Walking wounded
By Kimberly Chun

TAKE A CUE from that old National Lampoon comedy LP and try this on for size: Beck is a concept by which we measure our pain.

For better or worse, after the hits and the awards showered down post-Odelay, Beck Hansen became a yardstick of modern rock crossover success – what a person can do with the power once it's in a pair of grubby hands – and of hepsters' ambivalent feelings toward the mainstream. He was the acceptable face of Gen X pomo pop culture, embraced by graying indie rock scenesters, aging establishment music critics, and doddering modern rock radio programmers alike – with the odd, wannabe-creaky twentysomething tossed into the mix. He had two turntables and a microphone, an arty pedigree courtesy of his Fluxus granddaddy, a Warhol superstar mommy and session player pappy, and a willingness to play up the dopey aspects of then-dope hip-hop culture. He was the waifish, dippy white kid who was wise to the Wu Tang Clan and down with Thurston Moore.

Others were busy keeping it real – Tupac Shakur, for instance, released Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z. in 1993 – but Beck, who released Mellow Gold the same year, was clearly more interested in artifice. Alternating between funk and folk, he fanned the flames of ultradisposable pop culture and danced as the eight-tracks, DATs, and vinyl burned, high on the fumes and building on its smoldering ruins. Both West Coast and East Coast, uptown art world and downtown L.A. trash culture, and slippery as all get out, Beck was the one that everyone could easily reference when charting the state of the art – and commerce – in pop.

So it makes sense that when Beck got down to expressing a painful breakup on his latest album, Sea Change, he would do so in terms that seemed so delicious, upholstered with luxurious strings and outlined with a passive sex appeal. After all, this is the guy who found success in celebrating his rank loserdom. Beck doesn't try out a funky pose, as he attempted on Midnite Vultures; he is squarely in a funk, and the only beats here are way downbeat.

That's why this album is such a beautiful loser of a recording – pretty and airy with acoustic guitar and pedal steel but weighed down by way-up-in-the-mix bass and plenty of earthly woes. A kind of world-weary, Gauloise-devouring Francophilia abounds: "The Golden Age" climaxes with synth whirr in Air's high style, and Beck hints at Serge Gainsbourg-esque twisted kicks with the sullen, slinking "Paper Tiger," complete with a languidly, lackadaisically soulful orchestral arrangement that brought to mind Gainsbourg's masterpiece Histoire de Melody Nelson. The album's abstract lyrics get specific, sad, and countrified for "Guess I'm Doing Fine," which finds Beck doing his best Glen Campbell impression, before going one weepier with "Lonesome Tears," which crosses the dreamy, dread decadence of Air with the iced-tea emptiness of Air Supply and a melody that seems a train station away from "Wichita Lineman."

The only apparent irony here? Despite the tone of the lyrics and the dramatic title, Sea Change is far from a major shift for Becky boy. Musically, he is revisiting the dour, chilled, and emotionally numbed territory that has already been well-explored by Shackleton-like frozen romantics such as Radiohead. In that sense, Sea Change can be seen as a major washout.

Still, despite the title's overstatement, Beck is making a bit of a shift here, in image and in his straight-faced, somber mood: something that extends from his pores-and-all close-up cover photo to the sorrowful lyrics, cloaked in somewhat disaffected, distanced vocals. Eminem gets his jollies showing off his lily-white rump in 8 Mile; Beck chooses to bare a soft pale underbelly instead – and if the comparison between the two towheaded critics' darlings, pop-culty pinups, and conversation starters seems unlikely, it's also somehow apt. As Beck ushered out the last century with playfulness and a fluid license to jest, Eminem looked forward to the next with anger – and an inert sense of self. Em comes on like the angriest dawg in Detroit – nay, the world – even when he's playing it clean and safe in 8 Mile, but Beck has gotten softer and sadder. Beck doesn't sound wiser in Sea Change, or even full of new ideas. But he certainly does sound older. Perhaps this graying of modern rock is simply the latest sign that Mellow Gold is rotting from within, that this singer-songwriter's "Golden Age" – much like the go-go '90s – is coming to a painful close.