Charlemagne Fenton
Wordless Hymns: The Virtues of Beck, Part 1
Consider Beck. Is he not the anti-Coldplay for which we have been waiting? Is not Modern Guilt the absolute antithesis of Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends? And we say this not to find as much fault with Coldplay as we can (of which we have been lazily accused) but to posit Beck as the remedy for Chris Martin’s spiritual banality.
Stop. Begin again.
Consider Beck. When Chris Martin begins the lyrical profundity of Viva la Vida with a comparison of lingering religion (“Victorian,” he says) to a ghostly darkness over London in “Cemeteries,” we know we’re in for a rollickin’ ride of hope, masturbation, and chicken-soup spirituality. For when all is dark and stagnant, is not the only solution, clearly, to do a little dance and sing “la la la la la la ehh”? Oh, the humanity.
Beck, on the other hand, cuts straight to the chase in “Orphans,” the first track off Modern Guilt: the problem is not the ghosts of Christmas past but existence itself. Even when we orphaned children “leave [our] rulers behind,” we are still not free. “How can I make new again what rusts every time it rains?” Life will not set us free; it can only defeat us. Even rain, that cleansing force, “comes and floods our lungs.” This is the harder truth.
What remains, in the “tidal wave’s wake,” is the fact that we will one day meet our maker, “with all of his crimson and his iron desire,” and we will be found wanting:
We’ll drag the streets with the baggage of longing
To be loved or destroyed
From a void to a grain of sand in your hand
All of existence, this great push called Life, is nothing if not from the Love that began (and could just as easily end) it all. And our only response, Beck realizes, is put ourselves out there, vulnerable and weak, and ask to be loved. This is the truth and the point of all song. To be loved is to be destroyed, to pass through the void and find ourselves once again reconstituted and made new, grains of sand sifted through the ages, prostrate stars in the endless freaking sky.
Stop. Begin, we will begin again.
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January 24th, 2009 at 7:30 pm
but you have to ask the right person, don’t you? maybe i’m missing something, but i feel like there’s not much of a redemption arc in modern guilt. i dunno about beck and his crimson maker: maybe beck is ready to offer himself up to the volcano or the firing squad, but he’s not dead yet, let alone resurrected. he just seems sad.
how is he then, in the end, better off than chris martin, charlie?
January 26th, 2009 at 1:29 am
agreed with sophie.
January 26th, 2009 at 11:35 am
Interesting posting albeit pretentious
January 26th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Ah, Sophie. Old Al’s always going on about how much trouble you are, and now we know why! But lest your fellow commenters fall prey to “pretentious” personae, and even though it is court policy that we do not negotiate with trolls, we continue:
Is there no “redemption arc” in Modern Guilt because Beck’s “sad”? Would being happy make the album any more “redemptive”? How does one go about being redemptive, anyway?
If we are to go about in any way participating in the redemption of the world, should we at least not understand what needs redeeming? If the sick are to be healed, then the sickness must be known. Beck offers in one song a more astute and mature diagnosis of the condition of man than Coldplay does in an entire album. If he mourns in the process, it is all for the better. Solomon, we think, would understand.
What, too, does one mean by “sad’? Surely not “self-pitying” in Beck’s case. Would one read Beckett and dismiss him as sad?
We think we will get to the redemptive stuff of the matter soon.
January 26th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Bravo, sire!
Whether Beck is “sad” is not the question. The question is whether Beck has a better view of the situation than Chris Martin, which I believe you have demonstrated brilliantly. (A word which here means, apparently, “pretentiously”: tsk. To say that Charlemagne could overreach himself is a historical impossibility.)
Truth, Himself, sets us free, after all: and we all know that while Folly promises us a good spread, only Wisdom’s house can ever be our home.
Like Sophie, however, I look forward to your future treatment of “the redemptive stuff of the matter.” In this case it seems that our house may rest upon you, as it were.
Your devoted servant, as ever,
Al