SOUNDTRACK: BECK-“Beercan” (1994).
I 
had forgotten how much I liked “Beercan” as a song until I played Mellow Gold again. It’s incredibly catchy, has some wonderfully weird elements (like the sample of the girl saying “I’m Sad” over flamenco music), and deserved to be heard more.
The B-sides for this single really run the gamut of everything Beck does. The first track “Got No Mind” is a reworking of “Pay No Mind.” It’s done as a very simple folk song. The words are largely different and the music is played differently, but the chords are the same. It’s an interesting conceit to redo a song almost entirely like that. The second song “Asskiss Powergrudge (Payback ’94)” is just a dirty slow abusive song. The guitar strings are totally muted, just making noise. The vocals are slowed and sludgy. And it’s just heaps of abuse.
“Totally Confused” is also on the “Loser” single and is such a pretty, mellow folk song (with Anna and Petra from That Dog singing backing vocals). And the final song, “Spanking Room” is just a pile of sheer noise and feedback. It is loud and crazy and goes on for some 5 minutes. There’s a “bonus” track of which I have learned is called “Loser (Pseudo-Muzak Version).” It’s Loser sampled and played behind some weird keyboard “muzak.” It sounds like it was done live in a small club. Really weird.
[READ: February 28, 2014] Some Instructions
This little booklet came with the Believer 2014 Art Issue. It is called “Some Instructions.” It is inspired by George Brecht, a Fluxus artist who is credited with creating the written form of performance art (called the “event score”). Brecht was bored by didactic instructions in art so his creations were utterly open to interpretation. The example they give is his “Three Chair Events” which is in its entirety:
- Sitting on a black chair. Occurrence.
- Yellow chair. (Occurrence.)
- On (or near) a white chair. Occurrence,
–Spring 1961
This is the kind of thing that I think i would have enjoyed in college, being pretentious an d obnoxious, now I realize it is just navel gazing and (in many of the examples below) barely even thought out. You can kind of see what Brecht was getting at (although why he needed to do more than one or two is beyond me), as a kind of thought-provoking questioning of what we know of as art. But some of these below are just, well, stupid. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 