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— by James Montgomery, with reporting by John Norris
Ever since Beck Hansen shambled onto the airwaves way back in 1994 — balsa-wood acoustic guitar in one hand, cruddy beat box in the other — a whole lot of people have wanted to anoint him a whole lot of things.
He was the doe-eyed heir apparent to Dylan, a skinny kid who spat stream-of-consciousness vocals and strummed a six-string. He was the barrio-born dissector of hip-hop, a white boy declaring his love for the genre but also taking the piss out of it. And he was the young blues prodigy who grew up listening to crackling 45s of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Mississippi Fred McDowell while other kids played kickball in the street.
Throughout his career, Beck has been all of those things and absolutely none of them, often at the same time. But while music journalists were quick to place many crowns atop his flaxen dome, they did so via a series of backhanded slights. Take a closer look at the last paragraph and you notice a common theme running through all those made-up titles: Beck is always treated like a little kid.
Journos anointed him the "man-child," a term he bristled at: a sort of gifted, hyperactive kid with so much potential, but lacking the self-control to pull it off. When Beck went into full-on freak mode, as he did on Odelay and Midnite Vultures, it was greeted with condescending tones. When he tried to play it straight and somber, as on Mutations or Sea Change, critics gave him the "ain't he cute" treatment. Through it all, even though he was predicted to be the next Dylan, a white hip-hop ambassador and the modern savior of the blues, critics never, ever expected Beck to simply grow up.
"When I was 16, I was listening to old bluesmen. And I wanted to be 65, you know? There's a soulfulness and there's a kind of experience there that I always loved," Beck says. "But I think you have to keep a childlike [quality] to play music or make a record, too. I mean, everybody had their own take. And you can't please everybody. There's just as many people who probably don't want to hear something with a punch line in it. So it's a balance for me."
And it's a balance he's achieved on his new album, Guero, a heady mix of party anthems, beat-boxing, acoustic guitars, car horns, blues riffs, Christina Ricci vocals and hip-hop scratching that's 50 percent about getting down and 50 percent about death. And while all the mentions of "God's hammer" and "farewell rides" might throw some listeners for a loop, it's easy to understand his obsession with death when you realize that in the past year, Beck has defied the critics' expectations and actually grown up.
In April 2004 he got married to actress Marissa Ribisi, and later in the year the couple had a son, Cosimo Henri. He also made public what had long been rumored: that he was a practicing Scientologist. Critics let him live as a full-grown husband and father, but they seemed incapable of buying Beck Hansen: Spiritual Man. Soon, every time he was mentioned — be it in a GQ article that labeled him a diva or on Web sites devoted to debunking his childhood as a fraud — it was in a negative light. For the first time, Beck had honest-to-goodness haters.
And while a lot of that venom could be attributed to the fact that some see Scientology as, well, a bit creepy, it's interesting to think that a lot of it comes from people being unable to see past the ruddy cheeks and blond locks. They still see Beck as a little boy, a kid telling lies to cover his past, speaking to your face with fingers crossed.
"Scientology has helped me recently. And Marissa too. A lot of people think of it as a religion, and sometimes they have trouble getting their heads around something that doesn't involve a deity," Beck sighs. "And I think if someone is making a judgment when they don't really have firsthand experience, it's intolerant, which to me is kind of insidious. How can you make a judgment on something you don't really know about? I think it's unfairly criticized. And I think the good [it's] done speaks for itself."
Whether or not the media will ever come around to Beck as an adult remains to be seen, but it's obvious that the record-buying public has bought into the idea. Guero debuted at #3 on the Billboard albums chart and has sold more than 350,000 copies to date. The album's first single, "E-Pro," is blowing up on rock radio. Fans are buzzing about the possibility of a summer tour. It could even be argued that no one has been this excited about Beck since his Odelay heyday, back when he was just the straw-haired wunderkind with a crate full of records.
Almost a decade later, Beck's back — not as the next Dylan, white hip-hopper or bluesman, but someone who is happy and content as an actress-marrying, son-raising, card-carrying Scientologist. Just don't expect him to stay that way for long.
"I'm just taking one step at a time. I could zigzag one way, but it's not usually on purpose," he says. "There's some quality you get when you're not totally comfortable, when you're not at ease. When you're not doing what you're used to, you could completely fall on your face, you know? You could completely blow it."
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Photo: Autumn De Wilde/MTV News
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