20 Years Later, Beck's Midnight Vultures is a Delirious and Hedonistic Marvel
Tristan Young @talltristan
It’s often the case when an artist’s career reaches a length that can be measured in decades we start to compartmentalize their work. Terms like ‘eras’ or ‘periods’ are tossed around as means of helping navigate vast discographies. This is also a generally just a very fun thing to do. Bjork, for example, can be divided into her early human condition phase, her mid years abstract existential conceptual works, and her later day focus on the meaning of love and heartbreak. You can take similar approaches to Kanye, Dylan, Daft Punk, the list goes on. Beck is a little trickier. You can try certainly, separating his work based on which decade it resides. The 90s saw Beck’s first five or so albums experimenting with indie hip hop/rock country in outsized, proudly awkward combinations. Much of the 2000s found Beck dealing with very much on trend and stylized alt rock/pop. Our current decade has Beck in a more mature and relaxed form, content with his status and place in the music biosphere. Seems simple enough. However, that doesn’t really account for the late 90s Mutations, which saw a sharp turn to acoustic jam sessions. Nor does it explain 2002’s Sea Change, which signaled a melancholic version of Beck a decade before it would become the norm. The only through line among his albums was a genuine appreciation and talented extrapolation of their inspirations.
And then there was Midnight Vultures. Beck’s best or worst album, depending on who you ask. Wildly vibrant, deliriously preformed, bizarrely composed, Beck’s 7th studio album released in 1999 was just too strange for some at the time. 20 years later, that remains the case. That’s a shame, because Midnight Vultures is a blast. In it Beck took his core sphere of disaffected grunge rock, country jamboree, and west coast hip hop, and injected it with- soaked it with, even- an iridescent burst of neon tinged funk/soul/electronica. All of this seems ridiculous, and this is gloriously the case. Exalting banjo tangents are drowned in Beck’s hysterical falsetto in ‘Sexx Laws’. Dr Dre style G funk beats are interlaced with gratuitous psych pop amidst Beck existing somewhere between seductive crooning and bad acid trip in ‘Hollywood Freaks’. ‘Mixed Business’ is a straight up B-52s homage with its gangly pop guitar and day light disco rhythm. ‘Get Real Paid’ is an abstract art house dance hall epic that transitions into beautifully experimental electronica and still manages to fit an afro futuristic chorus from Beck in the middle. None of this makes sense. All of it is fantastic.
Why then is Midnight Vultures so divisive? Why do some love its chromatic bondage approach to pop funk while publications like Q listed it in the 50 worst albums of all time (burn all your copies of Q)? The debate mainly centers around if Beck was actually serious in his pursuits in making the album. Many insist that rather than a loving, albeit deranged, homage to the genres that inspire it, it is buffoonish parody, barely elevated from the likes of Weird Al. Arguments are based around the notion that the cacophony of mismatched genre compositions are too surreal and outlandish to be taken with any seriousness or sincerity. Beck is cynically screwing with these genres at best and outright making fun of them at worst, so the argument goes. Others insist that the care and intricacy of production, his ferociously committed performances and loving enthusiasm negates any semblance of derision or exploitation. So where, in the year 2019, do we land on the matter?
Surely there is ample evidence that Midnight Vultures is just Beck taking a piss, or based on the obnoxiously erotic and seedy lyrics,being masturbatory. You don’t get lines like, “brief encounters in Mercedes Benz, wearing hepatitis contact lens, bed and breakfast and away weekends with sports illustrated moms”, very often after all. Beck himself described this album as, “a party record with dumb songs and dumb sounds and dumb lyrics”. This does not inspire confidence in it’s sincerity. That the album was almost called ‘I Can Smell The VD in the Club Tonight’, which is actually a line from ‘Milk and Honey’, is not helping. As beck is cavorting throughout ‘Hollywood Freaks’ he proudly boasts, “We drop lobotomy beats”; in other words his beats are stupid, pejoratively speaking. Beck’s channelling the essence of Prince in it’s most salacious form in ‘Deborah’, coupled with overtures of wanting nothing more than to have sex with a girl he met at JC Penny, but also her sister who may or may not be named ‘Deborah’ is too ridiculous not to be crude comedy. “Don’t tell your left hand baby, what your right hand do”, is an actual line in a song that is actually called ‘Peaches & Cream’. We get it, the album is silly.
However! Midnight Vultures is also genuinely brave and lovingly crafted, so much so that intonations of parody just don’t hold up. Simply listen to the staggeringly fun climax of ‘Sexx Laws’. Beck, with every vocal muscle and breath of air in his lungs he can muster, forces out in the most ebullient of manners, “let the hand cuffs slip of the wrist, I’ll let you be my chaperone, I’m a full grown man but I’m not afraid to cry!”. You can literally hear his voice quivering and faltering at certain points of that line, as his vocals can’t handle the force and stress he is subjecting them too. Beck is pushing his very ability to preform to it’s absolute limits in “Sexx Laws”, to extent never encountered again in his entire discography. He is trying too damn hard not to be taking this seriously.
Listening to ‘Nicotine & Gravy’ and ‘Get Real Paid’ are also both instructive in this regard. The former, after it’s lured back ally seduction that transitions into horror core cinematic pressure, coalesces into an absolutely masterful layering of soundscapes. The tense noir funk melody combines with middle eastern citars while three different vocal tracks mix. Beck, with his somewhat nefarious chanting, “I think we’re going crazy”, mixed with the more up-tempo and celebratory rendition of the lines, while a back up female vocals, with a child like sterility, ominously chant “I don’t wanna die tonight”. A lot is happening at once and it all locks together perfectly. ‘Get Real Paid’ is even more staggering in this regard. Digitized and calmly rippled synth contrast with robotic incantations, “we like to sit around and get real paid”. Beck is meanwhile belting it out like a true shred soul jammer, while the song evolves into a pristine piece of experimental IDM and instrumental viscera. It’s a lot to take in and it’s all mixed with grace and elegance. Too much creativity, balancing, and production goes into the myriad layers of Midnight Vultures for it to be a joke.
Beck’s most famous work, Odelay, also had its fair share of extravagance. However, it was all built around the music of his SoCal roots and exist in the same wheelhouse of the music he had been curating up to that point. Midnight Vultures was such an aberrant shift that it wasn’t easy to infer where any of this came from. Even so, through falsetto laden soul, disco gong show elements, and equally weird lyrics (“Norman Schwarzkopf! Something tells me you want to go home”) are actually carefully integrated with more traditionally Beck stylings. ‘Milk & Honey’ takes Beck in a hallucinogenic state, to the point of being almost extra sensory, and weird bouts of synth glitching, but mixes it with a monster rock hook and a lovely acoustic come down refrain. That electric guitar by the way was courtesy of none other than Jonny Marr of The Smiths. You don’t get Jonny Marr for a joke record. The absolutely bombastic horns of ‘Sexx Laws’ are contextualized through a country folk throw down which is very on brand for Beck. The ludicrous red light district temptation of ‘Hollywood Freaks’ is paired with west coast style hip hop verses from Beck that sounds oddly compatible. It makes the line, “looking like jail bait, selling lots of real estate, looking like a hot date, banging like an 808”, a little less asinine. Appropriate even.
Which is not to say Beck’s phrases don’t get even more insane. “Cold cats bitch slap you’re so polite, will you thank them for the tea and sympathy”, and, “Excuse me please can you tell me how to get to the soviet embassy” are still just a modest sampling of some of things he actually wrote and actually sang. 20 years later Midnight Vultures still sounds weird as hell, and he never attempted anything like it again. It remains the most anomalous, impenetrable, and controversial album in its catalogue. Yet it also has his most joyous tracks ever in the form of “Mixed Business” and “Sexx Laws”. It’s by far the most fun and celebratory thing he’s ever done. Therein lies the answer to our central question; is Beck serious here? I argue that rather than cynical parody, Midnight Vultures is, more than anything, an honest celebration of funk, soul, and disco. How could you mock something you’ve taken so much time and care to understand, better than most of us ever could?