BECK: GOLDEN FEELINGS (1993)
1) The Fucked Up Blues; 2)
Special People; 3) Magic Station Wagon; 4) No Money No Honey; 5) Trouble All My
Days; 6) Bad Energy; 7) Schmoozer (Feeling Hurter); 8) Heartland Feeling; 9)
Unknown; 10) Super Golden Black Sunchild; 11) Soul Sucked Dry; 12) Unknown; 13)
Feelings; 14) Gettin' Home; 15) Will I Be Ignored By The Lord; 16) Bogus Soul;
17) Totally Confused; 18) Mutherfucker; 19) People Gettin' Busy.
All right, as far as I know, Beck himself has sort
of disowned this album, especially after it was re-released by the Sonic Enemy
label on CD in 1999 — so there is hardly any need to really hold its existence
against him. But there is hardly any need, either, to get acquainted with it,
other than out of sheer curiosity or biographic interest. Strictly speaking,
this isn't even a proper case of «you got to listen to this to know that even
great artists may start out with real shitty records», because it only really works
when you know for sure that the soon-to-be-great artist is unintentionally starting out with a shit record. Golden Feelings, however, seems to have
been very much an intentionally shitty
record (cassette, to be precise).
Basically, in 1992-93 Beck was hanging out in
L.A., fresh from a folk / anti-folk scene experience in NYC, stuck with a
boring dayjob at a video store (he could
have, perhaps, become the next Tarantino, but what is it, really, that decides
whether your brain gets hung up on music or on film?) and playing really rotten
folk gigs at nightclubs where nobody would be listening to him anyway. In this
kind of context, it is only to easy to make the transition from «folk» to «anti-folk»
(a.k.a. «music you regurgitate back at folk audiences when they don't like you»),
and from there, to sheer musical hooliganry of the ugliest kind.
The best thing that can be said about Golden Feelings (and I feel fairly sure
the title is really a variation on «golden showers», even if I know I can't
prove it) is that it does display a sick sense of humor. Beck takes it out on
everybody — the straightahead folker, the starry-eyed Donovan kind of folker,
the weathered old bluesman, the Southern country rocker, the passionate soul
man, and even Bruce Springsteen. The «Beck treatment circa 1992-93» means your
style being reproduced on a battered, out-of-tune guitar, sung in a battered,
out-of-tune vocal, with parodic or, in the worst of cases, dumbly repetitive
lyrics — all of it done so passionately that the maliciousness overwhelms the
talent, and only the most congenial intuition could probably spot tiny signs of
the «Beck genius» in any of these tunes.
Nevertheless, far be it from me to deny that
some of this stuff is quite damn funny. The accappella recitation of ʽSpecial
Peopleʼ, for instance, is a hilarious send-up of the «list principle» in rock
lyrics, where almost every second line neutralizes the first one ("special
people create belief, special people steal some beef... special people are so
sincere, special people got special beer") — simple, stupid, and
satisfactory. ʽTrouble All My Daysʼ is something that Tom Waits could have
recorded, had he been hit real hard with a hammer on the studio threshold. ʽBogus
Soulʼ bills itself exactly right, except that one doesn't even need to squint
hard to see how bogus it is (which kinda takes the sense out of bogus, if you
get my meaning). And ʽMutherfukerʼ sounds so much like a good old Ween tune
that it would be hard for me to believe that Beck never got the Boognish fever
while drifting around the East Coast. Not impossible, but hard.
Probably the best of the bunch — and also one
of the few numbers here that might approach the status of a «real song» — is
ʽHeartland Feelingʼ, starting out as a spoken recommendation to write songs in
the style of John Cougar Mellencamp ("music of a heartland quality, just
powerful straightforward music") and then turning into a playful folk
rumination on losers and their lives: "He's only a person / Who doesn't
know shit / Nothin' happenin' / That's about it", which is probably a
chorus that John Cougar Mellencamp couldn't ever afford — but, in a way, is
better than every John Cougar Mellencamp chorus ever created.
Other «songs» on Golden Feelings may be counted
on one's fingers, and, besides, they would soon be re-recorded in more polished
versions on Beck's next album. ʽGettin' Homeʼ is a nice little country blues
shuffle, running about three out of four minutes too long, but with a moody
enough, if not too original, chord change. ʽTotally Confusedʼ also seems to
take itself a pinch more seriously than the average track on here — at the very
least, it could be deemed «personal», seeing as how Beck must have been totally confused at the time.
The guy's interest in things other than «folk»
and «anti-folk» is already evident: some of the shorter tracks contain muffled
samples, some experiment with noise (rather boringly, I'd say), but it is
interesting that Beck preferred not to include the one tune that would
eventually propel him into the limelight — the sarcastic hip-hop anthem
ʽLoserʼ, with Beck rapping over a sampled slide guitar melody — apparently he
thought of that one as totally unsuitable for the overall mood of Golden Feelings. Which could,
altogether, be described as «hangover folk muzak, fresh from the toilet seat». But
do help yourself if you feel like it.
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