BECK

SLINGING SINGLES 

What the heck is up with Beck?

by Matt Ashare |    
Published July 17, 2013

Chances are you haven't heard the most recent album by erstwhile alt-rock slacker Beck Hanson, in large part because 2012's "Song Reader" wasn't really an album at all, at least not in the familiar sense. Instead, Beck, as he's been known since he emerged in the early ’90s as a mercurial singer-songwriter with one hand on a state-of-the-art sampler and the other on an acoustic guitar, challenged his fans and admirers by forgoing the recording process that's generally associated with making album and releasing a colorfully illustrated book of sheet music. Yeah, sheet music, that stuff with a bass and treble clef that most non-musicians probably haven't thought much about since their last piano lesson and that even a lot of actual musicians on the rock/pop end of the spectrum aren't generally apt to pay much mind.
    Beck's stated purpose with "Song Reader" was to give others the opportunity to perform and record the twenty compositions included in the book in the absence of a definitive version. Think of it as a musical twist on the idea behind conceptual art: "Song Reader" amounts to a theoretical "album," a blueprint that any curious, enterprising person with the ability to read music might follow to its logical conclusion. And many have. Indeed, there's a website — songreader.net — devoted to the project, and countless YouTube videos and streams of all sorts of "Song Reader" interpretations posted by various artists. Beck himself has been known to perform parts of "Song Reader" live. And just this month he turned up among an array of mostly British performers, including folk-pop songstress Beth Orton, Scottish rockers Franz Ferdinand, and former Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker, at a July 4th London concert dedicated to "Song Reader." Yes, there are already clips of it available on YouTube.
    As an artful stunt, "Song Reader" has succeeded. But, beyond the novelty of reviving the somewhat antiquated music delivery system of sheet music, the 108-page hardcover book ($22.38 plus shipping from Amazon) represents one facet of a new way of thinking about the business of making music in the digital age. To the extent that downloading and, more starkly, streaming have accentuated the ephemeral nature of discrete recordings, artists are facing a potentially perilous choice: find something other than music to sell — something that defies digitization — or face a kind of commercial extinction. A handsomely bound book of sheet music, as old fashioned as it may first appear, is an ingeniously simple solution to that dilemma. Much in the same way that the once imperiled medium of vinyl has provided a tangible alternative to MP3 files, a book offers consumers something more substantial and less fleeting than an easily streamable recording. If nothing else, you can put it on a shelf.
    Don't worry, though, Beck hasn't sworn off the recording studio entirely. Indeed, he's rumored to be working on two new full-lengths, a mostly acoustic album, and a proper follow-up to the 2008 Danger Mouse-produced "Modern Guilt," the last major-label outing he had due on his contract with Interscope. In the meantime, along with touring, he's been up to his old unpredictable tricks, in this case releasing two new singles that he's made clear are not destined to be included on any currently planned future album projects. On June 24, he released a queasy and characteristically quirky, dark techno-pop construction titled "Defriended" both as an iTunes download and as a 45-rpm 12-inch vinyl single featuring a 14-minute extended mix of the tune (with a limit of two per customer). And, last week, he did the very same thing with "I Won't Be Long," a less skewed, more guitar-oriented minimalist rocker with dream-pop overtones that saunters on pleasantly for just a little over five minutes. The extended mix is almost three times as long.
    If "Song Reader" slyly subverted conventional notions of what an "album" can be, then this pair of stand-alone singles from Beck questions the very nature of what an "album" is and whether or not it will continue to be a useful designation. At the very least, Beck seems to be tacitly acknowledging that, in the absence of contractual obligations to a record label, there are no longer any major imperatives — commercial, artistic, or otherwise — for even the most ambitious of artists to structure his or her output around the rather arbitrary construct we think of as an album. After all, every album track is now downloadable, not to mention streamable, as what is essentially a single. It's also worth remembering that the Beatles' debut album, "Please Please Me," was initially a vehicle for a handful of tracks that had previously been released as singles, and that to this day there are plenty of albums that exist as collections of singles with no unifying agenda. In fact, the the LP, or long play 12-inch album, evolved out of books that contained collections of sheet music and, later, 78-rpm records, and its length was determined by the number of grooves manufacturers could fit on two sides of a disc, a limitation has no meaning in the digital world.
    Beck's recent actions don't portend the end of the album as an organizing principle any more than the advent of cassette tapes and CDs doomed the vinyl 45 to the dustbin of history. (I'm pretty sure there are even still people making 78s.) As long as artists, including Beck, find it useful to think in terms of collections of ten or more songs, and there are formats that demand 40-plus minutes of music, the album will hold its ground. But, it's becoming increasingly clear that other arrangements — say, a four-song suite, or a 400-track opus — will find ways to proliferate along. And, who knows, maybe we're even in for another golden era of sheet music, which, incidentally, has already made the transition from paper to digital.