Mope-core and not much more

By Sylvia W. Chan

DON'T REALLY CARE if he's a loser, was dating Winona Ryder, or is a Scientologist. No, it's more that at the ripe old age of 32, Beck Hansen's become one seriously morose white guy.

He denies it, of course, because this alterna-self-fashioning morphster has decided his current pose is that of the embattled hipster artiste, into which privileged, artsy, morose white guys get to retreat when the weight of their last breakup becomes the weight of the world – that murky metaphorical tavern folks like Lord Byron, Jean-Paul Sartre, Leonard Cohen, and Dave Gahan visit to kick it, toss back a few absinthes, and prove their morosity matters. Their aim, of course, is not to foist their angst on you but to share it ever so generously – to convince you that their pain is your pain, that their ache will illuminate and elucidate, that their moping is a means toward your gaining clarity and resolve. As Beck says of his latest album, Sea Change, in a recent interview with Pulse magazine, "I don't see it as depressing. It resonates as something higher, like serenity."

Say what he will, but Sea Change is the most depressing thing I've heard since "Ben," by Michael Jackson (whom, I believe, one can most certainly categorize as a miserable white guy these days). A thoroughly low-energy endeavor with Beck's languid warbles and cautiously plucked acoustic guitar at its core, it's a case study in wistful listlessness, complete with mournful harmonium tones, a countrified obbligato slide guitar, and the occasional tinkle of a faraway glockenspiel. And though one might suspect irony still edges the Beckian universe (as it did on Odelay and Midnite Vultures – two really great records) on tracks such as "The Golden Age," the Sea Change opener on which the singer slowly burnishes his initial invitation to "let the golden age begin" into a dark, sludgy summons to a place where "the sun don't shine even when it's day," you just don't know if he's being cheeky or not. Because things just get glummer and glummer as the tracks roll on, as on "Guess I'm Doing Fine," one of the album's more hopeless self-assessments, on which he croons, "It's only lies that I'm living / It's only tears that I'm crying / It's only you that I'm losing / Guess I'm doing fine." Yikes.

Thing is, even though the pain is rather pretty at times – as on "Lost Cause" (the consummate breakup song – surely a paean to Beck's split with longtime love Leigh Limon or Ryder, whom he dated shortly afterward), a Cohen-meets-James-Taylor-style number on which a soft sweetness emerges from Beck's placid morass – I'm just not sure I give a damn about another sad white guy "living lies." Aren't there enough of those already? Because a clever fellow like Beck, one who's spent so much of his career playing his whiteness like the foolish idea that it is, gnarling and twisting it to suit his incarnations as slacker dweeb, hip-hop dweeb, soulster dweeb, etc., has now become the most boring white guy of all: the sad dweeb. And with shit the way it is these days, the weight of the world's way heavier than Winona Ryder's bony ass, and most of us just don't have time for anyone else's sadness in our lives. No matter how hip it's supposed to be.