix'n'merge all manner of styles?

BH: Well, I've always been orientated toward life in general, not just music. I tend to see the facilities and fragilities of what's around, and I accept that. That's where the humour comes into what I do. Not getting hung up on music, or love, or your job…

D & C: You've said that people like Bob Dylan aren't necessarily your primary influences. Is it the outlaw appeal of characters like Woody Guthie and Serge Gainsbourg which attracts you?

BH: I identified with them, y'know, because they just said something to me. I was a small, skinny guy, y'know? I guess if I was a strapping handsome brute then I would identify with something else. You tend to be attracted to the things you can relate to, people who were outsiders. I think real working class people respected Woody Guthrie, he was an outcast to the corporate music industry in America, and that was very rare at that time. He was very brave: he took chances. You don't see many brave people any more in music...

D & C: Has the honesty of the blues got lost in contemporary music?

BH: The interchange between black and white music doesn't seem to have continued. It was in hip hop, and in the dance world, but as for alternative bands there doesn't seem to be much of an understanding left. I recognize that things are headed in a certain direction: I just hope to attempt to preserve some things that are lost, some of the old sensibilities. Like the way we looked at the world before machines ran our lives… I walk a fine line because I don't want to surrender to the '90s. I just feel that a lot of the '90s is incredibly fad-based and already dated, even like this new U2 thing. I look at a lot of the alternative bands and it's already so played out, it's already been done over and over. The silver pants and that sexy but not sexy attitude. That sort of phony ambivalence. It's the whole attitude of angst and cynicism. Someone who can communicate and somehow contribute something musical which doesn't cash in on the cynicism of our time is just doing something that is so much more daring, and that's what I'm attempting to do. I draw on the past because there's so many things there that were really great, that we undervalue and scoff at. We're so led by this idea of laughing at the past. We're driven by this consumer need to have the newest thing all the time, so we tend to dispose of what is good. But at the same time, I'm against that one-dimensional nostalgia, just doing a retro thing. I think it negates the past, it just makes it one dimensional. I try to be subtle.

D & C: Is it a question of us needing to rediscover our own history?

BH: Only in bringing it to a certain place and time. I don't ever want to release a record that's seen as a novelty, but at the same time I want to avoid sounding contemporary because then it's already dated, if you see what I mean. So I'm trying to get to this place where you can stand outside the parameters of what's possible. If you can get outside there, out of the designated standards, the you'll preserve yourself…

D & C: Is that why you make such an effort to have as theatrical a stage show as possible?

BH: I just feel that the music has to be alive. When my music's playing and I'm singing, I feel electrified somehow. Music's all about a release. It's about letting go of the hand of our day to day existence. Not really being escapist, but more of it being a ceremony…

D & C: Are you someone else on stage?

BH: No, not at all. I'm not a character on stage. It's me; me playing my music. And I feel fully electrified. If I just got up there and rendered my songs it would be as if I was putting tracing paper over the original and just making a copy of it. I want to get up there and let people know that this music's live. That wherever they were that day, if they were at work, or having a fight with their spouse, or losing money in the subway, whatever the trifles of the day have been, this is the time to take off that burden. We don't get that in our lives. I think that's why people are so addicted to dance culture. That's where music is functional: it's not even art at that point. It's just primitive and functional, it just provides a service…

D & C: Do you think the music industry, by its very nature, dilutes the power of music?

BH: Well it's not just the industry. You can't float away in the clouds too much, because people and gravity want to suck you back down to earth, that's just the way it is. The first thing I learned when I put out a record was that people do want to suck you back down to earth as quickly as possible. Art is like oxygen, it's very weightless, and it's not something you can grab on to, so people think of ways to grab it…

D & C: Do you relish the power your position in the scheme of things provides you with to get your message across?

BH: Yeah, it's exciting for me. I grew up with certain limitations, and I'm very lucky to be doing what I do. At the same time I don't think that having a 'message' as such is applicable in the '90s. Rhetoric just doesn't have that power it used to have in the past. I think people can create their own misery or their own exit sign, their own escape hatch. See, I just felt satisfied when I started out and it was just me there singing songs: that was all I needed. I always wanted to contribute as a musician, and maybe sometimes want different things to that. I think you can detect people who are in it for the rock'n'roll side of things very early. When they're playing and it's all for themselves people get turned off. You gotta look at yourself. You have your own directions, your own possibilities. The things that have inspired me have come from everywhere. They could be R&B and soul music or something completely non-musical. Like the way some neighbours that I had as a kid walked. But the imitation is a crutch. You gotta make it your own somehow…

D & C: Is cool the curse of the age?

BH: As in being reversed? Yeah, I think it deadens the party. It makes people more reserved and self-conscious. Truly cool people aren't afraid of making an ass of themselves, not at the expense of others at least. The same thing applies with irony. It's a good device, a humorous device, and in such a straight, unimaginative time it's sometimes the only way to get some oxygen, y'know, but it can be over-indulged. It can be another mask. It's very easy to latch onto that. It's much harder to break
through the stifling normalcy that's around. But y'know, there's a real American spirit still alive, where people really communicate, that's a real old school thing. But a lot of the time all people can do is look at a screen…

D & C: Do you think TV has become the new Valium?

BH: Well, everything's too neutral, stale and static. The nihilism of the whole grunge thing in America was just a purge. A purging of the materialism and elitism that was in the '80s. But ultimately there's a place to go after that. Trouble is, people have got stuck in that. A lot of people are still there, y'know? It's very easy for people to uprise and rebel against something, but it's harder once you've done that to come up with something better. To get a functioning state of things back…

D & C: Do you think your position is made more or less powerful by not being a part of a traditional group?

BH: When you're in a band you can use the name as a kind of barricade when people try to shoot you down, y'know? But with me, when critics are saying 'Beck this' and 'Beck that', it becomes very personal. See, most people, at least in America, think that I'm just the lead singer for Beck. They don't even know that Beck indeed is my name, so it's like a backwards barricade!

D & C: A burden?

BH: Yeah, I mean being anonymous would be safer, but at the same time it wouldn't be as bold. You gotta put your ass on the line. I mean I come from a place where music isn't considered a career move or a vehicle to drive yourself into glory. At this point I'm just trying to make my only goal reaching a place where I can take what I'm doing just a little bit further, y'know, performance-wise. I've got lots of ideas where to take it. The thing to remember, though, is that you have to start out purely for your own amusement, because if you don't care about it, who else will? Like, if you're not doing something that turns you on, then how do you expect it to turn anybody else on?